Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

EIGHTEEN

Chapter Eighteen

With the maps of Callistra clutched in his hands, Warin Praeston—the Captain of the Unseelie guard—started surveying the lines and lines of mighty vessels docked outside the gates of Khotadi. He flitted from ship to ship, barking his instructions, for Deaths forbid a single detail slip past his scrutiny.

They were ready.

As the night pulled forward, as the members of the peasant class were forced onto vessels with nothing except a rusty sword, the Unseelie forces were set to invade. It was a numbers game. It hardly mattered that most of their soldiers bore magic weak enough to rival that of a newborn noble; there were many, many Unseelie peasants, and against the few thousand humans that remained on the Isles, an Unseelie victory was guaranteed.

Warin descended from flight, his feet touching down on the nose of a vessel. For a long moment, he stood unmoving at the very edge. If it wasn't for his staunch masculinity, he almost would have resembled those wooden mermaids that ancient sailors used to fix to the front of their ships. Those were the days before the humans would realise their mermaid symbols angered the undines beneath the waters, before they realised they were drawing more misfortune than luck to their odyssey.

Once the Unseelie forces set sail, the vessels would assume an arrowhead formation, following whichever ship Warin decided to steer into leading position. With so many fae to push into battle, they could not use their submarine technology: they were forced to return to their archaic modes of transport, and slowly chug along the globe to arrive at their war. He knew the responsibility that he had been given. He would not let his queen down.

Warin squared his shoulders, allowing the silver of his wings to catch moonlight as he raised one hand—a signal to the queen, and a cue for those nearby to hush in anticipation. Morgana was not visible from where Warin stood, but he knew that she would be watching from within Khotadi, waiting, plotting.

And indeed she was. Seconds after his signal, a sudden gust of unnatural wind blew upon them. It was Morgana's magic, sending off her warriors, pushing the vessels outward into the freezing ocean.

War drums began beating from inside Khotadi, thumping lower than Warin's own pulse. The Seelie Queen may have declared this war but now it was the Unseelie Queen who was setting chaos into motion. The wheels of the world were turning. There was no going back.

The Unseelie Court was ready to take over Callistra, and once they had the humans, they would be unstoppable.

***

The sound of footsteps nearing her door drew Circe's attention away from her textbook. She expected her mother to appear, but it wasn't Ophiua bustling through with a tea tray, it was Rhoden, strolling in with such a casual manner that Circe wondered if he had moved in.

"What are you up to?" Rhoden asked conversationally, dropping onto her desk chair.

"Reading about the Battle of Thermopylae," she answered. She waited for Rhoden to explain what he was doing in her house, but he didn't. He simply made a noise, as if it was completely normal for Circe to be reading up on archaic past battles in hopes of suddenly coming up with a brilliant plan. So far? It wasn't looking good.


"Was that after the modern second world war?" he asked.

"No, it was in the ancient Earthen period," Circe corrected, "between the Greeks and Persians." In which the colossal, invading Persian forces were defeated by the tiny Greek forces because the Greeks had the strategic advantage of fighting on their homeland. Circe's invasion of the Isles didn't have large numbers and they were the outsiders. "You're thinking about the Battle of Thermopolis."