One of the Sons stepped forward, leveling his sword at her chest. She swatted it aside with the flat of her hand, slammed the other into the soldier’s throat, then stepped past him as he dropped. The motion didn’t even seem violent. It seemed-sensible, efficient. She hadn’t even bothered to draw her own weapons.
“Kettral,” Lehav said grimly.
“Kettral indeed,” Adare replied. “The question is, whose.”
“Well, obviously they’re not fucking ours,” Nira snapped, “since we don’t know them, and they’re gutting our men.”
Adare watched a moment longer. “Not gutting them,” she said. “They’re not even hurting them.”
The red-haired woman looked up as though she’d heard the words, found Adare’s eyes, and spread her hands. “Call off your dogs,” she shouted. “We’re here to talk.”
Another man came at her, spear extended. She pivoted, grabbed the shaft, and tossed him half a dozen feet onto a flat-roofed building just south of the wall. She caught the next soldier’s sword on the spear, kicked him in the crotch with a booted foot, knocked his blade away as he fell, and stepped past him. They were maybe forty paces off now. The woman didn’t look frightened. She didn’t even look winded. She looked pissed off.
“If they keep this shit up,” she shouted, “we’re going to have to hurt someone, and I don’t like hurting Annurians.”
“I will deal with this,” Lehav said grimly.
“No,” Adare growled. “Call back your men.”
The commander glanced at her, face unreadable, then barked out the order. The Sons remaining between the Kettral and the tower-maybe a dozen all told-hesitated, then inched backward, blades still drawn. They might have ceased to exist for all the attention the red-haired woman paid them. From somewhere in the streets below, an arrow flashed up, but before Adare could shout, before she could even flinch, it glanced aside, as though striking an invisible wall. The leader of the Kettral didn’t pay attention to that, either, but behind her another woman, not much more than a girl, really, drew her own bow and fired back, three times in quick succession. There were no more arrows from the street.
“Enough killing,” Adare said.
“We’re not killing anyone,” the woman snapped. “Annick’s shooting stunners, and I’m relying on my fucking palms.” She held them up, as though to make the point.
“You are perpetrating violence against my men.”
“Your men are idiots. I told them I needed to talk to you. They were unhelpful.”
Kegellen chuckled merrily. “It is not often that people live up to their reputation, but I’ll admit to being charmed by these Kettral.”
The Sons of Flame had fallen back almost to the tower itself, and Adare studied the Kettral as they approached. It was possible that il Tornja had sent them; the man was the titular commander of all Annurian military orders, after all. On the other hand, it seemed a strange sort of assassination attempt that would take place here, in the full light of day, in the middle of a thousand soldiers.
“Leave your weapons with the soldiers at the tower’s base,” Adare said finally. “Come up, and we can talk.”
The Kettral leader nodded, but Nira was grumbling at Adare’s side. “Not sure if ya just saw that pale-skinned bitch slap her way through half your fucking army, but I don’t think the not havin’ of weapons is really gonna slow her down.”
Adare glanced over at Lehav and Kegellen. “They’re armed.”
Kegellen spread her hands. “I am a slow old woman with a fan.”
“This woman is fast,” Lehav said, watching the Kettral intently as they approached and surrendered their weapons.
The three of them seemed to be carrying enough steel to arm an Annurian legion: twin blades and belt knives, throwing knives and bows and arrows. It all went into a glittering heap. If they were worried about disarming, it didn’t show. The Sons, on the other hand, for all that they had the numbers and the weapons, looked ready to leap from the ramparts.
It was only when the red-haired woman finally stomped up the stairs that Adare was able to see how young she was. Despite the scars and the muscle knotting her frame, she looked younger than Adare herself, although the look in those eyes was anything but naive.
“Your Radiance,” she said, nodding so shallowly the motion barely qualified as a genuflection. “My name is Gwenna Sharpe. I knew your brother. Both of them, actually. Where’s Kaden?”
Adare’s heart thundered inside her. She kept her face still. “You were on Valyn’s Wing.”
“All three of us,” the woman replied. She studied Adare boldly. “Not sure if you got the news, but he died. Up north in Andt-Kyl. Heard you were there, too.”
Adare tensed, and Lehav, hearing something dangerous in the woman’s voice, took half a step forward.
The woman glanced over at the soldier. “Nice sword. Get any closer to me, and I’ll put it in your eye.”
“Gwenna,” said the man standing behind her. He was as dark-skinned as she was pale, as soft-spoken as Sharpe was brash.
“This is Talal,” she said, nodding to him. “He thinks I need to have a better attitude. Walk more softly. Keep the blades sheathed. That sort of thing.” As she spoke, her eyes never left Adare’s. Her smile was almost feral. “Thing is, I’ve had pretty good luck with the blades so far.…”
48
“We missed,” the Flea said grimly. “He’s not dead.”
“How do you know?” Valyn asked.
“I saw it. The explosion blew open the crown of the hill, but Balendin had moved off the crest a few minutes before. The blow hit him hard enough to knock him down. He was bleeding pretty bad, but he was alive. They carried him off while you were trying to fight the entire Urghul nation by yourself.”
Valyn closed his eyes. It was cold inside the chamber at the heart of Mierten’s Fort, cold in the darkness of his own mind. The savage joy that had borne him up all afternoon had vanished. His bones ached. His muscles felt strained beyond their limits. Dozens of shallow cuts burned on his skin. When he shifted, he could feel the scabs break open and the blood start weeping again.
And he was in better shape than some of the others. Of the six who had gathered just after the sun set to pound out the next day’s strategy, none had escaped unscathed. Belton walked with an audible limp. Newt kept coughing over and over, blood rattling in his chest as he bandaged a wound to Sigrid’s arm. The Flea and Huutsuu both smelled of blood, although Valyn had no way to gauge their injuries further. And they were, comparatively, the lucky ones. Outside of the old keep, sprawled out on the grass in the shelter of the crumbling wall, wounded legionaries were groaning, or cursing, or just dying silently.
“That leach bastard might be hurting,” Belton spat, “but so are we. I lost twelve men today. Another dozen probably won’t make it through the night, and I haven’t even counted those busted up too bad to fight.”
“Be glad,” the Flea replied.
“Glad? Glad for what?”
“That you didn’t lose them all.”
“Not yet,” Belton said. “The Urghul will come again tomorrow, leach or no. And now there’s a hole in the ’Kent-kissing wall. My men are exhausted, and now they’ll be up all night trying to plug that gap. What do you expect them to do in the morning?”
“I expect them to fight,” the Flea said quietly. “Put your wounded on horses and send them south. Have them warn the farmers and townsfolk between here and Annur. The rest of us fight until we win or we die. Each day we hold buys time.”
“Win? We can’t win,” the legionary exploded. “We’re facing the entire Urghul nation.”
“Then I guess we’ll die,” the Flea replied evenly.
“The horses,” Huutsuu cut in, “are mine. I came here to kill the Kettral leach, not to give up my mounts to save a soft people from their own destruction.”