“It’s not my sister.”
“Why, because you know her sowen?” Miklos said. There was more than a little sarcasm in his voice. “I’m sensing a bladedancer.”
“That’s only Gyorgy.”
Miklos grunted. “Seems like it’s not. Seems like a sohn, to me.”
Could he be right? Could it be Narina? Katalinka found it hard to believe that her sister would have ambushed Gyorgy and dragged him off, but so much about this situation was confusing.
She answered with a slow nod. “If it’s Narina, same thing. I fight her to a stalemate, you look for an opportunity. Don’t kill her, whatever you do. Just wound her.”
“I’ll do my best. The sword has its own auras, though. Its own will. Once I release that will, it wants to spill blood.”
“There’s one other thing,” Kozmer said. “Neither of you can take a wound. Not even a scratch.”
Miklos dropped one hand from his sword and touched the crystal feathers hanging at his neck. “The curse left me—maybe it’s like the pox and you can’t get it a second time. I might be immune.”
“You might be,” the elder said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Come on, the unknown sowen is growing clearer. Just up ahead, I think.”
They’d been moving across the meadow throughout this conversation, but very slowly, following the flattened grass parallel to the hillside on their left. A more permanent trail cut up that way toward even higher meadows, but their own path continued toward a large boulder sitting by itself on the far end. The mountains were studded with these rocks, rounded as if smoothed by some ancient flow of water or ice, standing like sentinels wherever the ground was flat enough to contain them.
The trio bent their course to ease around a fallen tree, and they spotted the wounded man.
He sat with his back to the boulder, head slumped against his chest. He cradled one arm to his chest as if it were broken. His clothes were torn and bloodied, and with his head bent down like that, Katalinka couldn’t be certain who it was.
“Gyorgy?” Katalinka called.
There was no answer, and she took a few more tentative steps. Her swords were humming, sensing her fear and uncertainty.
“Careful, it looks like a trap,” Miklos warned.
“Of course it’s a trap.” Katalinka glanced over her shoulder. “Kozmer? What do you sense?”
“There’s someone hiding behind the boulder,” he warned.
She felt with her sowen. It took some prodding to reveal it. Yes, the elder was right. An unknown sohn, most definitely a warbrand.
“It’s Radolf,” she said. “It must be.”
“You’re wrong,” Miklos said. “It’s Narina—I know that aura. I’ve faced her before.” He met Katalinka’s gaze. “I don’t know what she’s doing to fool you, but it’s definitely her.”
She was about to open her mouth to refute him again, but there was no need. At that moment, a tall, powerfully built man of about Miklos’s age came around from the back side of the boulder. He carried a massive two-handed falchion, an almost identical match to the one in his fellow warbrand’s grasp. It could only be Radolf.
A long, wolfish smile spread across his face. “Brother, so good to see you.”
Miklos blinked in confusion. “What. . .you. . .but I didn’t—”
“You didn’t think it would be so easy, did you? Just fumble about like a blind man and hope you could detect me? I’ve grown in power—more than you can ever dream. It was easy enough to disguise my sowen.”
Katalinka’s nerves were vibrating in anticipation, and she had no inclination to feel smug about having been proven right. In any event, she quickly suffered a shock of her own.
A lean figure leaped onto the boulder from behind. Even before Katalinka saw the gleaming white and black swords, picked out the familiar white tunic over leggings, or saw the woman’s face, she recognized the posture. The jump, the crouch when she landed.
She drew a sharp breath. “Narina?”
Narina bared her teeth and snarled. Something gleamed in her eyes, something demonic. It both was and wasn’t her sister at the same time.
“You know I have to kill you, of course,” Narina said. “I can’t wound you—you’ll only come back seeking my blood. So my blades will gash open your belly and spill your guts onto the dirt. And I will enjoy it. I’ll enjoy even more drinking your sowen and adding it to my own.”
“Narina, stop. You don’t have to do this. Please, listen to me.”
“Something is wrong,” Kozmer said in a low voice behind Katalinka. His sowen radiated outward, calmer than she’d have thought possible.
“You think we don’t see that, old man?” Miklos asked. He sounded shaken. “How are they. . .why are they. . .”
Radolf came stalking toward them, moving around Gyorgy’s slumped body with his falchion poised in front of his right shoulder. Narina crouched above him on the rock, ready to mount her own attack. Katalinka took a step backward, though she was not at all certain her sister couldn’t launch herself from the rock and fall on top of her, though the distance was at least twenty feet. What was Narina waiting for?
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Kozmer continued. “But something is. . .I don’t know, not what it seems.”
Gyorgy had been slumped against the boulder, unmoving. His sowen was gone, broken apart, and Katalinka had naturally thought he was dead. So she was shocked when his eyes blinked open and he reached out with his sowen, as weak as a dying candle in winter. The boy had apparently been guarding his strength to keep from bleeding to death.
“Illusion.” Gyorgy gasped, and blood bubbled at his lips. “Behind you. Using. . .sowen. Hidden.”
Katalinka whirled about and thrust out with her sowen. Kozmer beat her to it, already flailing outward. A figure appeared, charging toward them with sword upheld. Katalinka squinted, trying to distinguish who it was, but the light bent toward her in a blinding flash, and she couldn’t help but look away. Miklos roared a battle cry and lifted his falchion even as the figure burst free from the light and swung for the warbrand’s head.
Too late, Katalinka remembered the pair of sohns behind them. She turned toward the boulder expecting to find her sister flying through the air and Miklos’s former companion sweeping in with his falchion. They were gone. There was nobody there but Gyorgy, who’d closed his eyes and was gripping at his belly even while trying to contain the bleeding with his sowen.
The boy seemed very much alive now, and she realized how he’d saved them. The figure now attacking Miklos had used the wounded student to lure them to this spot, and further baited his trap with illusions of the missing warbrand and bladedancer sohns. Neither Radolf nor Narina were real; they’d never been here in the first place.
It had nearly worked. If Kozmer hadn’t detected something wrong with the surrounding auras, and if Gyorgy hadn’t given a warning, one or all three of the companions would have been murdered from behind.
Miklos fell back under a blistering attack from the sohn, but Katalinka hurled herself into the fight before the warbrand fell. She forced the attacker to face her long enough for Miklos to slip free, and caught a glimpse of her enemy’s face before he vanished in a blur. He was moving impossibly fast, and she could only fall back, flailing her swords desperately. If Miklos hadn’t recovered and forced another turn from their enemy, she’d have fallen in the first ten seconds of the exchange.
Katalinka had seen nothing like the speed of the enemy’s attack since she was a child and she and Narina used to lean against the railing of the shrine and try to follow the blurred movements of her father sparring with Abelard and the other sohns. Their mastery of sowen rendered them almost supernatural in speed, agility, and strength, at least from the viewpoint of an untrained observer.
This was nearly the same thing. Demons, how was their enemy bending light like that? The only thing keeping them alive was that the attacker was facing two opponents, neither of whom could be driven from the fight.
But it was only a matter of time.
Kozmer said something behind her. The air rippled, and her chest vibrated, almost like the feel of nearby thunder, but without the ear-splitting sound. It rolled past and hit Miklos and their enemy. For a moment, her eyes seemed fixed on the warbrand, who was swinging his falchion, but with exaggerated effect, as if he were pushing it through mud.
There, quite clear now, was their enemy. He had an elegant two-handed sword with a white blade containing a black edge as dark and glossy as obsidian. One of the firewalker swords. His head turned to follow Miklos’s slowly falling falchion, and she saw his face.
It was Volfram, the same man she and Abelard had stumbled upon in the cave during the snowstorm, his bare feet plunged into the coals of a fire. They’d fought, he had wounded Abelard, and been wounded in turn. After that, Abelard’s sowen took on a dark aura that he’d been unable to shed, and it ultimately led to his death. Katalinka had wounded Volfram in the exchange and driven him into the snow, and she hadn’t seen him since.
The firewalker had a fresh scar that traveled from a hairless patch on his skull, crossed from his forehead to his right cheek, and ended at his jaw. Unlike a typical scar, it wasn’t turning pink as it healed, but had a black, charred look to it.
That was a firewalker wound, the spectral burns left by their swords, which most likely meant he’d been fighting Lujza, his fellow sohn. Had he killed her?
Either way, he’d grown in power since Katalinka faced him in the cave. There, he’d been strong, and a match for either of the bladedancers, but not for both of them together. Now, he was skilled enough to hold off both Katalinka and Miklos at the same time. But he hadn’t accounted for Kozmer. The elder had reached out with his sowen and taken hold of the firewalker. Slowed him. Volfram fought to break free, but couldn’t do so with Miklos and Katalinka hemming him in from either side.
Volfram ducked Katalinka’s blow, and her demon blade whistled past his ear, frustratingly close, but striking only air. He rolled away from Miklos’s falchion, which crashed into the ground where the firebrand had been standing a split second earlier. Volfram might have come around with a sweeping cut to take Miklos’s legs out from underneath him, but he was charging toward Kozmer instead. He’d apparently decided to cleanse the battlefield of the troublesome elder and his sowen.
Kozmer stood several paces back, gripping his staff in front of him with gnarled hands. He’d been using his sowen to good effect, but seemed rooted to the ground as Volfram came at him. The old man would never get out of the way, and Katalinka and Miklos were too far away to reach his side in time. Kozmer’s eyes closed as if in recognition and acceptance of his impending death.
But at the moment Volfram reared back to strike, the staff seemed to melt in the old man’s hands. No, that wasn’t exactly it. Instead, it was twisting, vine-like. It deflected the sword thrust, then twisted again as the firewalker fought to get control of his weapon, tangling up the man’s feet.
Katalinka had been going after Volfram in a desperate attempt to reach him before he cut down Kozmer. Now, she almost stumbled herself as the firewalker fell at her feet. She struck first with her demon, missed as he rolled away, a blur again, and gave a desperate slash with her dragon at the space where he seemed to be moving.
She was rewarded with a cry of pain. She turned to see Volfram regain his feet and stagger away, with one hand on his sword and the other reaching back to his shoulder where she’d gashed him. His sowen was all around, a powerful force that would have been capable of overwhelming her own if he hadn’t been using it to fight the pain and heal his shoulder muscles.
Katalinka forgot everything they’d discussed earlier about taking Narina or Radolf prisoner. All nonsense. This man was too deadly to allow time to heal, or worse, to escape, grow stronger, and return for another ambush. And they had almost no chance of subduing him.
She ran after him. Miklos came up beside her, and together they charged with their swords lowered to skewer Volfram and finish this. The man turned, and his sword bashed away her dragon blade. Her demon got underneath his defenses, but she barely flicked it across his ribs and wasn’t sure if it got through.
Miklos, however, had brought his sword from behind his shoulder while Volfram had turned to face Katalinka. The firewalker spun away, again with impossible agility, but Kozmer regained control of his sowen and threw it into the fight. The elder’s sowen caught the enemy and slowed him.
Volfram was still mostly turned to face Katalinka’s blades, and could not get out of the way of the warbrand’s falchion in time. The sword slammed into his ribs and drove him to the ground.
That would surely end it. The blow had landed squarely on Volfram’s ribs and would surely have cut the man in two. But he was somehow back on his feet, and as he ducked past the startled warbrand, the gaping wound at his ribs closed in on itself. The sword remained in Volfram’s hand, and he was moving to attack Miklos, who was still off balance from his swing. Volfram swung with such power that it would lop off the warbrand’s head.
Katalinka shoved her demon blade in at an angle. It stabbed straight into the man’s side. There was resistance, as if his flesh were made of oak, but her blade could not be stopped. It was a master weapon forged by her own hand, the steel folded again and again with auras imbued into the metal. It thrust through the man’s chest cavity, all the way to the hilt.
Volfram dropped his weapon with a shudder and reached for the point, which emerged from the opposite side of his chest cavity. She dragged it brutally out, and it snapped through ribs before finally jerking free with a gush of blood. The firewalker fell facedown.
And yet even now he was not dead. She felt his sowen still gathering, still impossibly staunching his blood loss. He reached for his weapon and struggled to regain his feet. The air began to blur around them, and her eyes hurt from looking at him.
Before that could go any farther, Miklos rammed down with his sword point and pinned the firewalker sohn to the ground. Katalinka clenched her teeth and brought her dragon blade down on the back of his neck.
Only when his head was severed from his shoulders and she was able to stagger backward from the horrific, gory site of the dead firewalker, did she flinch in pain. She looked down to see a black streak across her left forearm. An icy lump formed in her belly as she realized what had happened.
Volfram had wounded her.
Chapter Six
Narina sniffed at the auras of the surrounding farmland. She could taste the warbrand sowen on the air, and swore it had a flavor, not so different than the hot mixture of spices the people of the southern plains stirred into their stews, even to the point of lingering on her tongue.
She turned to Andras, who stood behind her shoulder, wearing the perpetually worried frown that had taken hold of him these past few days.
“I know this man’s flavor,” she said. “I’ve encountered it before.”
“Who is it?” The ratter no longer asked what she meant when she talked about flavors. “And how close are we?”
“Closer than before. I almost have him.”
“Yes, but who?”
Narina ignored the question. That was more than he needed to know, and to be honest, a bit of doubt remained.
“I don’t feel safe,” he said after a few moments of silence.
“You’ll be safe enough if you stay close. Come on. We’ve a distance to travel yet.”
Andras glanced back to his son and gestured. Ruven came forward with the dogs as Narina set off again, more determined than ever.
They’d already passed directly through one of Damanja’s armies without being detected—had skirted a battlefield with cavalry riding back and forth, picket lines of spearmen, and tents containing the wounded. Nobody had spotted them—she used her new powers to bend their attention away—but Andras had been terrified for himself, his son, and his dogs.
Rightfully so; step away from her protective shield and Andras and Ruven would be no different t
han a thousand other peasants on the move. During the past few days they’d come across dozens of dead and dying men, women, and children of similar lowborn origins. Some had been trampled by horses or skewered by hostile troops. Others seemed to have been robbed, beaten, and left to die. The bodies of still others carried sores and bloated bellies, dried blood around their mouths, and other signs of the pestilence stalking the land. Such plagues were a common result of warfare.
Finally, there were those pathetic sorts who seemed to have collapsed of exhaustion by the side of the road and been left to die. Pushed here and there, day after day on the road without food, they were bony and pale. Crows settled on them to feast—often before their victims had fully succumbed. So many, many crows, and growing more aggressive all the time.
Narina could protect the ratters from all of these dangers. Brigands and soldiers looked away from the road when they passed. Disease could not penetrate her sowen. Hunger was easily solved; even in a land stripped as if by clouds of locusts, she could feel hidden caches of rice, sense where a pig was hiding in the brush, and call fish to her hands when plunging them into a stream or river.
As for the crows, they fled from her in terror as if her gaze could blast them from the sky. And perhaps it could; she hadn’t tested the extent of her growing powers.
They shortly came up over a hill terraced with rice paddies that had yet to be trampled by feet and hooves, and they stopped to stare into a long, low valley with a thick fog settling in as the sun dipped behind the western mountains. Woodsmoke hung in the air. Not the kind sent up by burning barns and farmhouses, but the good, honest sort, for cooking and keeping warm. It seemed they’d found a quiet corner of the fiefdom.
“Are you tired?” she asked.
Andras glanced at Ruven, who hung back with the dogs. “I could go a bit longer, but the boy is done for. We’ve been going all day, and he can barely hold himself up.”
“I’m all right, Da. I can keep going.” He didn’t look all right, he looked pale and drawn.
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