by Evie Manieri
Lahlil loosened her arm in the harness to make sure she could pull it out smoothly and headed straight for the terrace. The triffon stretched its wings out to slow its descent, but even so its tail smashed into the nearer statue of Eotan and sent the green-glass wolf’s head bowling into the crowd. When the beast flew over the space between Eofar and Gannon she swung over the right side and jumped clear, falling at least ten feet onto the terrace. She knew how to stay loose and let her body absorb the shock of the fall; even so, it hurt.
The triffon flew on, pushing Gannon and the spectators back toward the opposite end of the terrace and giving her a moment with Eofar, who was leaning against the balustrade still clutching his bleeding shoulder. Lahlil oriented herself: she was facing east with the broken statue on her right. Gannon was about thirty paces away and a crowd of at least a hundred had gathered in front of the balcony doors and on the other side of the terrace, mostly soldiers, plus two generals decked out for war, ink-stained scribes and even a few children, with at least forty Eotan guards keeping them all back—but there was no sign of Trey or Isa.
Eofar stared at her, aghast.
Gannon walked slowly toward her with her brother’s blood dripping into the snow from the tip of his sword, shimmering with smug assurance. The cut on his right forearm looked sour; if she had not seen Eofar give it to him just a few moments ago, she would have guessed it had been festering for a while.
Gannon looked her up and down like an ursa he’d just wrestled from a tree. For a moment he took his silver eyes off her to look down over the Front.
her brother seethed.
Then for no visible reason Eofar screamed like something was shredding him from the inside. He dropped to his knees as some kind of convulsions hit him, bending his limbs, then straightening them again, leaving crazy patterns in the snow around him. Before Lahlil could do anything to help him, he leaped up and ran straight at the emperor. A few in the crowd tried to rush forward, but the guards still had orders to keep everyone back. Gannon met the attack with surprise, but not without ease as Eofar hammered at him with Strife’s Bane as if the tactics of his earlier efforts had never even occurred to him.
Lahlil dashed forward and grabbed the back of her brother’s coat the moment she saw an opportunity and he went spinning off and collapsed against the broken statue. She half-expected him to bound up again and rush at Gannon, but he just lay there, surrounded by shards of green-glass, as if he had spent all of the energy he possessed in that one attack. That wasn’t all: his eyes had the hollow look of a corpse and his mouth hung open. This was some illness she had never seen before, and the wash of fear she felt for him caught her by surprise.
Gannon raised his sword. It was a beautiful thing, bronze, and ancient without being old: Valor’s Storm. Lahlil couldn’t have counted how many wooden replicas there had been among the toys in the secret room where she had lived as a child. Her mother had told her the stories of the first ruler of Norland, great Eowara, over and over again, even after she knew Lahlil’s scarred arm meant she no longer had any claim to that birthright, or any other.
Lahlil had not seen her father since she was three months old. She didn’t remember him. She had tried to imagine what he looked like many times, picturing him like an older Eofar, only that image had never really come clear. Now she knew that her father had looked exactly like Emperor Gannon looked right at this moment, standing in judgment over her.
Lahlil turned her back on him. She felt his fury, but he wouldn’t hit her from behind. He needed his defeat of her to be legendary; nothing less than a fight to the brink of destruction would satisfy. She walked to the front of the balcony until the entire army below her came into view. Their tabards shone like the colored tokens on a campaign map. The watch-fires looked a little brighter that they had just a few moment ago and she knew she didn’t have much time left before her attack. She leaned over the balustrade so that everyone could see her as the role of Destroyer—of life, of hope, of sanity—slid over her like a hangman’s hood, familiar and suffocating.
She could feel their surprise and knew in a moment it would give way to angry denial.
Gannon said behind her, but his certainty was beginning to drain out of him.
A breath went through her body; longer and deeper than any other breath before it. It found the spaces she had locked away, drifted through cracks and keyholes, blowing away the ashes of the fires that had finally burned themselves out.
Gannon brought Valor’s Storm around to face her.
She glanced back as she circled Gannon. Her brother had lifted himself up using a chunk of green-glass until he was kneeling in the snow. Lahlil had seen enough people die to know that her brother was dying. She forced her attention back to Gannon, sensing his impatience; waiting for her to strike. So many swordsmen gave everything away in that first strike.
Chapter 36
As soon as Rho was sure no one was waiting to pounce on them from the dais, he led the way out of the little room. Their swords were still there, lying forgotten in the corner. He reached for Fortune’s Blight, but somehow managed to knock both Virtue’s Grace and Honor’s Proof to the floor in the process and had to listen to the hilts bang against each step as they rolled down. He cringed, fully expecting their guard to come charging back, but he didn’t, and neither did anyone else. Not only had none of the people already crowding around the terrace doors noticed their escape, but the guards at the throne room doors had their hands full trying to keep more people from barging in to get to the terrace.
Rho bent down to pick up Virtue’s Grace, but the wound in his side had other ideas.
Trey lifted the coat over the hilt of his sword and put his arms through the sleeves.
Rho turned to her and was suddenly taken aback. She was obviously ill: her eyes were glassy and far too bright, her shoulders were hunched, and he could feel the hectic undercurrent of fever in her words.
Rho turned to Trey and found his brother drifting back toward the terrace. Cold fear rushed through him: he knew his brother would never leave if he found out Lahlil had come to Ravindal after all. They had to get him out quickly, before the perverse hopes Trey had spent the last three years of his life cherishing strangled him again.
She hesitated for a moment, but then she clicked open the latch and slipped out of the room.
said Trey. Rho heard them, too.
But Trey continued edging toward the terrace.
The sound of swords continued outside, along with the swell of emotion typical of the spectators at a tournament. Trey reached up with his left hand and kneaded his scarred shoulder.
A commotion cut him off, this time from the hallway outside the throne room, and a company of guards brought in Captain Vrinna. She wasn’t bound, but they had taken her sword, belt and all. She had obviously found something at Onfar’s Circle, going by her bloodstained shirt and the jagged tear across her chest. The wound looked more like the result of a mauling than a sword-fight, but it didn’t explain her feverish shuddering or her burning eyes. Just like Kira, Rho thought, getting more and more worried, only worse.
Vrinna’s guards tried to pull her toward the terrace, but she stopped short when she caught sight of Rho and Trey.
They were interrupted by the physical upheaval of the crowd on the terrace as the people in the front tried to back away, while the people who had been trying to see over their heads continued pushing forward. The tense excitement of a few moments ago melted away to reveal a bubbling, viscous dread, and suddenly people were running through the throne room in a frenzy. Rho darted forward and took hold of the first guard he could reach. It was someone he knew.
Rho pulled him closer so Trey wouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying.
Panicked people were still running through the throne room, and the ringing clash of swordplay was still echoing from the terrace. Rho took the chance to kick the stools out from under the table, tripping Dell and buying himself a moment’s respite. As pen-holders and ink-pots rolled to the floor he repeated,
Dell insisted, coming for him.
Rho ducked over to the wall where the map stands stood in a neat row. He thought about pushing one at Dell until he saw they were chained to the floor, so he slid in between two of them instead, then darted around and came out on the other side with Dell following close behind. He kicked at an iron fire-dog and sent one of the smaller logs on the top of the pile rolling down and bowling Dell over like a child’s wooden block. The soldier fell down, landing awkwardly and turning blue as the impact knocked the wind out of him.
said Dell,
Rho looked over his shoulder.
But then his eyes landed on the captain. Her guards were nowhere to be seen—either she had broken free or they had fled—and her sword lay cradled in her arms. The fetid wound in her chest dripped with slime, and the same silvery fluid leaked out from both corners of her mouth and dripped from her eyes like shining tears. The hunch of her back and the painfully unnatural angles at which her limbs were twisted struck Rho like a bolt of lightning as an image from his father’s huge copy of The Book of the Hall rose before his eyes.
