“Yes. That’s right. But now there’s nothing. She was awake and moving and then nothing.”
Lach thought back to those last few moments. His brother was wrong. “Not nothing. She was confused.”
The phooka huffed and tossed his head back and forth. “Perhaps the princess was drugged.” He sniffed the air. “I’ve heard that sometimes executioners are kind. They drug the ones they set on fire. Smells like they’re already at work.”
Panic, pure and unadulterated, raced through his veins. He started to run toward the village, but his brother’s hand stopped him.
“Don’t you dare. This is my element, not yours, brother.” His eyes closed briefly. “I can feel it. The fire. Idiots. They can’t kill my mate with fire.” He looked up again, and his normally dark eyes had gone a distinct orange. “Stay away from it. We both know it can burn you.”
“And we both know that a sword can cut you in half.” Lach looked to the phooka, who had far better senses than either of them. “How many people are out there?”
The phooka breathed deeply. “Many. At least twenty. By the horrible smell of them, I would say almost all men.”
And men would have swords. Two against twenty.
Or were they just two? What had Roan said back in Aoibhneas? That the dead Lach brought back were powerful. Chaos. Perhaps chaos could be their friend for once.
“Can you grab the fire? Keep it from her?” Lach asked.
“Already done, brother. Though I doubt anyone knows I have control. I can’t see anything, so I’m simply keeping it in a circle. How do I know she isn’t burning already?”
“Because I don’t smell the divine scent of roasting princess yet, Your Highness. No way I would miss that. Control the fire. I’ll see what I can find out.” The air around the phooka shimmered, and the horse became an odd-looking creature. What spoke to him was a combination of a large squirrel and a creature Lach had seen in vampire DLs. A lemur. But lemurs were slow, and the phooka was not. He scampered up into the trees using long claws. The leaves above their heads shook, delicate green shells raining down on them.
Lach’s whole body was on edge. Bronwyn was in that village. She was close, so close. It was everything he’d wanted since that first moment as a child when he’d closed his eyes and seen her in his dreams. She’d been a child, even younger than him and Shim. In that first dream, Lach remembered them all looking at each other as though wondering what to do and then Bron had shown them a game. A silly thing. She threw a pebble and then hopped and skipped to pick it up. Unseelie games tended to involve blood and often death. It had been a sweet thing to spend time with the wide-eyed girl.
When they had awakened the next morning, they had laughed about sharing a dream.
They were still dreaming of her when they’d turned sixteen, and Lach had known that somehow, someway Bronwyn completed him.
And then he’d seen a picture of her and set the idea in his father’s mind to merge the tribes through marriage.
“I can’t stand this waiting,” Shim said.
Lach hated it, too, but finding Bronwyn wouldn’t mean a thing if they didn’t live through the experience. They needed to stay calm. Rushing in could be bad for Bronwyn, too. What they really needed was an army.
An idea played at Lach’s brain. He needed an army, but his father had ensured their army wouldn’t follow him. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d treated Lach and Shim like fragile idiots for so long, no one would follow them. No Unseelie alive would follow a fragile king.
Lach opened his senses and found that cold place deep in his center where his power resided. He couldn’t have a living army. Roan was in charge of the men he’d brought. But there was more than the living to consider.
“Damn me, Lach. What are you doing?” Shim’s eyes were wide.
He felt for them. The dead were everywhere, as much a part of the land as the living could ever be. The dead were oddly eternal, shifting from one form to the next. From living to corpse to food and fertilizer, and in their own way, right back to living.
But Lach wanted the corpses. Yes. They would do nicely.
“Getting us some backup.” He called to them, reaching out with his mind, tendrils of power flowing like a cool river, sweeping up the dead in its wake.
He ignored the smaller creatures. Rats who had died crawled once more, birds flew, and cats hissed from long-dead mouths. But Lach was concerned with the mausoleums. Yes. His power sought the places of the dead.
He’d always fought the power, but now he embraced it. He opened himself to it, welcoming the rush of sensation that came with it. He knew them. As he called to them, so did they speak to him.
Sir Bran Jenkins lay on his cold slab, a sword clutched in his hands, placed there by his sons and his widow that he might fight on in the afterlife. Sir Bran wanted to fight. It had run through his veins, and though he no longer had blood, the desire clung to his bones more strongly than any shroud.
His sons, both taken not long after, lay in the crypt close to their father.
A family of warriors with nothing left but useless swords that would never again sing with the heat of battle.
Then fight, Sir Bran. Take up your sword. Wake up your sons. Fight for me.