Also they don’t really need an ambush at this point.
Unexpectedly flat ground met her foot, and she stumbled. Roughly plastered walls met her gaze, a room perhaps a dozen paces across with a single large wooden door at the far end. A half-dozen more crates were stacked neatly against the wall, bearing the stamps of vintners from downriver.
Davith yanked out a key and tried to fit it in the lock, then let out a blistering oath.
“Doesn’t fit, I take it?”
“Why have two different locks, I ask you…?” He went down on one knee.
Wren and Shane turned to face the stairs. Wren dropped her pack and revealed that her ill-fitting cloak had been concealing a round metal buckler strapped against her back.
Marguerite leaned toward Davith, not taking her eyes off the stairs. “Can you open the lock?”
“If I have enough time, yes.”
“I do not believe that time is on our side,” said Shane, as calmly as if he was observing the weather.
The two false guards reached the bottom of the stairs, followed by a wedge of men dressed as duelists. Their swords were clearly not peace-bonded. A big man in the clothes of a laborer brought up the rear.
“Seven of them,” murmured Wren. Davith swore again. Both paladins ignored him, watching the men approach.
The false guards didn’t say anything. They didn’t gloat. They didn’t threaten. They simply advanced. Professionals, Marguerite thought. Several of the duelists, however, grinned like sharks.
“I owe you, big man,” one said. “You broke my brother’s arm.”
“Ah,” Shane said. “So that was a test. I had wondered.” He still sounded extremely calm.
Davith stopped trying the lock and stepped in front of Marguerite.
“Chivalry isn’t quite dead, I see,” said Marguerite. She felt numb. She was about to watch her friends cut down in front of her. Would they kill her as well, or drag her back to the Red Sail for questioning?
Could I talk my way out if they do?
Can I talk my way out of this before anyone dies?
“Gentlemen,” she called, working hard to keep her terror locked down and out of her voice,
“there is doubtless a solution here that does not involve bloodshed. I would be happy to negotiate for safe passage—”
One of the men spat on the ground. The brother of the man with the broken arm started to inform her, in quite crude terms, what he was planning to do before he killed her.
He got less than halfway through the speech when Shane’s sword slid into his throat.
MARGUERITE KNEW that she shouldn’t be surprised. She had seen the paladins fight before. She had seen them take down a demon steer, for god’s sake. She knew what they were.
But she had never seen them when the battle tide took them, and it was extraordinary.
They were so goddamn fast. The men attacking them seemed like they were swimming in syrup.
Wren—short, frumpy, frizzy Wren, who fretted about her hair and how to use her fan—blocked a sword with the handle of her axe, smashed her buckler into the wielder’s head, ducked casually under a strike from another blade, opened the second man’s guts up with a backhanded swipe, and then turned back and buried the axe in the first man’s skull. Her expression of careful concentration never wavered once.
And Shane. Shane who was so guilty and so fretful under the surface calm, Shane with a voice so gentle and trustworthy that it cut Marguerite’s heart…Shane blocked a sword slash with his own blade and drove his mailed fist into the man’s throat, knocking him sideways into the man that Wren had casually gutted, then blocked another strike that had been aimed for Wren’s head while she wrenched her axe free.
The big man dressed as a laborer had a hammer. He swung at Shane’s head and the paladin stepped forward, not back, practically into the man’s arms. The hammer shot past him and the man’s forearm slammed into his shoulder. Shane didn’t even seem to notice. He shoved forward and twisted and his sword slid out of the man’s back. Shane caught the hammer-wielder as he fell, threw him into the remaining duelist, and Wren’s axe opened up the last man’s leg veins while his arms were full.
Gods above and below.
And just like that, their pursuers were dead. Shane and Wren stood back-to-back amid a wreckage of bodies. One of the men at their feet let out a long, rattling groan, and then was silent.
“My god,” said Davith.
Wren twisted like a cat and locked eyes on him. Her eyes were flat as stones and her teeth were bared. “Wren…?” Marguerite said, even as her brain hissed a warning. Has she not come out? Is she still berserk?
Wren raised the axe and charged.
“Wren, no!” Marguerite flung herself sideways, trying to get out of Davith’s way. There was no way that he could fight off the paladin with his bare hands, but maybe he could get out of the way, run long enough for someone to talk her down—
Davith hesitated a moment too long, his mouth open in shock. Wren swung the axe high and brought it down.
Shane’s sword blocked the blow. The blade broke. Davith fell backward. Wren hissed like a tea kettle, but Shane barreled into her, smashing her against the wall and pinning her with his weight
alone.
She snarled, dropped her shoulder, and tried to lift him off his feet. Shane flung the broken sword aside and put himself between Wren and the others.
The stained axe blade lifted again, and Shane had no weapon in his hands. He lifted his arm, as if that might somehow stop an axe. He was going to die. Marguerite cursed herself for not being a warrior, for not having so much as a pen knife to her name, something that she could throw or maybe just hand to Shane or—
“Enough.”
It was the paladin’s voice like she had never heard. It was no longer trust and care and kindness.
This was the voice of a prophet, not a priest. It sank into Marguerite’s bones and demanded obedience from her very soul.
If she hadn’t already been on her knees, she might have fallen to them. Davith, who had been trying to rise, sagged back against the floor.
Wren blinked. Some of the flatness left her eyes, and she looked from Shane to Marguerite to Davith, then back again. “Oh,” she said, in a very small voice.
The axe fell to the floor. Shane stepped forward, wrapped his arms around his sister, and held her tight.
THIRTY-ONE
MARGUERITE FINISHED CHECKING the last man’s belt pouch and sat back on her heels. “Nothing,” she said, in response to Shane’s inquisitive glance. “Nothing useful, anyway. Not that I expected them to have signed orders from Fenella, but it might have been nice.”
He nodded and took up his post at the foot of the stairs.
Davith, meanwhile, was trying to pick the lock on the cellar door. He looked almost normal but his hands were shaking in a way that Marguerite had never seen.
It was hard to say which of the two was more upset, Wren or Davith. Davith hid it better, perhaps.