The priestess and my relatives look up, trying to find the voice in the crowd.
“I’m the one with magic. You have the wrong sister. I’m the one who needs to be sacrificed!”
Kellyn turns to me. “What are you doing? Shut up. Are you trying to make this harder?”
“Let her through!” a voice rings out. And the bodies shove aside, leaving a path up to the stand.
“Never mind,” Kellyn corrects. “Carry on, bladesmith.”
There’s no way we can fight everyone in this room. I had hoped it would be only Volanna and her sons, but of course the priestess would want to make a spectacle of this. We’ve no hope of fighting a hundred or more city folk.
“I make magical weapons!” I shout. “Look, here they are!” I raise the shortsword higher, which is black as night when I loose the blade. “Take me and let her go.”
“We can’t be sure she’s telling the truth,” the priestess says as the three of us finally reach the front. “We should take them both, just to be safe. We can’t risk the blight of magic infecting this city once more.”
“The missive we received was that one of the sisters was carrying a magicked weapon,” Volanna says. “Perhaps if we just confiscated the weapon and let the poor girls go—”
“Out of the question,” the priestess says.
Temra is straining from her bonds, shouting underneath the gag, her words unintelligible.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her, stepping forward.
“Oh, like hells,” Kellyn says from behind me. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You, wicked priestess, are going to hand over the feisty one, and we’re going to leave the city, never to be seen again. No one’s committing murder tonight. The law forbids this. Now let her go.”
The priestess clutches her dagger more firmly, her knuckles turning white. “No. The Goddesses demand that this filth be purged from our midst. We will not sin against their wishes.”
“The law has legalized magic. You are sinning against the realm,” Petrik volleys back.
“The realm has become corrupt. We must take a stand. It must stop.”
Kellyn sighs and draws his longsword. “It’s not murder if you’re defending your life, and I’ll be glad to rid this town of you.” Kellyn points the considerable length of his sword toward the priestess.
“Take one more step and she dies!” the priestess shouts, holding the blade to Temra’s throat now. “Sotherans, grab the other.”
“No!” Volanna says, but her sons start toward me anyway.
Kellyn puts himself in front of me, blocking their path. I almost make the mistake of feeling gratitude before I remember how he didn’t immediately agree to help me save my sister.
From beside me, Petrik asks, “Should I throw the spear?”
“No, it might hit Temra. It’ll hit any flesh. That won’t work.”
For all of two seconds I consider the usefulness of Secret Eater, but that won’t work either. Temra can easily get injured if I start swinging that around. And so can Petrik and Kellyn. It’s a weapon of mass destruction. Utterly useless if you’re trying to protect someone other than yourself, unless you have the training to use it with precision.
Midnight isn’t helpful right now. That leaves …
“The staff, Petrik. Give it to me.”
“What? Why?”
“Now is not the time for your endless questions!”
He swaps me the staff for the sword.
I have impeccable aim when it comes to swinging a hammer, but throwing a projectile is another matter. Still, if it hits Temra, it won’t kill her.
I take aim and throw for all I’m worth.
The metal cuffs on either side of the wood cause it to turn end over end, and the magic gives it even more strength.
But I still have to direct it.
The staff misses the priestess completely, as I’d intended, but I shove into Petrik hard, altering the path between me and the spinning weapon.
Because when the staff starts turning end over end, back toward its caster, it hits the priestess in the head on the return. Her eyes roll into the back of her skull as she slumps to the ground, dropping the knife. The staff twirls back toward me, and I catch it round the middle.
“Boomerang staff?” Petrik asks in wonder.
I forgot that I never told Petrik what the staff did. Kellyn interrupted the conversation by demanding Secret Eater be used on him.
I set Twirly—Temra named it—on the ground and grab the shortsword from Petrik before racing toward my sister. Now that Petrik knows how the weapon works, I trust him to use it wisely.
And so he does.
I watch it spin out of the corner of my eye. Volanna’s sons are in a line, trying to reach Kellyn. The staff clonks all three of them, turning over itself, hitting a different one on each rotation. The first takes it in the stomach; the second, the head; the third, the crotch.
Kellyn doesn’t pause before stepping forward to finish dispatching the men, knocking each one out with the pommel of his sword. He dodges the staff as it flies back toward Petrik.
I reach Temra and use Midnight to cut her bonds. She removes her gag as I work at the ties on her ankles.
“I’m so sorry for what I said,” Temra says. “Ziva—”
“Later,” I say.
When Volanna tries to advance, I hold out the shortsword.
“I swear I didn’t mean you girls harm. This was out of my control. I couldn’t ignore the threat of magic.”
I shake my head in disgust. “You failed us. Just as you failed your son. Our father was so ashamed of you that he ran away so he could marry Mother, knowing she had magic. They were happy. And so were we. Now you’ve lost us. We won’t be seeing you again.”
“Bladesmith!” Kellyn shouts, and I turn to see the whole room of devotees standing from their pews, getting ready to charge.
“There’s a back exit,” Volanna says. “Through there. Go!”
We could be trapping ourselves, but our only other option is to push through the horde of bodies.
We run.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Volanna did not lie, it turns out. So we’ve one small thing to be grateful for. As soon as we step down from the alabaster steps of the church, we take off.
The angry mob follows.
I suppose the good news is none of them carry weapons, but faith appears to count for a lot.
I hand the shortsword over to Temra, since she has a knack for it, and keep the spear for myself. Not that I can actually throw the weapon, because then I’d have to go back to retrieve it. But Petrik has no problem throwing the staff as hard as he can, taking out waves of Thersans in the process. They fall down in the road, tripping the others next to them. The staff whizzes back to Petrik’s outstretched hand each time, like a lodestone drawn to iron.
Bit by bit we gain some distance.
Then they start throwing things.
The first rock catches Kellyn in the shoulder. The second, square on his back.
“I see how it is. Aim for the biggest target. That does it.” He plants his feet, refusing to run any longer. The rest of us slow our pace but don’t stop.
“Kellyn!” Temra shouts over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
With the tip of his blade, he draws a line in the dirt road, from one tree line to the next, covering the whole width of it.
He shouts in a voice I’ve never heard from him before, “Anyone who crosses that line is going to have their head separated from their shoulders!”
The city folk come to a halt just before the line, but one large man near the front tosses a rock up in the air and catches it in his hands in an obviously threatening manner.
“Try it,” Kellyn says. He runs through an impressive series of slashes, showing off his sword’s length and speed. He becomes someone I’ve never seen before. A hulking giant with death in his eyes.
“Abomination!” someone in the back of the crowd yells.
“The Goddesses demand blood!”
“Destroy the blight of magic!”
The crowd is tense, toeing that line Kellyn made.
“Oh, the Goddesses will get blood,” Kellyn says. “It’s just up to you whose they get. The first volunteer may step forward.”