Page 95 of Elven Prince

“Hal’a fri’tári!”

The entire battalion responded like a single automaton of pieces. Archers on the bridge knocked their bows and drew, the tightening of their pristine strings like a rise of mourning wails on the wind. Foot soldiers beneath the bridge and at the tree line surrounding Shade’s teams drew their weapons—long, lithe swords and intricately detailed battle axes and deadly twin blades. All of them prepared to move at single command.

The operatives around Rebecca and Maxwell looked nervously around, eyeing their perceived enemy, watching their Roth-Da’al and Head of Security to see what came next.

Rebecca couldn’t let their fear and uncertainty distract them. She couldn’t save them. Not the way they wanted.

This was the end.

No matter what she did, Shade lost. Her teams didn’t stand a chance against a battalion of elite Agn’a Tha’ros soldiers. They were out of their depths with a military force that shouldn’t have even been in this world.

Rebeccacouldhave taken the battalion on her own, if she’d been on her own, but trying it now would only spur more violence. The battle would break out in the battalion’s attempts to subdue her, and every Shade operative standing with her tonight would die because of it.

Shade would lose either way, but now it was a choice between all their lives or simply their Roth-Da’al.

She had to give herself up to this commander, whoever he was. She had to surrender. Then,maybe, once her operatives were safely out of the way and no longer a part of this fight that wasn’t theirs, she could make her own escape.

“If this is your decision,” the commander bellowed, “so be it!”

The impulse to turn toward Maxwell again was too powerful to ignore. When she met his gaze—his real gaze, those silver eyes no longer dampened beneath the illusion of someone else—she wanted to tell him so many things.

She wanted to apologize. To explain why shehadto do this. To assure him this was the only way any of their people got out of this alive.

But with so many hundreds of deadly weapons aimed at every operative on the road, each of them as lethal as its wielder’s honed precision, there was no time for any of it.

All she could do was try to find the core of him behind that silver glow before she murmured, “Forgive me.”

“No.” Maxwell snarled and tried to step in front of her, but she shoved him away. “No! You can’t just—”

“Stand down, Hannigan.” Somehow, when she looked him in the eye again, she felt the connection between them doing for the first time what she actually wanted it to do. To make him understand she had no other choice. To show him this was the only moment they had left.

To make him stay.

With a deep breath, she prepared to step forward toward the bridge and the elven commander shouting down at her with the full weight of old-world elven powers behind him. Ready to give herself up in exchange for Shade’s survival.

Ready to submit before everything she loved in this world was cut down all at once.

Just before her foot fully lifted from the dirt to step forward, another shout cracked across the dirt road.

A different command. A different intention. A different voice altogether.

“Bai-shi’i!”

The single word seemed to echo forever around the battlefield Rebecca hoped to avoid.

The elven word for “hold”. The command to stop and wait.

Again as one, every soldier in gleaming armor responded and obeyed, lowering their weapons and falling back into a perfectly straight line. All facing forward, all standing at attention, each of them capable of mass slaughter with a single slash or loose of a bowstring.

Nobody moved.

“What the hell?”

“Who was that?”

“What do we do now?”

Her teams whispered these questions and more to each other while the thickening tension clung to every breath.

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