Liberating Fight

by Melissa McShane

  For a moment, Amaya wondered if she had once more been Coerced, his words felt so right. But… “You would kill the king, and his brother, and all the nobles?” she asked.

  “Amaya!” Edmund exclaimed.

  “I would kill all those who stand opposed to freedom,” Valencia said in a low, almost seductive tone.

  Amaya shook her head. “Your way means death for more than just your enemies. I will not help you.”

  Valencia’s smile fell away from his face. “Jennet?” he said.

  “No,” Jennet said.

  Valencia finally looked in her direction, his brows rising in surprise as if his pet dog had risen up and spoken Spanish. “No?”

  Jennet drew in a breath. “It’s past time I chose my own damnation and not yours. Let your own words sway them, or not, but I will no longer serve you.”

  Once more, astonishment touched his features. Then fire engulfed Jennet, who screamed. And Amaya closed the distance between herself and Valencia, claws raised.

  She was distantly aware of Edmund rushing past her toward Jennet, and then she slashed her claws across Valencia’s face. Valencia stepped back just in time to avoid the razor tips gouging his flesh. He swung his fist and caught Amaya across the chin, rattling her skull.

  Amaya felt her every sunqu responding to her body’s demands, Need and Release tightening their grip on nonessential organs, Heart and Sense tuning themselves to peak performance, Strength building the muscles of her arms and chest and legs until they made the fabric of her shirt and trousers taut. She absorbed the blow to her face and slammed her fist into Valencia’s stomach, making him bend double over her hand.

  She shifted her weight to drive her knee into his face, but Valencia converted his reaction into driving his head into Amaya’s chest, shoving her back a few steps until she hit the alley wall. With her nerves muted, she felt no pain, just the thump of the impact and the scratchiness of the plaster surface, but she lost her breath for a moment, long enough for Valencia to disengage and back away.

  “You should burn me,” she taunted him, once more raising her claws. “This will not end well for you if you do not.”

  Valencia’s hair was a mess and his cheeks were flushed, but he still breathed normally. “You know you do not burn as others do,” he said. “I would expend myself needlessly.” He reached behind his back and drew out a pistol Amaya had not seen. “I wonder,” he added, as casually as if commenting on the weather, “whether you will survive being shot in the head.”

  Amaya rushed him. The gun fired with an explosion that filled the alley. Quick as a snake, Amaya dodged the pistol ball and bore Valencia to the ground. Valencia flung the pistol away and grappled Amaya as he had done with Edmund. Amaya dug her claws deep into the flesh of his hands, but Valencia held on, grimacing with pain.

  More gunshots, from farther away, and a growing brightness told Amaya the mob was headed their way. “You see what you have done?” she ground out. “How many of the people you claim to care about will die tonight?”

  “Better a clean death in battle than the slow death of oppression,” Valencia hissed. “You are a warrior. You should know the truth of that.”

  Amaya slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose, making him scream and let go her hands to cover his face. “A warrior knows no death at all is best,” she snarled. With a single blow, she tore out his throat.

  Valencia convulsed once. His hands moved to clutch at his throat as blood poured between his fingers. “Your…failure…” he whispered, and the light in his eyes died.

  Amaya leaned over Valencia’s body, propping herself on her bloody hands, and commanded Need to expand her lungs just enough to keep her vision from tunneling. She felt empty as she always did after a fight, empty and aching inside. Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep, blood-scented breath. Then she pushed herself up and stepped away from the body, toward Edmund and Jennet and the sound of gunfire.

  Two people huddled together at the mouth of the alley. One lay sprawled on the hard, blood-soaked ground, and the other supported the first’s head. For a moment, the scene made no sense. Then Heart jolted Amaya with a painful thump that had nothing to do with fighting.

  She raced toward Edmund and Jennet and fell to her knees by their side. Edmund’s bare chest was covered in blood from half a dozen wounds, and it rose and fell erratically. Jennet knelt with Edmund’s head in her lap. One sleeve was saturated with blood, but she seemed not to notice. “They saw us,” she whispered. “The men with guns. I couldn’t—they were too fast, and I couldn’t stop them, Coercion takes too long. He stepped in front of me. He hates me! Why did he do that?”

  “…stupid chivalrous notions…” Edmund said, his voice breathy and distant.

  “Do not speak,” Amaya told him. She gripped his hand and let herself drop into her sense of his body the way she had for Elinor so many times.

  Immediately, despair seized her. His sunqu were so damaged she could not imagine how he was still alive. Nothing had penetrated his heart, for which she was grateful, but one of his lungs had collapsed and his Need was in a panic trying to compensate. A rib shattered, his upper arm bone cracked, and half a dozen lesser wounds. More despair swept over her as she realized he had taken a ball to the stomach. Gut wounds were almost always fatal.

  She sent a command to his heart to slow, to stop spurting blood Edmund could not afford to lose. The flow of blood stemmed. To her horror, his skin began to chill and his lungs labored even harder. She tried to help his Need draw in more air, but that accelerated the blood loss. Terrified, she stopped Shaping him and sat back. She didn’t know enough. And Edmund would die for her ignorance.

  Edmund’s head shifted, and he opened his eyes to look at Amaya. “…not sure…this is…how I wanted…my life…to end,” he said. His breathing made a horrible whistling noise, and he sounded very far away, but his smile was as warm and familiar as ever.

  Amaya clutched his hand harder. “It is not over,” she insisted. “You and I are not over.”

  “What did he say?” Jennet asked. “I can’t hear—his voice is so quiet—he is dying!”

  Amaya switched to English. “He say he is done with life, and I say it is not so.” Closing her eyes, she dropped into that meditative state once more, searching for a connection she had never thought to need.

  Swiftly, one sunqu at a time, she gathered her awareness of Edmund’s body to herself. And one sunqu at a time, she made links between him and herself, joining his body to work in tandem with hers. She breathed, and Edmund breathed; her heart beat, and his beat with hers. It could not heal him, but it would keep him alive until she could find a solution.

  When she opened her eyes, Edmund was staring up at her in astonishment. “I feel different,” he said, his voice a little stronger. “What did you do?”

  “It is nothing,” Amaya lied. “You will be well.” To Jennet, she said, “You must find help.”

  Jennet jerked away from Edmund, and Amaya caught his head before it could strike the ground. Jennet’s strange light-colored eyes were wide and horrified in the torchlight. “I? But—you are an Extraordinary Shaper—”

  “He is wounded for you,” Amaya said. “You owe him. You were willing to work for Señor Valencia because you owe him, so how much more should you do for he who saves your life?”

  Jennet glanced out at the mob filling the plaza. Their violence had not ceased with Valencia’s death, though they had spread out from attacking the church to wreak destruction on the buildings surrounding it. “But I do not know what to do.”

  “You must do something,” Amaya insisted. “And if you start here, that is a good place.” She could feel her reserves dwindling like water through a sieve as they poured into keeping Edmund from dying. Arguing with Jennet frustrated her, but if Amaya left to find a doctor or an Extraordinary Shaper, Edmund would certainly die. Jennet was now their only hope.

  Jennet looked at the mob again. Her face hardened. “Stay here,” she said.
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  She stood and walked out of the alley into the plaza, into the midst of the mob. The men she passed, some dressed in blue and red uniforms, others wearing the same kind of worn shirts and trousers Amaya did, ignored her as if she were invisible, but made way for her regardless. Amaya watched her go, her heart in her throat. Surrounded by heavily built, armed, shouting men, despite her height Jennet looked almost childlike. Amaya could not believe she had ever mistaken Jennet for a man.

  Jennet stopped some ten rikras away with her back to Amaya. One hand curled into a fist. Then Jennet tilted her head back—and silence flowed outward from her, spreading like a wave over the mob until the only sounds were the roar of the torches and the more distant sounds of fighting. With a rush of sound like a room full of whispering children, every man in the courtyard fell to his knees facing Jennet. Amaya could see some of their faces, and the looks they bore were of exultant adoration, the way a man comes before his God. She herself felt nothing but numbness, the result of the linkage she shared with Edmund.

  Jennet lowered her head. “Go home,” she called out in a voice that carried to every part of the plaza. Without a word, without a murmur, the men stood and dispersed into the surrounding streets.

  A few of them approached the alley where Edmund lay. Amaya tensed, prepared to fight even though doing so might cost Edmund his life. But the men, three soldiers and a pair of ordinary folk who might have been farmers, walked past as if Edmund and Amaya did not exist. Their faces still had that strange, rapt expression of exultation, as if they were in the throes of the purest passion imaginable. Amaya watched them go, her hand still holding tight to Edmund’s. She had believed her own talent unsurpassed in its destructive power. Now, seeing the results of Jennet’s Extraordinary Coercion, she felt as small and insignificant as a helpless infant.

  She turned her attention back to the plaza. It was almost completely empty now, with a few men moving away into the darkness—and Jennet, standing where she had stopped, now facing Amaya. The look on her face, unlike those of her victims, was unreadable, her eyes cast into shadow by what few lights were left. She stared at Amaya, who stared back silently at her.

  Then Jennet turned and ran.

  “Jennet!” Amaya screamed, rising to her feet. She took two steps and was brought up short by Edmund, whose hand she still held. Her heart beat too fast, and she felt strangely twinned, one heart in her chest, the other in her hand. She looked down at Edmund; his face was grey and pinched, and his other hand closed over his chest as if it pained him. When she looked up again, Jennet had disappeared.

  “Jennet,” Amaya said, almost in a whisper. She sank down to sit beside Edmund and bade both their hearts quiet. Once more, she attempted to Shape his injuries, and once more had to stop when he let out a thin, keening whimper of pain.

  She slashed the bottom half of her shirt with her claws and tore away a large piece of fabric. Wadding it up, she pressed it to his wounds, but realized almost immediately they were too numerous for her to stanch the flow of blood from all of them. She resorted to pressing it against the bloody hole in his stomach, then guiding Edmund’s hand to hold it there. His grip was weak, but it gave her the feeling she had accomplished something.

  She rested her hand over his on his stomach and closed her eyes. Once more. She perceived the ball embedded in his flesh, a misshapen lump of void her talent could not touch. A Mover could remove it, and she knew from something Dr. Macrae had said that a proper Healing would push a foreign object up and out of a wound as the injury Healed. She drew in a calming breath and let it out slowly, picturing the air tinged red with heat from her body and curling to mingle with the cooler, blue night air.

  She compared their twinned sunqu, her stomach intact, his torn and bleeding inside as well as out. Carefully, she spoke to one of the many damaged blood vessels, showing it what it should look like. It shifted, then knit itself back together. Rejoicing, Amaya turned her attention to the next. Another success, and another. And Edmund had made no noise of pain.

  She examined his body again, and her joy faded. Edmund was still dying. Her vitality could only support them both for so long. And what Healing she was capable of was not fast enough to save him.

  She felt hollow and aching inside, not just from having killed Valencia, but from the knowledge that Jennet was gone, and there would be no help for them. Even the church was too far, and there was no help there in any case. Amaya could do nothing but sit beside Edmund with his hand clasped in hers and watch both their lives spin out to their ends.

  “Amaya,” Edmund said, his voice again surprisingly strong—well, he was strengthened by borrowed life now, so perhaps it was not so surprising. “Amaya, what have you done?”

  She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “I have joined our sunqu as one. It will keep you alive for a time.”

  Edmund’s dark eyes were fixed on hers. “And when that time runs out?”

  She stroked his hair again. “Do you not find this whole situation strange?” she said. “It is not at all how I expected this day to end.”

  “Amaya—”

  “I told you, if I did not love you now, I would love you soon,” Amaya said. Hot tears burned the corners of her eyes. “You are strong, and intelligent, and you always know what to say to me. And I cannot imagine loving anyone else.”

  “Amaya,” Edmund said, more forcefully, “what happens to you if our sunqu are linked when I die?”

  She smiled through her tears. “You should not worry about that.”

  Edmund tried to jerk his hand away from hers, but her body was still powerfully Shaped from fighting Valencia, and she held him fast, then caught his other hand as he let go of the cloth and swung a fist at her face. “If you fight, you will injure yourself more,” she warned.

  “You’ll die,” Edmund said. “Damn you, let go of me!”

  “You cannot force me.”

  “No, but—” He wrenched at her restraining grasp. “I will not permit you to do this. What good will it do anyone if we both die here?”

  Amaya shrugged, a difficult thing given that she was fighting Edmund for control. “If I let go,” she said, “I will always have the memory of watching my love die when I could not save him.”

  “You’re a damned fool.”

  “Then I am a fool.” A sob shuddered out of her, and the tears fell in earnest. “I am a fool, because I should never have refused Dr. Macrae’s demands. I should have learned the ways of Shaping others, and then I—” She sucked in a breath and tried to control her weeping. “I am a fool, and it will cost me everything.”

  Edmund stopped struggling. “Amaya, this is not your fault. If you had done as Dr. Macrae asked, you would never have come to Spain, and I would not have put myself in Mr. Valencia’s way, and I would not be here now for you to weep over. My love, please, let me go. I cannot bear the thought of you dying needlessly. Please.”

  A wave of dizziness swept over her as he spoke, and she found she needed her grip on his hands to keep from falling across his body. “It’s too late,” she said with a watery smile. “Too late. Shaping myself free of Mr. Valencia’s fire, and then fighting him…I have extended myself beyond what this body can bear.”

  With a twist of his wrists, Edmund jerked his hands free of hers. Immediately he sagged, and his wounds began bleeding more heavily. Amaya reached for him. Her arms felt so heavy, like iron rather than muscular flesh. She blinked, and found her eyelids unresponsive. Everything was so quiet she could hear the rush of blood through her veins, sluggish like an icy stream. She rested her hand on Edmund’s forehead and tried to make sense of his sunqu, but everything was muddled, mixed together as if his body and hers were made of air and earth and water rather than bone and blood. She could not even perceive where her own sunqu began and ended.

  She realized she had fallen face first across Edmund’s body, which was a warm, wet mass beneath her. “Edmund,” she cried out, or thought she did; she again heard nothing but the flow of blo
od, saw only a dark redness that she knew must be the insides of her eyelids. “Edmund, I love you—forgive me!”

  The last thing she knew was Edmund’s hand coming to rest atop hers, and then nothing more.

  Chapter 27

  In which a new threat arises

  Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

  The distant rhythm of a heart pulsed through her like a drum, making her bones vibrate.

  Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

  She became aware of having bones to vibrate, bones that ran through her body like a tree with many branches.

  Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

  A body. She had a body. Muscles clung to the bones, skin clad the muscles. One by one, her awareness spread to encompass her heart and lungs and stomach and kidneys and a dozen other organs. Sunqu. Heart, Sense, Strength, Need, and Release.

  As if giving those sunqu names had been some kind of signal, her sense of them as separate entities vanished, and her body gave a twang like a plucked string, and she was Amaya again.

  She drew in a deep breath. It hurt enough that she knew she had been breathing very shallowly for a long time. Aside from that, she felt no pain anywhere. She blinked her eyes open and saw darkness. That did not worry her; she could tell she was in a darkened room, or it was nighttime, as opposed to having gone blind.

  She lay still and let her senses tell her where she was. Dark shapes swam into view, distinguishable only as shadows of themselves: a table, a clothespress, the posts of the bed on which she lay. The bed was a soft European one with a mattress and not an Incan pallet, and a quilted blanket covered her from the waist down. The room smelled of fresh lavender and furniture polish. She did not recognize the room, so she was in no house she was familiar with, but she was certain this was not the Palacio Real, which was a relief.