by Megan Bannen
“The Goodson,” I cough, my throat stinging with bile. “Where is the Goodson?”
But in the question lies the answer. There can only be one explanation as to why the Goodson hasn’t stopped this attack. He must be dead.
And Zofia is dead.
And I am going to die.
I cover my head with shaking hands, wishing I could give in to despair, but the Rosvanian won’t stop shaking me. “Dammit, girl, is there another way out of this death trap?”
My mind clings to the memory of Zofia showing me the escape route. The world of men is dangerous for women. Do you understand? But I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t understood a thing.
An inhuman gurgling comes from somewhere nearby, and there is Zofia, struggling on the floor, the knife still jutting from her body. My heart swells and breaks all at once. “Zofia!” I reach for her like a lost child for its mother, but the ambassador yanks back my hand.
“No! You’ll give us away!”
I try to shake him loose, and when that doesn’t work, I sink my teeth into his veiny hand until the coppery taste of his blood fills my mouth. He releases me, cursing in pain.
I don’t look at the carnage around me as I crawl to Zofia—hearing it is horrible enough. I grasp her by the shoulders of her tunic and tug. At first, her limp weight holds her in place like iron to lodestone, but once I work up the momentum, I’m able to drag her under the table.
“Gelya.” An unnatural pink bubble forms between her lips.
“You’re going to be all right,” I tell her, as if I could will it to be true.
Two men plow into the table as they grapple with one another, locked in a battle to the death. The whole table shudders and slides back a foot, nearly uncovering Zofia and me. The Rosvanian squeals like a piglet. I push him away and bend over Zofia.
“Gelya,” she gurgles.
“Shh. Help is coming.” Dear Father, please, let help be on the way.
“My pocket,” Zofia insists, trying to move a hand that is no longer cooperating to her side. I reach into her pocket for her and pull out a folded piece of parchment.
“Hide it,” Zofia wheezes, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s speaking in Hedenski.
“I will,” I tell her, dredging up Hedenski words I thought long gone from my mind. I’ll say just about anything if it keeps her still and calm. She groans with effort as she puts her hand over mine. Already, her fingers grow cold.
“Don’t let the Goodson get it.” She coughs, shooting a spray of blood-dappled foam against the bottom of the table.
“Yes, of course,” I agree, desperate for her to save her strength while trying to push away the thought that the Goodson is almost certainly dead.
She grips my hand with what little strength she has left. Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth. “Promise me,” she rasps.
I would hand my heart in a gift-wrapped package to Elath the Great Demon if it would keep Zofia alive. “I promise,” I say in Hedenski, the words light and strange in my mouth.
“Blessed be the Mother,” she sighs in her native Aurian. Blood ceases to pulse from her mouth, and her gray eyes go blank, death robbing them of the brilliance that lit them in life. Disbelieving, I collapse over her and press my forehead to hers. An unbearable grief hovers nearby, waiting to crush me as soon as I comprehend my loss.
And then her words sink in like venom.
Blessed be the Mother.
The Mother.
Zofia . . . was an Elathian?
The betrayal is so thick it takes form, reaching into my chest and squeezing my heart.
The table is shoved to the side, and this time, there’s no place to hide. I scream, shredding my raw throat as one of the assailants drags out the terrified Rosvanian ambassador by the legs while another skewers him. The man releases the murdered ambassador’s limp legs and stalks back to the table for me. I’m frozen to the spot, waiting for the death blow with my pulse hammering in my temples. He stares down at me for a moment with cold blue eyes before turning away to help his partner dispatch the rest of the ambassadors and knights.
I’m not dead. How am I not dead?
There are so many emotions churning inside me, I can’t register my relief. I crawl to Zofia’s body under the table and gaze out hopelessly at the bodies strewn across the floor like garbage. I have no clue how I’m going to make it to the statue of the unknown saint without getting myself cut to ribbons, but I’m going to try for Zofia’s sake, whether she was an Elathian or not. I slide her paper into my pocket, grasp the knife handle sticking up from her lifeless torso, and pull. Her body clings to the blade as it once clung to life. I yank until the blade releases its hold on her, and my knuckles smack painfully against the underside of the table. My heart beating a staccato of fear, I emerge from beneath the table like a snail oozing out of its shell, and every bit as vulnerable.
Between me and the statue, an assailant grabs the captured Kantari around his bound torso. The boy rams the back of his head into the man’s face, sending a spray of blood from his opponent’s nose. I turn away, scooting across the marble floor as someone screams in agony from the other side of the room. “Please, holy Father,” I beg my god.
The boy’s opponent kicks him from behind and sends him sprawling across the floor. He slams against the wall, bounces off the stone, and rolls into a crouch.
Right in front of me.
My mind floods with everything I’ve heard about the Kantari.
You shouldn’t be exposed to such matters—such evil.
I should stab him before he kills me, but dear Father, I don’t know how to kill anyone.
They don’t make boys in Kantar. They make demons.
His focus shifts from my face to the knife. The blade shakes with the trembling of my hands. He looks me in the eye, and just in case the world had not gone mad enough, he holds out his bound wrists to me, as if he’s asking me to cut the ropes.
Now he can bite us all.
My chest rises and falls with ragged breaths. I hear the masked man stagger to his feet behind me. The boy’s eyes burn into mine. He reaches out, moving the ropes closer.
“Cut me free,” he orders in Kantari.
I shake my head so violently my brain rattles against my skull.
“Do it. Now.”
I remember the way Zofia scanned the room. She sensed something was wrong, and she was staggeringly, painfully right.
The boy shakes his bound wrists at me one last time. And for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, my gut says to do it.
I don’t think.
I don’t question.
My hands quake, but I take the knife and saw at the ropes.
Eight
Once I’ve cut through most of the rope, the boy pulls apart his fists, snapping the last, rough fibers. He snatches the knife from my hand and lunges over the top of me, shoving the blade between the assassin’s ribs. I scream as the slain assailant drops onto me and pins me to the floor, gurgling his dying breaths in my ear.
The boy cuts away the remaining ropes around his torso, fresh blood darkening his already-filthy shirt. He snatches up the slain attacker’s sword, leaving me to roll out from underneath the assassin on my own. By the time I’ve freed myself of the dead man’s weight, the boy has killed another assailant. The knife is tucked into the waist of his pants at his back, and he is now holding a sword in each hand as if he were born that way.
Oh, my Father in heaven, this boy—this child—is a Kantari Two-Swords?
But there is nothing childish about him now as he glides through the bloody throng of assassins and ambassadors and knights, his body moving among theirs like water easing its way between river stones. When one of the assassins lashes out at him with a longsword, he twists away and kicks off the ground, sending his body spinning, perpendicular to the floor, his blade aimed at the assailant’s heart like a screw into wood. He hits his mark, then kicks off the dead man’s chest as he pulls the blade out, sending an ar
c of blood curving through the air.
He’s still airborne. How can he still be airborne?
The Kantari swings his right-hand weapon at another assailant, but the man catches the hem of his shirt and yanks him sideways to throw off his aim. The Two-Swords flips in midair and brings his left sword down hard into the crook of his enemy’s neck, killing him instantly. He finally touches down with one foot long enough to regain his balance and leap into the air again, blocking maneuvers by two assassins with both swords at once.
I am not going to stay in this room long enough to find out what happens next.
The sounds of battle and death explode behind me as I sprint to the statue of the unknown saint, reaching up with both hands to pull down on its head. Nothing. I try again, letting my feet come off the floor to add my weight. Nothing.
A plume of smoke wafts past me. I turn my stinging eyes to the front of the parlertorium to see flames licking up the feet of Saint Ovin. The oil from the Eternal Flame must have spilled in the fight, and now it’s been set alight. If I can’t get this hatch open, I’m going to choke to death or burn alive in here.
Movement from above snatches my attention away from the fire. The boy has climbed onto the chandelier, out of reach of the other men’s weapons. Our eyes meet, and his gaze pins me to the statue. Then, with a sudden lurch, the chandelier dips, pulling hard on the support beam from which it hangs. The Kantari’s sweat-streaked face has just enough time to register alarm before the whole thing comes crashing down, taking half the crossbeam with it.
I turn and throw my arms around the statue’s neck and heave backward with all my strength as men fight and die behind me.
Nothing.
I abandon the statue and race to the double doors, pounding them with my fists, pressing my forehead to the ancient wood as I scream for help.
An object hits the door from inside the parlertorium, silencing me. Slowly, with my heart pulsing in my ears, I turn my head to find the knife’s handle jutting out from the door just inches from my nose. The wood has split around the blade, releasing the aroma of oak and lemon oil mixed with the rusty scent of blood.
“I missed on purpose. Next time, I won’t. Now stop pounding the door,” the Kantari commands me in his native language.
An electric current of fear zings through me. I turn and watch him step over a dead assailant to confront the two surviving ambassadors—Sudmar and Auria—as well as the only Knight of the Order left standing. The Sudmari ambassador clutches the altar statue of Saint Ovin, ready to bludgeon the Two-Swords with it.
“I saved your life,” the boy points out to him in Rosvanian, but that only inspires the Sudmari to hold the statue higher so he can hit the Kantari harder. The boy huffs in disgust before he holds up his left-hand blade and declares, “I offer you the Sword of Mercy. Throw down your weapons, and I will let you live.”
The ambassadors glance at each other, but they obey, the Sudmari setting down his statue and the Aurian dropping a broken table leg, which clatters on the marble beneath his feet. The one remaining knight, however, goes on the attack, thrusting his sword straight at his opponent’s stomach. The Kantari catches the young man by the wrist, holding the blade away as he knees the knight in the diaphragm. The weapon clatters to the floor, and the Two-Swords kicks it out of reach before dumping the knight on the ground.
“Let’s try this again,” he says sourly in Kantari before repeating, in Rosvanian, “I offer you the Sword of Mercy. Do you accept?”
The ambassadors nod, wide-eyed, while the knight gasps for air on the floor.
“Good.”
The Two-Swords finally faces me. Sweaty and painted to the elbows in blood, he’s even filthier than he was before. His loosened hair is glued to the sides of his face, and his perspiration ignites the air with a musky stink so thick that my empty stomach turns.
“You too,” he says. “I offer you the Sword of Mercy. Do you accept?”
I nod frantically, and just to be sure he thoroughly and completely understands my will to live, I tell him, “Yes. Yes, I accept the Sword of Mercy.”
“Thank you. Will you please tell these men to put out that fire if they can?”
His words run together, one garbling into the next. I’ve never spoken Kantari with an actual Kantari person until tonight, and I’m finding it difficult to pick out the individual words as he speaks. I’ve only ever read the language or practiced speaking it with Zofia.
Zofia.
Her folded paper feels like a stone in my pocket. I will not—cannot—look at her lifeless body where it lies beneath the table. And that leaves me nowhere to look but straight ahead. At the Two-Swords.
“Hello?” he says in Rosvanian, snapping his fingers in my face. “You translate, yes?”
“Um, yes.” I look over his shoulder at the three men. “He says you should try to put out the fire.”
“Thank you,” says the Two-Swords, and then he hurries toward the doors. On the way, he bends to pick up the rope that once bound him.
“What are you doing?” I call at his back, bewildered. Smoke stings my eyes and reaches into my lungs, making me cough.
He sets down both of his swords on the floor, then threads the rope through the iron handles. “Making sure no one can get in.”
“But the fire—”
“Ten armed men just moseyed through these doors to kill us. Do you really want to find out what’s waiting for us on the other side?”
“No,” I reply, seeing reason where I don’t want to. Any hope that the Goodson might still be alive shrivels. I push my fists against my eyes and will myself not to start bawling.
“Good. Now can you please help those men with the fire?”
A Two-Swords who just leveled a roomful of assassins is saying please and thank you. It’s so ludicrous that I burst out laughing, a hysterical combination of cackling and weeping.
“Great. Wonderful. That’s very helpful.” The Kantari returns to me, a blade in each hand again. “Look, either make yourself useful or find a different way out of this rat trap. Those are our only options at the moment.”
I’m about to entrust you with one of the greatest secrets of the convent. Do you promise to keep it to yourself?
I can’t stop giggling, because it’s horribly, painfully hilarious. Zofia asked me if she could “trust” me, when her last words in this life were “Blessed be the Mother”? If I stop laughing over the giant pile of irony the Father just heaped at my feet, I’ll fall into a darkness I don’t think I can escape.
“Useless,” the Kantari mutters as he walks away from me. “Completely useless.”
Every woman should have an escape route if possible. Do you understand? But I hadn’t understood at all, not until Brother Miklos’s knife went flying across the room.
I tug the knife free of the door and tuck it into my pocket beside Zofia’s parchment. Then I walk to the unknown saint. He stares down at his own heart, and it seems impossible that something so achingly beautiful can do anything other than crumble to dust in the nightmare that is this parlertorium. Still giggling, I take a running leap, catching the unknown saint by the back of the head. The hinges hidden beneath the floor creak, and the nameless saint finally pitches forward several inches. Breathless and giddy, I drop to the ground, ready to run at the statue again, when I realize the boy is beside me, staring at the small gap between the floor and the tile beneath the statue.
“I take it back. You’re not useless.” He sets down his weapons and slips his fingers under the marble tile. “You pull. I’ll push. On the count of three. One—two—three.”
The movement of the secret door is stiff, but in seconds we have it opened at a right angle to the floor so that the statue stands parallel to the ground. The boy stares at it quizzically before rapping the statue’s hind end with his knuckles. It’s clearly hollow. “Good. That’ll make it easier to pull the tile closed behind us.” He scowls into the hole, and then he stalks to the other side of the room to str
ip two slain knights of their scabbards.
Right now I want so badly to fall apart I can taste it, but instead I opt to do something practical to keep my terror at bay. I drag a chair to a nearby pillar and reach for the oil lamp hanging from an ornate iron hook. It’s one of those rare occasions when I’m grateful to be tall.
“What are you doing?” the boy calls across the room, clearly annoyed, but I don’t bother to respond. If he was going to kill me, he probably would have done so by now. Maybe he feels like he owes me since I’m the miserable idiot who cut him free.
The Two-Swords and I return to the hole in the floor at the same time, me holding a lamp and he with two swords strapped to his back. I can tell by the twisting of his mouth that he thinks the lamp is a good idea. He just doesn’t want to admit it.
The other men notice that we’ve opened an escape tunnel and crowd around us as we peer into the hole. A series of bricks juts out from the wall at regular intervals, forming a ladder into the darkness.
“Do we know when this was built? Has anyone been using it, maintaining it?” The boy speaks quickly, his consonants soft and squishy and difficult to track. It makes my head ache.
“I did not know it existed until this morning,” I tell him. Even referencing the conversation with Zofia squeezes my heart with grief and anger.
“So it could be caved in, or the ventilation could be shot and we’ll suffocate? Or we’ll knock loose some support as we move through and the whole thing will cave in on us?” Again, his words run together. I’m mostly just registering his misgivings when the right-hand door of the parlertorium shudders as something rams against it from the outside.
“Let’s go,” the boy says. “You first, then me, then them.”
Until this moment, I had only been thinking of escape, but it now occurs to me that I’m facing a choice: I could either go with the Kantari or stay here and, possibly, be rescued.
“Go on,” the boy urges me. But how can I willingly go with him, when there’s a slim chance that the Goodson is still alive?