Not much later, a cadence of explosions started, the soldiers on the walls making good use of their rocket launchers to take down the remaining constructs. With the rest of the people in the war room, we kept up with the information coming in off the battlefield and from the watchers on the walls, tracking the movement of the enemy. Our fae artist kept the live map updated with troop movements and which traps had yet to be sprung. The dead tried the rear of the palace, a whole battalion of the army having slid around ours through the forest, but the nomadic fae had been tracking the movement of it for thirty hours, and when I gave the order to light the napalm, I felt only clear, cold anger.

It was long past full dark when the fighting reached the walls. The army had already been retreating through the gates for more than an hour, so that they wouldn't get bottlenecked up against the wall, but the main body of the army was still trapped between the walls and the dead.

I'd promised to defend them.

Fae can't cast glamors on iron, but they sure as hell can cast glamors around it. Every fae in the Antlered Palace who could cast glamors had worked together to build a false shell of ground, making the slope up to the palace steeper, with a suspicious amount of flat ground at the top. We'd marked the edge of it with tall wooden dowels and cute, hot-pink flagging, and when every one of our harried soldiers crossed that line, and even Dain had been called back, I gave the command.

They broke their glamors, all at once, and for one fraction of a heartbeat, the dead army hovered sixty feet above the rocky slope. Beneath them was napalm, and row after row of iron nails, pushed through layers of linens so that they all pointed towards the sky, gleaming and deadly.

The dead fell, and from the walls rained fire arrows, turning the slope up to the Antlered Palace into hell.

I snarled with satisfaction as the reports came in. The dead army wasn't defeated; many of the dead had already been across the line of safety when we'd trapped the rest, but even dead things can't come at you when their muscles and tendons are seared into a rictus. The explosions resumed, making objects rattle as those in charge of maintaining the line for the retreating army blew the C4 traps beneath the napalm and nails.

"Don't move." The silken voice curled through the room, and every fae in the war room froze, barely breathing.

I turned, very slowly, and looked into the cold silver eyes of Queen Nephinae Ronelis.