Regret (Lady of Toryn Trilogy)

by Charity Santiago

  The next ninja came at her with his fists. She ducked the first punch and blocked the second one, but somehow missed the third one and stumbled backwards as he connected with the right side of her jaw. Ashlyn shook her head, trying to collect herself, and blocked another punch from her right. No time to think- she grabbed the arm and moved aside, twisting hard enough that he had no choice but to fall forward. She swung downward with her shuriken, aiming the flat side of the weapon for the base of his skull.

  A sudden eruption of hisses and growls came from her left- and Ashlyn realized that they had the shift magic, or at least one of them did. She had barely turned to face the beast before it was on her, biting and roaring. It was one of the cats, the weakest of the shift monsters, but that didn’t make it any less deadly. Its jaws clamped down on Ashlyn’s right arm, and she yelped in pain.

  There was no time to react- she gasped out a few words, and fire roiled around the big cat, singeing Ashlyn’s arms as she punched the beast, finally managing to knock it off with an elbow to the eye. Ashlyn scrambled wildly to her feet, clutching at her bleeding arm, her injured shoulder aching.

  There were two cats; the one she’d hit was shaking its head as it extricated itself from the pile of leaves where it had landed. Ashlyn glanced to her left, at the closest cat. She’d have to make this quick.

  Shouting her spell, she threw out her hand, and used the fire stane once more, flames exploding from the ground and consuming the poor animal. The cat screamed, but Ashlyn didn’t have time to see what happened next- she was already off and running. She ran by the burning beast, but had barely cleared the fire before she was knocked to the ground by the second cat. The shuriken flew out of her hands and slid across the leaf-strewn ground, the light from the stane extinguished the moment it left her grip.

  Ashlyn quickly rolled before the animal could get a chance to pin her down, but the cat’s claws dug into her shoulders and it rolled with her. Ashlyn landed on her belly again, and threw her head back, connecting with the creature’s face and momentarily stunning them both with the impact. Stars sparked before Ashlyn’s eyes. Panthers have hard heads, she thought stupidly. Who knew? Gasping with the pain of the claws on her shoulders, she tried to remember which stanes she had in her armlet. Which one could she use to get out of this? All that she had were heal…and shift.

  She twisted, trying to elbow the creature behind her, but the cat snarled and momentarily let go of her shoulder to take another swipe, gashing Ashlyn’s upper arm with its claws.

  She knew then that she didn’t have any other choice.

  Writhing and twisting, trying to at least make it difficult for the beast to get a death grip, Ashlyn cried out for help, the shift stane in her mind’s eye, desperately hoping that it would assist her in her time of need.

  The change was immediate.

  There was none of the agony that she had seen in Tag’s transformation, none of the gruesome rearranging of bones and shifting of tendons. Ashlyn had no reason to scream because there was no pain. It was instantaneous. One moment, she was in her human form, pinned to the ground and completely helpless against her attacker, and the next moment, a sense of clarity settled over her as she shifted into a panther. Every sense was heightened, her body humming with energy and anger. Ashlyn twisted and lunged upwards, sinking her claws into the other cat’s neck and dragging the creature beneath her own body. She ripped and tore at her adversary, tasting blood but too furious to stop.

  At last the big cat lay still beneath her, and it was only then that Ashlyn took a breath, the air feeling strangely pungent in her lungs. She backed off the other cat, slowly, adjusting to the fluid movements of her own limbs. After a moment, she realized that the darkness was no longer darkness. As a cat, she could see in the dark. She wondered briefly what daylight looked like through these cat eyes.

  Hesitantly, she tried to form words, something to stop the magic, but all that came out were a few growling noises. It worked despite its simplicity, and in another heartbeat Ashlyn was herself again, sore and bleeding- and naked- but alive.

  She propped herself up gingerly against a tree trunk, shivering, murmuring the words to mend her wounds as the heal stane glowed sweetly in her armlet.

  She allowed herself a moment to contemplate what had just taken place. She had taken on the shape of a panther, but the soldier she’d taken this particular shift stane from had been a bear. Was it possible that each person shape-shifted into a different animal? Or could you control the animal you shape-shifted into once you were more experienced with the magic?

  Also, by no means did she feel like a master of the magic, but Kou had previously told her that the shift magic was dangerously addictive. Yet she felt no different. There was no pull from the shift stane. There was no lingering pain from the shape-shift, which had certainly been almost anticlimactic in comparison to Tag’s awful and agonizing transformation that she had witnessed in the basement of her home.

  Perhaps the unnaturalness of his shape-shift was because he did not truly belong to the Li bloodline? Perhaps true Li heirs were able to transform without the pain?

  She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t really want to find out.

  With some effort, Ashlyn managed to pull herself upright, and made her way towards where her shuriken was lying on the ground. She eyed the fallen ninja closest to her, wondering if his clothes would fit her.

  The first strains of dawn were filtering through the trees.

  If FLD hadn’t already discovered that she was gone, they would soon.

  Chapter 2

  Like a Wild Animal

  The tents were a dull gray, not so dark as the gray that Toryn ninjas wore, but bland enough to fade into almost any landscape. In the wintry forest they blended in quite well, so well, in fact, that Ashlyn had almost missed them at first.

  On the southern half of the island, which was at a higher elevation than the city, the first snowfall had already occurred, though most of it had melted in the first few hours of morning. Ashlyn shivered at the frost seeping through her clothes as she inched forward on her belly, trying to get a better glimpse of the encampment from her position on the edge of the cliff above.

  It wasn’t a large army, by any means- Ashlyn had counted eighty-nine soldiers so far, though she couldn’t be sure how many were still in the tents and the caves.

  The location was fairly secure, flanked on three sides by jagged, ominous cliffs that jutted up above the trees. The only way in was to approach from the east, coming out of the forest, but the bare trees would provide very little cover for an army. Ashlyn was suddenly glad that she hadn’t attempted an attack on her father’s soldiers. The inexperienced Toryn army would not have fared well in a situation such as this one.

  Ashlyn herself had approached from the north, scaling the cliffs with little difficulty and dispatching the scout she found at the top, along with the one who had just climbed up for a relief shift a few moments ago.

  After spending a short time observing the encampment, she had to admit that finding her father was going to be more difficult than she’d expected. Initially she had thought that the chosen location was pretty stupid. All she needed were a few dozen good archers, and they could easily take out the army from the high ground. But then she realized that the cliff itself contained a cave, and although there was no way to be sure of the size of the cave from this vantage point, she had seen most of the soldiers disappear into and then reappear from its craggy opening in the last few minutes. There was just no telling how many more troops were already inside.

  She edged backwards, away from the cliff’s edge and out of sight of the soldiers below, and sat up, chewing her lower lip contemplatively. There was no way that one ninja, even a ninja as utterly bad-ass as she was, could possibly fight past eighty-nine soldiers.

  She looked down at her outfit, the traditional gray wool gi belted with dark green leather and soft-soled black boots. Her green mask was emblazoned with the mark of Toryn- the same as
the soldiers milling around below her.

  What if she could walk in? Just stroll right into the cave like she belonged there? She looked as much like a soldier in her father’s army as any other person in the encampment.

  It seemed like a really stupid and ridiculously simple plan.

  But maybe they wouldn’t be expecting it.

  Still…

  Ashlyn looked up, noting the sun’s position in the sky. It was late morning now, and she had wasted precious minutes watching the camp. Skye would have discovered her absence shortly after sunrise, and if she knew anything about the blond swordsman, he was already on his way, probably on horseback. It wouldn’t take him nearly as long to get here as it had taken her.

  Decision made. Ashlyn crawled to the backside of the cliff and carefully switched knapsacks with the first scout she’d slain, transferring her belongings and her shuriken into his far more distinctive-looking blue knapsack and using her gray bag to fashion a new harness to strap her sword onto her back.With any luck and with her mask on, the other soldiers would assume she was the scout who had just been relieved.

  Gritting her teeth, she skittered down the side of the mountain, grabbing hold where she could, and sliding haphazardly where she couldn’t. She jumped the last fifteen feet, tumbling indelicately into a pile of dead foliage in an extremely un-ninja-like manner. Whoops.

  Brushing leaves off her clothes, Ashlyn straightened her mask and tucked several errant strands of hair back into her hood. Okay. No big deal. Get in, get to her father, get out. The getting out part would be more difficult if her father didn’t cooperate, but if it came down to that…well, she just had to remember the old proverb about cutting off the head of the snake. Without her father, there would be no army, and she was next in line for leadership.

  She felt considerably more confident than she had a few hours ago, but was still unsure about the prospect of challenging her dad to a Leadership Duel.

  Unfortunately, she was out of time to deliberate over it. Now or never. Do or die.

  Ashlyn jogged along the base of the cliff, keeping under the overhanging ledge in an attempt to stay as inconspicuous as possible. When she reached the outcropping of rock at the entrance, she slowed down, forcing herself to walk casually. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat, pulsing fiercely against her tongue, as she took her first step into the encampment.

  No one even gave her a second glance, which was almost hilariously anticlimactic after all the different scenarios she’d conjured up in her mind. Ashlyn made a beeline for the cave entrance, then deliberately slowed, trying not to look too eager. A soldier nodded to her as he walked past, and she returned the gesture. He didn’t seem to notice anything, and kept walking.

  Ashlyn glanced up casually, surveying the cliff face. It was very steep on the inner walls, unlike the backside of the mountain, which was slanted enough that she could climb up and down without too much trouble. Although an attack would have been possible with archers at the top of the mountain, there would have been no way for them to get down afterwards without going around the long way. This was an ideal location for an encampment. The only downside that Ashlyn could see was the extreme cold that plagued the southern half of the island in the winter- but of course when the war started, it would have been summertime. Presumably when they’d set up camp here, they hadn’t expected the war to last this long. Ashlyn suppressed a smile. It appeared as though Kou and her father had underestimated Jackson and the rest of FLD, just as her father was underestimating her now.

  She was struck by the total silence around her as she wove her way between the tents. In any ordinary camp, even a military camp, there would be snippets of conversation, and she’d been hoping that everyone would be chit-chatting so she could attempt to pick out their dialects and figure out where most of these soldiers were from. But there was no chatting. No conversation, no joking or laughing or even crying. Just a whole lot of nothing, unspoken whispers ringing in her ears with the gentle pad-pad-pad of her own footsteps.

  It was, in a word, unnerving.

  But she reached the cave entrance without ado, and if they were a bunch of strong, silent types, Ashlyn wasn’t about to fault them for that, just as long as they stayed strong and silent long enough to let her get to Lord Li.

  Her eyes took a moment to adjust when she stepped inside, and the first thing she noticed was a torch mounted on the wall opposite her, burning ambitiously but not quite succeeding in chasing away the shadows around it.

  The entrance opened into a large cavern, with stalactites hanging down from the ceiling like an angry threat, dripping water on the stone floor. Although the outer edges of the room had dry ground, the floor’s center was swallowed in a large, shallow puddle.

  There weren’t many soldiers inside- just four, clustered off to one side and sharpening their weapons. Ashlyn noted with some irritation that one of them was holding an oversized bo shuriken, much like the one she’d lost several years ago. It wasn’t the same one- his was made of some burnished orange metal- but it irked Ashlyn to see anyone using a single large bo shuriken when she had been the one to engineer the technique as a pre-teen. Most ninjas carried several small bo shuriken in place of the small hira throwing stars, but Ashlyn had come up with the idea to forge a larger bo shuriken and use it as both a stabbing and throwing weapon.

  And now this little creep had stolen her idea. She frowned, but didn’t move towards him. Her wounded pride wasn’t worth blowing her cover over. Instead, she quickly moved towards the lit corridor at the other end of the cavern, keeping her chin down as she walked.

  “You! Scout!” one of the soldiers against the wall called to her in Toryn, and Ashlyn’s next step faltered, but she didn’t stop, ducking into the corridor in the following instant.

  She broke into a run, keeping her steps soft and silent, and turned with the corridor as it veered sharply to the left. She collided with another person, coming from the opposite direction, and spun as she fell, landing hard on her butt.

  “My apologies, Elder,” she said hurriedly in Toryn, wrinkling her nose to make sure that the mask was still in place. “I trust you bear no…” She trailed off as she looked up, finding herself face-to-face with a man she never thought she’d see again.

  What?! Impossible!

  She’d watched him fall, watched his body tumble into the ocean below Na Michico.

  Kou’s ebony eyes narrowed as he stared at her, and Ashlyn froze, unable to think of any excuse for her presence, any way out of this situation. How was it even possible that he was alive? It wasn’t! Even if he’d survived the fall, even if he’d survived the gunshot wound, how had he gotten out of the ocean alive?

  Maybe he didn’t recognize her. The entire lower half of her face was hidden. Ashlyn quickly averted her eyes and murmured another apology in the lowest voice she could manage, inclining her head as she picked up the knapsack she’d dropped in the collision and slowly got to her feet.

  “Wait,” he said as she moved to continue down the corridor, and she stopped, heart pounding so loud that she was sure he could hear it.

  There was the scuff of his boot against the sandy floor, and she felt his breath on her neck through the fabric of her hood.

  “Tomiko Yasu, of the clan Yasu?” he said, a playful lilt to his tone as he repeated back to her the false name she had given him the first day they’d met.

  Oh, crap.

  Oh, crap.

  “Did you really think you’d make it in here without anyone noticing?” he murmured. His lips were close to her ear.

  Ashlyn shivered with revulsion, fists clenching at her sides.

  “No,” she said through gritted teeth. “That’s why I came prepared.”

  She tore the shuriken out of her knapsack and whirled, slicing at his throat. He jumped backwards, the blade missing him by a hairsbreadth, and attempted a punch, which Ashlyn easily blocked. She threw a jab into his stomach, making him cry out, and she followed up with an elbow to the
gut. He tried for a leg sweep but she jumped over it, smashing her fist into his face as she came down.

  “You dog,” she hissed as he crumpled to the floor. “How dare you make claim to share the blood of the Li clan? How dare you?”

  He rolled over onto his back, still gasping for air, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand, one of the old DEMON antiques from her father’s display case. Ashlyn backpedaled, but not quickly enough to escape the noise, and as he squeezed the trigger the BOOM reverberated through the corridor deafeningly, bouncing off the walls and shrilling in her ears. The bullet went wide- thank you Drago- and Ashlyn kicked the gun out of his hand, stomped on his stomach and leapt over him, intent on reaching her father before it was too late.

  There were three- no, four soldiers coming down the corridor towards her, blocking the route that would take her deeper into the cave. Ashlyn turned and exasperatedly jumped over Kou again, who was now tenaciously trying to draw a knife from its sheath at his hip.

  “Points for effort,” Ashlyn snapped, yanking the knife from his hands and giving him a satisfying kick to the face. She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. In such cramped quarters, it would be difficult to defeat the four soldiers coming from the opposite direction- on the other hand, if she went back to the cavern, there could be dozens more waiting for her.

  Either way, she didn’t want to be trapped in this corridor.

  She took off at a dead sprint for the cavern.

  Her mind was racing. The ice stane in her shuriken was powerful enough to cause some real damage. She could create a wall of ice across the cave entrance to prevent the army from getting in. If she made it thick, it might hold long enough for her to take out whatever soldiers were already in the cave and then use reveal to find her father.

  A masked ninja came running down the corridor towards her, brandishing his katana. Ashlyn didn’t bother slowing down. She brought her shuriken up and wrenched her wrist, catching the blade between the prongs of the weapon. The katana snapped in half. She twisted her hand, still running, and the shuriken caught the soldier in the neck, dragging him with her three paces before he finally fell.