He pulled the bodice out of the pack and handed it to her as she wriggled into a tight servingwoman’s dress. She leaned over and pulled up the legs of her pants so they wouldn’t show under the dress, again giving Kylar an eyeful. He coughed.
She grabbed the bodice from his nerveless fingers. “Seriously, Kylar, stop acting like such a virgin—” Virgin! How he absolutely loathed the word! “I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve seen a woman naked.”
Actually, it was, but Kylar would have died—for real—before he admitted it to Vi. Elene had never let him see her breasts, though she hadn’t always stopped his hands from straying into that golden territory. She’d always wanted to save everything she could for when they were really married. And if Kylar had eroded those boundaries somewhat—bastard—every step seemed huge, a precious gift. It had been vastly frustrating then, but as Vi laced the bodice rapidly and adjusted the amount of cleavage, it was different. For Vi, showing her breasts was nothing. She didn’t even turn as she grabbed each breast within the bodice and pulled it this way and that to show it to best advantage. Kylar had thought that Elene’s were the ultimate of all breasts, but Vi’s breasts were fuller, larger. You couldn’t look at her and not notice her breasts. It automatically made her sexual—and yet… and yet, to her, they were just tits. Tools.
Elene was less blatantly sexual, maybe less sexual, period. But there was something cheap about Vi’s sexuality, something that told Kylar she took no joy from it. That had been taken from her, taken by her mother’s lecherous lovers, by Hu Gibbet, by Momma K’s clients and casual fucking. Kylar’s emotions skittered from aroused to mournful.
Vi picked up a wicker laundry basket and stuffed it full of clothes, including her own tunic. Under the last tunic, she secreted a dagger.
“How do I look?”
The outfit did look oddly familiar. She’d shown substantially less cleavage that day, in keeping with the modesty of the Drake household, but they were exactly the same clothes Vi had worn when she tried to kill him. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
She chuckled and turned, modeling for him. “Does it make my butt look big?”
“You get your big ass in the hall.”
She laughed and put the basket on her hip. She was provocative, gorgeous, tempting, and now she had to add fun to the mix? Dammit, he’d almost kissed her outside! No doubt he’d be wearing a knife in his back if he’d done it, but for a second he’d even thought that she wanted him to. She sashayed down the hallway, and the Khalidorans’ eyes locked onto her. One of them muttered an oath.
“Hello,” Vi said, coming to stand in front of the guard on the left. “I’m new here and I was wondering if—” Her knife slashed so deeply across the man’s neck it almost decapitated him.
Kylar broke the other man’s neck with a sharp twist and a meaty crack.
Vi looked over where he was—or wasn’t, since he was invisible.
“Un-fucking-believable,” she said. She cleaned the dagger and put it back in the basket. “Fine, you come in after ten seconds or as soon as you hear my voice. If the Godking wakes up, I’ll distract him and you kill him. If he stays asleep, I’ll take him.”
She opened the door slowly and silently and stepped inside.
A few moments later, she came out. Her face was green. “He’s not there,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Kylar tried to step past her, but she blocked him.
“You don’t want to go in there.”
He pushed past her.
The room was full of women. They stood frozen, like statues in various poses. One, on all fours, naked, supported a sheet of glass on her back, forming a table. Another, a tall noblewoman Kylar recognized but couldn’t name, stood on tiptoe, stretching seductively, one arm and one leg wrapped around a post of the Godking’s massive four-poster bed. Chellene lo-Gyre sat, legs crossed in her shift, in a wing-backed chair. Kylar didn’t know anything about her except her reputation for a fiery temper. Her expression showed it, as did her disheveled hair and the tension in her lean muscles. Most of the women were naked, the rest wore little. Two, on their knees, held a washbasin. Two others held a mirror. One was manacled to the wall, a scarf around her neck. Kylar’s breath stopped.
It was Serah Drake. Like all of them, she wasn’t as still as a statue; she was a statue. With a little cry, Kylar touched her face, touched the lips he’d once kissed. They were as yielding as living flesh, but cool, and there was no life in her open, shining eyes. Her flesh—all of the women’s flesh—had been frozen in place with some magic, then left here. As art.
Beneath the scarf, Kylar could see the bruises circling Serah’s neck. He looked away. There were two ways to die when hanged: if you fell far enough, your neck would break and you’d die quickly, otherwise you strangled slowly. Serah had died the hard way.
He stepped away, but everywhere his eyes turned, he saw gruesome detail. The women wearing bracelets concealed gashed wrists; chemises concealed pierced hearts; those wearing more clothing did so to conceal the imperfections of their taxidermy: they were the ones who’d thrown themselves from their balconies and now had bulges where no bulges belonged.
Kylar staggered like a man drunk. He needed air. He was going to throw up. He burst out onto the Godking’s wide balcony.
She sat on the stone railing, feet hooked through the posts for balance, leaning far back, naked, a nightgown in her hand, fluttering in the wind like a flag. Mags.
Kylar screamed. Talent leaked through his fury and the scream reverberated over the castle, echoing back from the courtyard far below. All life in the castle stopped. Kylar didn’t notice, nor did he notice the ka’kari rushing over his skin, the face of judgment covering his anguish.
He hammered a palm down on the stone railing and crushed it on one side of Mags, then again on her other side, then he lifted her and carried her back inside. The feeling of her skin, so like living skin, was obscene. But her limbs were locked in place. He laid her on the bed, then tore the bolts holding Serah Drake to the wall. He laid Serah beside her sister. As he covered them, he saw that each girl’s left foot was signed in a bubbly script, as if their corpses were art: Trudana Jadwin.
Vi was staring saucer-eyed from him to the shattered six-inch stone railing. “Fucking fuck,” she whispered. “Kylar, is that you?”
He nodded stiffly. He wanted to remove the mask of judgment, but he couldn’t. He needed it right now.
“I checked the concubines’ rooms,” Vi said. “Nothing. He must already be in the throne room.”
Kylar’s stomach flipped. He jerked involuntarily.
“What?” Vi asked.
“Bad memories,” Kylar said. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”
Dawn was coming. By killing the two guards, they’d tipped their own hourglass. Someone would check the men’s post soon—probably at dawn. Worse, the Cenarian army’s glass was already draining. The battle would begin soon and then the nasty surprises would start. If Logan were to have a chance to be king, Kylar needed to hand him a victory. Killing Garoth Ursuul would unman the Khalidorans.
They walked through the halls brazenly, Vi in her serving girl uniform, and Kylar invisible but flitting from doorway to doorway as if he weren’t, in case any meisters were wandering the halls. As they came to the last hallway, they passed six of the largest highlanders Kylar had ever seen. Kylar dodged behind some statuary as he saw that the highlanders were accompanied by two Vürdmeisters. Most curious of all, the protection seemed to be for one woman—apparently one of the Godking’s concubines or wives—all wrapped up in robes and veils so that not an inch of her skin showed.
When Kylar drew his knives to kill them, Vi laid a hand on his arm. He turned judgment’s eye on her and she flinched, but she was right. A fight here was a distraction that might jeopardize the real mission, and there was nothing that was going to stop Kylar from killing Garoth Ursuul.
Kylar’s stomach was a riot. It didn’t quiet even when the group rounded a corner
and disappeared. This was the same hallway he’d stood in with Elene and Uly, when he’d gone to his first death.
He calmed. Garoth Ursuul was far more powerful than Roth Ursuul, but Kylar was more powerful now, too. He was more confident. He’d been a boy trying to prove he was a man then, now he was a man making a choice, knowing what it might cost.
He smiled recklessly. “So, Vi, you ready to kill a god?”
66
The men perched on the crest of a hill south of the battle-field: six of the Sa’seurans’ most powerful magi. Their clothing betrayed none of that. Each dressed in the plain clothes of a trader from his own homeland: four Alitaerans, a Waeddryner, and a Modaini. Their sturdy pack-horses even bore a respectable amount of trade goods, and if their mounts were a little better than most traders would own, they weren’t so fine as to attract comment. But if the men’s clothes didn’t betray them, their bearing did. These were men who strode the earth with the assurance of gods.
“This oughtn’t be pretty,” the Modaini said. Antoninus Wervel was a short butter-tub of a man with a bulbous, florid nose and a fringe of brown hair combed over his shiny pate. In the Modaini fashion, he wore kohl around his eyes and had darkened and lengthened his eyebrows. It gave him a sinister look. “How many meisters you figure they’ve got?” he asked one of the Alitaeran twins, Caedan.
The gangly youth twitched. Caedan was one of two Seers in the group, and he was supposed to be spotting. “Sorry, sorry. I was just—are that man’s bodyguards all women?”
“Surely not.”
“They are,” Lord Lucius said. He was the leader of the expedition, and the other Seer. But he was more interested in the opposing side. “The Khalidorans have at least ten meisters, probably twenty. They’re standing close together.”
“Lord Lucius,” Caedan said timidly. “I think they’ve got six Vürdmeisters there, back farther, in the middle. It looks like they’re gathered around something, but I can’t tell what it is.”
The butter-tub hmmphed. “How many of the Touched fight for Cenaria?” He said it to irritate the Alitaerans. In Modai, touched meant Talented, not crazy as it did in Alitaera.
Caedan was oblivious. “There’s a man and woman in the Cenarian lines, both trained, standing together. Several others untrained.”
“And among the Ceuran raiders?”
“I haven’t seen the Ceurans since they went around the bend.”
The other young Alitaeran, Jaedan, looked unhappy. He was the identical twin of the young Seer, with the same handsome features, same floppy black hair, and totally different gifts.
“Why are they being so stupid?” he asked. “We all saw the Lae’knaught army coming up from the south. Five thousand lancers who hate the Khalidorans more than anything. Why don’t the Cenarians wait until they get here?”
“They might not know the Lae’knaught are coming,” Lord Lucius said.
“Or they might not be coming. They might be waiting to pick off the victor. Or Terah Graesin might want all the glory for herself,” Wervel suggested.
Jaedan couldn’t believe it. “We aren’t just going to sit here, are we? By the Light! The Cenarians will be destroyed. Twenty meisters. We can take them. I’m good for three or four, and I know the rest of you are as good or better.”
“You forget our mission, Childe Jaedan,” Lord Lucius said. “We haven’t been sent to fight in anyone’s war. The Khalidorans aren’t a threat to us—”
“The Khalidorans are a threat to everyone!” Jaedan protested.
“SILENCE!”
Jaedan cut off, but the defiance on his face didn’t alter a whit. The Cenarian line began moving at a slow jog, allowing the army, like an enormous beast, to gain momentum.
Caedan twitched. “Did—did any of you feel that?” he asked.
“What?” Wervel asked.
“I don’t know. Just—I don’t know. Like an explosion? May I go see what the Ceurans are doing, Lord Lucius?”
“We need your eyes on the battle. Watch and learn, childe. We have a rare opportunity to see how the Khalidorans fight. You, too, Jaedan.”
The Khalidoran army was formed in loose ranks, with space beside every warrior for an archer. The archers readied themselves now, each putting arrows in the ground where they could be grabbed quickly. In the front of everyone, the two-man teams of meisters sat on horseback. To the Seers, they glowed.
“What will they do, Caedan?” Lord Lucius asked.
“Fire, sir? And lightning second?”
“And why?”
“Because it will scare the shit of the Cenarians? I mean, uh, the effects on morale, sir,” Caedan said.
The Cenarian line was still jogging forward. They were four hundred paces away now. The group under General Agon had advanced to the fore and split. But they didn’t just split into one or two or even three groups. His few horsemen, and his foot soldiers, formed a fragmented line as long as the Cenarian front.
“What the hell is he doing?” one of the Alitaerans asked.
For a long moment, no one answered. He couldn’t hope to break the Khalidoran line with such a ragged line of his own. His move also left a gap in the Cenarian center. But even as the men watched, another of the Cenarian generals, Duke Wesseros, ordered his men into the gap.
“It’s genius. He’s minimizing his losses,” Wervel said.
for a moment no one asked. If there was one thing magi hated more than not understanding something, it was not understanding something after someone had understood it first and had given them a hint.
“What?” Jaedan asked.
“Think like a meister, childe. You’d have enough vir for what, five? ten? fireballs before you’re spent. Usually, you’ll kill two to five men with each fireball. With the line this thin, you’ll kill one. You might even miss completely. Agon knows he’s gambling. If the main line comes to support his line too late, his first line will be slaughtered, but if they hit within five or ten seconds, he’ll have saved hundreds and nullified the, uh, effects on morale. It looks like we’ve found a general who knows how to fight meisters. There might be hope for Cenaria after all.”
At two hundred paces, the line picked up speed.
The archers in the Khalidoran lines loosed their first volley, and a flock of two thousand black-feathered arrows took flight. For a long second, they darkened an already bleak sky, casting the shadow of death across the dawn. When they dove back to earth, they buried their barbed beaks in earth and armor and the flesh of men and horses.
Again, the dispersed ranks saved hundreds, but up and down the Cenarian line, men flopped over onto the stubbly fields, going from a full sprint to the rest of death in an instant. Others fell, injured, legs or arms pierced, and were trampled by their friends and countrymen a moment later. Horses lost riders and continued the charge merely because the horses to their right and left still charged. Riders lost horses and pitched to the earth at great speed, sometimes flying free of the saddle and rising to run with their earthbound comrades, sometimes getting caught in the saddle and crushed beneath their horse’s body.
The Khalidoran army performed as only veterans can. The archers loosed as many arrows as they could in a few seconds, then, as a flag went up, each grabbed his remaining arrows and retreated. There were perfect lines in the ranks to allow each archer to get to the back behind the spearmen and swordsmen who would protect them from the melee. As they retreated, without even a separate order being given, the rear lines filled in the gaps the archers had left. The maneuver was nothing special, but the speed at which the army carried it out with thousands of enemies sprinting toward it was.
The meisters loosed fire. Their original plan in shambles, some of the meisters hurled balls of fire at the charging horses while others, still hoping for the effect of running into a firestorm, swept gouts of fire across the stubbly fields. What would have ordinarily broken up and disoriented an entire line in the crucial seconds before impact didn’t even slow the Cenarians.
&nb
sp; The crash of the lines was distinctly audible to the magi, even as far away as they were. Men and horses impaled themselves on spears and their momentum carried them into the Khalidoran ranks. Others crashed full force into Khalidoran shields and sent men sprawling, but the Cenarians in that first rank must have been veterans. In most armies, no matter what their commanders told them, many of the men would slow before that last impact. The idea of crashing full force into a line bristling with swords and spears was too viscerally paralyzing for most men. These had no such doubts. They burst into the Khalidoran line with all their might. It was an awesome and fearful sight.
But they were almost swallowed up before the main body of the Cenarian line hit the Khalidorans. The shock of it rippled through the entire Khalidoran line, pushing them back a good ten feet.
On their horses, the meisters laid about themselves with fire and lightning, but far behind the Cenarian front lines, archers on horseback were hunting them, riding back and forth, stopping, shooting arrows from short bows and moving on. The shots seemed impossible—a short bow killing from two or three hundred paces? Caedan checked the archers again, but they weren’t Talented, he was sure of it. To Caedan, it was like watching candles being snuffed one at a time as meisters toppled from their saddles.
The lines heaved back and forth and disintegrated into a thousand clumps of individual combat. Horses wheeled and stamped and kicked and bit. Meisters burned holes in men, set fire to others, laid about themselves with cudgels or swords of pure magic, and sometimes fell dead, pierced by arrows.
In five minutes, seventeen of the twenty meisters were riddled with arrows and the Khalidoran line was stretching at the middle. The giant Cenarian who’d led the first charge seemed to be a beacon of hope. Wherever he went, the Cenarians pushed to go there, too. And now, he was pushing to cut all the way through the Khalidoran line.
Caedan muttered an oath. “Where did they come from?” he asked. The magi followed his eyes. Rank upon rank of Khalidoran highlanders were forming up to each side of the battlefield.