Page 209 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Ithought that my father’s reign had taught me everything I needed to know about the brutality and unfairness of death and battle.

I was wrong.

This war was on another level, with men younger than I was dying in numbers I could hardly process. Every other day, I rode to the battlefront, watching the wounded men be carried away.

Then there was Rowan, holding their hands and tending their wounds and training the assistants for the healers.

Every night, she came back spattered in blood and exhausted. And every day, she woke early and went straight back to the healers.

They had long since stopped complaining about having women help them, partly because they realized how much help the women could give, but mostly because everyone was stretched to their limit and they had no other choice.

My only consolation was that this would be over soon.

It felt like an eternity before we finally got word that Crane and Lynx were mobilized on the other side of the lines. They came in with a targeted assault, decimating Iiro’s forces from the other side.

His attack was weakening surprisingly fast.

Almost too fast, truth be told. For a man who started a war, he wasn’t fighting it with the vigor I had been expecting.

Then again, he may not have been prepared for Lynx to step in as well as Crane. Something about that felt false, but I hadn’t been able to come up with a better explanation.

I should have trusted that instinct. I should have thought harder about it.

I should have done a lot of things, but I didn’t quite realize the magnitude of my mistakes until the day the messenger arrived.

I was surveying the camp, mentally tallying the supplies we would need to secure before the week’s end, when Pavel approached me.

“There’s a man outside the camp to see you,” he told me uncertainly.

“Send him in,” I ordered.

Pavel hesitated. “He says he needs to speak with you in private.”

I glanced over to where Rowan was unflinchingly stitching a wound in a man’s chest, deciding it wasn’t the best time to interrupt her. Besides, this was...suspicious, to say the least.

Kirill was watching over her, as he always did without complaint, so I left her to find out who this man was and what he wanted.

I recognized him immediately as an Elk soldier. My fingers were already twitching toward my sabers when he raised his hands in front of him.

“Sir Theodore sent me with a message,” he said quietly.

“About what?” I asked, hearing the steel behind my words.

He met my gaze evenly, begrudgingly raising my respect for him. “Wolf has betrayed you.”

Cold dread seeped through my body.Nils.

I wanted to accuse the man of lying, but hadn’t I known something had felt off from the moment Crane sent the bird?

I thought about Nils’s response when I asked if we could count on his forces.You know we would not let that insult stand. So, so carefully worded to sound like he was referring to the insult of my father’s murder.

But this was all about Rowan.

He had been ready to see her executed, no matter the war it would bring from Lochlann. The man cared for nothing more than his own pride, his own vengeance for the casualties of a war that had happened before my wife was even born.

Where was all his storms-damned honor now?