by Evie Manieri
The lead rider on the armored triffon looped the reins over the pommel and drew his sword and as Trey sped past, Isa leaned over—perilously far over—and struck three quick blows. The first two missed, but the third sliced deep into the man’s arm. She had wounded both riders now. He bellowed in pain, then whistled an order at his triffon, who broke away and headed down toward the rocky ground below.
Isa’s head spun and she found herself dropping back down in the saddle, but before she could pull herself together, Trey had stood up in the stirrups and was taking the next attack from the remaining triffon, the one with the ugly tail. Her dizziness blurred his swordplay into a series of indistinguishable flashes, but a moment later he was sitting down again and wiping the blood from his sword with a rag he pulled out from under the saddle. The triffon was gone, just like the other.
For the first time she was glad of her enforced idleness in the Shadar, for she had spent a long time practicing things like one-handed knots. The depth of the cut surprised her, but likely the cold was dulling the pain and slowing the bleeding.
Isa squinted through the snow as the city grew closer and closer and wondered how Trey could possibly be looking at the same sky if he still believed they would get through alive. There was a great plateau down there at the foot of what could only be Eotan Castle, and triffons covered the whole area above it like a net. They had shaken off their pursuers, but that would hardly matter once they were spotted by these others.
Trey brought them along the northern edge of the walled city, the side furthest from the sea, racing along just below the wall as mounted soldiers hailed them. Trey ignored the first hail, and the second, and the third.
Low buildings and narrow alleys streaked past, then big houses like the ones in Isa’s picture books, with spiked towers poking up in the air and clan pennants flapping in the breeze. In between the buildings, spires, vine-covered walls and gigantic green-glass figures lay stretches of snow-covered rock and black fissures stretching open like eager mouths.
Trey brought them up again, rocking her back in the saddle: three triffons had swung into position behind them and were in hot pursuit. Isa gripped the saddle so hard that she was afraid her fingers would permanently lock in that position. Trey dropped them down suddenly between two high walls; only a battle-trained triffon could have been forced into such a narrow space without bucking, but even so, it roared out a deep-throated bellow of annoyance as its wings scraped along the stone walls. They shot out from between the buildings a moment later, straight into a thick plume of woodsmoke that stung her eyes and clogged her already-straining lungs.
They overflew several huge houses, then she got her first real look at the lusterless oval of the harbor down below them, bristling with masts and reminding her of a beetle flipped on its back. Then she looked down at the plateau—it must be the Front, she now realized—and her heart leaped into her mouth. Soldiers covered it, as thick on the ground as a flock of gulls on a rubbish heap.
Two more triffons ahead of them broke away and headed toward them.
He pulled their triffon up into a climb so steep that Isa worried her spine would snap like a dry twig. She wrapped the harness even more firmly around her arm, then gripped the saddle again and squeezed her thighs as tightly as she could to keep from being flung right off as the other two triffons converged on them. The angle at which they were flying was precipitously sharp. A knot of pain exploded at the back of her head and her stomach flopped as the horizon swung by faster than her eyes could track. Trey was hauling on the reins, but they were boxed in now: more and more triffons forming a circle around them. The charged emotions of the Norlanders watching from the ground reached up to her like the warm, grasping tendrils of the thaw-vine, trying to pull her down to them.
Trey told her.
Isa clenched her teeth together as the triffon stretched its wings out to slow its descent, but they still hit the ground much too hard and the impact threw her forward against the saddle, then jerked her back as they slid across the snow-covered rock, soldiers dodging out of their way and then rushing to surround them, their weapons out and ready.
* * *
Isa fought them when they came to drag her down from the saddle, and she refused to stand or walk, forcing them to half-carry her and revelling in it, because she could feel how much it sickened them to touch her. She kicked at them when they wrestled Blood’s Pride away from her and when one of them lost his grip on her arm, she punched and clawed at him until he was able to haul her back up out of the snow. She would have sunk her teeth into any of them if they’d showed her any skin. They thought she fought them because she wanted to escape, but she fought them because every scratch and bruise she inflicted made her existence a palpable fact; because they would deny her the right—the right of anyone like her—to exist. She fought them just because she could.
They wrenched her arm behind her back and pushed her down on her knees, twisting with her to keep her from writhing out of their grasp. This was her real homecoming: on her knees before these beautiful people, her people, who could barely stand to look at her.
She was still trying to get her breath back when she heard Trey’s name sweep through the minds of everyone there: first in confusion, then in horror and revulsion. Another whisper went through the ranks and the people in the crowd closest to her backed away. She couldn’t see any further than the first few rows of soldiers encircling them, then a channel opened up before her and she found herself staring up at a terrace made of green-glass that looked a confectioner’s fever-dream, all curlicues and furbelows. A man in a rippling silver-blue fur wearing a breastplate and a silver helmet stood at the balustrade, backed by yet another squad of Eotan soldiers. He looked so much like one of the legendary heroes from Isa’s storybooks that she caught herself looking over his shoulder for the painted background. Then her stomach turned as she recognized the wolf’s-head device snarling down at her from the peak of his helmet. It was identical to the helmet her sister Frea had worn every day, the one which was still on her corpse, lying at the bottom of the sea.
The ranks parted in another direction, this time to let through a man in the tabard of an Eotan lieutenant. He went straight to Trey and waited with his arms folded across his chest while the soldiers pulled him to his feet.
They yanked it off Trey’s head, revealing his scars, and the people around him
reacted as if they were watching a man being flayed alive. The soldiers dropped his arms and backed away, and it was Trey himself who threw off his cloak, displaying the scars on his neck, much to the onlookers’ disgust. But he wasn’t finished. With his gaze locked on to the man on the terrace, he ripped his shirt open from the collar to the shoulder, sending wooden buttons tumbling to the ground and making sure everyone could see the shiny, puckered scars that marred his flesh.
The emperor said nothing at first, but everyone could feel the tension between him and Trey humming like a bowstring.
Trey stepped forward, his skin streaked with cold-rash.
The emperor never moved, but Isa could feel his attention tightening around them like a garrote.
Trey kept silent, but the emperor’s derision had broken open something inside him.
Trey answered, twisting his wrists against the cords binding them together,
Gannon brought his fist down on the balustrade.
The soldiers grabbed Trey, averting their eyes as much as they could while they forced him to his knees. The lieutenant in the Eotan tabard drew his sword.
Isa struggled to get up, but they kept her down as Trey raged,
Trey’s shrill amusement cut like a flail.
Isa’s blood burned like pure venom through her veins.
The soldier behind Isa snatched off her hood, then grabbed her braid and pulled it hard enough to force her face upward for the emperor to see. Fat snowflakes dropped down on her cheeks and slid between her lips, making her realize she was incredibly thirsty.
Isa flailed against the people holding her, making herself a dead weight as they tried to haul her up. They didn’t bother to unfasten her cloak but just pulled it off her, and the collar choked her almost to death before the clasps finally popped open. They grabbed her under the arms and jammed the hilt of a knife into the small of her back while she was still gasping for breath.
She tilted back her head; she wanted to feel every drop of hate and loathing raining down on her; she needed it. She had to find a way to live through this, for Daryan’s sake … But Daryan wasn’t here, and there were so many of them; too many, and she was alone.
But the timbre of emotion changed as someone new came out onto the terrace, forcing a path through the line of soldiers behind the emperor. Isa could see nothing but a fur coat and the flash of a silver hilt as the newcomer walked straight up to the emperor, well within striking distance.
said Eofar.
said Eofar. Fury roiled inside him, not only for Gannon, but for her, for being a world away from where she was supposed to be. This was a grudging rescue at best.
said Gannon comfortably,
Eofar pulled off his helmet and then his hood and tossed them both down beside him. The helmet rolled over the green-glass surface, appearing then disappearing behind the fussy posts of the balustrade.
Gannon’s emotions sharpened to a single needle-sharp point.
Gannon’s anger started as a trembling that Isa felt in her bones, and then it flashed over her all at once, like bone-dry kindling thrown on the fire. She didn’t understand what was happening, only that her brother had somehow trapped the emperor into something. Gannon pulled off his helmet and hood and threw them into the hands of one of his guards.
Eofar came on guard and Isa suddenly understood what he meant to do. She had not been alone after all. The swell of pride and fear and grief for a family lost and betrayed echoed back to her, transformed into the raw thrill of five thousand Norlander soldiers.
Chapter 31
Lahlil stood at the end of the hall, watching Isa thread her way around the broken pillars behind Trey until both of them disappeared into the trees. Cyrrin’s fears had all come true: Trey had gone to ruin, thanks to her, and Isa had followed, caught up in the net of chaos Lahlil dragged with her everywhere she went.
The frenetic pace of the people fleeing finally shook her free from her stupor and she raced back down the corridor to Cyrrin’s surgery, nearly colliding with two heavily laden people who came running out of the doorway. They pounded off down the corridor in the opposite direction, heading for the escape route Lahlil herself had laid out when she’d last been there.
