as he engaged two charging Brailing soldiers, dispatching one with a cut to the throat and another with a spinning stab to the gut. He used his lightning to shield Dari and Lord Ross, who were battling beside him, as fierce as any five Stone Brothers, dealing death like assassins born to the task as Lord Cobb shouted and slammed his blade against foes on the other side of the mocker-filled waters, doing what he could to reach them.
Lord Brailing and his forces were advancing nonetheless, riding and running, moving ever closer, like a blue tide of destiny.
Above them, on Stone’s battlements, Lord Baldric barked orders and bellowed commands to shove away ladders and shore up damage done by catapulted stones. Blazing arrows sailed above them like crazed, burning birds. Smoke almost blinded Aron, and he couldn’t smell anything but mud and fish and the stink of molten tallow ready to spill through the castle’s murder holes. His arms ached from stabbing, thrusting, slicing, and the dozen wounds he had taken across his shoulders and elbows. Yet he was supposed to concentrate. He was supposed to go through the Veil.
And attack children.
Bile surged up his throat as his shoulders struck the stone walls of Triune.
He stared at the group of children on the other side of the moat, huddled next to the overturned carriage. Sixteen or so tiny bodies were still standing, and being reassembled by four Thorn Brothers who had thrown down their weapons and refused to join the battle around them.
At first glance, they seemed to be protecting the little ones, but Aron’s graal told him differently. They were readying the children to launch another attack. He thought about striking down the Thorn Brothers, but what would happen to those children then?
“Where is my sister?” Dari shrieked, beheading a Brailing soldier who had leaped from the nearest moat breach. The man’s head rolled into the moat, where a mocker-fish shifted to human form long enough to grab it and haul it below the water’s surface.
“Where is she, Aron? I can’t find her. Why can’t I see her?”
Aron made it through the Veil, trusting Stormbreaker’s blades and weather to keep his body alive as he tried to figure a way to block the inhuman graal these children were bringing to bear. If they joined their energies again, Aron didn’t think he could stop them. Not without Nic, if Nic was even still alive. Not without every bit of mind-talent he possessed, plus the loan of some of the strongest abilities in Eyrie.
His awareness seized on the first child, a boy, maybe five years, maybe six. Blond and blue-eyed like Nic, with the slight build of a Mab child in his formative years.
Powerful graal, trained, yet unformed, threatened to burst from the boy and overwhelm Aron.
Stop, Aron commanded, careful to focus on the energy, not the child’s life essence.
For a moment, the boy’s mind-talent faded to a dull shade of pink, but a shock of copper energy made the boy’s essence twitch. He redoubled his efforts, rudimentary but effective, with a child’s single-minded focus.
Aron held fast against the blast of red graal, already separating himself from the child’s attack and searching for the source of that copper energy. Altar graal, but joined with other colors.
Who did that Aron demanded, letting the question rise and flow through the Veil. Who just struck this child’s mind?
His awareness soared over the battlefield, taking in a new rush of fighters, veiled and primitive, disorganized but crushing toward the moat as they swung curved silver blades. Aron couldn’t discern who they were attacking. Everyone, it seemed, save for the children and their Thorn handlers. These new menaces seemed only to want to reach the spot where Aron’s body sagged against Stone’s fortress.
Stormbreaker’s thunder exploded through the Veil, making some of them stumble, and Dari’s Stregan graal, shielded in the forceful green of her grandfather’s energy, pounded forward, knocking more to their backsides.
Aron tore his thoughts from the spectacle and chased after whoever was communicating with the freakish children stranded on the battlefield in front of Triune. He drove his energy toward the wisp of copper graal retreating into the nothingness of the void at the edge of the Veil.
Show yourself, he demanded, flinging a tendril of his own mind-talent outward with the full force of his legacy. Show me where you are!
A scream of rage answered him, and a figure came tumbling out of the void, as if someone had fastened it to a catapult