Grant met my gaze, and I saw in his face the same look I had seen in the eyes of my uncle, my aunt, Mary, and countless others when they were reminded of the depths of Ben’s power.
“Try to leave one of them alive—an officer, if there is one,” Grant suggested.“Samuel, will you find Mary?”
Ben nodded and looked to his priming.
He and Grant fell into position, and I slipped up the bank, moving quickly away from the uneven creek bed.The wind andsnow whipped past me in a steady stream, but my feet had long numbed, and I felt no cold beneath my thick coat.There was only heat, sweat, and the unyielding threat of danger.
Mary came into sight, harried by nearly horizontal snow.
“We shall make a stand,” I called, just loud enough to carry.“They have a Sooth and a Magni, at the least.”
She took my proffered hand and splashed onto shore then followed me back towards Grant and Benedict.I spied my brother on the far side of the creek, rifle nestled in the crook of a branch.Grant crouched beside him, pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other.
Mary dropped the saddlebags on our side of the water and reached into her pocket, producing a few lead balls.She plucked out two—one marked with a red splotch of paint, one green.“I have extras to give the Admiralty.But there is only one for a Sooth.I think it is worth using.”
She held up the ball in question.I paused, simultaneously grateful for and saddened by her pragmatism.I plucked the green shot from her hand, bare and cool, and pinched with cold.My connection to the Other immediately faltered, then recovered as the ball disappeared into my musket’s barrel.
Mary’s own fingers closed on the red shot, and she readied her pistol.
After an interminable time, six figures emerged from the snow— three on each bank.They crept soundlessly, even with the wind at their backs, and my esteem for Mereish soldiers rose a grudging notch.For soldiers they were: they wore the pale grey of Mereish infantry rather than the brown of the prison guards.
The Other tugged at me, and I let it swell.Daylight fled and gloom rose as the creek overflowed its banks and transformed into the Dark Water.Mary and Ben were both hidden, their talismans intact, but a small woman was surrounded by a deep, forest green.Their Sooth.The Magni was across the creek, on Mary’s and my side.
“The Magni is that older man—grey hair, short beard,” I murmured to Mary.“The Sooth that short woman, on Benedict’s side.”
She nodded, already seeking out her target.I did the same, tracking the other Sooth on the opposite bank.She was small, the kind of woman one might mistake for a child in a crowd, but there was nothing childlike about the cool set of her lips.She slipped through the trees, her gaze flicking from my location to Benedict’s sheltering tree.She might not be able to see Ben in the Other like she could me, but she had certainly sensed his presence.
Benedict met my gaze across the water, through the veil of snow.His expression was cool, but I saw a twitch beneath it, a readiness for violence that bordered on hunger.It was a face he had worn a hundred times before.On any other day, this was the moment when I should intervene, talk him down, seek to separate him from circumstances where the full brunt of his corruption might be unleashed.
But I did not.Instead, I dropped my chin in the barest nod, and he inclined his in return.
The soldiers all halted in their tracks.I saw the terror and confusion in their eyes for an instant, then Benedict had them completely in his thrall.Their expressions glazed.
Only the mages broke free.The Sooth dove for cover while the Magni, not ten paces from Mary and I, stepped neatly behind a tree.
What happened next came in rapid sequence, nearly too quick to follow.Benedict’s musket rang out.A soldier’s head snapped back in a spray of blood, brain and skull, and the rest of her crumpled.One of her comrades screamed—a fractured, masculine wail that made my stomach flip.That cry cut off with another shot as one of the grieving man’s own comrades, on Mary’s and my bank, turned to shoot him in the throat.Arterial blood burst, scattering across the white of the snow.
His cries turned to a gargle, and Ben allowed him to collapse into the water with a splash and crack of ice.
In the same breath, the Sooth rose up from behind a hulking, many-trunked cedar and shot Benedict.My brother spasmed back into the snow, roaring in frustration and clutching at… his chest?No, his upper arm.
Grant shoved in front of my brother and shot at the Sooth, but she was already gone.
The enemies on our side of the creek broke out of Ben’s thrall and scattered for shelter.Mary crouched lower beside me, still as a rabbit in the brush, and I sighted the Sooth down the length of my barrel.
“Shoot her,” Mary hissed.
The other mage vanished behind a tree and did not come out again.“No clean shot,” I grunted.
My voice sounded louder than I intended.Silence had fallen around us, a thick hush that clawed at my nerves and compounded my aching head as each party waited for the other to act.In the creek, the soldier who had been shot in the throat ceased to bleed, and the last tendrils of red dispersed in the bubbling current.
I glimpsed Ben exchanging rapid whispers with Grant.Ben pulled a knife and shoved it into the other man’s hand, jerking his coat from his wounded arm.Grant looked ill, and I guessed what was happening: Ben wanted him to cut the Magni-suppressing shot from his arm.
“Tane wants to use the trees.”Mary’s voice was low and soft, carried between us on a tamed scrap of wind.“We can force the Mereish out of hiding.”
“They will know you areghiseau,” I countered, though my mind already leapt to the possibilities.
“They already may.”Mary shifted into a crouch.“Besides, they won’t be telling anyone else.Am I doing this?”
