Keely clawed her way weakly to her feet, panting for breath, and pulled herself up to peer out of the gully, trying to decide if there was any direction left to run. This time she saw the collision coming with just enough time to avoid it by pulling her head back down, and the doe that had run into her moments before went sailing over her head.
Keely pressed herself down amid the rocks and the leaves, making herself as small as possible as she watched the ghostly-white deer bound away amid a rain of hurled weapons. Two knights vaulted directly over Keely’s hiding place in pursuit of the animal, unmistakably convinced that their shape-changing quarry had transformed itself from a little white cat into a little white deer.
Keely felt a pang of guilt for the animal, but only a rather small one, considering she would probably have made good her escape just now if not for its interference. In any case, she was spent. The collision had finished her, and any attempt to intercede on the doe’s behalf would be suicide.
“Wait!” a man shouted. “What are you…?” Abruptly steel rang on steel. “Get away from my sister!” the voice snarled.
A moment’s leaden silence followed, broken in the end by another man’s calm, quiet voice. “Well, that wasn’t the right thing to say.” Keely swiveled her ears toward the sound in a double-take. That second speaker had been…Prince Tobias? She didn’t have time to confirm the thought or to ponder further before someone let out a feral battle cry and steel sang again.
“She’s getting away!” a woman shouted.
“Go!” a man yelled from nearly on top of Keely. “Get the witch! We’ll handle her minions.”
“I am no one’s minion,” Tobias spat. In an ideal situation, the words might have been taken as a defense against his association with any witch at all, much less the one in question, but neither his tone nor the adrenalin flaring all around did anything to encourage that interpretation.
Abruptly, Keely found herself in the middle of a frantic battle, with the sound of blades clashing in all directions, and boots treading so close as the combatants maneuvered for position that she began to fear getting stepped on nearly as much as simply getting discovered.
Keely began an attempt to take stock of the combatants, reflexively looking for escape routes while telling herself she’d recovered enough to dash a few yards if she saw the right opening. Telling one side from another was easy, with the Inquisition all in its team colors. It looked like they had perhaps four knights engaging Tobias and his companions, plus a pair of blackhoods. The women hung back for the most part, circling with their short blades drawn as they looked for openings, while the more heavily armed and armored knights engaged directly.
Tobias had himself, his squire, another swordsman, and a giantess of a woman. Like the blackhoods, the giantess didn’t seem so well-equipped for battle as her male counterparts, but she held a pair of knives at the ready and seemed to be making it her business to keep an eye on the circling priestesses.
As the combatants clashed and spun apart and clashed again, it quickly became apparent that they were evenly matched—which was saying something for the outnumbered Tobias-and-friends. They clearly hadn’t trained as one coherent team as their opponents had, but they did fight in teams of two—prince and squire, swordsman and giantess—and with an aggressive flamboyance that kept the Inquisition off balance.
They’d also arrived at the scene less winded. Still, first blood went to the Inquisition as a priestess spied her opening and lunged in under the squire’s guard. His hunting leathers took some of the impact, but the short sword of the inquisitrix still sliced across his left thigh and came up glistening red. Though the wound was minor, the youth reeled back from it, off balance for a moment—and that was all the knight he’d been facing needed.
A heavy, overhand stroke of his blade came crashing down toward the squire’s head. The squire parried the blow awkwardly, narrowly escaping injury, but failing to counter the knight’s real intent, which was to disarm him. The youth’s blade went clanging off the rocks underfoot and spun wildly away.
Had there been time for Keely to stop and analyze that moment and those that followed from it, her conscious brain would have arrived at the following observations and conclusions: in that one heartbeat, the balance of the battle had tilted sharply against Tobias. He’d been able to hold his own against a superior number of skilled warriors by taking the offensive and keeping them off-balance, like a con-artist who bluffed her way through a hairy situation by denying her mark time to think.
But in this case, Tobias’ mark had been suspicious to begin with, and, hunting for the weak link in his smoke screen, had cut through it with unnerving precision. Denying the squire his sword had been nearly as effective as striking him dead, because it put him on the defensive—and going on the defensive sounded the impending death of any con.
Unless Tobias and his friends could do something in the next few moments to restore the balance of power, before their opponents could capitalize on this weakness, the fight would be lost.
She would have gone on to ask herself what the bloody hell Tobias was doing at this very spot at this very moment anyway, and she would have answered that any idiot could see she’d led him to it. Certainly, he’d followed of his own free will, just as any mark would hand over his coin purse or the keys to the castle with a happy smile when she’d done her job right. And nowhere in her agenda had there been anything about luring him to his death in a sword fight with the Inquisition in the middle of a dark, old forest, but such was the nature of her agendas.
They started out as these nebulous, grandiose plans with a definite starting point, a goal that might or might not be concrete, and a whole bunch of “we’ll make it up as we go along” filling up the space in the middle. Going with the gut had always gotten her by on a day-to-day basis, but she’d long since passed out of the realm of the day-to-day con on this one.
Four people of arguable innocence, who had gotten tangled up in her web of deceits, were about to die right in front of her for it, slaughtered by the very evil she was working to bring down. A part of her had always understood that there would be a price for victory. It had known that her actions would have ripple effects, and that as the Inquisition hunted her it would surely be taking its frustrations out on whomever they found within reach. It had even told her as much, in matter-of-fact tones, while assuring her that she’d save far more harm than she’d cause if only she could bring down the Inquisition once and for all.
What that bit of her had entirely failed to mention was that she’d have to watch helplessly while the damage played out right on top of her.
As Keely looked on, a young man whose only crime had been to follow his master on an adventure screamed in pain and crumpled to the ground as the knight who’d disarmed him kicked him savagely in the gut. Beyond him, the only woman Keely had ever seen dare take arms against the Inquisition, much less go toe-to-toe with a knight, had just been cut off from her allies and backed against a tree.
The swordsman who’d somehow started this by trying to stand between the Inquisition and his sister held his own for the moment, but looked to have lost track of the second priestess who was now circling around behind him.
And the brash, bloody fool who—in addition to being rather handsome and an amazing dancer—had obsessively followed Keely across half a continent for the privilege of playing her knight in shining armor, now stood with his back all but unprotected between two men who were each nearly his equal with a blade. The preliminaries had come to a close, the bloodletting about to commence. She could talk about the monsters of the Inquisition all she liked, but this was her own idiot fault.
Amidst the swirling chaos of the fight, the only bit of this that actually reached her conscious mind was a blur of images—visions of gruesome deaths about to be. And as she drew in a breath and forced herself up, ignoring the slight twinge at her side and the ongoing panting as she labored to breathe, Keely bundled all the images up together with one of U
lric grimly assuring her she’d turned him into a dead-man walking.
Then she opened The Rules to the next blank page and burned the images onto it, overlaying them all with an echo of her own voice saying, “I’ll fix it.” Then the little white cat closed her book, tucked it neatly away onto its shelf in her mind, and launched headlong into battle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
True Love's Kiss
The sum of Keely’s knowledge of weaponry could be expressed as, “Don’t get poked with the pointy bits,” but within that specialized sub-field of the subject, she rightfully considered herself an expert. She’d seen a few fights in her day, but almost all of them had been from the vantage point of looking over her shoulder as they chased after her, beckoning her to join in. The concept of standing one’s ground belonged to people who possessed ground to stand on. So when Keely launched into the fray, her mind was coldly analyzing the whole thing not so much as a fight, but as a tactical extraction problem.
Priority one had to be the disarmed boy. He mightn’t last long enough to be a second priority. Sadly, his very predicament made a direct approach futile, so she veered away from the knight standing over the boy and toward the inquisitrix who’d wounded him. The woman had backed off a few steps and dismissed the squire as dispatched. Now her eyes settled on Tobias. That, at least, would be handy, as it put her back full to Keely.
Keely didn’t make a sound until she was already in the air, halfway to the woman’s back. Then she let out the most horrible feline screech she could muster. Having stepped clear of the fight, the priestess was at luxury to whip around in alarm, which resulted in her getting a face full of cat. She screamed, dropping her sword as she reached to pull Keely from her face, but Keely had already bounded away after giving the priestess a quick bloodying. “Witch!” the woman howled.
The only knight free to give his full attention to that cry would be the one standing over the squire, and Keely had covered half the ground to him before he could even start to turn. As he spun around to the right, she darted past on his left, and all he saw as he came about was the priestess clutching at her bloodied face with one hand while waving the other accusingly in his general direction. That left Keely free to bound over the fallen squire and between the legs of his master.
She came out in front of Tobias and under the guard of the knight facing him. She leapt once more, but with a much lower trajectory this time, straight at the man’s groin. With no time to analyze this sudden threat, the man involuntarily dropped his guard low toward her, and Keely caught the glint of steel flashing over both her head and the man’s lowered guard as he did. She rebounded harmlessly off the knight’s mail tunic, but still he screamed as she raced away. Keely accepted that as sufficient evidence that Tobias would be free to protect his squire now.
Her next priority could only be the second priestess, who now stood as the greatest threat by virtue of being neither disoriented nor distracted. With no element of surprise left, Keely could never hope to close on the woman, either, so fled past her instead, as tantalizingly close as she dared.
This time Keely didn’t fight the urge to escape up a tree. She scrambled up the first one she could reach, ducking behind a great gnarled branch just as a throwing knife flew past. Then she paused, panting. Her heart raced, and her head had begun to swim from the exertions, but she would be safe here for several seconds at least. Below her, the cry of, “Witch!” echoed again.
Before the world had quite stopped spinning, Keely heard the sound of someone scrabbling up the trunk, and she knew she had no choice but to move again. She began to climb in short, determined bursts. Glancing behind, she could see one priestess climbing while the other circled the base of the tree, keeping a careful eye on Keely. Then three knights of the Inquisition fell back to protect the women, loosely ringing the tree with their backs to it.
By Keely’s count, that left no one likely to be up and moving to block Tobias and his friends from leaving. Her plan had succeeded masterfully—even ahead of schedule. The one little hitch was that this had been the phase of the plan where the squire picked up the sword of the fallen knight and the two sides had faced off four-against four, keeping all but the one priestess too busy to chase her. Evading one woman trying to follow her up a tree would have been kitten’s play. Evading that woman and a small army camped at the bottom of the tree would…not.
Worse, this woman was a climber, and an inquisitrix out looking for trouble never seemed thoughtful enough to wear her encumbering robes of office to the party. The priestess hauled herself nimbly up branch after branch, quickly closing the distance between herself and Keely.
Winded as Keely was, she judged that if she persisted in trying to escape the woman by continuing to climb vertically, she wouldn’t have half a minute before the woman managed to overtake her. From snatches of overheard conversation and the sounds of feet crashing away through the fallen leaves, she also guessed that the unknown swordsman who had provoked the confrontation was already charging off with giantess in tow.
She wasn’t sure whether her own presence factored into Tobias’s decision to remain behind with his squire, or if they merely intended to buy time for the other two. Hoping for them to fight their way through the wall of fanatics in time to do anything about her predicament—even if they meant to—would be grasping at straws. She couldn’t survive a direct confrontation with her pursuer, and she couldn’t expect the woman to pause and listen to either negotiation or con. She couldn’t go up, she couldn’t go down, and she couldn’t wait. That didn’t leave a lot of options.
Keely paused to survey the branches radiating out from the trunk around her. She’d gotten maybe twenty-five feet into the air, but the limbs of the gnarled, old tree still started out thick as a man’s chest at this height. She’d have plenty of room to run along any of the ones she could reach in the next few seconds, but the leaves grew too thick and the branches too twisted for her to know what she’d find when she got out there. Her view of the ground, too, promised to be limited.
With nothing to distinguish one option from another, Keely committed to the branch she’d just reached. She scurried out along it and into an arboreal labyrinth, with a murderously pious minotaur on her heels, and all she could do was pray she’d find an exit too narrow for the creature to follow her through before it could trap her in a dead end.
Three times Keely judged another branch close enough and sturdy enough to risk the leap to it, but so did the priestess. The third time it seemed that the woman’s luck had finally run out. The higher branch she grabbed to steady herself when she landed snapped as she put her weight on it.
Overbalanced, the inquisitrix tumbled forward and down. Then one flailing hand caught a branch off the one they’d landed on, and her whole weight abruptly came dragging it down. Keely lurched off-balance herself, scrabbling for purchase with her claws. For a moment she hung there, hindquarters dangling off the branch, just out of arm’s reach of the woman.
Then a triumphant grin flashed across the woman’s face as Keely saw her reaching with her free hand for the dagger at her belt. In those eyes Keely read the dead-certain confidence that the same motion that would draw that dagger would bury it in Keely’s gut. Whether the owner planned to throw it or to simply use it to extend her reach, her eyes and her muscles had already done their reflexive mental arithmetic and deemed the outcome as certain as picking up a spoon from a table. In the mind behind those eyes, Keely had already died.
In the split-second left to her, Keely did the only thing she could do, and relaxed every muscle in her body. Her claws sheathed. Her feet stopped scrabbling. She plummeted like a furry white stone. Leaves and twigs slapped at her from all sides. Her flank glanced off something unyielding. Then her fall abruptly ended in a distressingly thin layer of fallen leaves.
Keely hadn’t even had time to properly assess if she was still alive when a rapid series of sickening cracks above her announced the descent of the inquisitrix. The woman
landed three feet in front of Keely, staring at her with dead eyes and an unmistakably broken neck. Half a breath later, a flash of silver announced the arrival of the blade-heavy throwing dagger, which sank two inches into the earth between Keely and the dead woman.
Nearby shouts and the sound of running prompted Keely to pull herself to her feet before she could finish taking stock of her own condition. Her body ached, and it moved reluctantly, but at least it responded more or less according to usual expectations. She rose to find a knight and the other inquisitrix bearing down on her. She didn’t dare run, and climbing another tree seemed a laughable proposition, so she fell back on the only instinct left to her and bluffed.
She bloodied one paw for effect, swiping it across the still wet wound where the spear had glanced across her rib cage, she hopped up onto the dead woman’s shoulder with all the ferocity she could still muster. She arched her back. She hissed. She assumed a stance calculated to say, “Ignore the relative lack of blood. This woman is dead because I just tore her stinking throat out, and I really can’t wait for round two to get started. Who’s next?” Then she waited to die.
The ploy did buy her a moment, as both knight and priestess faltered in their headlong charge. Then from behind them came the howl of a man who’d just met the business end of a sword. That divided their attention and deepened their moment of indecision, which Keely filled with the most blood-curdling caterwaul she could muster.
Before they’d made up their minds, Tobias came charging at them in a rage, blood dripping from his blade. A sense of self-preservation finally broke through the finely honed fanaticism of the zealots facing him, and the pair fled into the woods, quickly joined by the knight who’d been left facing Tobias’ squire, once the man realized he was standing alone.
At least one of the two fallen knights remained alive, judging by the groans of pain, but neither of them seemed inclined toward regaining his feet. The others would no doubt return soon with allies, but right here and now, Tobias and his squire remained as the only two people who might soon try to kill Keely. At the moment, Tobias stood staring at her through narrowed eyes, holding his bloody sword while clearly trying to decide if he would do just that.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 30