Page 141 of Frozen Hearts and Death Magic

Five more volleys of curving metal arrows were sent atop the wall, and Fel stopped them. He still couldn’t feel where the ironbringer or ironbringers were. If he could, he would eliminate them first, as they were the biggest threat. And yet he felt as if the Ironhold forces were only toying with them, testing their strength.

Fel then heard the iron gate grinding. It was on the opposite side of the fort, not where the Ironhold soldiers were, but he was aware that some of them might have moved to the other side, so that they were surrounded. He focused his magic to keep the gate in place, but it was no use. A lot of magic was acting against his, and he saw it being torn from its hinges and lifted up into the air. At least nobody tried to storm that part of the fortress, but it wouldn’t be hard, since the improvised wall was not high.

Outside, in front of him, some Ironhold soldiers were coming and throwing something at the wall, followed by a deafening bang. They had handheld explosives, and would soon destroy all the walls. The archers had gotten two men carrying the bags with gunpowder, but they were still thrown close enough to the wall to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the gate was floating above them. Fel couldn’t do much, and didn’t understand what they were trying to do. They had to have more than two ironbringers; it was too much power. The gate turned red, and he realized what they were about to do.

“Find cover!” he shouted. “They’ll rain molten metal on us.” He was unable to stop them, but he could stop the men with the explosives. He felt the swords among the forest, the swords in the hips of so many men. No mercy. Fel took a deep breath, and made the swords float up in the air and cut. They should have cut necks, but he couldn’t be quite precise.

At that moment, the metal gate melted above them, and Fel was able to take part of it and send it over the Ironhold men in the forest. He could sense the metallic tinge in their blood, and send the pieces, then the swords. He felt like a monster—a monster who had just saved his own men, at the cost of a hundred lives. He felt sick, but the battle wasn’t over yet. There were still at least two ironbringers out there, he could feel the magic even if he wasn’t sure where they were. He ran down the stairs, jumped the temporary wall, and sped into the forest, searching for the source of magic like his. He heard steps behind him, and saw Arry after him, bow and arrow in hand.

They found two young men running.

“Stop!” Fel yelled. “Stop and your lives will be spared.”

They kept running, until one of the ironbringers fell down, and then the other. Arry had hit them with his arrows.

“They didn’t stop.” Arry’s eyes were wide, and he said it like an apology.

Fel nodded. “We’ll come check on them later. Let’s go back and see if we can take any prisoners, and if the area is safe.”

Back in the fort, the healer was taking care of the Umbraar soldiers who were hurt. A few of them had been hit with pieces of the molten gate or curving arrows, despite Fel’s efforts. A young man had been strangled with his own necklace.

He wanted to yell and scream. None of this should have happened, he should have protected them better, he should… There was so much that could have been done, such as getting more reinforcements in the previous days, having more sentries. But how could they have known? If anything, Fel had been quick enough to act in the middle of the night, without any forewarning.

There were more horrors for him to face. After gathering a group of twenty foot soldiers, some armed with swords, some with arrows, Fel went to the area where the Ironhold soldiers had been stationed. He wanted to retch, horrified at what he’d done, horrified at so much loss. Perhaps he should have no mercy on the battlefield, but that battle had been over quickly, and now that he was allowed to be human again, seeing the result of his actions hurt.

Arry was beside him. “You didn’t have a choice, Fel, they had explosives, they would have torn down those walls and killed every one of us.”

“I know.” He turned to the soldiers. “If anyone is alive, take them to the prison. We’ll treat them and interrogate them. Watch out for any explosives. The others, we’ll put them in the open area for a funeral fire.” A horrible funeral, without loved ones, without their names being said or honored, but that was war.

He couldn’t look at it anymore and was almost dizzy, but it would be a bad example to go back. But then, as the acting monarch, he shouldn’t be here in the forest, exposed, where an archer could be atop a tree. He sighed. There were no archers. He had made sure everyone had been killed. Unless Ironhold sent reinforcements, or perhaps one or two soldiers who had ran away returned. No, deserters were cowards.

Still, he had an eerie feeling that this was far from over. Well, it had to be just the beginning. Ironhold wasn’t going to quit just like that. And the next time, they would send a much more powerful army. Hopefully his father would be back by then. Hopefully his father was alive, was all right. His sister… It was odd, but he trusted that River wanted to see her safe. He just wished he could talk to her. And Leah… Leah was in the middle of it all, and he hoped she was still safe.

Standing among dead soldiers fallen in battle wasn’t something anyone should ever do. What a gruesome, loathsome, terrifying experience. Near him, one of the fallen men moved.

Before calling someone to get him a healer, Fel crouched—and stepped back in horror. There was a soldier moving all right, trying to sit up—expect that the men had no head. Fel looked at the other side, and saw another body stirring. For some reason Leah’s voice came to him, even if perhaps she hadn’t said it using these words: Necromancy can’t raise a dead army.

It didn’t mean that there was no other type of magic that could: something awful and foul and unnatural.

“Retreat!” He yelled. “As fast as you can. Retreat! Back to the fort.” Still he stood his ground and watched as the men walked back. Walked? “Run! Run!”

“What’s going on?” Arry asked in a whisper.

“The bodies are moving,” Fel replied quietly. He wasn’t sure why he was keeping his voice down. Soon more people would notice what was happening.

“You mean… Necromancy?”

Fel shook his head. “Something much worse.” He turned back and yelled again. “We’ll need to send fire down here. Get the metal weapons. Run back. Fast. I’ll be there in a second.”

He focused on the swords lying among the corpses, and levitated them slowly into the fort. If anything, he didn’t want living-dead bodies armed. But the time he took doing that was a few seconds too long, as most of the bodies were now standing, some of them putting heads back on their necks. It was almost like the loose pieces of his metal hands, strung together with magic, but this was a strange, unknown type of magic. And then the bodies ran in his direction. They were too fast. Faster than him. He’d have to fight them.

He felt the broken pieces of the canons, pulled them, and made them levitate in a fast circle around him, making an improvised shield. There was no time to try to check if his men had made it to the fort. He looked back and saw Arry still too close to him, too far from the relative safety of the stone walls, so he opened the circle around him and turned it into a barrier, but it did little to stop the corpses, since they didn’t mind being hurt. There was no way for example to run a shard through their hearts and stop them. They just kept going, and were now almost on Fel.

He looked back and saw that Arry was now almost in the fort, so he closed the circle again around him, making the pieces turn faster and faster. They should act like the blades of a windmill, pushing away anything trying to get close to him, and still he was hit by an arm and a hand, but kept that circle.

He saw arrows with fire landing by him, but even they did very little. The corpses were like wet branches, hard to catch fire. Some thirty, forty corpses were pressing against his shield, as he stepped back slowly, trying to retreat to the fort, retreat close to where his men could back him up. Back him up with what? Fire arrows that did little to stop these cursed things?

Fel wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to keep up his shield, and how long it was going to work. He didn’t know what damage those creatures were doing inside the fort and if people were getting hurt. And here he was, unable to do much, feeling useless and hopeless, clinging to his life. Was it too much to wish for a miracle?

He wondered if he could find a way to conjure fire, like his sister. A circle of fire would be much more useful now. But what were the odds that he’d find a way to master it in seconds? And he couldn’t let go of the metal magic to try to reach for his fire, or he would be unprotected.

Despair was getting to him, even if he knew he should always hope. He’d never minded dying in battle, but if he did so, he’d like to die like a hero and do something that mattered, not go like that. But it wasn’t time to die, but to find a way to live. The question was how. Even his magic was about to fail.

At that moment, when his hope was almost lost, the forest got darker all of a sudden. There was another magic there, a magic he knew, a magic of something more dangerous than even these enchanted or possessed bodies. It almost felt like his father’s magic, but it wasn’t. And yet, it felt close and intimate, as if it were his own magic. But it couldn’t be.

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