Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

THIRTY-FIVE

Chapter Thirty-Five

There was nothing beautiful about the bloodshed staining the fields of the Seelie Court. As throats were slashed and bodies were dismembered, as the grass ran red and the Lumen river became stained with the gore of both sides, there was only tragedy and terror and the whispers of what one would hear when they pressed their ear against the very edge of a bottomless abyss.
Bel-Arh stopped in the centre of the battlefield, his eyes scanning the scene.

There was nothing beautiful here, for beauty required peace, beauty required love, and beauty required a dance that revolved little around bitterness and malevolence. There was nothing beautiful here, but there was a sense of something poetic.

Perhaps it was the brutal quickness of every cut, every step, every last breath. Perhaps it was the unconcealed manner in which the fae went head to head, writhing enemy against enemy like germs in a beaker, as if not a single rule applied and the world had forgotten its oldest laws. 

In the Earthen ages, they used to say, The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. That was a lie. There was only so long the players of Callistra's treacherous game could subdue and subdue and subdue before their enemies tore in at once.

Now the fight was here.

And the fight would remain until the world was changed.

Bel-Arh watched a nearby lone villager spin on her heel, desperately blinking red out of her eyes. There had to be a gash on her forehead, a wound bleeding down the length of her face, but it seemed that it was hardly a concern. She was only one out of the thousands on this battlefield today, and one of the many who had become vulnerable. The two soldiers who she had been linked with seconds ago were dead. The rest of her row had scattered: their impenetrable wall of shields broken.

"Kamilia!"

The roar came from the lone villager's left, drawing her attention sharply to another abandoned soldier, though this one was battling a noble without back-up. Bel-Arh watched the villager named Kamilia lunge forward, watched her expression twist tight with determination, but before she could take more than two steps, before she could come to the rescue, the other villager had been incinerated by a strike of magic.

Just like that: a full-bodied faery became nothing save dust.

Bel-Arh started moving then, tossing aside his usual slow analysis for immediate action. When he reached the villager, he offered no explanation before grabbing her by the arm and tugging her forward. Fortunately, the girl didn't resist. She was immediately eyeing the manner in which Bel-Arh repelled the friction in the air, and decidedly thought it would be unwise to extricate herself from his grip.

"Android," the girl guessed.

"Correct. Duck." 

The moment the command left Bel-Arh's lips, they both dropped low onto the floor, their noses pressed against the acrid, metallic grass as a shield hurtled overhead. The flying chunk of metal hadn't been targeted at them: they were simply in the way of an attack.

All around them, there were the sounds of metal cluttering to the earth and metal piercing flesh. War cries became a constant melody that their ears were accustoming to, for this battle was a game of chaos: a game of numbers. The villagers lacked skill, they lacked precision, they lacked any form of coherence or agility, but close to every faery outside of the Court walls had shown up to this revolution, close to every faery who had survived the deathly Mors and could walk on their own had volunteered themselves as a screaming soldier of the new throne.

They were overwhelming the nobility.

But that didn't mean they were winning—they had simply become worthy competitors of a magic that the nobility possessed.