The Traitor’s Ruin

by Erin Beaty

  By the time she and Clare made it to the top of the tower, half the stars had faded. Rows of troops spread out in the twilight below, looking pathetically small, even in the contained area of the bowl. Beside her, Clare’s face was parchment white and her mouth drawn into a thin line. “I wish I hadn’t come,” she muttered.

  Sage was about to answer her when the glow of flames could be seen reflecting off the stone walls leading into the pass. Was it the dremvasha? That should’ve been too far to see.

  But no, it was torches carried by the lead rank to light the way through the dark canyon. The first Kimisar burst into the open area, appearing surprised to find opposition.

  The Casmuni and Demorans charged.

  * * *

  For the first hour, the Kimisar made little progress. Every time they gained a few yards into the bowl, the allied fighters drove them back again. Sage could see their side rotating men, having them peel away from the fight to let the fresher rank behind them take over. The sun peeked over the horizon, shining light into the battlefield through the Neck.

  If the dremvasha was having an effect, Sage didn’t see it.

  “Sage.” Clare tugged on her arm, but Sage was glued to the battle, trying to pick out the one figure she cared about most. “Sage.”

  “What?” she snapped, harsher than she meant to.

  The fortress’s watchtower was built to see both into the bowl and outside the pass itself. Clare pointed at the flat plain below. “Who is that?”

  Sage squinted at a column of figures approaching from the north, along the slopes. It couldn’t be reinforcements—no one lived in that direction. Sage led Clare down the steps of the tower to where they could look out a window and not be seen by the advancing group. The first of the new arrivals reached the mouth of the canyon, and after a brief discussion, several entered the pass. A few minutes later they returned and others gathered around them.

  “Come on.” Sage went lower to find a better place to look out at the men, and Clare followed.

  “They look like Demorans,” Clare whispered, and Sage nodded in agreement. Their clothes were definitely Demoran in style, but everything was worn and filthy, like they’d come a long way.

  Sage crept closer to the window until she could overhear them talking.

  Kimisar.

  They were discussing what they’d seen in the bowl, concluding whoever had their backs to them were fighting their countrymen. Several wanted to join in.

  Sage tried to make a quick count, getting lost twice at a hundred as they shifted around, but she was sure there were more than enough to cause a major problem. The Casmuni and Demorans weren’t expecting danger from the east. With the rising sun, they wouldn’t even see the Kimisar coming until they were right behind them.

  “What do we do?” whispered Clare.

  104

  HUZAR HAD TRIED to make it to the pass before dawn, hoping for the chance to sneak in under cover of darkness. As he and his men approached, he saw no light coming from the fortress in the rock, as if no one was there. Seeing nothing to stop them, Huzar decided to continue even as sunlight poured over the horizon.

  The sound of shouting and metal on metal echoed out of the entrance to the pass, and he sent a few men in to investigate. There was fighting in the round area beyond the narrow opening. That must be where the men manning the fortress had gone—to stop Kimisar coming through the pass. Huzar’s numbers were few, barely over 120, but the Casmuni were trapped in the bowl. If he came in from behind the main battle, the Kimisar could wear the Casmuni down on two fronts. He discussed it with the men around him, and they were all eager to join the fight.

  This was what real soldiers did—not ally with traitors, not take young boys hostage. They didn’t die under rock slides. They faced their enemies and fought like men.

  Huzar was organizing the company into columns and instructing them how he wanted them to spread out, when a scream interrupted him. A white horse came flying around the fortress wall, ridden by a Casmuni man waving a sword. The Kimisar instinctively scattered out of his way, and the rider flew into the pass.

  Shit. Just as the Casmuni weren’t looking behind them, Huzar had been complacent about who could sneak up on the Kimisar. The rider hadn’t attacked, though—he was going to warn the Casmuni inside.

  Huzar had lost the element of surprise.

  105

  ALEX ROTATED TO the rear ranks of the allied soldiers, taking the chance to catch his breath. Gramwell was next to him, leaning on his sword and panting.

  “Where’s the damn waterfire?” Alex said. “I haven’t seen any sign it’s being used.”

  “Want me to go look?” asked Gram.

  “Maybe you should.” The whinny of a horse made Alex turn around. Out of the golden light streaming through the pass came a rider on a white horse. He headed straight for Alex and skidded to a halt in front of him.

  “Alex!” Sage shouted down at him. “Thank the Spirit!” She sheathed the sword she was carrying.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Sage?”

  She waved a gloved hand behind her. “Kimisar,” she gasped. “Coming from behind.”

  “Where the bleeding hell did they come from?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But there’s over a hundred.”

  Alex grabbed the man next to him. “Turn around! Turn everyone around! They’re coming from behind us!” Soldiers began to react, forming a rear line. “Sage, you need to get out of here!”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not till all those Kimisar come through.”

  She was right. Just then a Demoran came running toward them, calling for Captain Quinn. “Over here!” he shouted back.

  A man from the dremvasha detail collapsed in front of Alex. “Sir, the waterfire! There was a rock slide. It’s half-buried, and so are most of the men. We can’t use it!”

  “Here they come!” someone yelled, and dozens of Kimisar came running out of the sunlight.

  Sage kicked the horse to get behind the line of fighting. Alex followed, keeping himself between her and the Kimisar. “I heard what he said about the dremvasha!” she shouted over the noise, and pointed to the path up the ridge. “I can’t go back—let me go help up there!”

  Alex held her gaze for a pair of heartbeats, then nodded and grabbed Lieutenant Gramwell beside him. “Go with her, Luke!”

  Sage yanked the reins around and took off for the canyon.

  106

  SAGE ABANDONED LANI’S horse when the ground became too steep for him to climb and scrambled up the side of the bowl on her hands and knees. From the ledge, she paused to look down on the battle below. The Kimisar coming from behind had changed the whole dynamic.

  She ran along the ridge and into the canyon mouth, trying to ignore the forty-foot drop on her right. The air became thick with dust, and the stone vibrated under her feet with the rhythm of the soldiers passing below. That must have set off the landslide. Sage pulled her head scarf up to cover her face and stepped over an arm sticking out of a pile of dirt and rock. At the last second, she stooped to brush her fingers across the dead man’s palm, whispering a quick prayer.

  Several soldiers were ahead, digging with hands and makeshift tools to free a crate of dremvasha half-buried in the hillside. The crate came free, but it was full of dirt now, too. A pair of men dragged it toward the ledge, and the earth began shifting to fill the new hole. Sage screamed for them to get out of the way as the hillside came loose and pushed the crate over the edge, along with one of the men. Watching him tumble made her dizzy enough to turn away and hug the slope behind her.

  When the dust settled, Sage was on one side of a vertical scar across the hill, while three men on the other held on to the last crate, which had been ripped open. She looked down on the Kimisar below. Dremvasha and pottery lay strewn on a newly formed hill, and the Kimisar ran over and around it. There was no sign of the man they’d lost, and she hoped for his sake he hadn’t survived the fall.

&
nbsp; Every few seconds another rank of Kimisar passed, faster than before, headed into the narrow entrance to the bowl. The only way to end this was to cut off the supply of invaders entirely.

  Sage looked back to the men on the other side of the rockslide. “Throw it all out!” she shouted, and waved.

  Clay pot after clay pot went over, the sounds of shattering pottery lost, for the most part, in the movement below. The only thing left was the water, which was on her side. Sage turned around to find the barrels of water half-buried. She began flinging rocks away with her hands, grateful she still wore her riding gloves.

  One of the men on the dremvasha side called out, telling her to break them open rather than dig them out. Sage reached for her sword, but the soldier shouted again and stretched across the scree between them to hand her an ax. Yes, that was probably better. Sage reached back, but she couldn’t quite grasp it, and he had to toss it to her.

  A quick glance assured her the last of the dremvasha would be on the ground soon. Sage gripped the ax with both hands as she turned back to the barrels and took a horizontal swing.

  The blade bounced off, jarring every bone in her body, and she nearly lost her footing. Setting her feet, she tried again, this time aiming at a downward angle. A few heavy splinters came off, but it was better than nothing. Again and again she hacked at the barrel, sometimes switching to an upward angle to make the opening that was taking shape wider. When she felt she’d weakened it to the last few blows, Sage climbed over the barrels to the other side. Once the water was released, she’d only have a few seconds to get the other barrel open before the canyon below went up in flames. She worked the second as she had the first, until she felt sure a couple more hits would have it spraying water over the ledge.

  Sage stopped for a moment to look back the way she’d come. Lieutenant Gramwell was flying down the path, covered in dirt and blood. “Kimisar coming behind me!” he shouted. “Run!”

  “I can’t!” she yelled. “I have to get these open!”

  Gram stopped and took in the situation, then nodded. “All right, do it! I’ll hold them off!” He turned and set his feet, gripping his sword with both hands.

  If she wanted to escape, she needed to be on the other side. Sage scrambled over the barrels again to where she’d begun, then raised the ax to break open the one on the opposite side. After three hits, the barrel burst open, pouring water from the hole in its side and onto the dremvasha below. Sage was positioning herself to finish the second when Gramwell staggered back against the barrel, gasping, his face gray.

  Sage screamed his name and dropped the ax to grab him before he fell over the edge, soaking one leg of her breeches with water in the process. The left side of his body was wet with blood, and as she hooked an arm around him and heaved him to her side, she felt a warm wetness soak through her sleeve.

  So much blood.

  What had happened? There were no Kimisar on the path she could see. Sage propped Gramwell against the steep hill and felt around his body, finding an arrowshaft buried almost to the fletching under his rib cage. The angle told her it had come from the valley below. There was light and heat at her back as the dremvasha ignited, and she prayed to the Spirit whoever had fired the arrow would be caught in its rage.

  “Be still,” she told Gramwell. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  But the depth and the blood told her there was nothing she could do. She was sure the arrow had pierced his lung, and probably also his heart.

  “I can’t— I can’t—” he gasped, blood bubbling on his blue lips.

  There was no place to lay him down, so Sage pulled his hands up to his chest and pinned him upright against the slope. He took a rattling breath, struggling to fill his lungs with air. The pool of blood beneath him expanded.

  “Clare,” she said, her face hovering over his. “Think of Clare.”

  “Cla-Clare,” Gramwell choked, spitting blood.

  “Yes. Think of how much you love her.”

  And she stayed with him until he could think no more.

  107

  HUZAR RAN AROUND a bend in the path and stopped short at the wave of heat and light coming from the canyon below. In the rocky slope, a half-buried barrel poured water from a split in its side, but rather than extinguish the fire below, it seemed to add to it. What kind of weapon was this? He gripped his sword and took a few more steps, looking for the bronze-haired Demoran he’d scuffled with a few minutes ago. On the other side of the barrels, the boy on horseback he’d followed out of the bowl stood straight and faced him. Huzar froze in shock as he recognized him. Her.

  He’d seen her first outside Tegann, when she’d climbed a tree and struck down his hawk with a sling. He’d thought about shooting her then; he’d had a clear shot, but something had stayed his hand. Perhaps it was because she reminded him of Ulara, the sister he’d lost three years ago in the famine. In any case, she was relatively harmless.

  Or so he’d thought.

  She’d used the same weapon to take down his second-in-command as they pursued the prince along the river. Barely minutes later he’d watched her defeat two of his men as they tried to climb into the boat with her and the prince—one killed, one badly wounded. And despite all that, he was glad he’d spared her the first time because, Spirit shield him, that kind of courage was rare. This woman and Captain Quinn had been his two greatest obstacles in the past year, and he could bring himself to hate neither.

  Now she stood before him in Casmuni clothes, her short hair flying in tangles around her face, the left side of her body covered in her companion’s blood, a fierce look in her eyes. And Huzar hesitated.

  In that moment of hesitation she drew the curved Casmuni sword from her belt and swung the blade around in a fiery arc reflecting the light below. She struck the barrel of water in front of her, and it split in half, sending gallons of water over the ledge in one rush.

  Fire exploded below, so intense Huzar took a step back.

  Triumph gleamed in the woman’s eyes, but the loss of weight in that barrel and the other leaking next to it changed everything. The slope shifted, the earth moving toward the edge, no longer held back by the mass of the contained water. At least one more barrel went over the ledge with it, and Huzar knew whatever was happening below was now beyond anything anyone could stop.

  The woman scrambled to get out of the way, and Huzar watched in horror as she climbed on top of the sliding land mass, clawing desperately at something to pull herself up with but finding nothing until she, too, went over the edge.

  108

  THE FALL OF forty feet was considerably less thanks to the landslides, but it was still quite a distance.

  Sage landed on her hip, her left hand thrown instinctively out to catch herself as her right curled around to protect her face. Her left sleeve and pant leg were drenched in blood and water, and when she tumbled down the mound of earth, she rolled over several shattered jars of dremvasha, which burst into flame as it touched the moisture on her clothes. She expected to feel heat, but there was none, only pain.

  Get out get out get out

  When she’d hit the ground, she knew which way was the shortest path out of the fire, but as she screamed and writhed, she lost all sense of direction, all sense of dignity.

  Don’t touch anywhere else

  It would only get worse if she got more of it on her. Sage lunged in the only direction that seemed possible to move in and nearly fainted from the wave of agony. Screaming gave her an anchor in consciousness, gave her the energy to lunge again.

  And again.

  And again.

  A tall figure stood on the edge of the fire around her, on her. Casseck. He reached out a gloved hand, and she rolled and threw her good arm at him, and he grasped it and yanked her out.

  The flames followed her from the river of fire as he dragged and rolled her across the sandy ground. Some of the jelly smeared and extinguished briefly before reigniting.

  Hands on her waist, jerking her b
reeches down. Half the cloth had burned away and the rest melted to her skin. She cried out as they came apart. Her sleeve was already gone, but Cass tore the edges of that off, too. And her glove. The thick glove came away, and she saw it was on fire, but it had protected her wrist and hand, though they were blistered. Somehow they hurt more than—

  Through a haze of pain, Sage managed to focus on her leg, which was red as raw meat but still had ashy patches of fabric on it. She reached for one with her right hand, thinking to peel it off, when Casseck grabbed her to prevent it.

  “I just want to get it off, it doesn’t hurt there,” she told him. Those places were islands of calm in the sea of agony that was the left side of her body.

  And then she saw her left arm, and it was close enough in her pain-blurred vision to see the same patches that were not, in fact, black cloth but charred skin.

  She felt no pain there because there was nothing left to feel.

  Sage looked back down to her leg, where the skin bubbled and blistered, and fresh waves of pain washed over her. Then she cast herself into the ocean of it and let the depths swallow her into their blackness.

  109

  AFTER THE LANDSLIDE, everyone had stood still, shocked by the explosion of flame and light and heat. But Alex had only one thought: Sage.

  He kept no count of the men he killed or maimed to get to her. Most were fleeing, not fighting, but he made no distinction as he cut his way through them. They were obstacles, nothing more.

  Casseck was already there, bent over Sage near a river of fire flowing out and around a huge mound of dirt and glass. Alex fell to his knees beside her and took everything in. Cass had already stripped away the affected clothing, though Alex suspected most of it had burned off. Her left arm and leg lay exposed, red and blistered with sickening patches of black, but she didn’t look in danger of burning more. He felt her neck, praying for a pulse, and found it, shallow and rapid. Alive but unconscious, which was better for her.