A Court of Wings and Ruin
Page 133Cassian had picked his mark well. Hybern fled now. Outright turned and fled for the river.
But Hybern found Tarquin’s army waiting on its opposite bank, exactly where Cassian had ordered it to appear.
Trapped with the Illyrians and Keir’s Darkbringers at their backs and Tarquin’s two thousand soldiers on the other side of the narrow river …
It was harder to watch—that slaughter.
Mor said to me, “It’s over.”
The sun was high in the sky, heat rising with every minute.
“You don’t need to see this,” she added.
Because some of the Hybern soldiers were surrendering. On their knees.
As it was Tarquin’s territory, Rhys yielded the decision about what to do with prisoners.
From the distance, I picked out Tarquin from his armor—more ornate than Rhysand’s, but still brutal. Fish fins and scales seemed to be the motif, and his azure cloak flowed through the mud behind him as he stepped over fallen bodies to get to the few hundred surviving enemy.
Tarquin stared at where the enemy had knelt, his helmet masking his features.
The only mercy, it seemed, as Tarquin made a motion with his hand.
Some of the Hybern soldiers began screaming for clemency, their offers to sell information ringing out, even to us.
Tarquin pointed at a few of them, and they were hauled away by his soldiers. To be questioned. And I doubted it would be pleasant.
But the others …
Tarquin stretched out his hand toward them.
It took me a heartbeat to realize why the Hybern soldiers were thrashing and clawing at themselves, some trying to crawl away. But then one of them collapsed, and sunlight caught on his face. And even with the distance, I could tell—could tell it was water now bubbling out of his lips.
Out the lips of all the Hybern soldiers as Tarquin drowned them on dry land.
I didn’t see Rhys or the others for hours—not when he gave the order that the Illyrian war-camp was to be moved from the border of the Winter Court and rebuilt at the edge of the battlefield. So Mor and I winnowed to and from the camps as the exodus began. We brought my sisters last, waiting until many of the bodies had been turned to black dust by Rhysand. The blood and mud remained, but the camp maintained too good a position to yield—or waste time finding another one.
Elain didn’t seem to care. Didn’t seem to even notice that we winnowed her. She just went from her tent to Mor’s arms, then into the same tent rebuilt in the new camp.
Nesta listened to the low-level Illyrian soldiers whispering about how Cassian had thrown that spear, how he’d cut down soldiers like stalks of wheat, how he’d fought like Enalius—their most ancient warrior-god and the first of the Illyrians.
It had been a while, it seemed, since they had seen Cassian in open battle. Since they’d realized that he’d been young in the War, and now … the looks they gave Cassian as he passed … they were the same as those the High Lords had given Rhys upon seeing his power. Like them, and yet Other.
Nesta watched, and listened to it all, while the camp was built around us.
She did not ask where the bodies had gone before her arrival. She wholly ignored the camp Keir and his Darkbringers built beside ours—the ebony-armored soldiers who sneered at her, at me, at the Illyrians. No, Nesta only made sure that Elain was dozing in her tent, and then offered to help cut up linen for bandages.
We were doing just that around the early-evening fire when Rhys and Cassian approached, still in their armor, Azriel nowhere to be found.
Rhys took a seat on the log I was perched atop of, armor thudding, and silently pressed a kiss to my temple. He reeked of metal and blood and sweat.
His helmet clunked on the ground at our feet. I silently handed him a pitcher of water, and made to grab a glass when Rhys just lifted the pewter container and drank right from it. It sloshed over the sides, water pinging against the black metal coating his thighs, and when he at last set it down, he looked … tired. In his eyes, Rhys seemed weary.
But Nesta had jolted to her feet, staring at Cassian, at the helmet he had tucked into the crook of his arm, the weapons still poking above his shoulder, in need of cleaning. His dark hair hung limp with sweat, his face was mud-splattered where even the helmet had not kept it out.
But she surveyed his seven Siphons, the dim red stones. And then she said, “You’re hurt.”
Rhys snapped to attention at that.
But she reached for his arm—his shield arm.
Cassian seemed to hesitate, but offered it to her, tapping the Siphon atop his palm. The armor slid back a fraction over his forearm, revealing—
“You know better than to walk around with an injury,” Rhys said a bit tensely.
“I was busy,” Cassian said, not taking his focus off Nesta as she studied the swollen wrist. How she’d detected it through the armor … She must have read it in his eyes, his stance.
I hadn’t realized she’d been observing the Illyrian general enough to notice his tells.
“And it’ll be fixed by morning,” Cassian added, daring Rhys to say otherwise.
But Nesta’s pale fingers gently probed his golden-brown skin, and he hissed through his teeth.
“How do I fix it?” she asked. Her hair had been tied in a loose knot atop her head earlier in the day, and in the hours that we’d worked to ready and distribute supplies to the healers, through the heat and humidity, stray tendrils had come free to curl about her temple, her nape. Faint color had stained her cheeks from the sun, and her forearms, bare beneath the sleeves she’d rolled up, were flecked with mud.
Cassian slowly sat on the log where she’d been perched a moment before, groaning softly—as if even that movement taxed him. “Icing it usually helps, but wrapping it will just lock it in place long enough for the sprain to repair itself—”
She reached for the basket of bandages she’d been preparing, then for the pitcher at her feet.