the ground, searching for his mother’s blood and body—but he saw nothing.
The billowing red clouds of his own graal dissipated enough for him to see the nearest Mab soldiers, standing in absolute silence, and seemingly in awe. He knew most of the higher-level fighters in Mab’s army had enough legacy to see his, and to know it for what it was. That was probably all that had saved them thus far.
A few had removed their helms to look at him more closely.
“Steady,” came Snakekiller’s voice in one ear, and the command was so familiar that it helped him to marshal his strength and begin to find his balance again.
“Nicandro,” was the whisper in the other, and Nic heard the rattle of his mother’s voice, fragile but connected to his reality, at least for this one moment in time. “I know your energy. I know your essence. It’s you. It could be no one else.”
Snakekiller turned him loose to face his mother, and he managed to turn to her without falling. He could still feel the hot ruby energy she had lent him, part of what had kept him alive and beaten back the fit that tried to claim him as he saved Dari.
Lady Mab didn’t let go of Nic’s arm, and he felt her trembling grip tighten as her eyes widened. They were light steely blue, the color of a winter sky drenched in sunlight, and this day, at least, clear enough to make Nic believe she understood what was happening around her. Her pale blond ringlets were pulled tight into a bun, the stray strands held in place by her circlet with the red dragon head pendant dangling in the center of her lined forehead. From her neck to her feet she wore a fitted black leather tunic and skirt split and tied at her knees—the only proper fighting garb for a noble lady. The leather had been stitched with runes and etchings of dragons announcing the power and skill of Mab warriors. She also wore silver vambraces, though she had left her midsection unprotected to better wield the swords belted to her sides. At her waist, the bags holding the chevilles of her dead children and husband hung like the poisons and elixirs and stones carried by Stone.
“You fell,” she said, reaching her free hand up to trail her fingers across Nic’s scarred cheek even as her fingernails pressed through his tunic into the scant meat of his forearm.
“I was pushed,” he said, distracted by her touch, and the warmth and tortured surprise in her voice. “I think I flew.”
Lady Mab didn’t challenge this. She just kept staring at him as her many commanders pushed through Mab’s ample ranks, drawing in for a closer look at the young man who had just given them such a huge display of the Mab legacy.
“My son!” she cried out to them. “Nicandro Mab lives, and he returns to us this day.” Then, more quietly, she added, “A grown man, tall, if scarred and crippled. You are the hob-prince no more.”
“I am not,” Nic said, surprised to realize that term seemed so strange to him now, “though in truth I cannot tell you what new nickname I’ll earn for myself in the days to come.” He wasn’t certain what he was feeling, beyond increasing urgency to win his mother’s allegiance and take her forces into the fight to save his wife and his friends. Was he as heart-cold as she was, to be thinking so simply, with no regard for her emotions or welfare?
Lady Mab’s chilling gaze shifted to Snakekiller. “It was Stone that saved my son?”
Snakekiller’s palm rested on the hilt of the dagger she had drawn in Nic’s defense, now sheathed at her hip. “And hid him from the rectors who would have killed him.”
At the mention of rectors, Lady Mab turned her head away from Nic and spit on the ground. When she looked back at him, madness had edged out some of the reason she had managed to capture and reflect in the cold blue depths of those eyes. “They’re all dead. I had every rector in Dyn Mab put to the sword.”
Nic’s mouth drifted open, and he sensed Snakekiller tensing beside him. Beyond them, some of the commanders hung their heads, as if they knew what a monstrous crime this had been. They would have been helpless to stop it, short of outright rebellion against their own dynast leader—the crazed woman who was Eyrie’s queen.
“All of them?”