This is an excerpt from the third novel, Laeccan Waters. Currently, the main characters and their Hálsiend allies are trying to extract themselves from a raid that went badly wrong.

Ceinder fought desperately to defend those Hálsiends around her, but their numbers were getting thinner and thinner each time she looked. Even with her assistance on their strikes, there were so many of the enemy that exhaustion was killing many of her allies, as they became slow, and too tired to block the next blow. Indeed, she was reaching that same level herself, and if she did not collapse right then, she would do soon. Still, she had managed to hold the line, preventing the Þracian troops from overwhelming them here.

On the other flank of the battle, Atyniadol and the two warriors were all but fallen, their armour covered in nicks and cuts, and with red seeping out from several places on Atyniadol, for her thinner armour could not turn blades aside the way the mountain plate of Tri-Hauwcerton could. Atyniadol knew that soon she would need to step back from the battle to staunch her wounds, but there was never a break, never a moment when she could disengage and take that time, for they were so closely pressed by the enemy Áðexe that losing the rhythm of attack and block would see her skewered on the end of a thrust.…
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