Annwyl’s head cocked to the side. Did she hear something? What could she hear that Talwyn couldn’t?

“Talan,” she called to her brother. “Something’s wrong.”

Talan finally left his now-rotting corpse—once dead, the Zealots seemed to decay faster than most humans, an annoyance to the queen, who really enjoyed planting the heads of her enemies on her castle walls—and moved to his sister’s side.

“What’s she doing?” he asked, using magicks to send a small passel of Zealots flying in the opposite direction with a quick twitch of his hands.

“I have no idea.” Talwyn went up on her toes to get a better look.

What disturbed Talwyn more than anything? That none of the Zealots were trying to kill her mother. None attacked. Suddenly Annwyl the Bloody was invisible to them. The woman they wanted dead more than anything else in this world for bringing forth what they called the Abominations—Talwyn and Talan, specifically—was the one woman they were suddenly not paying any attention to.

“We better get her.”

Talwyn agreed and followed her brother, briefly pausing once or twice to hack at a few attackers with her short sword. But as they neared Annwyl, the queen’s head twitched to one side . . . then another. Like Talwyn’s dog. She almost laughed until her mother suddenly charged off.

Talwyn and Talan ran after her, no longer bothering to fight the soldiers coming at them. They just pushed them aside and kept running, trying to catch up with their fast-moving mother.

If this was anyone else, Talwyn would be less concerned. But their mother was known for her “bouts of rage,” as their father put it. He was just being kind, though. Saying their mother had bouts of rage was like saying that a typhoon was a “little storm.”

The twins also knew that their mother’s rage could be coming from her frustration. She’d expected this war would have ended long ago. She’d had more legions, more supplies, and more seasoned generals and soldiers than the enemy. But Talwyn’s father had tried to warn her. Fighting Zealots was different. And all of Salebiri’s loyalist troops were Zealots. So loyal to their eyeless god that many of them had purposely had their eyes removed during some ceremony. Yet, even without eyes, the Zealots still fought amazingly well and did constant damage to Annwyl’s troops.

Then, in the last year, the Zealots tried a new tactic. Scorched earth.

They’d been destroying the Southland territories, burning down farms, towns, even cities. They’d done even more damage than the dragons when, several centuries ago, the dragons and humans had an all-out war.

Apparently Salebiri’s Zealots told the people whose land and lives they were destroying not to worry, “our god will replace all that you have lost once the whore is dead.”

Annwyl being that whore, of course.

The name-calling didn’t bother Annwyl as much as the suffering of her people. Knowing they’d lost their homes and livelihoods tore at the queen more than she could say, but she kept pushing forward.