H ow insulting for you, of all people, to underestimate me, Max.

I never underestimated Nura. I just thought a chance was a chance.

Tisaanah barely got us out in time. Maybe it was the sloppy, frantic Stratagram or maybe it was the burst of Nura’s magic, but we lost seconds or minutes in the transition. We returned beyond the barricades of the Capital coast. When I opened my eyes, Tisaanah was leaning over me. She heaved an exhale of relief that made me wonder how long I’d been out, then helped me stand.

I had been in many disastrous battles, and so many times I’d thought from within their depths, This is what hell must look like.

No. Those had been nothing. This was hell.

Nura’s soldiers had crashed down upon the shore, a rising flood of corpses wielding sickening, unnatural magic. The Fey, too, had made landfall—only a few of their ships now, but more coming. I could barely see the ocean anymore, just a mass of red and violet and smoke and magic and bodies mutilating each other.

“Ascended fucking above,” I muttered.

I gave myself ten seconds to panic, ten seconds to think, We can not win this. We are all going to die here.

Ten seconds. And then I forced my fear away.

Tisaanah watched me with that hardened determination of hers. “We prepared for this,” she said.

Yes.

Evaluate. Judge. Act. Evaluate.

We were outnumbered, but we had a plan. We still held the barriers at the coast, at least for now. That was one piece of good news.

Something else nagged at me, a strange sensation beneath the surface of my skin. The red smoke drifting up from the Towers had grown hotter and more intense, now warping the air like fire. And stranger still, another streak of light had formed, this one at the shore—orange, to the Towers’ red.

Vardir’s warning echoed in my head. When a man as deranged as him was that alarmed… that was a bad sign. That meant something important.

Judge.

The soldiers were panicking. We needed to hold the barrier, but the plan had unraveled with the unexpected arrival of Nura’s troops and the unexpected nature of those troops.

As for the magic… we couldn’t deal with any of that if our city was being overrun. We needed to get this under control first, or we would all be dead before we could do anything about it.

Act.

I turned to Tisaanah. She already held Il’Sahaj, which glowed faintly with the blue fire of her magic. I picked up my weapon, opened my second eyelids, and let myself rush away.

OUR MEN HAD NOT BEEN ready for this. No one expected to fight literal walking corpses—not even those who had been finely trained in the art of the impossible after months of fighting the Fey king’s grotesque shadow beasts. I got on my horse and galloped among them, up and down the line, trying to keep them steady.

Thousands of soldiers waited to pour into the bay, between the Fey and Nura’s forces. It was enough bodies to drown us beneath the scale of it if the line broke. But if we managed to keep everyone calm, we could at least delay the inevitable.

We had arranged our forces by capability, layering defenses.

First, the Valtain who were skilled in water Wielding—they rose the surf, swelling it into massive, crashing waves that sent ships smashing against each other.

The Solarie Wielders skilled in speaking to the earth were just behind them, lifting the rock and dirt in jagged barriers that jutted ten, twenty, thirty feet into the air.

Behind them, more Valtain, those who had an affinity for mind-work, ready to cripple thoughts and manipulate the terrified emotions of the Fey spilling onto our shores.

Beyond them, the non-Wielders, the archers, the cavalry. Beyond them the warriors, for when blood just came to blood.

At first, this seemed to work. What slipped through one layer of defenses was stopped by the next. For a time, we held them off.

But here was the problem with fighting the dead: they didn’t stop moving once you killed them. They only stopped once you disassembled them. Soon, their numbers and persistence overwhelmed us. Meanwhile, the shapeshifting Fey turned to birds and flew over our barricades, circumventing our defenses layer by layer.

We fought with everything we had. But in all our planning, there was so fucking much we hadn’t accounted for. With every fracture in our formation, I sorely felt the absence of the Roseteeth—thousands of the most well-trained warriors in the world might have been the difference between narrow victory and devastating defeat.

But eventually, we reached a point of no return—a point when the only thing holding our barriers up was the dead bodies of our own soldiers. I shouted commands until my voice gave out. I killed until my hands were slick and my vision red with blood, killed until it was my instinct every time I moved, killed until everything smelled like burnt flesh.

I watched those bodies—the bodies of people who had trusted me—pile higher and higher.

There was only one sight worse than that:

The sight of those bodies beginning to move.