He had seen his death as the only way forward, but her rejection of his solution was final. He’d offered, and she’d slapped it away. There would be no clean end to whatever befell them. Gadriel had spent too many years training in battle to act the part of a coward. Even in his sacrificial death, he’d meant to go with pride and honor. The general had been ready to give his life for Raascot’s cause, but if the child of the moon would refuse to swing her blade, then he had no choice. If they were going to fight, then they were going to fight.

He found a smile. “A witchling even in death.”

She returned the smirk. “Would you have it any other way?”

Whatever end they met, they would do it together.

Amaris bent her knees slightly in the readied stance of a warrior on a battlefield. The crowd around continued shouting, crying, repeating something. A word had started to form on their thousands of lips, taking on the consistency of a chant. The pockets of the chant were broken up enough that she couldn’t quite hear what three syllables the people were bleating in unison.

She looked to Gadriel through the sweat dripping off her brow to see if he could understand the people any better than she could, but the general seemed to be scanning for something else entirely. An exit strategy? Another weapon? A plan?

“Do you see?” roared the queen.

Farehold’s monarch had known precisely how this would play out. Of course Amaris—who had seen that there was no crowned prince, who knew of the curse at the border, who had exposed Moirai as a witch in front of her court—would never execute the northerner on whose behalf she’d come to Aubade to intercede. Letting Amaris die in her cell would have let the curse’s secrets die with her. Showing Amaris’s ag’imni sympathies to the people would rally the queen’s loyalists against the reevers, deepening their hatred for the north and uniting them against any hope of peace that might have come from the intercession of Uaimh Reev.

“And what should we do to our enemies? What do we do with those who consort with demons?”

The chant from the audience grew louder as more and more mouths joined in its feral chorus. Hundreds of people repeated the word over and over again—the same three sounds like a howling, wretched prayer to the old gods, or the All Mother herself. Sadistic screams garbled out the consistency of their chants as bloodlust unified the citizens of Aubade.

She and the general might as well have been alone in the stadium, for she looked at no one else. The sun burned her shoulders and their sounds hurt her ears, but there was only her, her sword, and Gadriel. Moirai wouldn’t get the satisfaction of her attention.