The war-drake’s jaws closed with the concussive force of two iron portcullises slamming shut.
High Matron Morgana shrieked—a high, wet screech cut instantly in half as three hundred serrated fangs crushed through her pearl silks, through her bone needles, through the enchanted sea-turtle shell of her saddle. The sea-glass staff shattered in a blinding shower of caustic green sparks, its fragments raining down into the boiling magma ditches below.
For half a heartbeat, the ancient sorceress hung suspended in the beast's maw, her limbs thrashing uselessly against the scaly hide.
Then, with a sickening, violent shake of its colossal horned skull, the drake whipped its neck sideways and flung the broken, bleeding ruin of the Matron sixty feet into the air.
Her body fell into the eastern fissure with a hiss of steam and a flash of white ash.
A stunned, dead silence dropped over the volcanic causeway.
The Coven's mercenary spearmen froze, their weapons wavering. The enslaved trolls blinked their milky, bloodshot eyes as the residual necrotic fog cleared from their simple minds, dropping their iron haul-chains into the volcanic dust with heavy, hollow thuds.
The army of the Silver Coast was leaderless.
"Break them!" Varis’s voice tore through the smoke, cold, merciless, and triumphant. "Leave none to carry word to the southern spires! Feed the ash!"
The Ember guard surged forward like an uncoiling viper.
Without the Matron’s sorcery to bolster their ranks, the Coven blood-drinkers were slaughtered where they stood. The Void-dancers swept through the panicked mercenaries in silent, rhythmic pairs, their curved blades reaping a crimson harvest along the narrow stone road until the causeway ran slick with gore.
High on the aqueduct ledge, Lyra’s knees gave out.
The violent recoil from severing a tether that thick felt like having a hot iron bar driven through her temples. A thick river of dark blood was pouring from both of her nostrils, dripping over her lips, pooling in the hollow of her collarbone where the silver-ash brand throbbed with white-hot, agonizing heat.
Her vision tunneled into dark, swirling pinpricks.
The stone conduit tilted beneath her boots.
She didn't have the strength to catch herself. As her center of gravity tipped forward over the sixty-foot drop, her limbs refused to obey her commands. She tumbled into empty air, the roaring wind tearing the oilskin cloak from her shoulders as the basalt floor rushed up to meet her.
I broke her, Lyra thought, the dark, victorious whisper of her inner wolf echoing through the static of her mind. I broke the Matron.
A shadow ripped through the sulfur smoke beneath her.
An iron-clad arm wrapped around her ribs mid-fall, arresting her momentum with a concussive grunt of pure, immovable muscle.
Gideon caught her against his chest, tucking her head under his chin as his boots hit the volcanic slag below, the impact driving deep cracks into the stone. He rolled with the momentum, absorbing the crushing shock with his own armored shoulders, before coming to a halt against the petrified trunk of a dead pine.
Lyra gasped, her fingers clawing weakly at the boiled leather of his tunic as she dragged cold air into her burning lungs.
"I told you," Gideon rumbled, his voice rough, ragged, and breathless against her ear, "not to die, little bird."
His hands were trembling.
The great warlord of the Iron Wastes—the killer who had cleaved through an Alpha's vanguard without blinking—was trembling as his large, calloused fingers smoothed the blood-matted hair away from her forehead. His amber-gold eyes searched her pale face with a feral, terrified intensity that stole the breath from her throat.
"I didn't die," she choked out, a weak, bloodied grin curving her lips. "I fed her to her own lizard."
Gideon let out a sound that was half-chuckle, half-growl—a low, predatory purr that vibrated straight through his armor into her chest. He leaned down, his forehead resting against hers, his scent of burning cedar, crushed iron, and mountain rain washing over her like a healing balm.
"You're completely out of your mind," he murmured, his lips pressing a hard, desperate kiss to the bridge of her nose, then to her bloodstained lips. "A reckless, savage little queen."
The silver-red cord between their chests pulsed with an intoxicating, rhythmic heat, knitting the fractured edges of her exhausted soul back together. For a moment, the battle, the dead Matron, and the looming threat of the Northern Alliance vanished into the quiet sanctuary of his embrace.
Then, a heavy, rhythmic thudding shook the ground five paces away.
Gideon’s head snapped up, his right hand instantly dropping to the hilt of his star-iron claymore.
Standing at the edge of the smoke was the war-drake.
The massive beast lowered its horned, armored head, dark blood dripping from its scaly jowls. Its slit-pupiled, sulfuric eyes weren't wild with feral madness; they were ancient, intelligent, and fixed entirely upon Lyra.
Slowly, deliberately, the colossal reptile dropped its front knees onto the volcanic slag.
It lowered its snout until its rough, scaly hide rested against the dust three inches from Lyra’s boots—an ancient gesture of absolute, eternal submission.
Varis walked out of the thinning smoke, wiping her executioner's blades on a strip of silk torn from a dead mercenary’s cloak. She stopped beside the kneeling beast, her violet eyes wide with dark, reverent awe.
"The drakes of the Silver Coast were stolen from the Ash Court's volcanic hatcheries during the Great Purge," Varis said, her voice hushed. "Their ancestors were the royal mounts of the Morvath sovereigns. When you snapped the Matron’s tether, Lyra... you didn't just free an animal. You called your family’s war-beast home."
Lyra pushed herself up in Gideon’s arms, reaching out a trembling, bloodstained hand toward the colossal snout.
The drake let out a low, rumbling hum that sounded like subterranean magma moving through deep stone, leaning its massive head into the fragile warmth of her small palm.
"What do we call him?" Gideon asked softly, his arm still locked possessively around her waist.
Lyra looked at the beast's dark, obsidian scales and the glowing violet veins pulsing beneath its armored crest.
"Cinder," she whispered.
Talia hurried down the causeway, holding an iron cylinder she had retrieved from the saddlebags of the Matron’s fallen retinue. Her single eye was tight with grim urgency.
"Gideon, Lyra," Talia said, her voice cutting through the quiet. "You need to see this."
She uncapped the cylinder, unfurling a thick parchment bearing four wax seals: the snarling bear of the Western Timber, the white stag of the Frost-Barrow, the sea-serpent of the Silver Coast, and the iron hammer of the Iron Ridge.
"It’s not just a defense pact," Talia said, her voice dropping low. "Morgana was carrying the mobilization orders. While we were fighting here... the remaining three High Alphas crossed the Silver River."
Gideon stood slowly, pulling Lyra upright beside him, his jaw hardening into impenetrable granite. "Where are they marching?"
Talia looked at Lyra, her expression pale beneath the soot.
"They aren't marching on the Wastes, Gideon," Talia said quietly. "They know Lyra was hiding in the Blackwood territory. They think the entire Blackwood Pack conspired with her to assassinate Alpha Conlan and Lord Matthew."
Talia took a breath.
"They're marching thirty thousand warriors straight toward the Blackwood valley to burn the entire pack alive—every woman, child, and elder who ever called that territory home."