She simply slammed her head into that of the third. Its gaping maw sought purchase on her face for a futile second before Branwyn’s full weight hit it, knocking it backwards and into a hatchet that had only cut firewood a few days before.
For a few heartbeats, the world was clear around her. The construct had collapsed into a pile of corpses. The air was heavy with blood and smoke, much of it acrid. Darya, who was immune to poison, had led a squad of the twistedmen into a building and then set fire to a nasty packet of herbs.
Branwyn inhaled deeply anyhow.
There were still too many of the twistedmen, she realized. Only eight of the people she’d led still remained. She knew that she had only a few more minutes until she became flesh again, with the enhanced strength and skill of any Sentinel but no more.
And Thyran rose from the mountain of dead meat glowing with sickly fire. Olvir and Katrine stood below him. They’d been helping Amris to his feet, but now all three were still. Branwyn saw Darya start running toward them and knew that she herself was too far away to possibly intervene.
She was going to die.
Everyone was going to die.
There was nothing to say to the soldiers around her. There was nothing to do but face her death as bravely as she could. More twistedmen were running toward them already. Branwyn braced herself, lifted Yathana—
—and saw the twistedmen freeze in place, staring at the same multicolored radiance that Branwyn glimpsed from the corner of her own eye as it surrounded Katrine, Olvir, and Amris. Thyran’s flame froze, too, when it struck the shimmer, and then went hurtling back at its creator.
They had a moment. Branwyn didn’t know why, but she knew they’d better use it.
She broke into a run, crossing the distance toward the nearest still-distracted twistedman, saving her breath but shouting a battle cry in her mind.
From beyond Oakford’s walls, she heard the clear, sonorous sound of a war-horn.
Reinforcements had arrived.
Chapter 2
Star Palace of Heliodar, five months later
“Madam Branwyn Alanive, liaison from Criwath.”
The better part of the name wasn’t hers, but Branwyn stepped forward.
The polished marble floor of Heliodar’s Star Palace was smooth beneath her boots. She moved slowly as much to avoid a humiliating slip as she did to lend the proper ceremony to her entrance. All eyes fastened themselves on her.
There were sixteen in all. Four belonged to the footman who’d announced her and the scribe in the corner, a weary middle-aged functionary. The other six sets were all from Heliodar’s High Council, the assortment of strangers that her mission depended on impressing.
Branwyn bowed low, studying the faces that regarded her from the dais as best she could. Reflexively she categorized their owners by likely physical threat. Three—a fox-featured, dark-haired woman; a plump councillor in spectacles; and an oily man in more concealing, plainer clothes than the others—were negligible to average: healthy but unused to physical work, and with no evidence of any experience in combat. The one in a purple surcoat, with gray hair and a similarly gray mustache, bore himself like he’d been trained for war at one point, but his age would work against him in a fight. Seated next to him was a man of about Branwyn’s thirty-odd years and, as far as she could tell while he was sitting down, roughly her height, whose sleeveless russet-colored doublet showed arms that tended toward sinew rather than bulk, but that were firm and clearly muscled all the same.
He’d be a quick one, Branwyn judged, and his dark eyes were keen. He and the footman would be the ones to watch, assuming that the latter had taken some lessons to go with the silver-hilted sword he wore.
A lifetime of Sentinel training sorted her opponents in a heartbeat. It took longer for her to remember that none of that applied.
Her fight wasn’t physical this time. The sixth member of the High Council, the one in the gold circlet who looked like a skeleton with half an ounce of flesh stretched over it, had more power than any of the others in the chamber. Even he, High Lord Rognozi, had no absolute authority.
The marble beneath her feet, and the earth that lay below it, were foreign ground in more than one sense. Branwyn spoke with more conscious awareness of each breath than she’d needed in any fight over the last fifteen years.
“My lords and ladies,” she began, voice coached to a pleasing cadence and words long since memorized on her journey. “I come with these messages from King Olwin.”
With a gesture she knew to be smooth, she proffered two sealed letters. The contents would repeat her message and confirm her identity, provided that the council didn’t think she’d murdered the real Branwyn Alanive on the road and taken her place.
The footman, resplendent in a purple coat with gold braid, took the letters from her and transported them the entire twenty feet to the platform where Heliodar’s rulers sat. Branwyn waited.
She felt overdressed in her wool gown and bronze torc, and not in terms of finery. Most of Heliodar’s council wore gemmed circlets, rings on many fingers, and an assortment of silk and velvet that would have made tailors and courtiers in Criwath weep with envy. They wore the silk thin, though, and the velvet slashed open. Rognozi’s violet and silver brocade was long-sleeved and his only ornament was the circlet, but age and frailty likely played a part there. Branwyn didn’t know what lay behind the long, plain black sleeves and high collar of the oily man, but even his clothing was far thinner than she would’ve expected in the Hunter’s Month, midway through autumn.
She should have expected it, though. Heliodar, out of all the human kingdoms, still had the magical strength for fireless heat, as well as for the pure white globes of light that illuminated the council’s private audience chamber. Those who had power generally weren’t shy about showing it off.
Rognozi opened the letters with a silver knife and a shaking hand. He read slowly while Branwyn waited, ignoring the way sweat was making her back itch.
