Vialine shrieked as she leapt between the pillars and onto the short man’s back, grabbing him around his bull neck, clutching at the wrist of his sword arm. He tried to throw her off, shield flailing, but that left a gap. Thorn dived at him, her left knee buckled, pain stabbing through her leg but she caught his armor as she fell and dragged herself up, snarled as she drove the broken sword blade up under his jaw. He spoke blood, the empress squealing as they crashed down on top of her.
Thorn rolled just in time, the Vansterman’s heavy ax flashing past, thudding through Thick Neck’s mail and deep into his chest. Thorn half-scrambled, half hopped up as he struggled to drag his ax free, the breath burning in her heaving chest.
“Brand!” she screamed in a broken voice. She heard a step behind her, lurched around and saw a flash of metal. The duke punched her in the cheek, made her head jolt, but it was a feeble sort of blow, barely even staggering her.
She clutched at his gilded breastplate. “That your best?” she hissed, but the words were blood, drooling down her chin. There was something in her mouth. Cold, and hard, across her tongue. That was when she realized he’d stabbed her. He’d stabbed her and the dagger was right through her face, between her jaws, his hand still around the grip.
They stared at each other in the darkness, neither quite believing what had happened. Neither quite believing she was still standing. Then, by the glimmering of torchlight, she saw his eyes go hard.
She felt the blade shift in her mouth as he tried to tear it free and she bit down on it, kneed him in his side with her wounded leg, twisted her head, twisting the bloody grip of the dagger out of his limp hand. She shoved him clumsily away, staggering sideways as the Vansterman swung at her, his ax grazing her shoulder and ripping a shower of leaves from the bushes as she hopped back toward the fountain.
Everyone’s got a plan until they start bleeding and she was bleeding now. Her leg was hot with it, her face sticky with it. No plans any more. She snorted and blew a red mist.
She caught the grip and dragged the dagger out of her face. Came out easy enough. Might have been a tooth came with it, though. Gods, she was dizzy. Her leg had stopped throbbing. Just numb. Numb and wet and her knee trembling. She could hear it flapping inside her blood-soaked trousers.
Drowsy.
She shook her head, trying to shake the dizziness out but it only made things worse, the blurry gardens tipping one way then back the other.
Duke Mikedas had drawn his sword, was dragging the corpse of the thick-necked man away so he could get at the empress.
Thorn waved the knife around but it was so heavy. As if there was an anvil hanging off the point. The torches flashed and flickered and danced.
“Come on,” she croaked, but her tongue was all swollen, couldn’t get the words around it.
The Vansterman smiled as he herded her back toward the fountain.
She tripped, clutched at something, knee buckling, just staying upright.
Kneeling in water. Fish flitting in the darkness.
Vialine screamed again. Her voice was getting hoarse from it.
The Vansterman wafted his ax back and forward and the big blade caught the light and left orange smears across Thorn’s blurred sight.
The empress said don’t kneel but she couldn’t get up.
She could hear her own breath, wheezing, wheezing.
Didn’t sound too good.
Gods, she was tired.
“Brand,” she mumbled.
HE CAME UP THE steps running.
Caught a glimpse of a darkened garden, a path of white stones between flowering trees, and statues, and dead men scattered in the shadows about a torchlit fountain—
He saw Thorn kneeling in it, clutching at wet stone carved like snakes, a dagger in her other hand. Her face was tattered red and her clothes torn and stuck to her dark and the water pink with blood.
A man stood over her with an ax in his hand. The Vansterman from the market.
Brand made a sound like a boiling kettle. A sound he never made before and never heard a man make.
He tore down that path like a charging bull and as the Vansterman turned, eyes wide, Brand caught him, snatched him off his feet like the north gale snatches up a leaf and rammed him at a full sprint into a statue.
They hit it so hard the world seemed to shake. So hard it rattled Brand’s teeth in his head. So hard the statue broke at the waist and the top fell in dusty chunks across the grass.
Brand might’ve heard the Vansterman’s shattered groan if it wasn’t for the blood pounding in his skull like Mother Sea on a storm day, blinding him, deafening him. He seized the Vansterman’s head with both hands and rammed it into the marble pedestal, two times, three, four, chips of stone flying until his skull was bent and dented and flattened and Brand flung him down ruined onto the path.
Thorn was slumped against the fountain, her face all the wrong colors, skin waxy pale and streaked with blood and her torn cheeks and her mouth and her chin all clotted black.
“Stay back!” someone shrieked. An older man in a gilded breastplate with a sheen of sweat across his face. He had the Empress Vialine about the neck, a jewelled sword to her throat, but it was too long for the task. “I am Duke Mikedas!” he bellowed, as if the name was a shield.