Lost Ones-Veil 3 Read Free

it would mean spreading their troops out into small pockets. If one side achieved the upper hand in the battle, the others would not be able to see what was happening. Hunyadi wanted his enemies to see what they were up against, when the time came.
    As a trickster, Blue Jay liked the idea of springing a trap on the invaders, but he saw the king’s point. There were too many variables. Not that it was up to him in the first place. After all, he and his fellow Borderkind were only volunteer soldiers in the army of Hunyadi. More than anything, he knew that the king wanted him and his kin to be visible in the battle. In the two months since the war had broken out they had made every effort to spread the word into the south that the Atlanteans were the true enemy, that Hunyadi had not had any hand in King Mahacuhta’s assassination.
    And nothing would show the human troops the truth more clearly than the fact that nearly all of the surviving Borderkind were fighting on the side of the kingdom of Euphrasia. Even Yucatazcan Borderkind had joined the troops of King Hunyadi. That ought to be evidence enough that the whispers about Ty’Lis were true.
    Blue Jay let a gust of wind take him higher, and then banked west, toward the ocean. He came around in a long arc, moving behind the invaders, then descending until he flew less than eighty feet above the battle.
    The combat had begun shortly after dawn, with the Yucatazcan force marching out of the ruins of Cliffordville, up a long slope to the northeast that would take them to Boudreau and Hyacinth, and then to the small city of Dogwood. Hunyadi’s forces had come down out of the hills and waded into the invading force. The Yucatazcans had suffered enormous early casualties, but now the battle had become a bloody melee with new corpses falling on both sides.
    The little blue bird darted over the battle lines. He saw perhaps two dozen Atlantean soldiers amidst the humans and the handful of legendary creatures fighting on the side of Yucatazca. There were Jaculi amongst them, tiny but savage winged serpents. A small cadre of Battle Swine—tusked boar-warriors whose hair was matted with fur and gore—held firm. Not one of them had fallen as yet. A single Atlantean giant still lived. Two others had stood with the greenish-white-skinned monstrosity, but they were dead now. Archers took cover behind them and loosed arrows at the enemy.
    At the center of the area that had become the muddy, bloody battleground, a sphere of death radiated outward from a strangely silent, elegantly choreographed skirmish taking place amongst magicians. Seven Mazikeen—the Hebrew sorcerers who had allied themselves with the Borderkind—stood arrayed in a semicircle, electric golden light crackling in arcs from their fingers and eyes, lancing across the open space that separated them from a quartet of Atlantean sorcerers, whose own spells and hexes burned the air in black and blue tendrils. Not a single living soldier or warrior—human or legend—came nearer than twenty feet from this war-within-a-war.
    Blue Jay thought it appeared, for the moment, to be a stalemate. That did not bode well.
    Nagas slithered on serpent bodies through the battle. Their upper halves were humanoid and they swung swords and fired arrows, cutting down whatever human soldiers got in their way. The Lost Ones of Yucatazca were not their focus, however. They were slaying as many of the enemy legendary as they could.
    More blood spilled.
    Pointless. A dreadful bitterness welled up in Blue Jay. He had always been a trickster, a mischief maker, but this was different. The schemers of Atlantis had manipulated the Two Kingdoms into this war so that they could reap the rewards. The Lost Ones on both sides were dying because they did not know the truth. They were all humans, no matter what part of the ordinary world they—or their ancestors—had originated from. To see them massacring one another was an abomination. To watch the