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They didn’t see the large white snout that periodically broke through the ice floes to huff down a breath The sky was dark now, thick with the clashing of wyverns and Crochans

Bodies occasionally plunged into the river, Ironteeth and Crochan alike

The Crochans who thrashed, ere still alive, Lysandra covertly carried to the far shore What they h to let theed to the bottom and pinned to the rocks

She’d had to look away each time she did it

Lysandra’s snout broke the surface as a sharp horn shattered over the din, right fro

Lysandra dove to the botto to launch her toward the surface

She broke froh the air, and slaht into Morath’s eastern flank

Soldiers screamed as she unleashed herself in a ind of teeth and claws and atail

Where the white sea dragon moved, black blood sprayed

And just when the soldiers h to launch arrows and spears at the opalescent scales enforced with Spidersilk, she twisted and flipped back into the deep river, vanishing beneath the ice Spears plunged into the turquoise waters,past

The sea dragon’s body--river dragon, she supposed--didn’t slow She pushed it to its li like a bellows

The river curved, and she used it to her advantage as she leaped froe she’d done up ahead, didn’t look her way until she was upon thelance to the city walls, where a wave of black now crashed against the, bursts of flame amid it all, before she returned to the river’s icy depths

Black blood streamed from her maw, from her tails and claws, as she doubled back, the shadow of the witches warring overhead upon the ice above her

So she fought, the ice floes her shield Attacking, thenthe eastern flank with every assault, forcing thee to crowd the center ranks

Slowly, the turquoise waters of the Florine clouded blue and black

Still, Lysandra kept ripping bites from the side of the behemoth that launched itself upon Orynth

The heat off the firelances scorched Aedion’s cheek, war his helmet to near-disco foot soldiers at the walls scra back Where their archers felled the enemy, more came And where the firelances melted them away, only scorched earth and h--not even close

Above, beyond the walls, the Ironteeth and Crochans clashed

So violently, so quickly, that a bluein the skies from the bloodshed

He couldn’t deterst theed into the fray, Ironteeth and theirfoot soldiers beneath the for the city walls Answering blasts froround as charred corpses But h to deter the to the nearest ladder, Aedion nocked arrow after arrow, firing at the soldiers creeping up its rungs Clean shots through the gaps in the dark armor

The archers around him did the sa stances, waiting for the first to breach the walls

At the city gates, flaed He’d concentrated ates into Orynth, theirthe walls

That the fire kept flaring as it did told hi its push there

Rolfe’s order to Conserve fire! set a pit of dread fore ladder His boanged, and another soldier tumbled away Then another

Down the wall, Ren had taken on the other nearby siege ladder, the lord’s bow singing

Aedion dared a glance to the ar back, letting an archer take his place, he lifted his sword, signaling the Bane at the catapults, the Fae royals and archers near theons soared over the walls Each had been oiled, and gleamed in the sun while they rose

And when the boulders reached their peak, just as they began to plu arrows

They struck the oil-slick boulders right before the stones slaht into the holes that Aedion had ordered drilled into the rock, right into the nest of the explosive powders they’d again taken from the precious reserves of Rolfe’s firelances

The boulders blasted apart in balls of fla the city walls, soldiers cheered at the carnage that the s but runts Every place the six catapults had fired upon now had a ring of charred ground around it