by Anna Holmes
One fight at a time, Caelin.
“You’re certain you don’t want backup,” Riley calls to me. He holds out a smooth steel object, the size of a good skipping stone. A signaling beacon. “I can have them here in minutes.”
And again, I find myself teetering on a slope. I hadn’t wanted to call any attention to Alain, but that’s been derailed by a bunch of priests with high-minded ideals and not enough earthly sense. Everything I told August is still true, however. If I have uniformed guards attacking Legion people and we don’t make it to explain that it was justified…Elyssia will be right back where it was two years ago. I push at my forehead. “Not now. If it looks like it’s more than we can handle, call them then.”
He nods once, turns back to scanning the area. Nuthatch fidgets nervously with the pouches at his waist. Every so often, he casts nervous glances back in the direction of the cryst.
“Problem?” I ask.
“A million of them, Highness,” he answers. “But right now my largest is that your prince should be back. I don’t like him down there with that cryst.”
Me neither, but I’m fairly sure he’s the only one of us who, at this time of year, would survive that, short of the eleven year old girl with a tendency to faint at the drop of a hat. “He’s moving a little slower than normal. I’m sure he’s fine.”
He doesn’t look assuaged, and that assuages me not at all. “Listen, Highness,” he says, jerking a thumb in the direction of the lake, “I haven’t the faintest what him stewing in that mess will do, but I know it’s not benign. If he’s not out in the next—”
His words are swallowed by a huge splash. We both whirl. A pair of divers disappear under the surface near the river mouth. At the same time, a small group rushes towards us from the canyon. “That’s bad,” I remark. Unless Alain has taken time I’m not aware of to become versed in hand-to-hand combat, he doesn’t have a means of fighting back.
Nuthatch flips open a belt pouch. “Rye,” he calls. Gavroth and August both turn, and he sighs. “The—alchemist. Sorry.” He tosses a small glass sphere, which Gavroth catches ably, starting toward the water. “We’ll get the prince,” he tells me.
I want to scoff, oh, will you, now? But frankly, of us, I’m pretty sure they’re the only other ones capable of surviving the lake right now. In the end I nod and take up my sword to meet the oncoming.
There are eight to our four. Not insurmountable, but I can’t help but let go of a small laugh. Of course. We come ready, they come readier. And not a mage among us. Here’s hoping they haven’t brought one.
As their silhouettes draw into sharper focus and finally into fully three dimensional figures, I feel a little more confident that they haven’t. Each of them holds at least one weapon and no one’s lobbed any sort of spell at us just yet. There’s one safe way to find out. “All right, Riley,” I call. “I wouldn’t mind some cover.”
None of the bolts get deflected early or disintegrated. They’re swatted away with swords or shields or bits of armor, or in one fellow’s case, sink into his shoulder. “Keep at it,” I say, moving to interpose myself between them and the lake, keeping my sword angled out wide. Just in case they start to return the pleasantries.
Oddly enough, they don’t. No bows, no crossbows, no javelins. One man carries a polearm, but we’re still too far back. “All right, August,” I instruct, keeping my voice low. “It's going to be up to you and me to maintain the last line of defense here.” He nods, his already pale face a little floury. His bony knees are knocking together. Oh, dear. “Are you going to be able to handle it?”
“Yeah, I have this,” he tells me, or himself, or the world at large, keeping a death grip on the hilt of his sword. “I can do it.”
“Yeah, you can,” I answer, turning my sights back on the assault team. Seven left. I pivot my heels into the gravelly shore, secure my footing, and wait.
I know it’s seconds, but time drags strangely in a fight in a peaceful place. The water still laps gently at the shore, the cold air crisp at our faces and in our lungs. Birds call across the water. Nature never intends any place to be a battleground, of course, but the pristine ones are surreal. “Alive if you can,” I remind my companions, “but do what you have to.”
From the look of that polearm fellow, he's not going alive if he can help it. He arrives first, ducking bolts as if they’re the streamers children fling at each other during festivals. “He’s mine,” I tell August. Not because I’m looking forward to engaging the man—his dark eyes are wild and each of his arms might be the size of my whole rib cage—but he knows that weapon. His grip is light, his posture strong. He’s practiced. I don’t want August trying his luck.
Polearm swings his weapon above his head to force us both to duck, a showy move without much lethality behind it. I chop upward. My blade sinks into the wooden haft with a dull thuk that reverberates up to my elbows. I’m in no danger of splitting the wood. It’s thicker than the average glaive, with a nasty hooked steel pike at the end. He catches me looking and grins, a poisonous thing that slinks from my eyes down the rest of me. I grit my teeth against the revulsion and kick out at his knees. He only buckles a little, but it’s time enough for me to withdraw my sword and swing for his neck.
I’m vaguely aware of the rest of the fight moving around me. August is pretty handily engaging two swordsmen next to me and Riley’s put the crossbow aside in favor of his daggers. I still have another two approaching, and as Polearm dismisses my slash with a casual wave of a bracer-clad forearm. I’m going to have to keep him busy for a moment. My eyes flick from his armor to the weapon to a familiar three-circled brand in the palm of his hand. A prince, and nothing like mine. Interesting. I look back to the polearm for the briefest of moments, then take a running start and jump, landing with my full weight on the haft, slipping purposefully until I’ve got the point pretty well wedged in the wet dirt. I keep a foot on it and swing out wide around the wielder to engage with the first of the two approaching.
She’s a wiry woman with a scar down one entire side of her face that's sealed her eye shut. She’s got a wickedly curved falchion, which she jabs sharply in my direction. It’s a feint. I ignore it and swipe at her legs. She’s too slow to block, too absorbed in trying to intimidate me, and my blade comes back red as she topples to her knees. Polearm yanks on the haft, trying to pull the point first from the dirt, then from under me. I keep my heel jammed down and twist again to meet the second, slightly less memorable helmeted man. He seems to have more sense than Falchion. Helmet has a pair of small axes at his sides, and he— wisely— aims high, well away from his prince. It forces me to shift to avoid, which means stepping off of the polearm. I probably only have a few seconds until it’s free of the dirt and coming at me again, so I drop, swing from the haft and slide through the dirt and slush between Polearm’s legs and out the other side to fully face Helmet.
Whoever he is, he’s seen battle before. He’s instinctively ducking, casting glances around him for additional fighters. It means he’s not terrifically surprised when I come out on his side. Polearm, on the other hand, seems shocked. I only managed a quick slice to his inner thigh while sliding, but I may as well have winded him completely with how he’s acting. I don’t have time to comfort him. Helmet brings both axes down toward me in quick succession. The first I knock aside, the second I roll away from, using the momentum to get to my feet again. Helmet follows after me, hacking through the air. This time I parry both with the same strike. I hear him grunt his displeasure in the hollow of his metal canister as he drags the blades across my steel and brings them low to cut for my legs.
Meanwhile, behind me, the glaive pulls free of the mud with a wet sucking sound. I can hear Polearm shifting his heavy weight and the drawback, the beginning of the arc through the air. I wait as long as I can, then drop, aiming a kick for Helmet’s shin. He has time to sort of correct with one of his light weapons. The point of one of his axes digs into the side of my thigh. I don’t even re
ally have time to register the jangling alarm of my nerves or the warm blood seeping into the cloth of my breeches. I finish my kick which knocks the axe free and Helmet back long enough for me to spring back up after the glaive passes overhead. Helmet doesn't recover fast enough. I bring my sword into his shoulder and he drops, and I swing around to face Polearm again.
A sharp burst of static pushes at my ribcage, lifts the hair on the back of my neck. The absence of sound leads me to duck my head under the haft and look back at the water just as the purple light seems to subsume nearly half the lake. My breath gets knocked back into my chest and my pulse slams in my ears, in the wound in my leg. “No,” I whisper, though to my own ears and in my own head it may as well be a scream.
Polearm looks too, for the first time seeming to drop the bullish fury. My own kicks up. Of course he’s worried. Can’t bring his bounty back to Pell if he’s been disintegrated. My fingers tighten on the hilt of my sword, and metallic blood swills on my tongue. Apparently I’ve bitten my lip. “He is a person,” I hiss. “Not your asset.”
His eyes waver over to me for a second, and then he starts backing up. Retreating. “Oh, no you bloody don’t—” I start.
An enormous splash breaks the surface. I turn again. Something blue and shiny has emerged close to the shore. At once, I can breathe again. Alain. I forget Polearm and run for the edge of the water. Alain is struggling, a sopping Kai Nuthatch draped over his shoulder. I ignore the bite of the gash in my leg and run to pull the doctor free and haul him up to the shore. He coughs up a good amount of lakewater, gasping on his hands and knees. I reach out to help him crawl free of the water. At his side, two rocks glint in a glass canister dangling from his belt. Relief on relief. He got the cryst. “Gavroth?” I ask.
“On his way,” Alain pants. Water runs in rivulets from his neck and sides. “Just thought the doctor could use a faster exit.”
Nuthatch gags slightly, then rasps, “Thanks.”
“I should thank you. If—”
Thudding footfalls interrupt as Polearm charges forward again. I bring my sword up and step out in front of our sodden mages, ready. He levels the tip and begins a shout. Midway through his charge, the shouting stops, arrested in his throat with a wet gurgle. He lurches forward, then snaps back as though he's run into a pane of glass and claws at his massive throat. I look back at Alain, startled. He shakes his head. So what’s…?
Polearm’s face goes brighter and brighter red as he sputters, still digging his fingers into the fold of his neck. I’m about to lurch forward to help him, against all instinct to the contrary, when a geyser of blood explodes from his nose and mouth and he buckles. As he falls forward, we see Jori very nearly riding his back the rest of the way down, the chain of her manacles around his neck. She rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically. “I thought he’d never die.”
Riley is back at my side immediately, crossbow raised. I lift my sword. “Where’s Sergeant Nuthatch?” he demands. “What did you do to her?”
“She’ll be along,” she says. “Moving a little slowly these days, so I took off ahead of her.” No sound from the earring. I nod toward Riley, and he shoots her another glower and runs toward the canyon. She scowls. “You’re welcome.”
“Thanks, and all,” I say, “but I seem to recall leaving you in a locked hold with your hands fastened behind your back.”
Jori stomps to her feet, giving the dead prince a bit of a dismissive nudge as she goes. She stoops and with a pair of sickening pops, loosens her shoulders and neatly hops over her dangling arms and sets them back in with two more snaps. “Happy now?”
I look back to Alain with widened eyes and he gives me a similar, slightly nauseated look back. “That’s…new to me.”
She grins. “There are a lot of tricks I never got to show you, loftleng.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” I mutter. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you just kill him? He’s on your side.”
“Was he? Rosalia is a big three dimensional mess with all sorts of vertices and faces. Don’t assume we’re all the same.”
Kai manages to get himself to a knee, still coughing. “So you’re not working with Pell.”
“Sort of.”
“You don’t sort of work with Pell,” Alain counters.
“That’s what he’d like people to think, yeah. Just because you didn’t ask questions when he showed up and started offing people doesn’t mean everyone gives in so easily.”
Kai’s hands ball up at his sides. His skin is an unhealthy waxy white, still sodden. He’s going to need to warm up and fast, though from the look of him right now the fury might thaw him out from the inside. “You’re either supremely overconfident or a fool. Perhaps both.”
“Doctor,” I say. “I think you should go get those clothes off.”
He pauses, fire still burning in his one visible eye, then glances down at himself and nods. I lean over to help him get to his feet, and as he starts on his way back to his tent, he throws her a look. I frown at her, too, and once he’s out of earshot, spit, “Don’t you have any shame?”
She looks up at the sky serenely as if only gauging the weather. “Shame is a hindrance, valsht.”
Alain stiffens. “I suggest,” he says tautly, “We continue this conversation after we deal with this scene.”
I glance around. There are still fighters on the ground, August is bleeding a bit from a cut across his cheek, and it is damned cold. “August, you good?”
He breathes hard, clouds of air bursting from his mouth. “Y-yeah.”
“Can you help me tend to any still alive?”
“Tend to—”
“We don’t kill unless we have to,” I say, sparing a brief look at Jori. “See to the wounded, get them stabilized and secured.”
“What about Gav?”
Another loud splash behind us as Gavroth surfaces, encased in what looks like a large glass sphere. He runs on top of the water, the sphere spinning around him. As he grinds to a stop on the pebbly shore, he yells, “Look, lad, I’m in a ball!” He glances around and cringes. “What’d I miss?”
August sighs and pats the bubble, and we all turn to finish our grim work.
Chapter Twenty-One
Alain
I pace in front of our tent and rub at my jaw. It’s an old habit, I’m not even sure where from. It, like a lot of things lately, feels like an old bruise that I don’t want to prod at, but if I don’t, life is going to do it for me.
“You can come in, you know,” Caelin calls. “I’m a mildly injured girl, not a leper.”
“Your lieutenant will shoot me.”
“He will not.”
I pace a few more steps, run a hand through my hair, prod at my jaw again. Ah, hells. I throw my hands up in the air at last, then lift the flap and ease inside.
She kneels on the tent cushion, down to just her undershirt and smallclothes. She’s got one of the doctor’s warming tubes at work, at least, the glass radiating a gentle heat into the cloth cushion. Expensive enough not to spend on a night’s sleep, but probably the safest thing when she’s down to her skivvies after a fight in the cold. Her fingers fumble with a bandage around her leg, the white weave already soaking through red. I edge closer and take over. “You’re shivering.”
“It’s cold as the second hell. The leg’s fine.”
“Ah, yes,” I say, pulling the ends of the bandage taut and tying them off. “That would be why we’re bandaging it.” She makes a face at me and reaches for a fresh overshirt and the same breeches. The right leg bears a hole and a bloodstain. I pull at the pants leg. “I can fix that.”
“No,” she scolds.
“I’m feeling all right. Just…being near that creepy stuff seems to have helped.” I bite my lip and spread the fabric over my knee to get a better look at the damage. “Can you promise me something?”
“Anything, darling.”
“If I get….” The words kind of die in my throat, an
d I have to swallow the lump they leave behind. “If I get like her…don't let me get like her.”
“Like her—your mother?” she asks, surprised.
I nod slightly, staying focused on the bloodstain. It’s easy enough to lift. It’s so different from the cloth. “I was down there, and thinking things, and I—sounded so much like her, in my head. If this…infusion thing the doctor wants to do to me turns me into her, please—don't let me.”
Caelin stops, mid-slip of her arm into her sleeve. “Alain….”
“I know. I know it’s an unfair thing to ask, but I would rather die as myself than live as her.”
“You won’t. You’re not her.”
“What if she wasn’t always like that?” I ask, my face flushing. “What if it made her that?”
“She willingly let the Legion cut her open and affix cryst to her bones so they’d fuse,” she reminds me. “She’s always been that. At least a little. What Kai wants to do—it’s different, and you survived it twice before without becoming anything horrible.”
That is true, I suppose.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but a bit at a time, I convince the split fibers to weave themselves back together. She finally finishes pulling her overshirt on and watches intently. “That is really remarkable. And complicated. Is that what you did to my shoulder?”
“Sort of,” I realize for the first time, still watching the threads looping around and under each other and twisting back together. “It was harder. These threads are all the same. There were poison and antidote and blood and muscle and skin to think about.”
“No wonder you passed out.” She leans her cheek on my shoulder, absorbed in the mending. “And how are you now?”
“As far as passing out? Fine. As far as anticipating interrogating Jori and dealing with the Legion and this infusion, I kind of just want to go swim out to sea and stay there.”