Aria pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. She walked over to Araris, bent over, and made a stirrup of her interlaced fingers. Araris hesitated for a moment, then put his booted foot upon her hands. “One,” she counted. “Two. Three.”

Aria straightened with fury-assisted strength and tossed Araris upward as if he’d been a small sack of meal. He went through the hole with his arms held straight up above him, then slammed his elbows down on either side of the hole when he reached the other side. Amara saw his legs kick several times as he hauled himself out, and heard a fresh round of wailing vord cries.

And beyond those, faint but clear—trumpets. Aleran Legion trumpets, sounding the attack, over and over and over again. Firecraftings crackled and boomed in the near distance, and Amara sucked in her breath, sitting up in the pool. “Do you hear that?”

“The Legions,” Aria breathed. “But the whole horde lies between here and Garrison. How?”

“Tavi,” Isana said, her voice suddenly fierce. “My son.”

They fell quiet, and everyone listened to the distant sound of trumpets and firecrafting. Each sounded both near and far away by turns. Minutes crawled by in which nothing changed.

Then the exhausted Lady Aria, still slumped beneath the holes in the ceiling, drew in a sharp breath, and staggered back, crying, “Vord!”

And, as quickly as that, half a dozen mantis warriors came flooding into the hive.

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 52

Fidelias sat upon his horse, keeping pace with the weary infantry of the Legions, and watched the most desperately aggressive military action he’d ever witnessed begin to play out.

The enshrouding mist complicated matters. The knot of Canim ritualists who kept pace with the command group muttered and snarled to themselves constantly. Every so often, one of the Canim would slice at himself with a knife and fling droplets of blood into the air. The drops vanished as they flew, presumably to maintain the misty shroud that would hide their precise location from the enemy.

Of course, it also meant that Fidelias couldn’t see his own bloody troops once they were a few hundred yards away. They’d had to work out several chains of couriers to relay signals between the units that had traveled out of sight of the command group. Even now, signals were coming in: Attack under way, light enemy resistance. Apparently, the vord Queen had left a few alert guardians among her sleeping brood—probably posing as sleepers. At least, that was how Fidelias would have done it.

The front ranks of Legion infantry had reached the old steadholt, and the most experienced cohort of the Free Aleran, together with the First Aleran’s Battlecrows, reached the gates and a broken-down section of the wall, respectively.

“Now,” Fidelias said to the trumpeter behind him.