“I know my limits,” Yrene said stiffly.
Eretia gave a knowing look to Yrene’s still-flat abdomen. “Many would not risk it at all.”
Yrene paused. “Is there a threat?”
“No, but any pregnancy, especially in the early months, is draining. That’s without the horrors of war, or using your magic to the brink every day.”
For a heartbeat, Yrene let the words settle in. “How long have you known?”
“A few weeks. My magic sensed it on you.”
Yrene swallowed. “I haven’t told Chaol.”
“I’d think if there were ever a time to do so,” the healer said, gesturing to the shuddering keep around them, “it would be now.”
Yrene knew that. She’d been trying to find a way to tell him for a while. But placing that burden on him, that worry for her safety and the safety of the life growing in her … She hadn’t wanted to distract him. To add to the fear she already knew he fought against, just in having her here, fighting beside him.
And for Chaol to know that if he fell, it would not be her life alone that now ended … She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Not yet.
Perhaps it made her selfish, perhaps stupid, but she couldn’t. Even if the moment she’d realized it in the ship’s bathing chamber, when her cycle still had not come and she had begun counting the days, she had wept with joy. And then realized what, exactly, carrying a child during war would entail. That this war might very well be still raging, or in its final, horrible days, when she gave birth.
Yrene had decided that she’d do everything in her power to make sure it did not end with her child being born into a world of darkness.
“I’ll tell him when the time is right,” Yrene said a shade sharply.
From the open hall doors, shouts rose to “Clear the way! Clear the way for the injured!”
Eretia frowned, but rushed with Yrene to meet the townsfolk bearing an already-bloodied stretcher and the near-dead ruk rider atop it.
The horse beneath Chaol shifted but stayed firm where they stood along the lower battlements of the keep walls. Not as fine a horse as Farasha, but solid enough. A bravehearted beast who had taken well to his brace-equipped saddle, which was all he’d asked for.
Walking, Chaol knew, would not be an option when he dismounted. The strain in his spine told him enough about how hard Yrene was already working, the sun barely risen. But he could fight just as well from horseback—could lead these soldiers all the same.
Ahead, stretching too far for him to count, Erawan’s army launched at the city for another day of all-out assault on the walls.
The ruks soared, dodging arrows and spears, snatching soldiers from the ground and pulling them apart. Atop the birds, the rukhin unleashed their own torrent of fury in careful, clever passes organized by Sartaq and Nesryn.
But after five days, even the mighty ruks were slowing.
And Morath’s siege towers, which they had once easily shattered into scraps of metal and wood, were now making their way to the walls.
“Ready the men for impact,” Chaol ordered the grim-faced captain standing nearby. The captain shouted the command down the lines Chaol had gathered just before dawn.
A few bands of Morath soldiers had managed to get grappling hooks into the walls these past two days, hoisting up siege ladders and droves of soldiers with them. Chaol had cut them down, and though the warriors of Anielle had been unsure what to do with the demon-infested men who came to slay them, they’d obeyed his barked commands. Quickly staunched the flow of soldiers over the walls, severing the ties that held the ladders to them.
But the siege towers that approached … those would not be so easily dislodged. And neither would the soldiers who crossed the metal bridge that would span the tower and the keep walls.
Behind him, levels up, he knew his father watched. Had already signaled through the lantern system Sartaq had demonstrated how to use that they needed ruks to fly back—to knock the towers down.
But the ruks were making a pass at the far rear of Morath’s army, where the commanders had kept the Valg lines in order. It had been Nesryn’s idea last night: to stop going for the endless front lines and instead take out those who ordered them. Try to sow chaos and disarray.
The first siege tower neared, metal groaning as wyverns—chained to the ground and wings clipped—hauled it closer. Soldiers already lined up behind it in twin columns, ready to storm upward.
Today would hurt.
Chaol’s horse shifted beneath him again, and he patted a gauntlet-covered hand on the stallion’s armored neck. The thud of metal on metal was swallowed by the din. “Patience, friend.”
Far out, past the reach of the archers, the catapult was reloading. They’d launched a boulder only thirty minutes ago, and Chaol had ducked beneath an archway, praying the tower base it struck did not collapse.
Praying Yrene wasn’t near it.
He’d barely seen her during these days of bloodshed and exhaustion. Hadn’t had a chance to tell her what he knew. To tell her what was in his heart. He’d settled for a deep but brief kiss, and then rushed to whatever part of the battlements he’d been needed at.
Chaol drew his sword, the freshly polished metal whining as it came free of the sheath. The fingers of his other hand tightened around the handles of his shield. A ruk rider’s shield, light and meant for swift combat. The brace that held him in the saddle remained steady, its buckles secure.
The soldiers lining the battlements stirred at the nearing siege tower. The horrors inside.
“They were once men,” Chaol called, his voice carrying over the clamor of the battle beyond the keep walls, “they can still die like them.”
A few swords stopped quivering.
“You are people of Anielle,” Chaol went on, hefting his shield and angling his sword. “Let’s show them what that means.”
The siege tower slammed into the side of the keep, and the metal bridge at its uppermost level snapped down, crushing the battlement parapets beneath.
Chaol’s focus went cold and calculating.
His wife was in the keep behind him. Pregnant with their child.
He would not fail her.
A siege tower had reached the keep walls, and now unloaded soldier after soldier right into the ancient castle.
Despite the distance, Nesryn could see the chaos on the battlements. Just barely make out Chaol atop his gray horse, fighting in the thick of it.
Soaring over the army hurling arrows and spears at them, Nesryn banked left, the ruks behind her following suit.
Across the battlefield, Borte and Yeran, leading another faction of rukhin, banked right, the two groups of rukhin a mirror image swooping toward each other, then back to plow through the rear lines.
Just as Sartaq, leading a third group, slammed from the other direction.
They’d taken out two commanders, but three more remained. Not princes, thank the gods here and the thirty-six in the khaganate, but Valg all the same. Black blood coated Salkhi’s armored feathers, coated every ruk in the skies.
She’d spent hours cleaning it off Salkhi last night. All the rukhin had, not willing to risk the old blood interfering with how their feathers caught the wind.
Nesryn nocked an arrow and picked her target. Again.
The Valg commander had evaded her shot the last time. But he would not now.
Salkhi swept low, taking arrow after arrow against his breastplate, in his thick feathers and skin. Nesryn had almost vomited the first time an arrow had found its mark days ago. A lifetime ago. She now also spent hours picking them from his body each night—as if they were thorns from a prickly plant.
Sartaq had spent that time going from fire to fire, comforting those whose mounts were not so fortunate. Or soothing the ruks whose riders hadn’t lasted the day. Already, a wagon had been piled high with their sulde—awaiting the final journey home to be planted on Arundin’s barren slopes.
When Salkhi came close enough to rip several Valg off their horses and shred them apart in his talons, Nesryn fired at the commander.
She didn’t see if the shot landed.
Not as a horn cut through the din.
A cry rose from the rukhin, all glancing eastward. Toward the sea.
To where the Darghan cavalry and foot soldiers charged for the unprotected eastern flank of Morath’s army, Hasar atop her Muniqi horse, leading the khagan’s host herself.