I grabbed the stake and tugged on it, but it was buried deep in the muscle and didn’t want to budge. But at least that got a reaction. Mircea’s head came up, his mouth wide and shocked and gasping, his eyes meeting mine out of heavily bruised sockets. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear, and there was no time to figure it out. I got a filthy foot, which had long ago lost its shoe, onto his chest, and heaved.

The stake came out, along with a lot of almost black blood, splattering both of us. Mircea gasped again and did not do it quietly, but nobody heard. Because all the soldiers were busily coming to attention.

Guess they’d spotted the king, too.

But Mircea couldn’t fight like this, not against these odds. And of the three prisoners, he was the best off, still being conscious. I stared around, looking for something, anything, that might help, but I was out of both time and ideas.

I’d come too late, I thought blankly.

We were going to die.

It didn’t compute; I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. That all we’d done, all we’d suffered, was for nothing? That it ended like this?

I knelt again, and cupped Pritkin’s face, feeling a three-day growth of beard scratch my fingers. I did the same to Mircea’s, which had dried blood on it, because his grievous wound hadn’t allowed him to reabsorb it. I loved them both, so much, and maybe I did lose them today, but it wouldn’t be for nothing.

Because I had a knife and vampire speed, and right now, Aeslinn was just another fey. I didn’t need to take all of them; I just needed him. To end this war, to make all this count, I only needed a single stroke and I was taking it. I turned with a snarl on my lips to see the soldiers drawing aside, making a door through their ranks, creating a path for a tall, silver haired fey—

Who wasn’t Aeslinn, I realized, halfway through a lunge.

I had brief moment to see Arsen—half naked and looking like death, but with tawny, sunlit eyes—grabbing the hand with the knife in it; to notice another fey striding forward with his bow raised, as if planning to strike me; to watch the rest of the guards spinning with shock on their features, only now noticing that they had an intruder.

And then the earth convulsed, throwing us all to the ground.