The fae couldn't touch most of the human weapons, but that didn't matter much. Humans, to a man, tend to be wildly defensive of their homes and people, and the humans of the Antlered Palace were no different. We were ready to throw down, and plenty of us had watched zombie movies or played zombie shoot-'em-ups. The anticipated gore of the upcoming battle was upsetting, yes, but as the day turned the fae had the rather unpleasant experience of watching the overlooked humans they'd surrounded themselves with turn absolutely feral, as they built gruesome traps and prepped for war.

One of the delicate ladies of the High Court came to the war room in the early afternoon with a delicate suggestion: would the humans be interested in shooting iron shrapnel at the dead? After all, she explained, while the fae looked on in horror and I listened with growing feral glee, blood magic was still fae magic, and could be disrupted with iron. If the Crown didn't mind planning on a careful clean-up of an iron-filled landscape, perhaps I might enjoy knowing that there were many barrels of iron nails in the Crown's possession.

I did, in fact, enjoy knowing that.

By nightfall, there were humans turning regular grenades into homemade frag grenades, and adding nail-traps to the battlefield. The fae, not keen on being outdone by their human servants, started scheming about how to make gruesome traps of their own. I passed the torch to Lady Yllatris, who joined the discussion of how to add glamor to the field of battle for maximum destruction with the aspect of a wolf licking her chops, and went up to the roof to stand under the light of the pale moon, and look out across the churned landscape towards the battle, and Dain.

To the west, long after the sun had set, the horizon glowed red from the approaching flames.

53. An Answer to Prayer

Chapter 53

An Answer to Prayer

By the time the noonday sun stood high in the sky, four and a half hours before moonrise, the armies were visible, battling their way towards the Antlered Palace, the fae armies being driven slowly up the hill by the dead. I looked through a spyglass, regarding the shapes of monstrosities, before returning to the war room. Dain had done a good job; the majority of the constructs had been broken down into their individual components, but each one of those components was the corpse of a person or animal, and those corpses still walked or crawled towards the living.

The thought made my face twist with rage. Someone had killed all those people, and then mutilated and defiled their bodies. I wouldn't allow it to stand.