by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Fifty-Five
On the cobblestones of the palace courtyard, Chris waited.
Mactalde appeared through an arched doorway one level up and started down the stairs that hugged the wall. His footsteps crunched in the snow, and the sound reverberated against the high stone walls. The gray swirling shadows of the morning lit the sprawl of the courtyard.
Mactalde’s men had admitted Chris through the gates, but the explosion had crumbled the walls in several places, just as he had hoped. Had they not let him in, he could have climbed over the rubble into the courtyard.
His sword hung loose in his hand, and sweat scalded inside his glove.
Mactalde reached the last step and approached to within a few yards. They were alone in the courtyard. Chris’s own men waited in the streets beyond, and Mactalde’s troopers were nowhere to be seen.
Mactalde flashed a smile, but the skin around his mouth stayed tight. “Rather an exciting few months it’s been.” He unbuckled his knee-length doublet and cast it to the wind, leaving himself free to move within the loose weave of his blouse. “As a professional psychologist, I admit this isn’t the way I usually like to see my client relationships end.” His sword hissed free of its sheath, and he rolled his shoulders before stepping forward. “But at least we solved that troubling little dream question of yours, eh?”
Chris brought his sword up in front of him and fell into his stance. “It’s not solved. Not yet.”
Mactalde raised his sword in front of his face and touched his forehead to the steel in salute. “Then here’s to solving it.” He attacked, his blade swiping low, trying to chop Chris’s legs out from under him.
Chris leapt back and swung blindly, just nicking Mactalde’s blade with his own. He parried Mactalde’s salvo and staggered back, one step after the other. He sank into the instinctual rhythms and patterns of his body, but even with all he had learned since crossing over, his brain couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t afford for it to keep up.
For a split second, the attack slowed, and Mactalde’s right side lay open. Chris lunged to the left and swung low. Mactalde’s sword snapped down, one-handed, to catch the blow, and he slammed his elbow into Chris’s temple. Darkness fluttered across Chris’s vision, and he lurched back, automatically dragging the length of his sword in front of his face.
Mactalde laughed. “The heroic Gifted isn’t quite good enough, is he?”
The sickening part was . . . he wasn’t.
_________
Allara plummeted through the waterfall’s spray, Steadman grappling her body. Shouts and gunshots droned from the palace above, and the slugs ripped past. She stopped breathing. In seconds, the sheet of water looming beneath would snap her spine with the impact of the long fall. Water and blood rushed in her ears. She barely heard the faint rattle, like a piece of parchment in the wind.
A shadow the size of a hawk flitted across the water, and the Garowai, in miniature, careened past. He slapped his wings together in front of him and blasted from the cloud of dust in his proper size. With a roar, he dove past. He snagged her arm with his foreclaw, and all her joints seemed to burst.
Steadman lost his hold on her and skidded down her body, one hand clawing her gown, his eyes huge and dirty. The Garowai’s wings pumped hard and the wind swirled her body like a kite tail. Steadman’s grip slipped, and he fell, screaming, into the lake.
More shots howled past. One scored the Garowai’s wing and another skittered off his hard ribs. He angled for the top of the city wall, and its iced bricks flew past, so near she could reach out and touch them.
“Warn the Gifted’s men,” the Garowai said, and then he let her go.
She thudded against a flying buttress and started climbing the rest of the way to the parapet on top. The stones were large and the cracks between just wide enough for a finger hold. Her hands cramped in the snow. The ice tore through her skin and her fingernails, and pink blood trailed her progress.
Below, horses stopped. The rattle of equipment and the buzz of rifle hydraulics could only mean men had been sent after her. Their gunfire had stopped, no doubt because they feared alerting Chris’s men to their presence. They would have to climb up after her and kill her by hand.
She screamed out a precious breath: “Quinnon!”
The shout echoed back and mocked her as it faded. If she could get Quinnon’s attention and tell him of Mactalde’s treachery, then at least she would not fall in vain. Her pursuers gained slowly, hampered by their armor and their weapons.
“Quinnon!”
Below her, men cursed. “Shoot her before someone hears!”
Rifle bolts clattered into place. Above her, the edge of the wall leered just out of reach. The gunshots hammered into the stones beneath her.
“Reload!”
A few more handholds and she would be safe.
“Fire!”
Stones split on either side of her, and in her left forearm, skin and muscle pinched. Something that felt like a warm fingertip traced a caress down her arm. The sky, huge and white, expanded over the edge of the parapet.
Almost there, almost there.
She didn’t look at her arm. She didn’t listen when the muscles insisted they couldn’t lift and clamp and brace her weight. One more rung to climb and she would be there.
A hand seized her ankle. Her hold on the rock snapped, and she skidded down the face of the wall. Rolling half onto her side, she caught a buttress, and drove her free heel into the Koraudian’s mouth. Sputtering and spitting blood, he slid away. She kicked him again, and his hand scraped free. Oaths howled from below, and the firing once again smacked into the wall. She clawed her way to the top and hoisted herself over the edge.
Below, interspersed among the blue-roofed monasteries of the Vesper district, waited a ragtag army such as she had not seen in twenty years. Her breath caught. They had come. After all these years, the Cherazii had once again joined forces with Lael. She pushed to her feet and ran the length of the parapet to the stairs.
They saw her coming and Quinnon hurried to meet her. He slung his coat around her shoulders and thrust her blood-soaked sleeve back from the half-span bodkin bullet that pierced her forearm between the wrist and elbow.
She gritted her teeth. “Just leave it in for now.” She faced the soldiers. “Mactalde has betrayed the bargain.”
Alone in the shadows of a monastery’s blue eaves, Orias Tarn straightened. He would understand. Better than anyone here, he understood what that meant.
“Even if Chris succeeds, the Koraudians will kill him.”
Someone shouted an order. The men mobilized into a hundred tiny fragments.
Quinnon tore away the rest of her sleeve and used a tourniquet, but her eyes followed Orias. Before she had finished speaking, he had mounted up and called to his lion. The rest of the men marshaled into ranks, but Orias already galloped up the street, bent low over his horse’s mane, his hair blowing out behind him.
_________
The thunder of marching footsteps filled Chris’s consciousness, but he dared not look up. One misstep, one blink, and Mactalde would disembowel him.
Mactalde chuckled. “Go on, take a look.” He swiveled away a step.
On the walls all around, Koraudian troops tromped into view. Chris’s breath heaved from his mouth in long clouds. They were here to either watch him be killed or to kill him themselves if their master failed.
Futility welled in his gut. “You couldn’t even keep your word.”
“The Gifted are dangerous individuals. They never play fair. So why should I be fair with them?” Mactalde spun in for another attack. “Of course, life hasn’t exactly shown justice to you either, has it?” His blade slammed into Chris’s, inches from his face. “Tell me, how does it feel to have a path set before you that’s not of your choosing? How do you like being controlled?”
Mactalde pulled his blade free. He rotated his wrist, and the reflected snow flashed against the glint of steel. “The onl
y difference in our lives these days is I have maintained the right to act, whereas you . . . you can only react.” His blade crashed down and nearly ripped Chris’s sword from his hands. “Tell me the truth, would you not trade places with me in a heartbeat?”
Chris held, his strength aching against Mactalde’s. “No.”
“Why not?” Mactalde shoved him back a full step. “You can’t truly believe I’m destroying the world.”
“How many people have died because of you?”
“Hundreds. How many have died because of you?” The corner of his mouth tilted. “Too many to count, I think?”
“No. Not too many.” Chris tightened his hold on the sword. His gloves squeaked against the leather-wrapped hilt. “Just one less than enough.”
“Then may it be your death that fills the tally.” Mactalde charged, but before he could reach Chris, his attention wavered. He glanced at the crumbled corner of the courtyard wall. The sound of a hundred melded screams filled the air.
This time, Chris didn’t turn to follow Mactalde’s gaze. He had been given the advantage, if only for a split second. He lunged and thrust.
Mactalde saw his attack, parried in time to save his life, but too late to keep the blade from glancing off his thigh. His wild swing chopped the point of Chris’s blade into the snow, then hacked upward and hissed past Chris’s head.
Chris pulled back, sword in front of his face. From the corner of his eye, he saw the motley charge of Laelers and Cherazii scrambling over the broken walls to meet the Koraudian defenders.
He filled his lungs with a new breath. “Consider the playing field leveled.”
Mactalde stared down at the wash of red on his leg. Then he dropped his hand to his belt and drew his mace. “Not yet, I think. Not yet.”
_________
Allara galloped atop the wide city wall, headed toward the palace. On her right, the shoreline vanished, and the mist and thunder of the wind-whipped waterfall burst into view.
Her left arm throbbed against her chest, and her bones ached with the brittleness of cold. Chris’s presence roared inside her as it had not done even when he had held her after her father’s death. His thoughts rushed with fear, with anger, with a flurry of reflex and instinct.
Quinnon galloped up beside her and yanked her horse to a stop. “This is madness. What good are you to anyone if you kill yourself before the battle’s half over?”
She dismounted. “Give me your spyglass!”
In the faraway eastern sky, falling stars rained through the clouds. The sound of their crash disappeared in the collision of troops. Soldiers swept through the snow in the courtyard. They stopped. Staggered. Then red and green tabards and the glare of blue-streaked Cherazii faces blended into the chaos.
She raised Quinnon’s spyglass to her face, and clarity unfurled across the field. She saw all their faces. She saw the Commander of the Guard collapse, a pike haft filling a hole in his stomach. She saw her uncle, Amras Denegar, fighting on horseback, cutting through the ranks with sword and mace. She saw Glelarn Rotoss’s pistol shot blast through a Cherazim’s face. She saw the Cherazii leader, Cabahr Laith, fighting on foot, his black hair swinging around his face as he spun in wide arcs, cutting down everything, man and horse, that neared him. She saw Orias scrambling through the dead, clearing a path before him, but running, always running, through the fight, toward the far end of the courtyard.
She raised the glass, and she saw why he ran.
In the middle of it all, Chris and Mactalde battled on. Mactalde fought with mace and sword against Chris’s single blade and a lifetime’s lack of experience.
The time had come. This was her time as surely as it was Chris’s. She would ride to him. She would fight by his side. She would die on Mactalde’s sword if she had to.
The Garowai alighted on the wall’s edge, and Quinnon’s hand came down hard on her shoulder.
Her heart leapt. “You’ve come to fight with us.”
“I cannot,” the Garowai said. “I am allowed only to watch. I have done all I can do in saving you.”
“You know Mactalde’s the better fighter.” She pulled her sword from its sheath on her saddle. “You’re here, you can help Chris!”
“No, my dear, I told you: I will watch.” He sneezed. “I am here because epochs tend to require my presence.”
“If Chris does not win today, there will never be another epoch!”
He shuffled around to face the palace. “You can’t know that, love.” He hooked his claws over the edge of the wall. “You must trust that which is beyond your own senses.”
Her stomach cramped. “You may choose to stay here and watch. But I cannot.” She dragged herself into her saddle. “I was born for this day. I will not live to see it slip away into darkness!”
Quinnon gathered his reins. “You won’t live a’tall if you don’t start showing some sense.” But he had to know she was right. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t watch while the drama she had feared all her life spun itself to an end in a battle she couldn’t touch.
“Allara.” The Garowai swiveled his head almost backwards over his shoulder. “You need to know this is not your battle.” His inner eyelid filmed the bottomless green of his eye. “Your battle is not of flesh and bone and blade. Your battle is coming.”
Blood pounded in the broken veins of her left arm. She opened her mouth to ask him what he meant. He stared at her, unblinking.
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “I cannot watch him die.”