Princess Willowyn's Arc

Chapter 30 of 70

Willowyn climbed the ridge with Raven close behind. The smoke stung her eyes. When she reached the top, the battle spread below her in the valley. Two armies clashed on a muddy field. Men fell. Steel rang against steel. She had crossed an ocean to end wars, and now one raged at her feet. But she knew nothing. Not who fought. Not why. She saw only banners she did not recognize and blood she could not read. "Pick a side and you might kill the ones in the right," Raven said. She stood at Willowyn's shoulder, the green fox pressed against her boots. A year of training had made her blunt, and she did not soften now. "You could pour the river on them and drown the wrong men." Willowyn's hands shook. Her whole journey had aimed at this moment. Yet Raven was right. Power without knowing was just another way to spill blood. "Then I don't choose a side," Willowyn said. "I stop the swords. Both of them." Raven turned to her. "How?" Willowyn looked past the field. A river cut through the valley behind the armies. She had held an ocean above the waves for three days. This was one river. She spread her hands and reached for it with her will, the way Raven had drilled into her every night for a year. The water answered. It rose from the riverbed in a wall, gray and roaring. Willowyn did not send it at either army. She drove it down the center of the field, between the two lines. The wall struck the mud and split the armies apart. Soldiers scrambled back from the churning flood. No one drowned. The water only pushed them apart and held them there, a barrier neither side could cross. The field went quiet. Steel stopped ringing. Every face turned up toward the ridge, toward the elven woman in the silver gown who had raised a river with her hands. Willowyn held the wall until her arms burned. "Now they have to talk," she said through her teeth. "They can't reach each other to fight." Raven watched the soldiers stare. "They can't reach each other to talk, either." A rider broke from the far line. He carried no weapon, only a pale cloth tied to a spear. He rode to the water's edge and stopped, staring across the wall at the other army. A rider from the near line did the same. Two men, one from each side, faced each other across the flood Willowyn held between them.