Their minds seized on hers and held it. She struggled to free herself from the confusion, wrenching her mind out of the desperate, unconscious clutching of theirs—and suddenly her thoughts brushed against something.
Something horrible.
There were no words for what she felt at that moment, as time stood frozen for her and she knew how a hunted rabbit must view a great, slavering hound. Whatever this was, it was cold, if a thought could be cold, cold as the slimy leeches living in the swampy fen below the cattle pastures. There was something sly about it, and filthy—not a physical filth, but a feeling that the mind behind these thoughts would never be contented with pleasures most folk considered normal. Kero couldn’t quite decipher them either; what she experienced was similar to what she had “heard” as her ability first appeared—as if she were listening to someone speaking too quietly for the exact words to be made out. There was only a sense of speech, not the meaning.
But worst of all, that brief brush created a change in those not-quite-readable thoughts, as if she had alerted the owner of the thoughts that he—or she—or it—was being observed.
The back of her neck crawled, and gooseflesh rose on her arms, as the thoughts took on a new, sharp-edged urgency. Propelled by fear, she managed to tear her mind away, and slammed the doors in the walls of her protections closed.
She opened her eyes, sick and sweating with fear, to discover that far less time had passed than she imagined.
The servants were still clogging the doorway, and the screaming from beyond had only increased.
For an instant, all she wanted to do was to scream and cower with the rest of them—or even faint as some of the kitchen girls had already done, sprawling unnoticed beneath the table. At that moment, something as hard and impassive as the walls around her mind rose up to cut off her emotions. Suddenly she could think, calmly.
The door to the back court—if they come in behind us, we’ll be trapped—
Freed from the paralysis of fear, she ran to the back door of the kitchen, slammed it shut, and dropped the iron bar of the night-lock into place across it. The noise behind her was so overwhelming that the sound of the heavy bar dropping into the supports was completely swallowed up in the general chaos.
She whirled, stood on her tiptoes to see over the mob crowding between her and the door, and looked frantically for two people—Wendar, and the cook. Wendar’s balding head appeared in a clear spot for a moment next to the table, and she spotted the cook, burly arm upraised and brandishing a poker, beside him. Cook was snouting something, but she couldn’t even hear his voice above the others.
Wendar served with Father, and Cook takes no nonsense from anyone—in fact, Cook looks like he’s ready to lead a charge back in there!
She dove into the press of bodies and struggled across the kitchen, elbowing and punching her way past hysterical servants who seemed to have no more sense left in them than frightened sheep. As she dragged a last wailing girl out of her way by the back of her rough leather bodice, Kero got Wendar’s attention by the simple expedient of grabbing his collar and dragging herself to him. Or more specifically, to the vicinity of his ear.
“We’ve got to stop them at the door,” she screamed, hardly able to hear herself. “We can hold them there, but if they get in here, they’ll kill us all!”
Most likely Wendar didn’t have any better idea of who “they” were than Kero did, but at least he saw the sense of her words immediately. He turned and reached across the table for Cook’s shirt; satisfied that he would handle the rest, Kero looked for weapons, snatched up a heavy, round pot lid and the longest meat knife within reach, and ran for the door.
She reached it not a moment top soon.
There was no warning that the invaders had found the half-hidden stair to the kitchen. He was just there; a squat, broad shadow in the doorway, sword negligently stuck through his belt, plainly expecting no resistance. He paused for a moment and squinted into the brightly-lit kitchen, then he saw her, and grinned, reaching for her.
Kero had no time to think. Training took over as wit failed.
“This’s no dance lesson, girl!” She could hear the armsmaster’s bellow in the back of her mind even as she slashed for the man’s unprotected eyes. “This’s fightin’ o’ th’ dirtiest—y’ hit yer man now an’ hit ‘im so’s ‘e knows ‘e’s friggin ‘-well been hit!”
Armsmaster Dent could have been dismissed for teaching Kero anything besides archery, and well he knew it. He’d done his best to discourage her when she presented herself beside Lordan for training. It was only when he caught her clumsily trying blows against the pells with a practice blade too long and heavy for her, and realized that Rathgar would assume he’d been training Kero anyway if her father ever found her out there himself, that he made a bargain with her.
In return for a reluctant promise never to touch a longer weapon, he promised to teach her knife-fighting. He hadn’t been happy about it, but Kero had made it very clear that it was the only way to keep her out of the armory and the practice ground.
Knife-work was, as Dent put it, the dirtiest, lowest form of combat, and figuring that if she ever really needed that training, it would be a case of desperation, he had taught her every trick he’d learned in a lifetime of street scuffling.
By some miracle, knife-work was also the only form of combat suited for the close confines of the kitchen doorway; the only kind of situation where a knife-fighter would be at an advantage against a swordsman. In the back of her mind, Kero thanked whatever deity had inspired that bargain with Dent, and slashed again at the man’s face when he evaded the wicked edge of her blade with a startled oath.
He reached for his own weapon, hampered by the wall at his side and the stairs at his back, further hampered when the quillons caught on his ill-kept armor.
Then she was no longer alone; Cook and Wendar were beside her, Cook armed with a spit as long as her arm in one hand and a cleaver in the other, and Wendar (with a pot over his bald head like an oddly-shaped helm) with the even longer spit used when they roasted whole pigs and calves. Cook stabbed at him with the wicked point of the spit and the man dodged away, moving into Wendar’s reach. Wendar brought the heavy, cast-iron rod down on the man’s head, and caved his helm in completely. The brigand fell backward, but another took his place.
Now there were more men piling down the staircase; how many, Kero couldn’t tell. One of them dragged the first out of the way, and the man on the stairs pulled him into darkness.
But the three defenders had the doorway blocked against all comers, with Kero going low, Wendar, high, and the Cook holding the middle and protecting them both with Kero’s pot lid. Then one of the young squires began lobbing ladles of hot turnips over their heads and into the faces of their opponents, using the ladle like a catapult. The stairs were already slippery; that made them worse, and no one fights well with scalding vegetables being flung in his eyes.