Page 2 of Of Iron and Moonlight

Any sensible man would have thought: good, let the pampered pig roast—and told anyone who asked he had not seen. To the moons with the useless lord.

But if the enemy noticed their baron had fallen, what was already an impossible battle would become irrevocably lost.

So Gavriel ran.

When he wrenched the helm free, the bloated face beneath was dark red and slack, the lips puckered, the eyes rolled up like a fish cast onto a quay. Gavriel bent and put his ear to the lord’s mouth. He heard nothing but the rasp of his own labored breath.

“Curse you,” he said softly. Less an insult than a verdict. He glanced toward the ridge where the enemy dotted the skyline, then down at the scattered clashes where his neighbors died far too quickly. “Curse me,” he added, and hooked his hands beneath the armpit plates.

Lord Pietre was heavy. Though Gavriel suspected pride accounted for some of the man’s weight, as he fought buckles designed more for a craftsman’s vanity than a soldier’s necessity. When they finally gave, he dragged the breastplate over his own shabby gambeson, cinched the straps with quick competence, and secured the hip plates—all with a muttered string of curses, yet more care than the armor, or its owner, had ever earned.

Then he reached into the weeds for the helm. It was obscene, that dragon face—heavy and stinking of a man who had sweated for nothing. But when Gavriel set it upon his head, the world narrowed to something he could command. He took the signet ring from Pietre’s finger as well, sliding it past a knuckle scar won in a forge fight as a younger fool, before pulling on the gauntlets. The matching sword, which the lord had apparently never noticed lacked a sharpened edge, he cast aside in favor of his own battered blade.

Gavriel stood, looked down, and despite the dire situation—and the sour voice in his mind asking if he had finally gone mad—he grinned. The armor fit perfectly.

He knew he was stepping into a lie he could not hope to explain on the other side. But some lies were necessary for survival. In the fire of now, he could afford little thought for later.

“Listen to me!” Gavriel’s voice filled the iron and came out like a boom as he climbed back to the lip of the ditch and charged into the heart of the battle. “Shield wall, stand! Stand!”

His eyes swept the field, and he knew instinctively how to keep their line from fraying. “Tighten the left!” He pointed with his sword as if he had been born to it. “You—pikes, set and brace!”

At first, the men stared. Then they blinked. Then, impossibly, they straightened and began to move. Perhaps it was the shock of a leaning tower set upright on the skyline. Perhaps it was only that men reach for familiar authority when they need a center for their fear. Whatever the reason, they listened.

When steered correctly, the men of Netherfen Hallows had grit. Their line shuddered. Then shuddered again. But the second tremor carried a different character—not collapse, but resistance. They began to press forward. And despite the wrongness emanating from the enemy, it seemed the tide was turning at last. Gavriel allowed himself a glimmer of hope.

A boy with a tufted beard stumbled to his side. Marten—that was the name. “My lord!” he pleaded, pointing fervently. My lord? Astonishing, how easily truth and perception blurred. “At the top of the hill. They’ve just appeared. When they lift their hands… the air changes. It hurts my head.”

Before Gavriel could turn, the air split with a sound like shattering glass. Wind tore through the valley, and a wave of cold flared across the basin. Ice erupted where air had been and slid down the long swell of the battlefield, taking men—and the parts of men that did not move fast enough—slaying both enemy and Netherfen soldier without distinction.

The racket subsided. Gavriel uncurled from a defensive crouch and finally saw. Several large, cloaked figures stood spaced along the crown of the lowest Niverna ridges, just before the mountains tilted into a steeper rise toward the north. He watched as they raised their hands.

An unseen force spilled across the valley from their direction, bending the pale grasses. Another blast of wind, cold, and ice swept the battlefield. More men collapsed in the act of screaming, frost feathering their lashes. And the spark of hope Gavriel had felt only moments before guttered as the inconceivable truth of the enemy revealed itself.

Left with no other options, he turned back toward the enemy’s advance and fought until his arms trembled. Until the weight of the armor dragged him to his knees. He let his sword fall and tore off the lord’s gauntlets, then bowed his head, fixing his eyes on the ground. The moons knew he had tried to wrest something better from something hopeless. But there always came a moment when a man was forced to accept his limits.

A shadow slid into the tunnel of his vision.

Gavriel lifted his head slowly.

One of the cloaked figures stood towering over him, confirming his earlier suspicion. Purely violet eyes regarded him with cold, luminous appraisal. Beneath the hood, silver hair—metallic rather than dulled by age—was cropped close, revealing elegantly pointed ears that marked the fae. A long scar cut brutally across the left side of his face, a line from cheekbone to jaw, rendering already harsh features more severe.

His companions followed, having descended the slopes and crossed the breadth of the valley certainly far too quickly to be human. Each male shared the same silver hair and varying shades of violet eyes, gleaming like amethyst. They halted in a semicircle around Gavriel and inclined their heads, almost imperceptibly, toward the scarred fae. Clearly, he held authority among them.

“Baron Pietre derOlpendorf, you have taken something of ours,” their leader said. He examined the signet ring at Gavriel’s finger and smiled, bending the scar unnaturally. It drew the eye like a crack in a mirror. “Our king requires your presence.”

Gavriel knew he should deny it, but the words caught in his throat. Outcomes unfolded in his mind, and he understood that honesty would not spare him. Instead, he bowed his head and chose to bear the false title and another man’s borrowed name, sinking deeper into a lie that might damn him rather than proclaim a truth that surely would.

The scarred male made a small, almost delicate gesture, and two of his companions stepped forward to wrap a chain tightly around Gavriel’s torso before hauling him to his feet.

“Walk.” A command that allowed no refusal. Their leader turned and began toward the Niverna Mountains, not deigning to glance at the clashes he passed.

Some men still rallied. Some ran, skidding and flailing across slick ground where ice had turned dust to mud. Others knelt sobbing over friends in the last moments of the faltering battle, where victor and defeat seemed to blur into one.

For his part, Gavriel obeyed. What other choice remained? At full strength, he might have stood a chance against the fae with a blade. But he was spent—drained by long hours of fighting and the brief burden of wearing the lord’s moonsforsaken plate. Beyond that, he could not hope to contend with fae magic. Even iron could not guarantee complete protection.

He lifted his head, kept his feet moving, and did not look back. There was no purpose in watching the place where you had once been a free man diminish to dust on the horizon. Despite his mere twenty-four years, Gavriel was well acquainted with life’s cruelties and had long abandoned any expectation of reclaiming what was lost.

The fae holding his bonds tugged him forward, into the mountains.