Foul turnips and painful palms forgotten, Disaris shrieked her joy. “Bron!” she yelled, and promptly threw herself into his arms.
Chapter Two
The miasma of dust hanging in the air filtered sunlight into a sparkling net that settled on Bron and his vanguard as they surrounded the only person valuable enough to save from the ruins of Baelok.
Stunned by the unexpected sight of the woman who’d gifted him with her devotion, then turned her back on him, Bron froze at the touch of her fingers on his scarred cheek.
“The moon. The beautiful moon.”
Her voice—long unheard but never forgotten—was raspy and thin, a half-smile creasing her gaunt cheeks. Her hand fell away, and her eyes rolled back as she canted to one side in a sudden faint.
“Disa!” Bron caught her before she fell. She sprawled in his arms, still clutching her ragged bag in a bloodied arm as if it were an infant she must protect.
He barely recognized her. Battered and filthy, she looked a far cry from the memory he held of her when they last met face to face three years earlier. An ugly memory, one that still twisted his insides when it surfaced in his dreams.
“Do you know her, Commander?” Jarik, his second-in-command, glanced between Bron and Disaris, his expression incredulous, as if it was an impossibility that the Moon Raven had any connection to the Daggermen’s itzuli beyond that of hunter and hunted.
I thought I did. Long ago.Bron kept that part of his reply behind his teeth. “Yes.”
Disaris was his childhood companion, his first lover, and the reason he’d learned to see the world in a better light. Then she’d gut-punched him by marrying the man who’d once been his friend and was now his enemy, and renounced her friendship with a cold, clear-eyed finality that had almost brought Bron to his knees.
He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear before scooping her into his arms. She didn’t weigh much more than his armor, and he stood without effort, holding her gingerly, listening intently to her shallow breathing. The injury to her arm wasn’t fatal from what he could surmise in a glance, but the gods only knew what other wounds might be hidden beneath the rags she wore. The thought of Disaris jin Gheza dying in his embrace turned his blood cold with horror. The knowledge that he might have ordered the catapult round to end her life made his throat close.
A thousand questions whirled in his mind as he carried her past piles of rubble toward the blasted openings in the palace’s walls. Had the Daggermen abducted her? Where was Ceybold? And how did a woman who couldn’t read until Bron taught her become a coveted code breaker?
They emerged into razor-edged sunlight. Bron squinted against the glare as he tucked Disaris closer into the cove of his body. “Shield wall and retreat,” he barked, rewarded with his team’s swift formation into a bulwark with him in its center. They had achieved the first part of their mission: find the itzuli.The second and most challenging part remained: bring her out of Baelok alive and take down anyone or anything trying to stop them.
The path from the ruined palace’s interior to the main gate was a killing field of fallen men, women, and children. Daesin soldiers swarmed what remained of the ramparts and engaged the last of the Daggermen who fought with the same zealotry with which they embraced their religion. Bron and his men jogged for the gate in unison as they maintained the protective shield wall.
A thin whistling made him instinctively hunch over Disaris who lay senseless to her circumstances. An arrow struck one of his soldier’s shields, burying the broadhead tip in layers of wood and iron sheeting. The bulwark moved to the side as one beast. For a moment, a gap opened as the soldier whose shield took the arrow stepped out of sync, only to swiftly close again at Bron’s bellowed “Fill the hole!”
More Daesin soldiers eddied around them, fending off those Daggermen who hurled themselves onto their enemies’ swords and spears with suicidal savagery. Bron sent up silent thanks to his fellow battle mage outside the citadel. While he disliked invoking an orbis spell or having one laid on him, its uses went beyond intelligence-gathering. The ability for Cimejen to see terrain and surroundings through Bron’s eyes allowed him to send more troops directly to Bron’s location and bolster the defenses held by his vanguard.
Bron’s line-of-sight narrowed to the men in front of him, and he peered through the slivers of space between shields, listening for the tell-tale whistle of an incoming arrow. The bulwark heeled to the side once more as another of his team blocked a thrown javelin. The impact shoved the soldier into the defense’s interior, the javelin’s point hammering through the shield toemerge just above his arm straps. A hair’s breadth lower, and it would have impaled his forearm to the shield.
Bron muttered a stream of invectives. They were halfway to the gate, and it felt like the remaining Daggermen had turned all their attention on his group as if knowing the itzuli lay hidden within their midst. “Jarik!” His second-in-command glanced over his shoulder, his expression puzzled when Bron motioned for him to turn. The man obeyed, marching backwards now, the space he’d occupied instantly filled by another soldier as the bulwark contracted and continued its relentless push toward the gate.
Jarik’s eyes widened when Bron shoved the limp Disaris into his arms. “Hold her,” Bron ordered. “Keep moving. I’ll take care of the vermin on the battlements.”
He didn’t wait for his second’s response, spinning about to call an order. “Make light!” Two of the soldiers in the back of the bulwark pivoted sideways, opening a gap for him to slip through before closing again. The spell he uttered was as familiar to him as his favorite tunic and just as well-worn. Invisible jets of air blasted from his palms, sending up geysers of pebbles and other debris that pelted anyone close by, blinding them so they faltered in their attacks.
Another spell followed the first, this one birthing a trio of whirlwinds that spun around each other like the palace dancers who entertained the king of Daes. Just as graceful, just as agile, and just as deadly. They sang in whispering voices, arcane lullabies that soothed demons and flung men into walls and each other like poppets tossed aside by bored children. Standing in a protective column of air that warped arrow flight and scattered those projectiles in every direction, Bron assessed the battlefield before him. A ragged line of Daggermen archers stood on the remains of a battlement, their nocked arrows aimed towardhim as they waited for the miasma to clear and allow them an unimpeded view of the battle mage known as the Moon Raven.
He didn’t give them a chance, releasing a third spell – a shock wave of air that dropped the temperature around him, popped his ears, and swatted the archers off the rampart as if they were no more than pesky flies before a giant hand. Cheers from his fellow soldiers followed him as he raced back toward the bulwark. “Forward!” he shouted, flinging himself into the narrow opening made by the same pair of soldiers until he was ensconced in the center.
When Bron held out his arms, Jarik silently returned his burden to his commander and resumed his position in the shield wall. Their rhythm never faltered, and they reached the gate without further attacks.
“Funnel down!” This time Jarik called the order, and the square formation narrowed and lengthened into a column, allowing their group to pass through the gate and still keep the Moon Raven and his prize behind a protective barricade of shields.
Once past the gate, they continued at quickstep down the great ramp and past the siege engines the Daesin army had built to conquer the citadel. Bron held onto his patience, suppressing the urge to break from formation and hurtle down the remainder of the ramp with Disaris, tortured by the certainty that she suffered fatal injuries he couldn’t see. The medical camp was so close, yet so far away.
A lancing pain struck behind his eyes, blurring his vision for a moment. Cimejen had broken the orbis spell that allowed him to see what was happening through Bron’s eyes, a welcome sign that they were no longer in danger from attack.
Bron didn’t waste the opportunity. “Break formation!”
The funnel line broke apart, opening a clear path for him to sprint to the bottom of the ramp where he navigated past smallmountains of stone and forests of catapults manned by teams of ten men each.
Army camps didn’t always have medics embedded in their midst. The one Bron transferred from had relied on nearby village healers to set bones, sew wounds, nurse the sick, and help bury the dead. Bron was grateful that the general who commanded this long siege had insisted on a true medical camp, complete with surgeons, litter-bearers and gravediggers as well as tents designated for the wounded, the sick, and the convalescing.
