“Hold fire! Hold fire!” a voice yelled from outside. Abruptly, the guns went quiet.
The Blade dropped Halyna’s body and threw herself behind a desk for cover, escaping the burst of starfire Soren sent her way. He snuffed it out with a curse. He couldn’t simply burn everything around him, not when he didn’t know where everyone on his side of the fight was taking cover. He’d have to get in close with Terilyn in order to kill her, all while the enemy kept them boxed in.
“The Blade killed Halyna,” Soren called out, scrambling after her. He stayed low, not trusting the absence of bullets. Maurus swore, and Soren hoped someone was with Caris to keep her safe. His focus had to be Terilyn.
Soren lunged for the desk Terilyn had taken cover behind, unsurprised to find she wasn’t there. The brass goggles he wore impeded his sight, so he shoved them on top of his head and unclipped his gas mask. Revealing his face meant revealing his identity, but that wouldn’t matter if he was dead.
He unsheathed his poison short sword, pressing his thumb to the tiny button beneath the crosshairs. It released a thin stream of poison from the vials in the hilt and internal tubing to trickle down the blade to coat it. The paralyzing chemical agent was meant to bring down revenants, but it would do fine against a Blade. Soren slid out from behind the desk and cut diagonally across the floor for the desk opposite him where Blaine was crouched.
“I expect they’re holding fire because Terilyn is inside with us,” Soren said in a low voice. “Try to get Caris to use her starfire and clear the front. I’ll handle the Blade.”
Blaine craned his head around, looking over his shoulder. Soren followed his gaze to where Caris and Nathaniel were crouched behind another desk. Caris huddled in Nathaniel’s arms, small in a way Soren knew they couldn’t afford her to be.
“She’s in shock,” Blaine said.
“We don’t have time for her to grieve. Get her up and get her fighting before reinforcements come.”
“Terilyn might be a good bargaining chip.”
“I’m through with bargains.”
Soren shoved himself back the way he’d come, focused on hunting Terilyn in the confines of the room they were in, with no way out. Not the best odds, but Soren would make them work in his favor—somehow.
All his people were behind him, and odds were that Terilyn would try to murder them. With that in mind, Soren cast starfire on the area in the rear, not caring where it landed. Wood and paper went up in flames, electric sparks fizzing out as wires popped and burst before melting.
A shadow streaked out from behind a desk, coalescing into a figure that lunged for the entrance back into the jail. Soren sent starfire arcing toward Terilyn but missed, the heat of it hitting the wooden floor and eating a hole right through it. He let it all die down, sparing the others the heat of the magic, before throwing himself toward that same door. He let starfire lead him through it, using it to melt the bullets Terilyn aimed his way.
Before he could orient himself to her position, Terilyn lunged toward him, quick and lethal, stiletto extended. Soren brought his poison short sword around to parry, starfire flickering around them both while nearby prisoners screamed. Their blades clashed together, and Terilyn twisted close again. Soren drove his other elbow toward her face, but she dodged, went low, her other hand snapping out, fisted for a hit, only it was a lie.
Something sharp pierced his thigh through the weave of his trousers. Soren grunted, locking his knee as whatever Terilyn had injected him with made that area go numb. Terilyn tossed the small syringe aside, her hand flicking to another weapon strapped to her body. Soren shifted his weight and spun, snapping his other leg out and catching her in the chest, sending her reeling back. She wasn’t a revenant and so managed to duck the sweeping cut of his poison short sword where her head used to be.
“Poison?” Soren asked incredulously. “You know I spent my entire life becoming immune to most of them.”
“TheKlovodmade this one especially for wardens,” Terilyn snapped.
“Terrible craftmanship. The alchemist masters back on the island would be so disappointed.”
Even as he spoke, he could feel a weakness spreading down his leg, up to his hip, but Soren could still move. Whatever theKlovodhad created, perhaps it could incapacitate a warden in time. But the alchemy running through Soren’s veins would hopefully counter it long enough for him to finish this fight.
He planted his feet firmer on the floor, concentrating more on the starfire curling through the air than his sense of balance. Fighting was muscle memory, something he could handle because pushing through the pain or worse while alone in the poison fields was something he’d trained for as a tithe.
He hadn’t trained at all to wield starfire, but reaching for the aether and manipulating the raw magic into something ferocious was almost instinctive these days. After the past couple of weeks wielding it in defense of Solaria, the power of it came easily to him.
Soren no longer had to hide behind the mantle of a warden, the only road he thought he’d ever walk now lost to him. He’d do his duty to the wardens and leave it all behind, because his home was in the south, in Solaria, by Vanya’s side, and he would not die here in a country that had never been his at the hands of a Blade who belonged to Eimarille.
Soren wrapped Terilyn in starfire, twisting molten white-hot flame around her body like ivy, forcing her to halt mid-lunge, her dark eyes wide in her face. The starfire hadn’t touched her yet, but he could see the way her skin sizzled from the heat of it, the panic in her dark eyes something not even her own training as a Blade could push aside.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope you’ll betray Eimarille and get us through the checkpoints between here and the palace without me having to burn everything to the ground?” Soren asked.
Terilyn’s mouth firmed, her grip on the stiletto never wavering even as starfire melted the blade of her weapon. “My loyalty is to my queen.”
“I thought as much.”
He didn’t try to change her mind—fanatics weren’t worth the effort. Terilyn’s scream of agony was cut short before it could get high-pitched, starfire covering her in a pillar of fire.
In the end, there wasn’t even ash left of her.
Soren turned to leave and stumbled, his left leg nearly giving out. He staggered upright, scowling down at the spot where she’d got him with the needle. He pried a travel-sized antidote kit from his belt pouch and took out a small vial. The broad antidote would hopefully help counter whatever poison had been in the needle. Downing it in one swallow, he slid the empty vial back into the kit and tucked it away into his belt pouch.
