by Amy Bai
Good. Taireasa was thinking again. Though it left her nothing to do now but lie.
"I’ll be riding after you." Taireasa's disbelief was evident even in the dark. Kyali embraced her quickly and fiercely, before her friend could see how the truth lit up her eyes. "I'm going to gather the guard here first. We'll need them. I love you. Believe in me, please, just go, now!"
Taireasa hugged her tight. "Go, go now," Kyali gasped, and shoved her away. She was choking on tears, on sorrow so great it was like a blade in her chest. Taireasa and Marta slipped behind a tapestry, where a door hid that led to the secret passages. As girls, they had done this a thousand times to hide from Taireasa's guards, as a game.
No game now: it was life, for Taireasa. All her hope was pinned on that.
Kyali didn't watch them leave. Instead she buckled her sword and daggers in place and breathed, trying to find her center, trying to drown the terror battering at her thoughts, hearing the approach of booted feet and the clash and whine of arms just outside the door. There was the fire, banked low; she could barely breathe at all, but if she calmed herself she might be able to kindle enough to burn whoever came in here.
But the tapestry would burn too. They would find the door behind it, and that could not be allowed to happen. A sob leapt out of her throat. Tears drew a hot line down her face.
Don't flinch, Kyali.
Her breathing fell effortlessly into pattern. She drew her sword.
They were at the door, demanding entrance and offering—of all the stupid things—safety. There was no such thing, not anywhere, never again. Her heart thundered. The air burned her lungs. The bar splintered and the door burst open, flooding the room with the nightmarish light of torches reflected on steel, men standing stark-faced and bloody. They crowded in, blocking the entrance. Baron Cyrnic stepped out from among them, prudently remaining out of reach of her sword. Baron Walderan was behind him, and his expression promised revenge for his nephew.
"Where is the princess?"
Kyali raised her chin, swallowing past the tightness in her throat.
"You’ll not have her," she said, and was astonished at how calm she sounded.
More tears spilled out. She couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter. Taireasa, go, she thought with all her desperate, terrified love, and for a second she was dizzy, seemed to hear panicked breathing, to smell the musty stone of the old passages.
She shut it out firmly. She was determined that Taireasa would not in any way experience these next few moments with her.
"Then we shall have to have you," Cyrnic said. "I think you will tell us eventually, general's daughter."
His meaning was plain.
Oh, gods, she thought—death, she had braced herself for. This possibility had never occurred to her.
She would just have to find a way to die, then. After she killed as many of these as came near her.
She set her feet as men fanned out on all sides. Her sword caught the torchlight and shone. She swept it up and around in a perfect, twisting arc, first of the Forms, the one from which all others grew. And all the fear left her as the blade cut first the air and then the face of the nearest.
Blood flew.
They fell on her.
CHAPTER 9
The night was full of the cries of men and the screaming of horses. Devin crouched in the saddle, half-frozen with terror, as blood was shed all around him. His horse Savvys fought the rein and shied forward, sideways, back. Savvys didn't know what he wanted. Devin had some sympathy for that state of mind, but he dug his heels in anyway, wrenching the reins right, hoping he stayed ahorse.
Riders passed on his left, a thunder of hooves and a flash of steel. Savvys made to follow, knowing his place. Devin, utterly at a loss about where his own place might be, let his horse take him into the thick of the screaming and the ringing of steel. He set his hastily appropriated helm, hoping it would be enough.
An explosion came from behind, a blast of heat and sound so deafening that even the wails of wounded men and horses seemed small. Devin knew what that was, and grief and fury settled like a stone in his guts. The grief he ignored; the fury he welcomed. It made riding into the middle of battle easier, somehow.
Behind him, the house he had lived in all his life was afire, blazing into the night sky. Glass burst in the terrible heat of it. Smoke billowed out and mingled with looming thunderheads above.
They were outnumbered, losing rapidly. And he didn't know where his father was.
A sword flashed up at him. Devin ducked and swung his own with clumsy haste. He bit back a yelp as the jolt rattled up his arm. Blows rained on his back. He struck about with the sword and brought his shield up, yelling in sheer terror. Horses and men twisted past in struggling knots. Everything was glinting steel and black blood glistening in the firelit dark.
They had gone home to gather the battalions and head back to the capital in force, thinking they'd surprise the barons of the West. Instead, they'd met an ambush just outside the Corwynall estate by men bearing the colors of Canellys and Tharst. Betrayal, treason—every plot his father had suspected paled next to this unbelievable truth. This was no political maneuver, no attempt to wrest away the levies or gain control of the Sainey's trade ships.
They meant to take the kingdom.
Taireasa and Kyali were in deadly danger.
The thought gave him desperate strength and he kicked the next man that grabbed at his leg—kicked, then drove his sword through the gap in the man's armor at the shoulder. In the jostling madness of battle, the soldier's startled gaze locked with his—then his enemy slipped backward off the blade and was immediately lost in a deadly tangle of hooves. Devin shook his sword, struggling with a stupid but intense urge to reach after the man and pull him up before he was trampled.
He had just killed someone. Someone with a mother, a father, perhaps a sister of his own to worry over. And there wasn't even time to think on it: the battle was all around him now. Savvys stumbled, screamed, and bit a man. That man screamed, too, and Devin accounted for him with an awkward sweep of steel. Blood splashed him.
This was a day of many firsts, it seemed.
He fended off a lance, but took a blow to his head that made the helm ring. Through the ringing came a blessedly familiar voice, raised in a battlefield shout. Devin pointed Savvys toward that voice, using his heels.
Bodies were everywhere underfoot. Riderless horses wandered among them or lay screaming in the grass. It was chaos. He and Savvys bolted over the southern rise, dodging wildly.
On the other side of the hill was a knot of perhaps seventy men, grimly holding their own against a force twice that size. They raced right into the thick of that, too, and Devin tried to haul Savvys up short, thinking of pikes and arrows. Savvys cow-kicked and plunged onward with the bit in his teeth.
"Oh gods," Devin moaned, seeing the advancing line of the enemy rush toward him, and hunched over the saddle, holding the shield over his head. They knocked two horses over and trampled a man before anyone on the other side could lift a weapon.
As the enemy recovered, Devin struck blindly around himself with the sword. His grip was failing, his fingers grown slick with sweat or blood, he wasn't sure which. A streak of fiery pain ran up his calf; a spear blow dented the cuirass some soldier had lent him. It knocked the breath from him and he bent, gasping. Behind him, he heard his father’s men shout as they took the opportunity—or perhaps they only felt obliged to rescue a fool—and charged. The air filled with the crash of metal and more screams.
A hand closed on his arm, wrenching him sideways. A sword crunched through the eyeslit of the man who had been trying to pull him down—a sword he knew well enough. Devin swallowed hard and pulled his own helm off to look into his father’s soot-blackened face.
"Boy," his father said. Always boy—even when he had boys of his own and gray in his hair, he doubted he would ever be anything else to Niall Corwynall. Around them the battle was waning and waxing in fits, beginn
ing to move past them. Savvys shied and shifted.
"Ride back to the capital," his father told him. "They will need you now."
Need me? Devin thought, dismissing that even as he heard it. They would need the army: this army, or what was left of it. They would need his father. Not him. What could a Bard possibly do for anyone at a time like this?
Their horses stumbled apart and came back together as the battle began to move past them. His father had a hand pressed to his middle.
Blood was on that hand. Blood was pouring, oh gods—pouring out around it.
Devin saw that and couldn't make himself believe it. It was impossible.
"Go!" his father shouted, and he felt blood spray over his face in warm drops. His father bent in the saddle and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "Your sister needs you, Devin, needs you now, there is no time. Fast as you can. Over the hill. Gather up the men when you pass and head back to the castle. You must rally the guard there, if you can."
If there are any left, his father didn't say, but Devin heard it all the same.
Shivers shook through him, making it hard to keep a grip on the sword. He felt like a child facing every imagined monster he'd ever feared might hide in the dark—he felt utterly lost. How could he follow such an order?
How could he not?
He was leaving his father here to—to—
His father stripped the Corwynall ring from his finger and tendered it in a shaking hand. Devin could only stare. His father snatched his hand, shoved the ring onto his finger—then, amazingly, pulled him close. They embraced, for the first time he could recall since childhood, the horses bumping under them. He could smell blood and sweat and, under that awfulness, ale, horse, pipe smoke: the scents he'd known all his life. Somehow that made it all real. The shivers turned into frantic words.
"Let me stay. Father, let me fight with you, please."
"No. No, Devin, this part is for me alone. You must go. Only you can, boy. You and Kyali and the princess. The kingdom needs you now. Farrell is dead. So is Marissa." They leaned back to look into each other’s faces. There was something like pain in his father’s eyes.
The king and queen were dead.
His father was dying.
"Gods," Devin said weakly. "Oh dear gods, no."
"No time, Devin, no time now: I wish there were. Go!" the general yelled, and wheeled his horse around. Savvys reared up. Devin kicked his heels in hard, reining about in the opposite direction. He was choking on sorrow, drowning in it. He'd had barely a day of a whole House, and now everything was ripped apart forever.
They topped the rise again and came thundering down the other side.
"Hyaaaaah!" he shouted—no, screamed, a ragged sound that was more grief than rage—and struck men down from a dead run. The sword was nearly wrenched from his hand. "To me!" he bellowed to his father’s men as he passed them.
He had no idea if they followed. He hardly cared, but that was his father's last order, and he’d be damned before he’d disobey it. Tears blinded him, raked through him, making the night a prism of firelight and moving shadows. His breath came in shuddering gasps. He wanted to kill everything in sight, to make the whole world stop before he lost anything else.
But he had a direction and a mission, and a sister who was, like him, about to lose her father.
Will I have to tell her? Will she even be alive when we get there?
Oh gods, I can't bear this. I'm not strong enough.
He and Savvys pelted up the next hill and over it. Hoofbeats thundered behind them. Devin lifted the sword wearily, wheeling his mount around. But it was a ragged and diminished company of the Third Battalion facing him, perhaps three hundred men: they had come. He held aloft the hand that bore his father’s ring, hating that he wore it. It felt like a theft, or a bitter jest.
"I’m going back to the castle!" he shouted—not the most inspirational of battle-speeches, but he was lucky he could put two words together right now, really. The hand he held up was shaking badly. He lowered it before anybody could see that. "Come with me!"
As they turned toward the main road, there came a burst of light and sound from behind them.
Lightning.
Devin slid halfway out of the saddle as the hillside tilted under him. A hole opened up in the world. A piece of him went away. The pain of it was stunning. He might have lost a limb.
Beside him, Peydan, his father’s first lieutenant, cried out, and he understood.
His father had called down lightning, an ability he had never in his life suspected… and his father was dead.
There was silence now on the other side of that hill, a ghastly silence where better than two hundred men had fought only seconds ago. He was still breathing. Still thinking.
His father was dead.
Unable to reconcile these two things, Devin turned his horse wordlessly onto the capital road. There was nowhere else to go. Rain began to sheet down. His eyes still held the afterimage of that terrible flash. The ring was heavy and warm on his finger. The Corwynall locket under his shirt was warm, too.
The rest of him was frozen and numb.
* * *
Taireasa staggered to a halt in the dark of the passageway, a dreadful wrenching in her chest stopping her breath. She leaned all her weight on the dusty stone wall, but her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees, gasping. Images pressed in on her mind. Her father—gone, murdered—a sharp sudden agony in her side and a sense of regret and surprise. For a moment she saw the outer walls of the castle as if from a great height, and then the wrenching came again, and she crumpled as her mother died on the northern wall.
She had no idea how she could know these things.
She hardly cared. The shock of it twisted through her, took all thought away. She clutched at the stones, trying to find herself in the middle of the terrible hurt.
"Lady, we ’ave to keep going!" Marta knelt over her, face panicked in the flickering light of their only candle.
Taireasa fended off Marta's hands and huddled over the center of the feeling, which was somewhere just below her heart, vast and awful as though a piece of her had been torn away. Her parents were both dead this very moment. She pressed her hands to her face as her lungs locked on a scream. Tears spilled from her eyes, over her fingers.
"Gods, oh gods, please no," she moaned.
The whole castle opened itself to her mind’s eye. Men coursed through the rooms like rats, a deadly invasion killing wherever they found life not loyal to their cause. She saw it as though she were there.
Then something else intruded, something even worse. Her back arched. The agony was immediate, directionless, too great to think past. She was dimly aware of Marta fluttering over her as she curled up, trying to breathe, to move. The vision thundered over her, coming clear suddenly on a face, and then another face, and another—Cyrnic, Walderan, Brisham, Viam—
Her arms were tied. Her skin was bare. She could taste blood. There was rough stone against her back, and a pain that obliterated all else began. Kyali’s ragged gasps filled her ears, and all at once Taireasa understood what was happening. She tried to rise, frantic to stop this final horror, but her legs only jerked senselessly. She heard her own anguished cry echo off stone as Kyali’s consciousness swallowed her again, all of her torment and rage and terrible, resolute love completely overwhelming her.
Marta’s palm covered her mouth, smothering her cries. Her lips tore as they met her teeth. It was nothing against this new pain, this awareness of wounds, of burns and bones broken, of her skin slick with blood, and this... this unspeakable violation of the heart of her. There were voices, chanting together, pulling at her thoughts. There were men crowded close.
Then the world in her mind shifted again, and the dark was suddenly rent by light too bright to look on. There was a crack like thunder. A horse shied under her. The Lord General was dead, too, and Devin was riding with desperate haste, armed men on all sides of him.
Devin was c
oming for them.
Picking this urgent notion out of the rest, Taireasa fought to be free, and was suddenly back in herself. She lay there, trying to remember how to breathe, how to live. The candle did nothing against the darkness. Around her, the whole world trembled.
There was no time for grieving now.
She got her arms under her, and Marta cautiously removed her hand. She managed to get to her feet and stood panting, pressed against the wall, shaken to the core.
"Lady…" Marta ventured, little more than a shadow in the gloom. Taireasa held a hand up for silence. She wanted to weep, or scream, and swallowed the impulse. Her friends were still alive. She had lost her family; she could not lose Kyali and Devin too. She would not.
Her feet moved her before she even knew the choice had been made, taking her back. She felt that pulling begin again in her middle and was relieved this time, because it was a direction, and it meant Kyali was still alive.
Marta rushed up beside her, even took her arm to tug it in the other direction. Taireasa turned, glaring. Her handmaid fell back gasping; from what, she had no idea.
"Marta," she said, as the woman flinched away and leaned into the wall. When their eyes met, Taireasa reached out and took her maid’s hand, drawing her close. The air seemed to have a haze about it and her ears were ringing.
Is this magic? Gods, please, if there were ever a time to have it…
"The old passageways lead all over the keep," Taireasa said slowly, the thought taking shape as she spoke. "The hidden rooms. The servants don’t talk about them, do they?"
Marta frowned and shook her head. "No, lady."
"Then we must go back."
Around them, that strange haze grew thick and shimmery and almost solid, then vanished as she shook her head. Kyali’s presence was in the back of her mind. Voices hissed at her, urging her to speak, promising an end. The pain was rising and rising, unimaginable. A ghostly sheen of gold clung to everything.
I’m coming, she tried to say, to reassure Kyali, but she had no sense that the message went anywhere. The horror of it all but swallowed her and she bent, trying to find the courage to keep going, to salvage something from this.
