Blades Of Magic: Crown Service #1

by Edun, Terah

  “The second?”

  She smiled to take the bite out of her words, but she was deadly serious when she said, “If you hadn’t stopped your howling, I would have stuffed something down your throat. We don’t need a bunch of mercenaries sticking inquisitive heads into our tent. Besides...you kind of deserve it after making me eat a dragonfly that nearly choked me to death. Why couldn’t you eat it?”

  She waited for an answer.

  “Well, um, you see...allergies are a very serious—“ he stopped talking abruptly.

  Then he closed his mouth, cleared his throat and said, “I don’t really have a great reason. Can’t we let bygones be bygones?”

  “I didn’t think you would,” Sara said dryly.

  Sighing, Sara grabbed the knife from where he had dropped it and picked up her sheathed sword.

  “I’m going to clean these off and pack,” she said as she exited the tent.

  “You should do the same and get your friend to take your trunk before it’s too late.”

  She heard a cursing Ezekiel move into action as she looked around outside in the noon day. The hill was abuzz with men running to and fro with their weapons clutched at their sides, like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked.

  She went over to Danger and cooed at him. “I never would move from my position so late into the evening, but I’m not the captain, am I?”

  “No, you’re not,” answered a human voice.

  Sara turned from Danger to find Captain Barthis Simon standing a few feet away with his arms crossed.

  She narrowed her eyes, heartily tired of people sneaking up on her.

  He dipped his head with a calculated smile and looked her directly in the eyes.

  “Did you want to ask me something, Captain?”

  He tilted his head. “I’ve been wondering why you’ve done everything in your power to push the mercenaries in my camp away.”

  She opened her mouth to say something but he beat her to it.

  Holding up a hand, he said, “Don’t give me that whiny spiel about them picking on you. Throwing stuff into your tent and cutting the straps to your saddle. Because I’ve checked. No one touched your things. And the second morning before you mounted up, one of the urchins noted something curious.”

  Sara stiffened.

  “He saw a woman, petite and with a large sword on her back, fiddling with those same straps on a mounting block,” the captain said. “Now, it was still an hour before dawn, so he couldn’t be sure who it was. But I’m fairly cognizant of the people in my company and I don’t have many short women serving for me.”

  She looked at him with calm eyes. Waiting for him to say it.

  “I think you cut your own saddle and wrecked your things. Then I think you blamed your comrades,” he said, “but what I can’t figure out is why. Why you’d go to such lengths to be seen as a snot-nosed brat and get my people to despise you.”

  He paused.

  She waited.

  “Do you have anything to say?”

  “Nothing good.”

  A cold look crossed his eyes and he stepped forward to stand directly in front of her face. “Whether you want to be here or not, whether you want to survive this battle or follow your ancestors into death or not, you will stop sowing discord in my camp. You will integrate yourself as a full member of this team and you will do so promptly. Because if you don’t, I will have your back whipped for insubordination until the ground beneath your spread feet turns red with blood. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  He stared into her eyes as his nostrils flared wide in anger. He spun on his heel and left without a further word. She was left staring at his back as he crossed the ground in angry strides. When she turned back to take care of Danger, she saw something more ominous in the captain’s wake. Ezekiel stood there with his arms full of saddlebags for his horse as a man hastily carted off the trunk behind him for who knows where.

  “Ezekiel,” said Sara, her face stricken. “I didn’t mean for you to hear that.”

  “I know,” Ezekiel said thoughtfully. He bit his lip.

  She came forward. “It’s not like it sounds.”

  “You mean you didn’t lie about those people doing all of those horrible things to you?”

  She stopped. She couldn’t tell him that she hadn’t. She wouldn’t lie. But she wouldn’t tell the truth, either.

  That was all right, though. Because she didn’t have to.

  Ezekiel gave her a sad smile. “I know why you did it.”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “To protect the others. You don’t want anyone close to you, do you? You’re afraid of going berserk. Afraid of the curse of the battle mages.”

  She stiffened. A way out had presented itself. A way out that was most of the truth. Just not all of it.

  “Yes,” she said finally.

  Ezekiel dropped his saddlebags and held out his hands as he walked forward. Unfortunately, he hadn’t dropped the bags to either side of his body but rather straight in front of his feet. He fell head over heels to land with his face planted on her boots with a muttered, “Ow.”

  She stifled a laugh and helped him up.

  He gratefully took it, dusted off his pants, and said without missing a beat, “Don’t you see, there are others to help you. I’m here, and the battle mages present surely will have some insight.”

  She grimaced. “Maybe.”

  “Even Captain Barthis Simon himself,” Ezekiel said with a waggle of his eyebrows.

  Then she couldn’t help but bursting out laughing. “Yeah, I don’t think he wants to see me anytime soon.”

  Ezekiel shrugged. “He will soon enough.”

  “And why is that?” said an amused Sara.

  “Because we’re going to make you the best loved mercenary in this entire company,” he said with fist pump that knocked his glasses in the dirt.

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  Then the war elephants began trumpeting and they had no more time to talk. Scrambling Ezekiel went to tear down his tent and Sara hefted his saddlebags under one arm while carrying her weapons with the other. Putting the blades on a nearby large rock, she set about securing Ezekiel’s bags to the mare he had named Desire.

  She watched him fight a losing battle with one side of the tent that he should have rolled up before proceeding to the other.

  She chuckled into Desire’s side at the sight.

  “I’ve got it!” came the triumphant declaration from her curator-turned-mercenary moments later.

  Then Sara froze. She had thought of Ezekiel’s as hers. She hadn’t thought of any person that way since her group of friends, co-conspirators, really, at the training camp of her youth had abandoned her and her family in their hour of need.

  Slowly she rose and looked over at Ezekiel Crane. Really looked at him. He was the exact opposite of the four fighters she had considered hers before. He couldn’t fight worth shit, couldn’t defend himself, was more book-smart than street-smart, and got into tiffs with just about anything stationary.

  But then she smiled. Because the warm pit in her stomach didn’t lie. He was hers.

  Then and there, Sara Fairchild swore that come hell or high water, Ezekiel Crane would leave the battlefield alive.

  She didn’t swear anything about herself. Because she couldn’t. But him. Him she could make sure of.

  Turning from Desire, Sara went to clean her swords and get ready.

  It was time to move out and move on. She needed to make some friends, and fast. Ezekiel’s life depended on it.

  Chapter 21

  As their convoy moved on in the evening, night was already falling.

  Ezekiel’s Desire trotted beside her own Danger as they moved forward at a comfortable pace.

  Then the troops moving forward halted.

  The sound of rustling armor and clinking chains moving about as the mercenaries strained forward in their saddles to look around their fellow man told
Sara that no one else knew why they’d stopped either.

  “What’s going on?” Ezekiel whispered.

  Sara held up a fist to silence him.

  She was trying to hear.

  But she couldn’t pick out anything specific over the loud whispers of the hundreds of men and women around them.

  Then it came to her. The sound of whispers on the wind. The sound of magic being used on a large scale.

  Before she could call out a warning, a shimmer of lights blasted overhead in the sky. Like streaking comets they went over the entire company, and Sara watched in horror as a blast of power followed their path in a wave.

  Her eyes were blinded and her ears deafened. It didn’t attack her anywhere else, but that was enough, because she was effectively helpless, as were her colleagues.

  Then she heard the whooshing of small objects through the night.

  Those aren’t magic, she thought as eyes started to clear. Large black spots still impaired her vision, though, so when Danger fell beneath her and rolled to the side it was a complete surprise.

  Sara didn’t have time to jump from his back. When Danger fell to the left, she fell with him, and he rolled onto his left side with a pain-filled scream. Sara let loose some screams of her own. She could finally see and she banged against the saddle ineffectively. Her scimitar was trapped and so was her leg.

  Ezekiel came up behind her. “Sara, we’re under attack!”

  “No kidding,” she shouted as she desperately looked around at the hail of arrows that was thudding into the people and the horses surrounding them. As she watched a man in front of her was pierced directly through the eye. He fell to the ground. Dead instantly.

  When his head lolled to the side, the arrow’s fletching became clear to her keen eyes.

  “Ezekiel, we need to get out of here now,” said Sara desperately.

  Damn it all to hell, they can’t be here. Not now, she thought.

  “My legs are trapped,” she said as she tried to lift herself up, but couldn’t under the weight of her now-dead horse.

  Ezekiel braced his hands under Danger’s left shoulder and Sara pushed with her battle strength into the middle of the saddle. With a sickening sound, they lifted Danger’s body off of her leg and she scrambled back.

  Ezekiel lifted a hand to ward off the putrid smell coming from the horse to his nose. “What is that smell?”

  “Putrefaction,” Sara said while crouching low.

  Ezekiel stared. “But how? He’s hasn’t been dead but for a few minutes. For that matter, why is the horse dead anyway? There’s an arrow sticking out of his right leg. That’s enough to maim him, not kill him.”

  Sara grimaced as she looked around and scoped out the battle scene. Damn curators and their need to know. It doesn’t matter how or why he died. It matters that we get the hell out of here.

  Sara grabbed Ezekiel’s arm and tugged to get him to follow her.

  Ezekiel planted his feet and gripped her arm tightly. “Sara, one of us knows something and the other needs to share now.”

  “We’re not doing this right now,” she said firmly.

  “Oh yes we are.”

  She turned back at him with fire in her eyes. “Look, Ezekiel. Look around you. What do you notice?”

  He did as she bid and she watched as he saw Danger’s stomach bulge up on its left side as if it would burst with the contents spewing forth only to deflate suddenly with a black, gooey mass eating its way through the flesh. Then Ezekiel spotted the man with an arrow through his eye from before. The arrow was gruesome enough. It was what came after that was sickening. The entire socket and half of his face had turned black with a wasting disease of putrid, midnight slime.

  “What is that?” Ezekiel said in horror as mercenary after mercenary fell around them with the same disease. Even if their wound from being pierced by the arrow wasn’t deadly, the blackness spread throughout their body at a rapid pace anyway.

  “Poison,” said Sara grimly. “The same kind the Kade mages like to use on enemies of war.”

  He gasped. “They’re here.”

  “Them or their regiment, yes. Which is why we need to go, regroup, and find out how to attack,” she said urgently. “We’re sitting ducks right here.”

  He nodded. “We need shields and mages of our own to counteract the falling arrows.”

  She looked up at the sky where the black arrows still feel like iron rain all around them. “Or least to get out of range of these blasted missiles.”

  “Let’s go,” Ezekiel said, looking around cautiously. “But where?”

  She nodded. “Back that way is uphill. We’ll have a better chance of scouting the enemy and any others of our company that got away.”

  He gulped audibly.

  She turned and whispered fiercely, “Stay low, stay on my back and do what I do and say.”

  He nodded and grabbed an arrow to notch into his crossbow.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “You never know,” he said defensively. “There might be Kade troops already on the ground fighting our men.”

  She said nothing, but she highly doubted it. The Kade mages were continuing their offensive from a safe distance. Why risk your men if you could kill all of your enemies in one fell swoop from far away?

  She set out in a crouch low to the ground as she tried to weave around dead bodies, screaming men and overturned supply carts. When they’d gotten maybe forty feet away, she stopped in the shadow of a large wagon with sacks piled high to the top. It was good shelter from which to reassess the situation. Peering around she took stock of what she saw around her. In the distance she knew there was a dense grove of trees maybe thirty feet away that would provide shelter.

  Unfortunately between here and there was nothing but open ground. No wagons to hide behind. No mercenaries to take arrows in their sides instead of her. Nothing but grass and dirt. It would have to be a flat-out run, she decided.

  Sara stared at the paths of the arrows overhead and knew it would be bad.

  “I think we can make it,” she said.

  As the arrows streaked past the other side of her shelter, the sacks above split open and potatoes tumbled from the top to hit her in the sides and on the head. She flinched but didn’t move as she turned her head to check on Ezekiel. He was too silent for such a usually chatty fellow.

  Her stomach sank as she realized she didn’t hear his panting breaths for a reason. He wasn’t there.

  Groaning, Sara looked back at the carnage of the one-sided battlefield that was now aflame.

  “Some guardian I am,” she growled as she turned back and dove back into the fray. She had no choice. She couldn’t leave him behind.

  Quick and sure of foot, Sara raced around dying men, looking for the one who mattered to her. She was usually unemotional, but never callous. Not like that. But she justified passing person after person by the sight of the arrows in each of their chests. Even if they weren’t already dead, they soon would be. And there was nothing she could do about it. Practicality like that would always win out with her.

  Just as she took another step forward for a run, she heard the streak of an arrow coming straight for her chest. Sara threw herself backward and landed on the ground breathing heavily to see a still-quivering arrow in the dead flesh of a Cams orphan who had been running past.

  She watched in horror as blood gushed from his pierced neck as he arced his back in pain in a useless attempt to get away. His body fell twitching to the ground and Sara crawled over to him on her hands and knees. Flinching each time an arrow streaked overhead.

  The young orphan turned pain-filled eyes to her, and Sara felt her own emotions well up in response. There was nothing she could do for him. He was dying.

  But she realized soon enough that the arrow had managed to pierce his neck in the only place that wasn’t immediately fatal. She knew that the poison would eat him alive and dissolve his flesh within minutes, but she couldn’t watch that happen. She shuddered.
She couldn’t let him die this way.

  Sara turned her eyes back from his pierced throat to his shaking form. His eyes met hers, pleading. He fingered the knife at her waist. She knew he’d been taken from a life on the streets of Sandrin and given a home here with the mercenaries, like most of the Cams had been. But if there was one thing her friends at the fighter school had taught her, it was that an orphan always remembered their life before they had ‘made good.’ And they always made a pact with their friends who lived as they did—in the sewers, in the alleys, in the shadows of opulent homes, under bridges, and in stick hovels—that if one asked the ultimate price, the other would give it. Sara had never been an orphan until recently. But she knew what it was like to have less and want more. To suffer and not have the pain end. To hope someone would be there at her last moment and, if needed, kill her to end the nightmare. In this case, her nightmare was of going berserk and killing those she cared for.

  In this boy’s case, his nightmare was of a slow and painful death on the battlefield.

  Lips trembling, she raised her gloved hand and placed it over his mouth and nose. Pressing down firmly, Sara waited while his breaths shuddered to a stop. He didn’t struggle. As he died peacefully, she took her hand away and closed the lids of his eyes.

  Wishing him a safe journey far from these lands, she turned on her hands and knees to scout for another path.

  That was when she saw it.

  An overturned weapons cart. She knew what it was because the thin metal disks on the sides were supposed to be spelled for an illusion to protect it. They weren’t now.

  The mage holding the spell probably died, she thought.

  Which was why the cart was visible to everyone as moonlight’s rays bounced off the thin metal disks and illuminated it in an oddly beautiful display amidst the blood and gore.

  Teeth gritted, Sara knew she needed what was in that cart. If not to protect herself from the blasted arrows, then to fight against what was to come. If she could locate a small circular disk known as finder in the supplies as well, even better. She could use it to find Ezekiel.