the iron master more than ever.
This was Stuart’s home, his true home. Peigi loved him, and she believed he loved her, if what she’d seen in his eyes was true. But the choice had to be his.
Peigi pulled him close, warming him as he kept watch, pain in her heart.
They reached Cian’s camp the next afternoon, and found it in chaos.
The battle had resumed, Cian told Stuart as he and Peigi hastened to where Cian stood over his map in the middle of the site. Tents fluttered as they were dismantled, dokk alfar hastily piled carts and wagons with supplies, and wounded soldiers lay everywhere.
Stuart translated for Peigi. Things were going poorly, Cian said. He’d have to retreat or be killed to the last man.
Stuart should have been exhausted from their three-day trek with nothing to show for it, but he straightened his shoulders and took on an expression of hard determination. He asked Cian a question, and Cian motioned him to his map spread out over flat boulders.
The map was beautiful, exquisitely drawn to the last detail, very different from a relief map or a hastily scribbled plan of battle. Peigi saw a flicker of movement on it and leaned closer.
She sucked in a surprised breath. This was a real-time depiction of the battle, with tiny figures moving around trees and rocks, as though a GPS satellite beamed images down to the sheet of paper.
Stuart rested his hands on his thighs as he scrutinized the battlefield, he and Cian speaking together in the dokk alfar language. Finally Stuart straightened up, gave Cian a nod, lifted the iron sword he’d reformed, and strode off under the misty trees.
Peigi, as bear, ran after him. Stuart turned to her as she crashed through the brush, but he didn’t admonish her or tell her to go back and wait for him. He rested his hand on her shoulder, and together they walked toward the battle.
The armies were fighting hand to hand by the time Peigi and Stuart reached them, bloodily hacking and cutting each other. Men shouted, screamed, died. Shifter bodies lay everywhere, motionless, while the Shifters still alive fought in tight groups, harrying dokk alfar who had to divert from fighting hoch alfar or be torn apart by Shifters.
So much for rounding up the Shifters and keeping an eye on them. Peigi saw Michael, roaring as his grizzly bear, his scarred face fearsome. He shifted to his between-beast as he fought a leopard who was lithe and fast.
“Stay down, you fuckers!” he yelled. “Stupid bastards. No Guardians, you assholes.”
The slain Shifters would simply be dead, no Guardian to release their souls to the Summerland and render their bodies dust. Shifter souls floating free could be enslaved, with no hope of reprisal. It was the worst fear of a Shifter, and Peigi shared it, to die out of reach of a Guardian.
No one was winning this battle—they were simply killing each other. The hoch alfar fought with mad hatred, as did the dokk alfar. The Shifters only added to the madness.
“Screw this,” Stuart snarled.
He strode forward. The mists silhouetted him as he lifted his arm and spun his sword like a quarterstaff.
Mist swirled from the sword and gathered around him like a cloak. Peigi hung back, not wanting to hamper him, poised to rush to his aid.
Stuart flung the sword high. It flipped end over end in perfect arcs, rising higher, higher. When the sword reached its apex, Stuart bellowed a single word.
That sound reverberated from the trees, amplifying itself above the noise of battle, above cries of man and beast. The vibrations of power that touched Peigi were no less formidable than what had come from the Tuil Erdannan in the castle.
Fae soldiers halted in sudden worry. Shifters were slower to respond—when Shifters hit killing frenzy, they were difficult to stop—but at last they ceased, breathless and wondering.
The iron sword splintered. It became thousands of shards, dull black against the mist, thicker than a swarm of locusts. A darkness formed around it like black fog.
Peigi had seen this before, when they’d fought the hoch alfar just inside a gate in the ley line outside Las Vegas. As they had then, the hoch alfar looked skyward in collective terror, and then they ran.
The hoch alfar soldiers fled through woods and underbrush, scrambling and slamming into each other, anything to escape the deadly bolts falling from the sky.
The Shifters stared in bafflement as the hoch alfar changed from attacking fury to screaming masses of