Chapter 19
Annalise
The battlefield at the palace was unlike anything I’d ever trained on before. It stretched vast and unforgiving, a seemingly endless plain of hard-packed dirt that left no room for error. The open sky above bore witness to every strike, every fall. But it wasn’t just the sheer expanse of the ground that made it perilous—it was the cliff at its far edge. A drop so steep and deep it seemed bottomless, promising death to anyone unfortunate enough to lose their footing there.
Dane had warned me this wasn’t going to be easy. He meant every word.
He slammed me to the ground with a loud thud, the weight of his blow reverberating through my body. My armor—light and utilitarian in a rugged brown—was doing little to soften the impact. Dane, on the other hand, was clad in slee
