Sword

by Amy Bai

  Kyali bowed her head. Around them, soldiers looked on in justifiable panic as she clenched both hands over the hilt of her sword and fought for air, for sanity. Taireasa could only watch, mute and wretched, as Kyali put that cold mask of hers back together out of nothing but her iron will and the raw rage that was burning in her eyes.

  And, guilt twisting sickly in her, knowing this might be the last glimpse she got of her truest friend, Taireasa let it happen. Their army was waiting. There was another army making its way across the valley toward them. There was a battle ahead. There was no fixing this now. There might never be.

  It was like losing her all over again.

  "Majesty," Maldyn murmured, close and worried, calling her away from this moment, this chance.

  "We have no time for this," Kyali said finally, still trembling, but as cold as winter again. "You cannot fight. And we cannot guard you while we do. The villagers will follow you. Damn you, Taireasa, get into the trees."

  Something rose in Taireasa, past the terror that clamored at her thoughts and the mingled sorrow and guilt, something hard and determined and sure of itself. She brushed Maldyn's hand aside and urged her horse close, closer, until she was looking into Kyali's face from inches away and she could see the knots in her jaw.

  "Then fight," Taireasa said. Her voice was shaking, but for once, she didn't care. "And win, Kyali Corwynall. I didn't come all this way to flee like a frightened sheep at the first sight of the enemy. I assume you didn’t, either."

  Kyali opened her mouth to retort. Taireasa held up a hand. She had heard all she could stand to hear. This was worse than anything she had ever felt, this breaking between them. She could feel tears pressing at the backs of her eyes and she couldn't, for all their sakes, allow them to fall. "Win," she said again, the word barely a hiss, and kicked her horse around.

  To meet a crowd of terrified villagers waiting for orders.

  "To the trees," Taireasa said, sliding from the saddle. She didn't look back, though the soldiers who were about to die in her name deserved that much.

  She couldn't make herself watch Kyali riding away from her.

  * * *

  "Aye, la—cap… aye," Ciaran stuttered, flushing red.

  None of them knew what to call her.

  She didn't care one way or the other and only stared, waiting for him to sort it out. Finally giving up, Ciaran rode away to pass her orders down the line and Kyali shifted her gaze to the valley, where Sevassis was moving with slow, taunting deliberation toward them.

  Fools. They would have to climb to reach the battle at this rate, but they appeared almost stupid enough to do it. She wondered idly who was commanding down there, if he was truly arrogant enough to try such a thing. An idea began to take shape in her mind, one born of two years of fighting with the Fraonir. She waved Ciaran back to her before he could make it to the right wing cavalry.

  These new orders chased the pinched look of desperation from his face. He even smiled. The expression faded when she didn't return it, though, and he rode off again.

  The effort of acting normally was wearing her to the bone, and she wasn't even doing a good job of it.

  "Form up," she shouted, pitching it to carry over the din. She could hear the echo of her father's famous battle-shout in her own voice, and it was like a kick in the guts: she couldn't find her next breath. Every soldier’s face turned toward her, like plants toward sunlight. They bunched together as instructed, presenting the sorriest possible appearance, making their numbers look even smaller than they were. Surprise was the only chance they had.

  Jeers floated up to them, and a few arrows flew uselessly toward them, crashing down well out of range.

  Still struggling for air, Kyali rode down the line of men, knocking the flat of her sword against their upraised blades in the old battle-blessing. She kept her eyes forward, because the hope she saw in her ragged, makeshift army made her want to strike every man who dared to look at her that way.

  It was a bad jest, all of it. They were outnumbered, exhausted, poorly armed. There was little to hope for here. Many of these soldiers would die today, and probably she would with them.

  And she didn't care, she didn't care, she didn't care at all.

  If she kept telling herself that, maybe it would be true again.

  Before this, there had been peace, a beautiful, cold distance from the world and everything in it. She had come to herself standing over Baron Cyrnic's corpse and not batted an eyelash, had dealt with all the things that needed to be done without a ripple of worry or confusion. Everything had been possible, and nothing mattered. But now—

  Now she remembered.

  The memory was a gaping wound in her mind, bleeding sick, black rage all over everything. Her hands shook. Her whole body shook. She lowered the sword before any of the soldiers could see and rode to the front line of the left wing, from which she planned to lead. Ciaran had the right wing. She had changed the battle order still further: Feldan Corwynall, cousin and would-be challenger for Taireasa's throne (as if she would ever let that happen) had the center now, where the heaviest fighting would be. He had understood that order clearly, by the pale, hurt fury on his face. She didn't need to explain to him whose claim she would be supporting, or how far she would go to keep Taireasa safe.

  A cousin's life meant nothing next to that. Not even a cousin she’d known all her days.

  One more thing she would have liked not to care about.

  Damn Taireasa, who had done this to her.

  Taireasa stood even now at the very edge of the forest, her dress blowing like a banner in the rising wind. At the sight of her, Kyali hissed a helpless curse, love and rage seeping out of her very bones, making thought almost impossible. Taireasa was there, but she was also here somehow, in all her stubborn, bright loyalty—far too close, a heart impossible to hide from forever.

  Mystery solved. This was how Taireasa had known of the ambush, and that meant Devin wasn't far. She could almost sense her brother now too, pushing at her like Taireasa was, but thankfully without Taireasa's astounding strength. A treacherous part of her wanted it, whatever it was—wanted nothing more than to curl up in the headstrong, foolish comfort of their love and wail like a banshee until some of this unendurable darkness left her.

  That could never happen.

  They would see immediately what had happened, how she had fought and lost, what the price of that failure had been. They would see how the memory filled her and twisted her thoughts; they would see the dark and ugly stain of it all through her. They would learn about powerlessness, and cruelty. And then they, too, would have to live with it. The thought was more than she could bear.

  Her heart clenched in her chest like a fist, one more misery on top of a thousand of them.

  Kyali looked down the hill at the enemy, trembling and aching and wanting to kill everything in sight, to just lay around her with the sword until the death she dealt or the death she expected to meet in the valley below gave her back that cold, unfeeling peace.

  Sevassis’s forces came blithely into range and began their mad uphill charge, singing battle songs and shouting taunts, stupidly sure of themselves. Gods, what kind of fool was giving orders down there? They hadn't even raised their shields. Kyali lifted a single hand. A second later, the air filled with the deadly whine of arrows, as the archers she'd hidden behind the bunched infantry stood and loosed.

  Screams filled the valley. The men in the front line went down and were trampled by their own cavalry, who were now moving too fast to stop. She felt a fierce, angry satisfaction kindle in her.

  In that moment, Devin's presence came suddenly clear, a force like a gale, irresistible, breaking her open and making her feel, oh gods, not now—

  "Now!" Kyali screamed, her voice cracking on the word. It brought the rage in an annihilating flood, sweeping all her hurt and horror along with it, and oh, dear gods, it was such a relief to let go.

  Ainhearag leapt to life under her. They were
racing down, down, the air filled with thunder. Her men were behind her, shouting and howling.

  She set her arm, braced her feet into the stirrups.

  Ahead, the Sevassis line loomed, and as she met the eyes of a Western soldier holding a pike, she discovered there was still room in her for fear. But her hands knew their business. They swept the pike aside while her mind was still noticing the color of his eyes and opened a hole in his exposed throat. He went down, and she met the enemy line full-on. The impact was stunning. She kept her grip on the sword only out of habit.

  Then there was no more time to think or feel, only a series of seconds streaming by in a welter of chaos: blood spraying, a gash opening in a man's head, horses screaming. Every man wore Cyrnic's face, or Brisham's, or Viam's, or Walderan's—she heard a strange, high sound of pure fury and realized she was making it.

  A blow landed on her hip. Kyali shook her splintered shield off and got the sword in both hands, beginning the mounted Forms, making a space about herself that was filled with the wails of wounded men and horses. Ainhearag screamed and reared up, kicking a man, shouldering a horse aside. Kyali gripped the saddle with her knees, forced her blade through the arm-join of a chestplate with the Sevassis shield glaring bright on it, and spun to swing at the herald behind him. The blow took the man's head clean off, and the banner he was holding disappeared into the jostling mess as he fell.

  A great cry went up from her men.

  There should have been triumph, but she felt only the increasing pressure of Taireasa and Devin reaching for her. Her heart was cracking like a bowl, the pain and dark inside bleeding out—it was beyond bearing, she had nothing left to fight it with, and she screamed again, her throat going instantly raw with it. She swung the sword over and over without thought, until all around her there was a dreadful, perfect silence.

  They had broken the enemy line.

  No—they were behind it, all the left wing wrapped around it like a snake. Kyali let Ainhearag stumble to a halt and stilled herself with a ferocious effort, every limb trembling.

  She was still alive.

  There was no triumph in this either, only a vague, exhausted acceptance—that and the rage, the endless, angry wound. Killing didn't help. She suspected that nothing would.

  Tears were leaking slowly from her eyes. She bowed her head, because the officers of her wing were struggling toward her and she'd given them more than enough cause to doubt her already. She swiped at her face with shaking hands, looked up, and was struck by the sight of the center and right wings of her cobbled-together army meeting the Sevassis line, turning the whole valley into a heaving sea of metal under the bright, indifferent sky. Her cousins were holding the center, but the bulk of the Western effort was indeed falling there. Men were dying by the dozens. The right wing was struggling to echo her sweep, snagging in the brush-ridden ground on that side of the valley, doomed to fall when Sevassis turned its attention to them.

  They'd done better than she hoped, but they were still outnumbered, and numbers were going to tell. Her men were regrouping around her now, and there weren't many options left. Kyali tried to gather her scattered thoughts and wished hopelessly that Taireasa and her brother would stop pulling at her so.

  "Captain!"

  Gods, who was calling her that?

  She looked around, frowning, but she couldn't tell who it had been. She felt Devin's presence grow into something fierce and close, and she held her hand up to silence any other remarks while she tried to simultaneously fight her brother off and figure out where he was.

  Then she saw the metal flashing in the trees on the northern slope.

  As she squinted, it became a company of soldiers, every one of them ahorse. They broke past the treeline onto bare ground, pounding toward the Sevassis line. It was Devin, dear gods, and what was left of the missing Third Battalion. She saw it all in an instant, how it would happen.

  They were going to win.

  The new company hit the slope at a wild gallop and drove down. Sevassis buckled instantly, and a sound like a whole hall full of pots rattling rolled over her. Men were running from the field, chased down by her center and right lines. Her officers were cheering.

  Kyali sat numbly in the saddle, trying to feel something, trying to be glad. Even now there was only rage, and the futile, painful struggle to keep Taireasa and Devin from seeing it. Devin was fighting now, right in the thick of it: she could feel him more clearly than ever. His terror and his resolve not to lose her and Taireasa cracked her heart open further, a paralyzing, bittersweet sort of agony she'd never known. She doubled up, her hands pressed to her chest. Part of her was reaching for him, reaching for Taireasa. The pulling in her middle was agony. They were both so close that flashes of what they were seeing came to her—a tangle of men and swords, the faces of terrified villagers. She was lost in it, drowning under their love and their determination.

  "No," Kyali gasped. "Please—no—"

  Cyrnic's face. Walderan's. Pain, blood, failure, endless questions—fire—

  Her heart shut itself like a door, locking tight around the memory.

  Kyali straightened, dazed. Taireasa and Devin were gone. Only seconds had passed. Her officers were looking to her, worried, waiting. She stretched, trying to ignore the lonely, furious voice inside her crying out for her best friend and her brother. She could never have that, not without hurting them.

  She was alone. As she would have to be from this moment onward. She thought she could live with this.

  Somehow.

  "We have help!" she cried, hearing and hating the rough edge of pain in her voice. "Let's finish this! Ride for the center!"

  She kicked Ainhearag into a run and heard her men come racing behind her, their battle cries echoing off the watching mountain and empty dome of the sky. Her sword was in her hands. They were screaming her name, or her father's. It didn't matter which.

  CHAPTER 14

  "A harpy?"

  "Yes."

  "That's a bit extreme."

  "It is accurate, my Lord Prince."

  "She was fresh from battle. Nobody is at their best then. I'm sure her manners are perfect when she's in her element."

  "She was in her element then," Annan said emphatically, his usual non-expression suffering a little. Kinsey smothered a smile. He'd known Annan for years, and he'd never seen his lieutenant so aggravated. To be fair, it wasn't exactly unjustified. The Lady Corwynall had practically frozen the blood in his veins when she'd appeared at the end of the battle, grim-faced and misted with blood, to address him in a voice more appropriate to sentencing a hanging than thanking him for his company's assistance in the fight.

  But it was still funny to see how shocked Annan was, confronted with a commander both female and a year or two younger than Kinsey himself at the head of over a thousand men.

  "Elaria of Fellisdown commanded a battalion, didn't she?" Kinsey murmured, avoiding the uneasy glances of the Lardana soldiers they passed. They were busy building cairns, retrieving armor and blades, burying the dead.

  "That was a hundred years ago."

  "I'm just saying. There is precedent."

  "Probably much more of one here," Annan grumbled.

  Kinsey bit the inside of his cheek against a grin.

  They rode up the northern rise toward a great pavilion tent the Fraonir had provided. They were to meet both of the Fraonir Clan leaders and also Lady Taireasa Marsadron, the deposed queen of the Lardana. They had scraps of white cloth tied over the pommels of their swords. Kinsey looked back, over the ravaged valley and the yawning graves, the bodies, and shivered.

  "So, second thoughts?" he asked, in this last moment for them, and Annan huffed in stifled outrage.

  "Only a wagonload or three."

  "Three, is that all? I must be on the right track, then."

  Annan wasn't amused. "You trust too easily, my Lord Prince, and commit yourself too quickly to get the sense of a situation."

  "Well, I hope to get th
at now."

  "Too late, my lord; you are already committed." Frustration was written in the sullen hunch of Annan's shoulders. Kinsey felt bad about that, but not about the rest. He knew he should be worried at where his wild whim to trust a stranger had brought them, and more so still by the absence of any information about where they were headed now—but he found he was strangely cheerful about it all.

  He should probably be worried about that, too.

  "Maybe I’m bespelled?" Kinsey suggested, frowning mildly at the sky.

  "I thought of that."

  "Did you?" This was fascinating. "And am I?"

  "This is unusually rash for you, but I see nothing that suggests it."

  "Are there signs?"

  "I don’t know, my Lord Prince. I never took all this—this—for more than a child’s tale. And now I've been dropped in the midst of singing fools and harpies at the head of armies, chasing over the countryside after a rhyme a dead man wrote." Annan rubbed the back of his neck and glared at the ground.

  "It is rather extraordinary, when you put it that way. I think you can stop calling me ‘my Lord Prince’ now, by the way. I assure you no one else here is likely to."

  That earned him a glower and, after a moment, a short grunt that might have been laughter. "What do you suggest I call you instead?"

  "I'm sure you can think of a new title."

  "Oh, several," Annan said, dry as bone, and Kinsey snickered.

  "Just so you don't accuse me of—ah, Devin," he blurted, because the Bard had come to meet them at the edge of a great mass of encamped men. Meeting Devin's miserable gaze, Kinsey felt all the good humor flee him. Devin did not look as though winning a battle and being reunited with his sister and his queen had eased his mind at all.

  Quite the opposite, in fact.

  "You can leave your horses here," Devin said, and Kinsey dismounted without a thought to protocol. Annan eyed the army of foreigners they were now standing in the midst of and followed suit.