Beyond the Warlord, at the edge of his vision, Hyden could see the limp hind quarters and tail of Claret’s body lying across a section of broken palace wall. She had crushed it when she fell. Above her, her young hatchling flapped and screeched in confusion and sorrow because his consistent pestering refused to rouse his mother.
Hyden felt Ironspike’s white hot swath of power hit him in the back. In the span of a heartbeat, he saw in his mind’s eye Vaegon Willowbrow shredded and broken in the rubble; Brady Culvert being eroded in his tracks by a black dragon’s acidic spew. He saw Oarly’s pulverized body, and the smoldering form of the High King lying in the bloody slush like a roasted animal. When he looked back up at the Warlord and started channeling Ironspike’s power through Claret’s tear drop, all he saw before him was evil. When he directed that tremendous flow into the Tokamac Verge, he knew that even though none of Gerard’s goodness remained in the thing before him, it would remain in his own heart, where it would always be.
Durge and his fellow dragon-riding guardians had herded the bulk of the common folk fleeing the gates into a snowy, horseshoe-shaped valley in the hills north of the city. One of the cocky red-scaled wyrms had set a good portion of the trees on fire to keep them warm and the others had taken up positions to defend them.
Jicks, on his long, sapphire dragon, and the two white wyrms that seemed to obey his blue’s every command, found themselves in trouble. Most of the imps and wyvern had fled the sky out of fear of the dragons, but the hellcats, Choska demons, and the larger beasts still fought with ferocious intensity. Just when it seemed that the young swordsman’s mount had gotten the best of the dark flock, a noxious purple radiance filled the sky. One of the ice dragons began sneezing out shards and circles of frozen spew as the stuff irritated its nostrils. A Choska hit it hard and raked a claw down its back. White scales opened wide, exposing pink muscles and cartilage that were soon flooded with crimson. Blood streaked across the dragon’s scales in thick rivulets. Before it could recover, it was set upon again, this time by two hellcats that savaged the wounded wyrm’s wings until they folded back, broken. Finally, with a shriek of horror, the proud white wyrm went spiraling down to the earth like an autumn leaf falling from a tree.
Jicks’s blue and the other ice dragon fought with all they had in them. Now they were fighting to get out of the choking purple cloud, instead of being on the attack. With half a hundred hellspawn still in the sky, all of them unaffected by the miasma, the situation was suddenly grim.
Corva could feel the pulse of the Arbor’s Heart coming from his Queen Mother. He urged the sparkling blue he rode toward her. He found the battle on the palace’s front steps. The horrid stench that was permeating the sky wasn’t as bad down low. He found it was bearable, but for how long, he didn’t know.
Hyden Hawk and Phen were battling a beast so malignant that it actually pained Corva to look upon it. A patch of golden green on a blackened Westland coat caught his eyes. A ruined man, whose chainmail armor had been melted to his torso, fought in vain to survive. Corva might have been able to help him, but he doubted it. There were elves pinned down who needed him and his dragon far more desperately.
Three elven swordsmen were fighting a losing battle around a pair of wounded pikemen and a dwarf who had lost a forearm. Some two-legged, wolf-headed monster, whose claws and furred head were soaked black with the blood of its previous victims, had hemmed them in at the edge of the forested park that flanked Whitten Loch. Corva urged his dragon to the scene just in time to save one of the two uninjured defenders.
While his dragon’s attention was on the attack, a hellcat attacked Corva out of nowhere. It happened so fast that the elf was ripped from the dragon’s back before he even felt the claws digging into his shoulders. The blue dragon wasn’t physically harmed, but feeling the proximity of the demons behind it, and with Corva’s weight suddenly gone from its back, it whipped around and left the warriors to their fate. The two uninjured men joined to attack the bloody beast. The sparkling blue dragon leapt back into the air in pursuit of the hellcat that was still holding its rider in its claws. The hellcat led the blue wyrm up into the toxic cloud the Warlord had created, and then dropped the elf. Torn between chasing the demon and trying to catch Corva, the dragon followed its instinct. It could only assume that Corva was already crushed to death, so it went after the beast. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had chosen to dive after its rider, though; it had been led into a trap.
From above, below, and even behind the sparkling blue, a dozen or more hellcats, and a massive red-furred apish thing converged on it all at once. The red-furred beast had a black, leathery chest and its wings were far too small to actually carry it. It flew by way of magic. It was a greater demon and it tore into the blue with its power while its minions did the same with tooth and claw. It was all the hellborn creatures could do to get away from the wyrm when it started falling from the sky.
“Put me down!” Queen Rosa screamed at the Blacksword Knight who’d just brought the Queen Mother in from the gate. He was fearfully trying to drag the queen of the realm from the balcony. “Tell him, Willa!” She thrashed and swung as she yelled. The last words she spoke very loudly and very clearly. “Mikahl is out there!”
Queen Willa gave the man a nod and he let the High Queen loose. Telgra stepped up to her quickly in order to keep her from scratching the poor man’s face.
“Come,” the Queen Mother of the elves said. “Both of you. Stay close to me and the Heart of Arbor will shield us from sight.” With that, she shouldered away the stupefied guard.
Rosa saw Mikahl lying burned and broken in the snow, saw Phen touching him with Ironspike. The fact that the sword was responding to Phen didn’t register on her. She was overcome with grief. From her vantage, Mikahl looked injured beyond hope. She barely heard the gasps of the other two women.
Queen Willa was gasping because of Phen. She remembered vividly the large Westland lord named Ellrich who’d brought the boy to Xwarda so long ago. In a single sitting he had eaten the better part of a roasted pig.
Willa hadn’t been a queen then, only a princess. The expression of anguish on the boy’s face as he pulled the sword away from the High King said more than words ever could. She stepped up behind Rosa and gave her gentle support.
Telgra gasped because the sight and smell, the very presence of the thing rising up out of the water before Hyden Hawk, was appalling to her senses. The Arbor’s Heart hammered through her chest in disgust and she had to fight to breathe as some dark purple taint jetted up into the sky from the Warlord’s outstretched hands. She didn’t even notice the body Phen had been worrying over, but she saw the sword’s bluish glimmer brighten to red, then orange, then pure white. She could almost feel the heat from the magic warming her skin. In her heart she cheered Phen as he strode forward purposefully and pointed the sword at Hyden. Her intense focus was broken suddenly as Corva’s body came slamming down into the balcony with a sickening crunch. All of the women screamed in terror. The way the body lay across the rail, like a grain sack, limp and still, left no room to hope that he had survived.
Queen Willa, shocked to the core by the impact, pulled Rosa back into the chamber. Rosa was far too traumatized to resist.
Telgra knew immediately that it was Corva, and it crushed her emotions into a compressed knot so tightly that they exploded. She lost the spell of concealing she’d cast over them. She fell to her knees and wailed out tears of sorrow. That was when Phen sent Ironspike’s magical blast into Hyden Hawk. It was the last thing she saw, for the elven guards rushed out onto the balcony and pulled the Queen Mother, and then Corva’s broken body, out of the open.