Aisha looked around. ‘Is there another way down?’
‘We’ll make one.’ She looked Aisha over. ‘Can you walk by yourself?’
‘Yes,’ Aisha replied as confidently as she could.
‘Follow me.’
They forged another path to avoid the warriors. Safiya kept her bow trained ahead as they half ran, half slid towards the bottom. Aisha fell over more times than she cared to admit, but thankfully Safiya didn’t seem to notice.
By the time they reached the bottom, Gruisea’s line had fractured. Soldiers were scattered all over the beach, some fighting with blades, others wrestling in the surf, some sprawled unmoving on the sand. There was no safe place, no fixed point of retreat. Only chaos.
A warrior caught sight of Aisha, and his eyes widened with recognition. He came for her, not with a weapon, but with hands outstretched. She was far more valuable to them alive.
Aisha stumbled back out of his reach. ‘Safiya!’
But Safiya was already locked in another fight. ‘Run.’
Even if she could run, there was no way she was going to leave her sister behind.
She spotted a sword lying in the sand nearby and swooped down to grab it.
The man stopped and laughed. Laughed.
Aisha suddenly wished she had taken training as seriously as Safiya had growing up. Instead, she staggered around, messy and weak.
The man lunged at her. She swung her sword at him, and the tip of it sliced the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to notice, because he lunged for her again.
A shadow cut between them.
That shadow was Tariq.
The king drove his weapon through the man’s neck, steel bursting through flesh. The warrior’s eyes widened in shock before he crumpled to the ground, blood spilling out on the sand.
Aisha looked from the dying man to her own useless weapon. Her hands were covered in flecks of blood. When she looked down, she saw that the rest of her was also sprayed with blood. She dropped the weapon.
‘Are you hurt?’ Tariq’s voice drowned out the noise around them.
She looked around for Safiya and found Kaidon with her. They were safe. All she needed to do now was to keep it together.
‘No.’ She looked at him properly for the first time and saw that he was covered head to toe in blood. ‘Oh, gods.’
‘Most of it’s not mine.’
‘Most?’
‘I’m all right,’ he reassured her. ‘Really.’
She looked from his blood-soaked clothes to the shrinking pockets of fighting around them. The beach was covered in corpses, just like her vision.
‘Have they broken the line?’ Aisha asked.
Tariq shook his head.
That didn’t make sense. Perhaps her visions were unreliable in her current state.
‘Take some men and go to the castle,’ Kaidon told Tariq. Blood streaked his jaw and covered his sword. ‘We can handle this.’
Tariq hesitated.
