Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7) by Sarah J. Maas

He’d make any bargain, he’d sell his soul to the dark god, if they spared her.

He hadn’t meant it. He took it back, all those words.

Useless. He’d called her useless. Had thrown her into the snow naked.

He took it back.

Aedion sobbed, flinging himself toward her as Lysandra tried again to rise, using her shield to balance her weight.

Men rallied behind her, waiting to see what the Fire-Bringer would do. How she’d burn the ilken.

There was nothing to see, nothing to witness. Nothing at all, but her death.

Yet Lysandra rose, Aelin’s golden hair falling in her face as she hefted her shield and pointed the sword between her and the ilken.

The queen has come; the queen fights alone.

Men ran back to the front line. Turned on their heels and raced for her.

Lysandra held her sword steady, kept it pointed at the ilken in defiance and rage.

Ready for the death soon to come.

She had been willing to give it up from the start. Had agreed to Aelin’s plans, knowing it might come to this.

One shift, one change into a wyvern’s form, and she’d destroy the ilken. But she remained in Aelin’s body. Held that sword, her only weapon, upraised.

Terrasen was her home. And Aelin her queen.

She’d die to keep this army together. To keep the lines from breaking. To rally their soldiers one last time.

Her leg leaked blood onto the snow, and the two ilken sniffed, laughing again. They knew—what lurked under her skin. That it was not the queen they faced.

She held her ground. Did not yield one inch to the ilken, who advanced another step.

For Terrasen, she would do this. For Aelin.

He took it back. He took it all back.

Aedion was barely a hundred feet away when the ilken struck.

He screamed as the one on the left swept with its claws, the other on the right lunging for her, as if it would tackle her to the snow.

Lysandra deflected the blow to the left with her shield, sending the ilken sprawling, and with a roar, slashed upward with her sword on the right.

Ripping open the lunging ilken from navel to sternum.

Black blood gushed, and the ilken shrieked, loud enough to set Aedion’s ears ringing. But it stumbled, falling into the snow, scrambling back as it clutched its opened belly.

Aedion ran harder, now thirty feet away, the space between them clear.

The ilken who’d gone sprawling on the left was not done. Lysandra’s eye on the one retreating, it lashed for her legs again.

Aedion threw the Sword of Orynth with everything left in him as Lysandra twisted toward the attacking ilken.

She began falling back, shield lifting in her only defense, still too slow to escape those reaching claws.

The poison-slick tips brushed her legs just as his sword went through the beast’s skull.

Lysandra hit the snow, shouting in pain, and Aedion was there, heaving her up, yanking his sword from the ilken’s head and bringing it down upon the sinewy neck. Once. Twice.

The ilken’s head tumbled into the snow and mud, the other beast instantly swallowed by the Morath soldiers who had paused to watch.

Who now looked upon the queen and her general and charged.

Only to be met by a surge of Terrasen soldiers racing past Aedion and Lysandra, battle cries shattering from their throats.

Aedion half-dragged the shifter deeper behind the re-formed lines, through the soldiers who had rallied to their queen.

He had to get the poison out, had to find a healer who could extract it immediately. Only a few minutes remained until it reached her heart—

Lysandra stumbled, a moan on her lips.

Aedion swung his shield on his back and hauled her over a shoulder. A glimpse at her leg revealed shredded skin, but no greenish slime.

Perhaps the gods had listened. Perhaps it was their idea of mercy: that the ilken’s poison had worn off on other victims before it’d gotten to her.

But the blood loss alone … Aedion pressed a hand over the shredded, bloody skin to staunch the flow. Lysandra groaned.

Aedion scanned the regrouping army for any hint of the healers’ white banners over their helmets. None. He whirled toward the front lines. Perhaps there was a Fae warrior skilled enough at healing, with enough magic left—

Aedion halted. Beheld what broke over the horizon.

Ironteeth witches.

Several dozen mounted on wyverns.

But not airborne. The wyverns walked on land.

Heaving a mammoth, mobile stone tower behind them. No ordinary siege tower.

A witch tower.

It rose a hundred feet high, the entire structure built into a platform whose make he could not determine with the angle of the ground and the lines of chained wyverns dragging it across the plain. A dozen more witches flew in the air around it, guarding it. Dark stone—Wyrdstone—had been used to craft it, and window slits had been interspersed throughout every level.

Not window slits. Portals through which to angle the power of the mirrors lining the inside, as Manon Blackbeak had described. All capable of being adjusted to any direction, any focus.

All they needed was a source of power for the mirrors to amplify and fire out into the world.

Oh gods.

“Fall back!” Aedion screamed, even while his men continued to rally. “FALL BACK.”

With his Fae sight, he could just make out the uppermost level of the tower, more open to the elements than the others.

Witches in dark robes were gathered around what seemed to be a curved mirror angled into the hollow core of the tower.