His jaws slid open, and a vine crept through his mouth, snaking around his muzzle. It was like watching time move faster, thorns exploding from the vine, glossy black needles that pierced Miro’s body with every inch of the vine’s creeping expansion.

His entire body was moving, the ground beneath him a roiling mess not of wargs, but of more vines. They glistened, red with blood and wet with glassy tears, the thorns and petals of the golems shivering in the dirt where those liquids had touched.

They swallowed Miro whole, dragging his corpse into the earth, and the vines spread outward.

I stood, Cirri in my arms, and the agony in my back grew bright and hot as I pulled away from the thing that had latched onto me.

I turned my back on the churning ground and saw what had bitten me.

Not a warg, no, but blackened brambles bursting out of the earth. Wargs were tangled within their thorny branches, screaming and fighting, but the brambles grew through them, bursting through eyes and piercing mouths.

The golems’ remains were reaching for me, trying to send sharp thorns into my skin and hold me in place.

Clutching Cirri, I backed away, and the vines swirled up my ankle like living things, needles bursting outward and driving through my skin.

I couldn’t fly, my back a mutilated mess. But I needed to bring Cirri from the terrible Fae magic erupting around us. She had my blood, but she needed Wyn to put her back together.

That became my sole thought. Get her away. Take her from the magic. 

I tore my foot away from the vines, leaving blood and skin behind.

We walked from the battlefield surrounded by thorns, only a step ahead of their slithering, hungry masses, the thorns lengthening into tiny blades and reaching for me with every step.

I held Cirri close, keeping her from their reach, but it wasn’t her they wanted. It was me they tried to take, and I left more of myself behind with every step.

But as thirsty as they were for my blood, they cleared my path. The vines snaked beneath the earth, and I could hear the screams of the wargs as they were caught in the ravenous brambles, trying to flee and failing.

I passed over a scattering of petals that shivered, sprouting into hungry new vines, and looked up at a warg caught in the towering brambles overhead, his eyes dull and dead, a hundred long thorns piercing his heart.

Strangely, what occurred to me in that moment as I carried Cirri from the forest of brambles was the letter, the one I had disavowed and burned to ashes the night I decided that she was mine, and that I would have her, one way or another.

They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place.

The thorns, the brambles, they saw no difference between me and the wargs.

And they were right.

We were things that should not be.

But that meant nothing to me now, because if I had been a man, I would not have been able to carry her from this killing field. If I had been a vampire, I would not have been able to tear away from the grasping thorns. I would have been swallowed whole, Cirri in my arms, both of us to perish on this bloody ground and rot together.

It had taken a monster to save her life.

The thorns hissed behind me, nothing but the wind in their branches, but it sounded almost like a voice, furious that its prey was escaping.

I held her closer, tighter, hearing nothing but the weakened beat of her heart with every step, further diminished with every step, until I finally took the step that led onto solid, unshifting ground and open air.

I exhaled, blinking as I was pulled from my daze of determination.

The open plain before me had been transformed into a camp; the legions had caught up in full. They’d built barricades before the softened earth that hid the wargs, scarred by battle, but still standing.

Knights had gathered behind them, bloody and exhausted, some slumped on the ground, but none of them watched the field.

I turned, and saw nothing but a sea of brambles rising high overhead, and in the distance, the tower stood like a lonely lighthouse on a sea of thorns.

A thousand wargs were pierced on them, dangling and loose, the brambles drinking them dry.

The war was… over.

I cast my eyes back over the camp, looking for one person. Visca was there, a gory sight from head to toe, on her knees as she panted for breath. Andrus, each antler point bloody, clutching his pendant close as his lips moved. Wroth, still pacing, red in tooth and claw. And Voryan, looking all too pleased as he took apart a dead warg, rearranging its limbs as he had the rabbit.

I was glad my brothers had escaped the ravenous thorns, but I needed Wyn…

And there she was, emerging from a tent. The last legion had arrived, and more than half the knights were peering out at the field of brambles with no small amount of alarm.

Wyn herself was a crone, stooped and round-shouldered, and she let out a dusty squawk as I stumbled to her, fumbling several vials.

“Wyn.” Gods, without lips, with several rows of teeth, there was no way to form understandable words. “You must save her. Above all else, save her.”

Wyn peered at the woman in my arms, her eyes colorless and lost in a mass of wrinkles behind her spectacles. “What in all the hells did you do out there?”

She hurried as fast as her newly-old bones would allow, dragging the tent door aside, and my whole body ached with protest as I ducked under and brought Cirri into the dark.

There was a cot for the injured, blessedly empty, and I laid my wife on it. I held a hand over her stomach, feeling for the rise and fall of breath, and there it was—faint, but perceptible.

“It was her.” I touched my wife’s tear-stained cheek, knowing Wyn could not hear me. “It was all her.”

Wyn sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of Cirri’s mutilated hands, the terrible twisted masses of flesh and bone they’d become.

“Take my blood, Wyn. Give it to her and keep her alive.”

The world was becoming darker, too much of me gone into the bellies of wargs and the roots of thorns.

I looked up at Wyn, tapped my bloody wrist, touched Cirri’s soft lips. I couldn’t speak, but I could give everything I was to her. The last bit of life I had left inside me.

“I love you,” I told her again, the truest words I had ever spoken in my life. “Too much to allow death to have you. The ancestors will have to wait for a very, very long time, because you are mine.”

Wyn came to me, a blood-letting blade clutched in ancient hands.

I no longer felt pain. With every drop of my blood she spilled, I felt only the bloom of fresh hope.

With every drop of blood she spilled, Cirri’s heart beat stronger.

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Chapter 49 Cirri

When I opened my eyes, I didn’t feel as though I’d woken from sleep.

It had been something deeper, colder, a sensation of absolute nothing—an abyss, rather than the comforting darkness of true slumber.

But when consciousness returned, that feeling of icy null slipped away, and for a time I couldn’t quite place where I was.

My mind skittered over memories, flickers echoing in the dark: awakening in a swaying wagon, weakened by poison; Miro’s self-satisfied pride as he demonstrated his treacherous hidden skills; the eye-smarting darkness beneath the mountain. I thought I remembered the wind whipping through my ears as I fell, and the sight of an ancient crone bent over me, scowling and snapping words that came from a great distance.

And then Hakkon’s face came to life in my mind, his gaze thoughtful but cunning, assessing me as either a sheep or a wolf.