by Jaida Jones
“You’re the one who knows the way, remember?” I told him, before I broke a man’s jaw—and maybe my own knuckles, too, it felt like. “That’s the whole reason we brought you in the first place, so don’t go getting all useless on me now.”
I kicked a guard back, and when he fell, he broke through the wooden-framed screens and tore through the paper wall.
“Get going,” I said, “or I’ll break your head too and you’ll have to explain to Greylace and Josette what you were doing sleeping in the middle of a battle.”
“I do not know that I like the idea of explaining to Margrave Josette that I left you to fend for yourself, either,” Temur retorted. He was leaning against me a little more heavily than he had been when we’d started, and I didn’t think it was because he was preparing for a nap.
“Who’s by themselves?” I asked, insulted by the very idea. “I’m not cutting you loose, mind. I’m sending you to get the reinforcements! If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m bringing down the palace, and if you’re not sure whether I’m exaggerating or not, well then, it’s probably a good idea just to come back right away, isn’t it?”
Temur hesitated, which was his fatal error as far as I was concerned. It meant he agreed with me.
“Okay,” I said, lowering my voice, and wishing not for the first time that the walls were built of something slightly more substantial, that I could trust myself to lean against them. My arm was stinging something ferocious and dripping all down my sleeve. “Here’s how it’s going to go. I distract them while you take your chances and make a run for it, all right? Fiacre’s not an idiot, so if you explain the situation to him, I’m sure—”
An arrow whizzed past the side of my head, nicked my ear, and embedded itself in the far wall. The courtyard just beyond the wall, where the fallen guard had torn a hole in the screen, was filling with soldiers, all of whom were wielding those damned longbows.
I stepped abruptly away from Temur, hoping the loss of support wouldn’t leave him stumbling. I had a kind of plan, though it’d only just come to me a moment ago—about the time I’d realized that the chances of us both getting past had been ground right down to zero, and the chances of me holding off a palace army by myself were… Well, easier to say that if our endeavor had been a play, there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house.
I wasn’t any kind of sentimental myself though—unlike Greylace, I didn’t have a collection of lace hankies for every occasion—and if this was truly where my play ended, so to speak, then I was sure as hell going to make it one hell of a finish.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it would sure as bastion prove useful. One might even call it poetic.
“As soon as their attention’s on me, you go,” I said, resigning myself quickly to not explaining the plan. Temur was a smart man. He’d figure it out for himself.
I heard a shout from behind me. Whether it was Temur or whatever man was unlucky enough to be fighting him, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t pay attention to that at the moment. Another arrow hit the wall next to my hand and I jerked it away. Things would have been so much easier if I could have just closed my damned eyes.
I was about to do something I hated, and it kind of took all my concentration to do it.
The thing no one tells you about having a Talent is that it’s a giant pain in the ass. I kept mine good and hidden for as long as I’d been able to, so long that most who found out after they’d known me still didn’t really think of me as a magician. It was why I’d up and refused the title of Margrave, back when they’d been handing them out like caramel apples after the war. General, I told them, suits me just fine. I didn’t want anything to do with being a magician, but that damned plague hadn’t taken into account who wanted a Talent—cultivated it in their bloodlines like a fine wine—and who didn’t. And after the plague, I was pretty sure I was never going to use my Talent again, no matter how useful anyone called it. Mine was a nature-based thing, the same as Josette’s, which meant we could use them pretty much anywhere and that it was real hard to stick any kind of limitations on us. Not for the first time I was really starting to wonder how they’d managed to wrap up both Fiacre and Marcy, both neat little powerhouses in their own right, and the others no slouches themselves though Ozanne was a healer, and Marius’s Talent had something to do with light. Casi and Val didn’t have any Talents to speak of. All the same, I was thinking they’d better have had a good explanation ready for why two of Volstov’s lieutenants could get snapped up that easy.
It just plain made us look bad.
Maybe the Ke-Han’d used an old trick and grabbed just one of our own to use as a hostage against the other five. I wasn’t any kind of magical scholar—needed Greylace for that, or Marius, in a pinch—but I had a feeling it was easier to neutralize just one magician, then threaten to kill him if the others so much as blinked.
Which might have meant that I was about to do a real stupid thing right about now, but I figured we’d already kicked up so much fuss by this time that it couldn’t worsen matters one way or another.
At least, I really hoped it couldn’t.
There was an underground water vein beneath the palace. It bubbled up in places as a courtyard fountain, or an ornamental pond, but the bulk of it stayed beneath the earth, like a tailor-made distraction just waiting for me to use it. It fed the hot baths Caius liked so much, among other things, but it was going to be real useful to my purpose. Even the smallest of houses needed a well. Needless to say, a palace required a whole lot more than that.
If I’d had more practice with using my Talent, I might have known better how to shape it to my will. As things stood, I just knew where the water was—uncomfortable as it was to admit it, I could feel it—and I homed in on that like a marksman on his target. As deftly as pulling back the bowstring, I yanked on the vein of water as hard as I could with all I had in me, just to get it where I wanted it to be.
The room began to shake, sending gravel skittering across the floor from where the soldiers had tracked it in. One of the guards screamed as an arrow sprouted in his shoulder, and I turned around quickly to find Temur.
He had the beginnings of a black eye, and a cut on his leg was seeping blood through the cloth, but other than that he seemed in decent enough condition. Also, he was wielding one of those longbows. It suited him.
“That’s your cue!” I shouted over the rumbling, briefly swaying off-balance. “You’ll lose your chance in a minute, so you might as well go for it now!”
I really thought for a minute he was going to make some kind of speech, like the remembrances left by poets and playwrights for fallen heroes, except if he’d tried that, I would have hit him. Instead he hesitated, and so I lunged forward and shoved him ahead of me, which seemed to snap him out of the mood quickly enough.
Not a moment too soon, since I could hear the hiss of water spraying up between the floorboards. Soon, I knew, the ground would start to crack under the pressure. Who knew where else the repercussions would be felt? I only hoped that, by then, Caius and Josette were on their horses and far away from the stables.
“I will return with your men,” Temur promised, as a geyser erupted outside and the archers howled in surprise and fear.
“Get out of here, fool!” I grunted, turning away to guard his escape.
If Temur didn’t make it through, then we were both sunk. Literally.
The polished floor beneath my feet groaned and stretched against the pressure of the water, swelling upward and knocking guards off their feet in a way that would have been almost comical if I hadn’t been fighting for my life. At least I’d be able to take the looks on their faces with me to the grave. Meanwhile, I reached out with my Talent again, wrenching the water upward this time with everything I had.
The room exploded. Splintered floorboards shot upward as if caught in an upside-down waterfall and all the lanterns went out, extinguishing even the dim light that had shone before. I could see the shadowy outlines of the guards
as they got caught up in the rush, but more than that I could hear them shouting in their language, which I’d never bothered to learn, calling for backup, or help, or maybe even their own gods. They were the same gods, I supposed, who gave me my Talent in the first place. Pleading with them would do little good.
I backed up quickly, throwing myself against the wall without throwing myself through it and squinting after Temur to see whether he’d got down the hall in time. I couldn’t tell.
In the end, it probably didn’t really matter that much. Not that I was a pessimist or anything, but Temur and I had both come there with reasonable expectations of what we were going to get out of this little rescue mission, and staying intact definitely hadn’t been one of them.
Water swirled hungrily around my feet and rained down over my head, soaking me through in a matter of minutes. I heard a loud crack in the distance that nearly stopped my heart before I realized what it must have been—the giant fountain in the gardens crumbling under the pressure. Good. I hoped it was Iseul’s favorite giant fountain, and I hoped it was ruined forever.
The earth was still shaking with the aftershocks of the explosions. I readjusted my hold on my sword and squinted into the dark and the sheeting rain I’d called upon. Under such circumstances, it was difficult to tell just who was your friend and who was the guy you were trying to kill, which worked out great for me, since everyone seemed to be either clawing for their lives or running through the broken-down doors, or standing about uncertainly, not sure who to strike out at. Then I heard a shout from the hall Temur had ducked down, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the water gushing in dark geysers all around me. I didn’t know what it was, whether it meant we were winning or losing or if Fiacre had decided he didn’t feel like trusting any man at that moment and who could blame him, but I pulled as hard as I could with everything I had—if there’d been oceans nearby I’d have included those too—and just let loose.
If I was going to die in a country I hated, surrounded by soldiers I’d spent my entire life fighting and six weeks kissing up to, then I sure as hell was going to take as much of that damned palace as I could down with me.
Maybe if I’d been better educated in the ways of Talents, I’d never have tried it, since there were all sorts of rules about what you could do without draining your own life force. But the way I saw it, if it came down to dying on my terms or theirs, then I knew which side I was sticking to.
The courtyard disappeared with a boom like dragons exploding overhead, and white sheets of furious water exploded upward in its place, swallowing the trees and any soldiers yet trying to escape. The building rocked with the force of it all, knocking me clean off my feet and sending me through the far wall—grateful at last that they were made out of a bare wooden frame and mostly flimsy paper.
The water swirled after me eagerly like a hungry pet looking to be fed as I fought to get up. I blinked the droplets out of my eyes and shook my head out like the dog Caius had named me when we’d first met. One of the guards with better eyesight had finally taken notice of me, and I threw myself to one side. Moving was harder than it’d been when we’d first started that little campaign. I managed to block the guard’s sword when he swung, but only just. Even my good arm was getting tired from having to take all the weight of the sword by itself.
The only problem was that Josette was probably going to kill me if I died, or worse, if I let Temur die, whatever that was about.
I was just resigning myself to fighting about as dirty as I possibly could—biting, clawing, scratching, you name it—when all of a sudden the guard went stiff like he’d been turned to stone. A moment later he toppled over, flat on his face in the rising water.
“Is Marcelline all right?” Fiacre asked, sloshing out from behind the guard, where I guessed he’d been standing. “Are the others? They said if I used my Talent, it’d mean a quick end for them, but I thought… considering the situation…”
“Alcibiades!” Marcy sloshed through the water toward me, clutching at Marius’s sleeve. The better to drag him across the battlefield, no doubt. “Have you seen the others? I’d have torn this place down around us, only they said they’d kill the other delegates!”
She caught sight of Fiacre and stopped short.
“Ke-Han ingenuity,” I said. “No doubt everyone got that story, and they were betting on us being good and attached to our fellow delegates.”
“Yes, well I’ve no doubt that had you been in the same situation, you’d have upended the palace at once,” Marius said, just as Casimiro appeared like a shadow, with Valery behind him.
“Hello,” said Val. “Is this your rescue? Rather wet, don’t you think?”
“It’s the best I could do under the circumstances,” I said.
“Well, you know what they say,” Fiacre replied, clearly itching to take out his aggression on some of the soldiers. “You can’t choose your Talent.”
So that I wouldn’t have time to think about Fiacre and the way he—and all men like him, for that matter—rubbed my fur in the wrong direction, I paused to take stock of our numbers. Fiacre, obviously, was in tiptop shape, although I noticed there was a nasty cut on his face; probably from the debris flying in all directions a moment ago. The others were all right, though shaken, and I didn’t blame them. Marius was with Marcelline, and Wildgrave Ozanne was beside Lieutenants Casimiro and Valery. As sorry a ragtag group as I’d ever seen, but at least most of us had Talents. If ever there was a time to wish Margrave Royston was on your side—and at your side—it was right about then. Even if you did have to hope he wouldn’t blow you sky-high along with the enemy.
But no Royston, so Fiacre, the Wildgrave, Marcelline, and I would have to make do.
They called our glorious diplomatic leader “Fiacre the Spider” because of his particular skills, paralysis like a web around his enemies. I’d seen the Wildgrave, if he had time to practice his arts, bring a man back from the brink of death; the question here was only whether or not he’d have the time before we were all brought down under the Emperor’s superior numbers. And Marcelline—thank bastion for darling Marcy. She could bend metal to her will, and, considering the number of swords we’d have to go up against, I probably could have proposed to her on the spot, with Lord Temur the officiating officer at our wedding. That is, if he agreed to play the part.
Lord Temur, though, looked like he had other plans in mind for the evening. All the expression his face had been lacking ever since the first day I’d met him was out in full force. In fact, one might even have said he was grinning like a maniac and grimacing through the rest. I didn’t blame him. How many of the men he’d killed were friends, brothers in arms, soldiers he’d known since he was a little boy? Armies worked on the same principles the world around, and bastion if I was sure I couldn’t’ve done what he had.
“Here’s the plan, then,” I said, done with taking stock.
“Forgive me.” A cool voice, hard as metal that Marcy couldn’t bend, came from behind me. “But it would seem you have made a mess of my palace.”
Temur’s shoulders stiffened, and I could feel all the short hairs on the back of my neck jump to attention. I knew that voice just as well as Temur did, and the look on Fiacre’s face as he stared over my shoulder would have told me everything if I hadn’t already managed to piece it together for myself.
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, then, because there was no avoiding what came next, I turned around. Best to get it out of the way as quick as possible—that left less time for anticipating things.
There he was: Emperor Iseul, in all his glory. His eyes were glowing mad and that necklace around his neck, creepy as ever, caught the barest hint of the light, flashing red. There was blood in it, or I was a jackrabbit’s grandpa. The whole rest of him was impeccable, though, like the image out of a nightmare. He was cool, calm, poised, without a single hair out of place. In other words, he hadn’t just been fighting off dozens of damn soldiers the way I’d
been, and he’d probably been preparing himself for this inevitability all along. He was ready to fight me; he was eager. It wasn’t like the playing ground was even. But fuck it, because I had a plan.
“Leave the others out of it,” I said, holding up my empty hand. I was between the rest and him. “I’ve used all my magic up, Your Highness, but we’ve got a fight to finish.”
“Ah,” the Emperor said. “An interesting brand of duty, I must admit.”
“Fighting you’s the only reward I want,” I said, “for saving your life.”
Everyone was real quiet after that, and I was satisfied even if the Emperor didn’t let on that I definitely had him there.
“Very well,” he said at length, and, with a flick of both arms that startled everyone around us, began to tie back his long sleeves.
We had an audience—just like last time, only more. There were the people on my side, the bare handful of them, and all of the bastards rooting for him—an assortment of guards and warlords whom I did and didn’t recognize, men caught up in the various blasts and those who’d only just joined us.
“I give you my word that none on my side will interfere,” I added, while he readied himself. “So long as you make the same promise, and we…” I cast my eyes about me for a place suitably distant from the rest of the room—a place far away enough for me to take only the two of us out and leave the rest to their own devices.
All these heroics were making my head hurt.
I wouldn’t have turned down a little Ke-Han wine, either.
“Agreed,” the Emperor said. “I too have wished to come to the conclusion of our… practice.” He smiled at me like he was commenting on what I was wearing. I spat blood out between my teeth. That creepy vial around his neck glinted red.
“You cannot do this,” Lord Temur said, stepping forward. “It is my place—”
“I have no reason to fight a dead man,” Iseul said curtly. “It is for General Alcibiades to name the place.”
“The courtyard,” I said, and jerked my head in its direction. Water was everywhere, pooling between broken rocks and fallen beams, bits of paper floating in the pools like flower petals. It was the perfect site for me to get my ass handed to me, but I wasn’t going to let it go that far.
