fight for her safety.
Stormbreaker pitched off his talon, striking the ground limp and heavy, like he might have died before he fell. Energy rushed out of him in a glittering silvery wave. Two more Stone Brothers collapsed, turning their talons loose to feed on Brailing horses and soldiers.
More cries rose from the wooded edge of the valley, but Dari couldn’t think well enough to sort them out. Men wrapped in veils and scarves, wielding the big, curved blades common to the Altar Barrens, stormed into view, but some of them broke away and stumbled as the formless graal overtook them as well. A few more retreated, dropping their blades and hurling themselves back toward the tree cover.
Aron reached Dari’s side, but fell to his knees, his short sword and dagger dropping from his open fingers. His legacy flared brilliant sapphire, then went dim and began to spout from his body like an uncontrolled geyser. His eyes closed, and he collapsed at her feet.
Dari watched all this, saw every bit of it, but couldn’t cry out or even lift her sword. Her head ached as if her skull had been dissolved. Her grandfather’s protective energy broke around her, and she heard his pained, enraged shout. Once more, she could see graal coloring—the rainbow hues of her own energy, flowing straight out of her body.
Nic!
Her mental shout rose from her heart, her soul, flying against the energy beginning to crush her thoughts into so much dust and nothingness as she fell helpless to the battlefield before the sword-wielding Thorn Brothers.
Nic, help me!
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
NIC
Dari’s scream echoed through Nic’s muscles and bones.
His teeth slammed together, his fists clenched, and he almost dropped to his knees in the midst of the halted traveling column of hundreds, maybe thousands of Mab horsemen, archers, and foot-soldiers.
In front of him, Snakekiller held a dagger to his mother’s throat. Snakekiller’s dark blue eyes had gone so flat Nic had no doubt she would enjoy spilling Lady Mab’s blood at Nic’s feet, to avenge the thousand pains he had suffered from her neglect.
How had this gone so wrong?
None of this had been in his visions.
Not the way he had used his graal to punch through the Mab lines. Those with no mind-talents never saw him, and those with legacy did, but knew him for who he was and fell away from him, fleeing what they thought was a ghost with the full measure of the Mab legacy.
Not the way he and Snakekiller set Tek free before soldiers could skewer her with pikes and reached his mother’s personal guard on foot, or how Snakekiller’s hood snake illusion sent the horses thundering away, dragging their riders with them, weapons and all. His mother had been thrown—which Nic had not foreseen, any more than he had caught a glimpse of the way his mother had drawn her silver dagger and tried to thrust it into his heart, her blue eyes wild with terror.
“Abomination,” she had shrieked, taking him for a mane. “Monster!”
If Snakekiller hadn’t grabbed Lady Mab, Nic might indeed be shifting into a mane.
“He’s your son,” Snakekiller was telling her. “Nic is not a mane or a ghost or some cruel illusion. He’s your own blood, your heir.”
“Dari,” Nic said aloud, turning his head toward Triune’s castle, where his wife and friends were now under some attack he couldn’t sense or understand.
There was no way to divide his attention between his mother and Dari.
“Hold her another moment,” Nic told Snakekiller, then closed his eyes and sent his mind blasting through the Veil.
The abrupt change in sights, smells, and sounds sent tremors through his physical body, and once more the sparks of a fit began to rise and flicker through his mind. Nic ignored this and struggled to move through the world carved over the world, until his awareness hovered over the madness spreading out around Triune.
A thick gray cloud of graal energy hovered above the battlefield, seemingly leeching the power and life out of everything beneath it. Nic could sense nothing below that cloud, and see very little beyond the cardinal red blaze of Thorn Guild robes. The color drew him like a beacon, but as he tried to drop his awareness through that strange gray fog, it repelled him like an iron shield.
His real body wavered again, but he made himself think of Dari, of the baby she didn’t even know she was carrying. Of Aron and Stormbreaker, of Lord Baldric and Zed and Raaf and all the many people he