and fired.
It landed, ghostlike and shrieking, near enough for him to make out familiar features.
The tall frame.
The wisps of blond hair. The blue eyes, cornflower but blazing with hatred.
As Aron’s false goddess lifted both hands to the sides of her head, he roared and struck at her with his sapphire energy. She absorbed the blow, but staggered and dragged at the multicolored energy supporting her own.
“Stop!” Aron shouted, intent on severing Pravda Altar’s connection with Kate, and stopping the evil woman’s mind and heart as well. Before his bolt of graal reached her, she fell straight through the Veil, down, down to the woods closest to the fallen carriage below.
Her location glowed a brilliant copper and silver, ringed by a rainbow, as obvious to Aron as if someone had struck a flint to the land’s largest funeral pyre. Then a gray shield of formless energy sprang over the spot, covering it and preventing him from sinking down to take hold of Thorn’s Lady Provost.
Aron swore and forced his awareness back into his own body.
“She’s in the woods,” he called to Dari and Lord Ross, forcing his voice above the raging clatter of swords. “They’re in the woods nearest the carriage—but hurry. I don’t know how long before they bolt. The children have them shielded.”
Beside him, Stormbreaker spun, both jagged blades moving with the speed of his lightning. Veiled bandits poked and struck at him from all sides, but with each step, he drove them back, back toward the moat, and the eager, hungry mockers waiting below the churning surface.
Dari and Lord Ross stormed forward onto the nearest moat breach, and Lord Cobb thundered toward them, chopping a path through Brailing warriors as his few remaining Guardsmen did the same on either side.
Aron turned his focus to the children, but before he could select a course of action, shadows crossed his vision. Huge shapes wheeled in the sky above Triune.
His pulse raced as he prayed this would be the Sabor, arriving with Cobb and Ross reinforcements—but this cloud of screeching motion was coming in from the wrong direction. Great wings battered the air, swooping down from the west, from the direction of the Barrens and Outlands, and Dyn Altar.
“Rocs!” Stormbreaker shouted. “Rocs carrying warbird soldiers!”
Above them, Stone Brothers took up the call on the battlements, and Lord Baldric bellowed, “Take cover! Take cover now, now, now! Where are my archers?”
Aron counted ten massive birds diving toward the battlefield, each overmastered by a thin but well-disciplined cloud of coppery graal. Each carried four to six Altar warriors, swords gleaming and flaming arrows ready to fire. The first bird dived behind Stone’s battlements, breaching the fortress as no battering ram or ladder or tunnel had been able to do.
Aron ripped his focus from the children across the moat and attacked the graal controlling the Rocs.
Exhaustion swept over him as he took on that sharply focused energy and the wild impulses of the birds themselves. It felt like slamming his head into Triune’s walls, and he couldn’t stay on his feet as he cracked through first one copper cloud, then the next. Aron’s vision blurred on both sides of the Veil. Dirt brushed against his lips as he toppled belly first to the berm, close enough to the water’s edge to hear the snapping jaws of fish creatures only a few feet from his face.
He beat at the tiny but deadly mockers, feeling needle-teeth lance into his fingers as he used his mind to tear apart the soldiers’ control of the Rocs. At least two birds made it through into Triune’s grounds, but Aron ripped open the graal driving seven others, and Stone’s archers brought down the eighth. The massive bird plummeted to the ground near the overturned carriage, landing in a crash of feathers and armors and swords. Some of Brailing’s Guard fell beneath the bird’s bulk, but not enough.
Aron heard an old man’s shrill cry, and saw a thin, reedy soldier dressed in Brailing colors, wearing a sapphire-studded helm with eagle’s wings, wading through the Brailing Guard unhorsed.
Distant memories stirred inside Aron’s mind, and he knew the soldier for who he was.
His sapphire-crusted sword hilt raised, Lord Brailing bore down on Lord Cobb, Lord Ross, and Dari, who were just breaking free of the moat breach and starting across the main battlefield toward Kate’s last-known location.
Dark, bleak hatred surged through Aron, familiar and seemingly as old as Lord Brailing himself. He tried to rise to stop the monster from robbing him of