“And I’m sure Vera will be counting on everyone to come to that exact conclusion when people start asking questions.” There was a flat edge to Allaster’s voice, but it was the cold emptiness in his eyes that prickled her skin. “This is a message for me. Vera said I would regret claiming you, and this is her response.”
He was wrong. This was a message for Kasira. She had told Vera to send soldiers to Spenshire, to take hostages without hurting anyone, not to send butchers who would kill without a second thought. But this kind of cruelty …
This was Thane’s doing.
He must have given Vera the idea when she told him of Kasira’s plan. Was he trying to get under Kasira’s skin, to force her to slip up? Knowing him, he had probably done it purely for the pleasure of ruining her move and watching her squirm. She knew what she was supposed to do next. She was supposed to convince Allaster to go. But this wasn’t the simple intervention she had planned to get him back on her side. The Ryveren were butchers.
This would be a bloodbath.
The debate on Allaster’s face told her he thought the same, and so it was with growing apprehension that she sought the words to push him over the edge.
“You mustn’t go,” she said and watched the resolve settle in his eyes like a noose slipping about his neck.
“I agree,” Warrin said as he cleaned the blood from Ambric’s wound and began to stitch the flesh together. “This is a political trap.”
Allaster thrust out a hand, and his bow and quiver materialized. “It is an assault on my home, and I will not stand by and watch it done.”
Of course you won’t.It was one of the things she admired about him, and it would be his undoing.
Kasira summoned the relic sword. “I’m coming with you.”
She thought Allaster would deny her, his anger still too raw, but he only slung his bow across his back and said, “You’re the AssistantLibrarian now. You’re subject to the same laws I am. If they come after me, they’ll come after you too.”
“I know.” She swept past him before the doubt worming in her heart could writhe free. “Now hurry. The Ryveren work quickly.”
They returned to the portal room, where Allaster ripped open the Miravi door to reveal a dark-paneled study that would have looked cozy if not for the overturned furniture and blood trailing from the entrance to the portal. Panicked voices resounded from the hall, and the scent of smoke filled the air.
“Stay close.” Allaster nocked an arrow, and Kasira hefted the relic blade, its faint humming almost tangible.
Wherever they were, Allaster was familiar with it. He led her along a broad curving hall toward a vine-covered archway that opened to the outside. Someone screamed, and a servant tumbled through the arch. She tried to regain her feet, but a hulking form swept down its sword, decapitating her a second before Allaster’s arrow caught him through the neck.
Allaster didn’t even stop to watch him die.
Kasira kept to his side as they skirted corpses and emerged into a garden courtyard fraught with chaos. The white stone was dyed red with blood, dismembered bodies spanning the walkways as fires consumed the planters. Beyond the courtyard, a wide staircase descended into a square that on any other day might have been picturesque. Small cerulean and lavender buildings with white-painted signs. Elegant spiraling towers wrapped in ironwork.
Ryveren mercenaries cloaked in the slate gray of beast-scale armor clashed with the town’s forces. Civilians fled their homes as they were set ablaze. And beyond the town was the glittering midnight blue of the impassive sea, which watched Spenshire’s destruction in silence.
What had Vera been thinking accepting Thane’s proposal? Had she thought she could control the Ryveren, that this wouldn’t unspool into carnage?
Allaster assessed the square. “They’re overwhelming the town guard.”
There were two Ryveren for every guard in pale green, and the guards were falling quickly. The Ryveren were brutal, disemboweling people and hacking at limbs with cool efficiency.
“The Ryveren are bandits first, mercenaries second,” Kasira told him. “If they sense the tide turn, they’ll abandon the town with whatever they’ve already stolen.”
Allaster nocked another arrow, and maybe it was the coastal sunlight glinting off the white stone, but his eyes looked pure silver as he said, “This doesn’t have to be your fight.”
This was the second time he had given her a way out. Was it only that he didn’t trust her, or was it something more? She thought of the way he’d looked at her in the arena before Elyae arrived, as if she were a salvation he didn’t deserve, and in that moment, she wanted so badly to break down the last of the wall between them.
But seeing him now, with Kalish blood darkening the hem of his uniform and his bow a trembling threat in his hands, she knew it was a future she couldn’t have.
Not after what she had done.
“Haven’t you figured it out by now?” she asked, and the words came as if from another’s lips. She could feel the magic flooding into his body like water into a pool, and she drew it into herself as well. The relic sword emitted a hawklike cry, turning the heads of the fighters. “I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
She charged down the stairs, slamming into two Ryveren who had been coming to investigate the new arrivals. Her blade clove clean through the nearest one’s leg, sending him tumbling to the stone with a scream. The other caught her downstroke with his own sword, but with the strength of her magic in her veins, his arms buckled, and her blade caught him across the chest. A second strike was all it took to put him down permanently.
An arrow whizzed past her ear, and she spun in time to catch the falling corpse of the Ryveren whose knife had been inches from her back. Then Allaster was past her, engaging another mercenary at the base of the stairs. She shoved the body away and surged onward.
