by Evie Manieri
Vrinna didn’t lower her guard.
One more push was all she needed.
Kira waited for Vrinna to sheath her sword and fly back to her beloved, but instead, the captain stood perfectly still. She hoped Vrinna just needed a moment for the idea to find its way past the severed limbs and burning villages that took up most of the space in her head, but the pause went on and Kira’s concern began to build. She took advantage of Vrinna’s preoccupation to slip around to the other side of the massive anvil.
said Vrinna. Kira could hear her breathing through her nose.
Vrinna sprang up onto the anvil as lightly as a cat and threw herself at Kira, who finally drew her sword and backed up—until she felt the stone wall behind her: she had nowhere to go. She crashed past the ash barrel and ran for the back of the yard until her knee struck the corner of a trough and sent her sprawling into the snow. Vrinna’s imperial sword whisked through the air, guided by her battle-honed thoughts; she could have killed Kira effortlessly, had that been her aim.
Instead, she used her sword to batter Virtue’s Grace to one side, then she took Kira by surprise by actually grabbing the blade at the unsharpened base near the hilt. Kira tried to pull it away from her, using her mind as well as her out-of-practice muscles to twist the sword from Vrinna’s grasp, but she was concentrating so hard on regaining control that she never even noticed the pommel of Vrinna’s sword before it crashed into the side of her head.
She fell with Virtue’s Grace still in her hand, but she could do nothing with it. The gray sky above her went darker and the ground swung beneath her like a triffon going into a dive.
Kira saw a flash of light as the blow landed, and then her head snapped to one side with so much force that she was sure her neck must be broken. Hot pain like the touch of a brand zipped across her face a moment later.
said Vrinna.
Kira tried to lift Virtue’s Grace, but Vrinna’s fist smashed into her stomach and expelled the remaining breath from her body. She heard the clang of her sword hitting the ground. She instinctively reached for it once more, but Vrinna’s fist streaked through the snow again and Kira had a moment to anticipate where the punch was going to land before the pain crashed through her. She tasted blood, and her swollen left eye didn’t blink with the right one.
The enraged captain leaned in and kicked her in the stomach, and now Kira didn’t know whether she should be trying to protect her face or her stomach; maybe it was too late, because her mouth had filled with blood. She spat it out and, coughing, tried to crawl away, but Vrinna picked her up by the back of her coat and shook her like a helpless kitten, repeating the same words over and over again until they no longer made any sense.
Finally the shaking stopped and Kira was thrown back onto the ground. For a moment she just lay there, shuddering violently; then she told herself she had to escape this madwoman and tried to crawl back to the anvil so she could use it to get to her feet.
But pain lanced through her like a spear-thrust; it burst under her right breast and knocked her back again and she ended up back on the ground with her forehead pressed against the freezing iron, fighting for breath.
A dark shape swelled in front of her, and out of it came Vrinna’s fist once again …
Chapter 24
Rho left Kira’s apartment with the map in his pocket. He watched dawn lighten the sky above Arregador House’s famous green-glass atrium as he made his way back to his room, where he threw himself down on the bed—but sleep remained elusive, creeping up to him with promises of oblivion, but then disappearing the moment he closed his eyes. After committing Kira’s little map to memory, he had nothing to do but wait until midday and the opening of Eowara’s tomb. Eventually the walls of his cramped room pushed in closer and closer until they pushed him out to roam the cold corridors for what he fervently hoped would be the last time.
He and Trey had played war with their toy soldiers right there; that corner was where Trey had found him passed out and put him to bed the night he’d got sick on that Thrakyan wine; down there was the spot where Trey had broken Weld Arregador’s jaw for starting a rumor that their mother had been set out for pockmarks. All of his clearest memories were of Trey, as if he didn’t even have a past life of his own. He was his own ghost.
And here, next to this column, was where he’d been standing when Trey had told him he had been invited to join Gannon’s regiment. Rho remembered his answer so clearly: that he couldn’t see the point of putting so much effort into an empire that would eventually collapse, just like every other one had. He had been a little proud of his philosophical cynicism back then, but he had a sneaking suspicion that if he stuck his finger into it now, it would crumble away like the empty shell it had always been.
Someone called his name and he turned to find Trey’s old friend Remi stomping down the staircase behind him in helmet and breastplate, carrying a very expensive shield with the Arregador pine-wreath cast in brass on the front.
Rho looked up at the green-glass roof.
Rho’s stomach flipped over.
Rho tossed Remi a hasty word of thanks, then ran back to his room for his coat and was back downstairs again in a flash. The door-warden opened up for him and he rushed out into streets so deserted it might have been the middle of the night. When he reached Branch Street he found a crowd of onlookers, but his clan name got him past the line of guards sealing off the Front.
His view of the rest of the Front was blocked by a Garrador company leaning on their spears, but he could feel the discomfort of all five thousand soldiers. The Garradors didn’t pay him any mind as he went past, but he noticed the rusty dents in their armor and guessed they were only just back from the provinces. He caught many of them checking out the innumerable cracks in the rock and bet that stabbing a few farmers in someone’s bean field wasn’t much preparation for facing down your childhood terrors come to life.
The crowd milling about in front of Eotan Castle was large enough that Rho was able to work his way through them, up the steps and through the castle doors without being questioned, or even noticed by anyone. In fact, the ease of his passage worried him a bit; it made him even more certain that a gut-punch was waiting for him around some unexpected corner.
Eofar was standing in the corner next to a sputtering torch that cast jumpy little shadows on the stones around his feet. He wore a fur coat like everyone else but had tossed his gloves and hood into the silver helmet under his arm, and Rho guessed that the sweat sheeting his skin had something to do with why he wasn’t wearing them.
Eofar replied,
Eofar straightened up and pushed him back.
Rho stood there for a moment, gritting his teeth. At last he said,
The few people he encountered in the servants’ passages were only too happy to pretend not to notice him and he followed the map in his head throug
h the dimly lit warren, moving upward through the stories, chasing a spectral image of Kira’s silver furs and wondering which of the doors he was passing led to the emperor’s bed. He was afraid if he looked inside any of those rooms he would find Frea waiting for him with her leather jacket unfastened and her black-bladed knife strapped to her thigh.
Finally he climbed the last dark, zigzagging staircase and came out through another unbarred door onto the top of the tower. He kept his hand on the hilt of his sword as he stepped out onto the roof, sweating under his furs and trying to get his breath back, but he didn’t see the guard Kira had mentioned—in fact, he saw no one at all. He looked around, then made an easy guess: he’d find them all in the square structure built around the tower’s chimney and surrounded by stacks of firewood. The building had only one door that he could see—he must have flown past it a hundred times without ever noticing it before now.
He spared a moment to crane his neck over the spiked wall: the army had arranged itself over the Front like a general’s map: regiments from all the clans were lined up facing Eowara’s tomb, except for the penurious Aelbars and the Peltrans, who probably didn’t have enough soldiers to form even one company. Gannon had had the spearmen set up on either side, with the remaining troops organized in wedges in between them. Armored triffons lined the headland, and archers were marshalled on the walls, their longbows and steaming cauldrons at the ready. Rho might have found it amusing to see all of this fuss over that one narrow little tunnel in the headland, had it not been for the dread that washed over him when he looked into that breach.
Do not go down into the deep places.
He crept to the little stone building and tried the door, which moved so easily that he’d swung it halfway open before he had the presence of mind to grab it and stop it. A gust of heat rolled over him like the breath of some fiery monster, but the room beyond was about what he’d expected for a prison cell: a single cot, a chair, a table and not much else—except that looking at the clothes and a pair of boots next to the table, this room was clearly used by the guard, not the asha.
