I edged around a fallen bay gelding, the beautiful beast’s eyes still wide with terror, flies crusting his bloodied flank. The Loyalist army had retreated rather than surrender, leaving their dead for the crows. So still-the battlefield was so still, compared with the slaughter and chaos that had finally halted hours ago. Especially since the other side did not bother with it at all. We needed them too desperately to bother with honor. I made a note to dispatch any soldiers who could stomach it to claim weapons from either army. The smoke of those forges now blended with the pyres already being kindled behind me as I kept walking, scanning the faces of the dead. For the forges that smoldered day and night on its western side, toiling to stock our forces. Not just for its location in the heart of the continent, but for the supplies it guarded. The keep looming at my back was too valuable to be yielded to the Loyalists. To falter here would have been the killing blow to our already-sundering resistance. We’d held the lines against Ravennia’s legions-hour after hour, we’d held the lines, as I had been ordered to do by my father, as I knew I must do. I’d spent the final hours fighting as the mortals beside me had: with sword and fist and brute, unrelenting focus. My own power had been depleted well before the carnage had stopped. It took most of my lingering strength to keep my wings from dragging over corpse and armor.

I picked my way across the once-grassy plain, marking the banners half-buried in mud and gore. They didn’t differentiate between mortal and immortal flesh. Flies already crawled along eyes gazing unblinkingly upward. With the heat, despite the heavy cloud cover, the smell would soon be unbearable. The killing field was now a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted only by broken wings jutting toward the gray sky or the occasional bulk of a felled horse. The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums.

A court of wings and ruin first book