The war council of Oak haven lasted three hours, but the marching orders took only three minutes to deliver.
With the Western Timber now secured under Gideon’s ancestral mantle, their forces had swollen from an elite vanguard into a massive, continental avalanche. Two thousand timber-wolves—hardened foresters and veteran axe men who had chafed under Eamon’s cowardly rule—had taken up arms alongside the two hundred thawed warriors from the Red Ferry. Above them, Cinder circled the ancient redwood canopy, his deep, volcanic purr vibrating through the soil like an impending earthquake.
Yet as the army broke camp at midnight, heading south toward the maritime border, the scent of the world shifted once more.
The rich, resinous air of cedar and pine began to curdle, replaced by the bitter tang of sea-salt, drying kelp, and a suffocating, synthetic sweetness that Lyra’s ability recognized with cold, razor-sharp certainty: The Great Siphon.
They halted at dawn upon the crest of the Weeping Bluffs, four leagues north of the coastal capital.
Below them lay the Silver Coast.
It was an architectural marvel built upon deceit. Sprawling across five miles of jagged sea-cliffs were soaring, needle-thin spires carved from iridescent white coral and polished mother-of-pearl. Enormous aqueducts carried seawater into deep, circular lagoons that glowed with a sickening, neon-green phosphor.
At the center of the bay, rising out of the churning Atlantic surf like an ivory spear, was the Citadel of the Tides—the sovereign seat of the High Coven, and the stronghold of the final, surviving signatory of the extermination decree: Alpha Lucian of the Silver Coast.
Lyra dismounted from the warhorse, stepping to the edge of the limestone precipice. The salt spray whipped her dark hair across her face, stinging the pale, newly healed skin of her cheeks.
Beside her, Gideon planted the butt of his right claymore into the turf, his wolf-pelt mantle snapping violently in the gale. His amber-gold eyes narrowed as he surveyed the glistening spires below.
"Lucian is not a brute like Conlan, nor a fanatic like Torian," Gideon said, his low baritone cutting through the crash of the breakers below. "He is an alchemist. A merchant-king who made his fortune selling false-mate draughts and suppression collars to the High Lords of the inland territories. His personal guard—the Chitin Legion—fight in armor forged from the crushed shells of deep-sea leviathans. Blades slide off them like water."
"Blades don't matter," Lyra replied, her voice eerily calm.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose.
The sheer volume of sorcery humming within the coastal basin made her teeth ache.
To her mundane vision, the spires were pristine, gleaming like pearls in the morning sun.
To her ability, the entire bay was wrapped in an enormous, pulsating dome of pitch-black necrotic energy—a monstrous, artificial web anchored to the central citadel.
And feeding that web were thousands of glowing, silver threads being siphoned directly from the lower districts of the city.
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat. "He’s harvesting them."
Talia stepped up to the edge, lowering her spyglass with a sharp, grim scowl. "Harvesting what?"
"The common wolves of the docks," Lyra whispered, her violet eye flaring with sudden, nauseating fury. "The laborers, the net-menders, the pearl-divers... he has them locked in the lower tidal pens. His sorcerers are actively draining their natural mate-chords through the aqueducts to power the citadel’s defensive wards."
Varis stepped forward, her silver braids tied back with black leather thongs, her executioner's blades humming with quiet bloodlust. "If that ward is active, my Queen, Cinder cannot fly within two miles of the bay. The green fire in those lagoons will boil a drake’s blood in its veins."
"Then we don't fly over it," Lyra said, turning to look at Gideon.
The warlord met her gaze, reading the dark, feral determination written across her sharp features.
"The tidal tunnels," Gideon said, a slow, knowing smile touching his scarred mouth. "The smugglers' flues that empty out beneath the lower docks at low tide."
"You know them?" Talia asked.
"Twelve winters ago, after I took my father's blades, I hid in those tunnels for three moons while Lucian’s bounty hunters combed the cliffs," Gideon rumbled, his hand reaching out to wrap firmly around the nape of Lyra’s neck, pulling her close until his scent of burning cedar and crushed iron banished the stench of the sea. "They're narrow, flooded waist-deep with freezing brine, and guarded by Coven thralls."
He leaned down, his forehead resting against hers, his breath hot against her parted lips.
"We take a dozen Void-dancers, slip into the tidal pens, and sever the siphon from the inside," Gideon murmured. "While Varis and the timber-army stage a false assault on the northern causeway to draw the Chitin Legion."
"A decapitation strike," Lyra whispered, her pulse hammering against the pad of his thumb.
"Just you, me, and forty blades in the dark," he growled softly, his amber eyes burning with an intense, possessive hunger that made the silver-red cord between their chests thrum with electric heat. "Just how I like it."
From behind them, Riona—the auburn-haired marsh girl they had freed from the altar—stepped forward, holding a pair of curved fishing daggers.
"Take me with you," Riona said, her chin held high despite the bruising on her jaw. "My kin worked the pearl-barges in those pens for ten generations before the Coven took our land. I know every iron grate and drainage sluice in the lower bay."
Lyra looked at the young she-wolf, seeing the same desperate, unbroken fire that had kept her alive in the Blackwood cellars for nineteen winters.
"Get your boots on, Riona," Lyra said.
Two hours later, under the cover of a thick, rolling sea-fog, the strike team slid down the jagged limestone cliffs on braided ropes of boiled leather, disappearing into the dark, yawning maw of the drainage conduits below the waterline.
The water inside the tunnel was freezing, reeking of rotting kelp, sulfur, and the metallic tang of harvested souls.
Gideon led the way, his colossal frame hunched beneath the low, dripping stone ceiling, his drawn claymore held flat against his forearm to prevent the steel from scraping the mossy walls. Lyra followed directly behind him, her left hand lightly resting against the small of his back, drawing continuous, steady strength from the furnace-like heat radiating through his armor.
After half a mile of silent wading through the black water, the conduit opened into a cavernous, subterranean vault carved directly into the bedrock beneath the citadel.
The sight made Lyra’s blood curdle in her veins.
The chamber was lined with hundreds of rusted iron cages, half-submerged in the brackish tide. Inside were over a thousand emaciated, shivering wolves—men, women, and young pups—shackled by their necks with glowing copper collars.
From each collar, a fine, luminous thread of pure silver was being pulled upward into a massive, pulsing conduit of sea-glass that hung from the center of the ceiling, pumping their harvested vitality directly into the citadel above.
Standing along the catwalks above the cages were forty guards clad in iridescent, shell-plated armor, holding barbed spears that crackled with green lightning.
And standing on the central observation platform, wrapped in a robe of sea-otter fur and holding an iron ledger, was a slender, silver-haired male with cold, calculating sapphire eyes.
Alpha Lucian.
"Keep the siphon steady!" Lucian’s clipped, melodic voice echoed through the vault over the weeping of the prisoners. "The northern scouts report the Drake bastard is marching on the causeway! I want the wards at full strength before his vanguard touches the sand!"
He closed the ledger with a sharp snap, turning to his head alchemist.
"And if the commoners’ hearts give out before the battle is won... dump their carcasses into the bay and haul in the next batch."
Down in the black water, Gideon’s hand shifted to his back scabbard, the muscles in his neck bunching into cords of pure, murderous intent.
He looked back at Lyra through the gloom.
Lyra didn't say a word.
She reached to her waist, drew her antler-handled knife, and let the celestial violet fire ignite in both of her eyes.
"Free the pens," Lyra whispered to the shadows behind her.
And then she vaulted out of the black water, driving her blade straight into the chest of the nearest guard.