Something in her words penetrated his wall of detachment and anchored him in place. Before him, a flood of steel bodies assembled in a chaotic blur. Behind him, a person he thought he knew. What an idiot he had been. How well could he have possibly known someone he met less than a week ago? Only a fool would’ve formed a bond that quickly.
Only a fool would turn around.
And yet ...
Sikras slowly spun and found her pleading eyes.
She opened her mouth to speak, whether to plead her case further or offer an explanation, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t even know if she could say anything to ease the sting. Whatever it was Helspira had intended to say became lost when her unspoken words turned into a scream at the sight of an arrow sinking into his shoulder.
And here he thought he was dead inside. Too numb to feel. You know what was easy to feel? A fucking arrow in the shoulder.
An agonized wail pierced through his clenched teeth as he fell to his knees.
“Sikras!” Helspira bolted forward, kicking up snow, and slid to the ground beside him.
The world whirled as adrenaline flooded his system. For a moment, nothing but blinding white blurs and an ear-piercing echo existed. When realization struck and clarity returned, Sikras arched his back, a second agonized groan forcing its way up and out his throat.
“An arrow?Really?” Sikras instinctively reached to touch it, to rip it from his shoulder, but immediately abandoned the plan when touching the shaft sent a ripple of agony through his torso. “Fuck me, I thought Vessik’s ‘army’ was comprised of the downtrodden, not artfully skilled warriors trained in the ways of gods-damned archery!”
“It wasn’t a skilled archer.” Helspira placed a gentle hand on him and inspected the arrow. “If it were, they’d have used a barbed tip, and you’d be bleeding out from a severed artery right now. It looks like it missed anything vital.”
Sikras bit back another pained grunt. It certainly didn’tfeellike it missed anything vital. It felt like it somehow managed to skewer every internal organ, as if it planned on roasting them on a spit over an open flame. “Great. Shish-kabobbed by a talentless albeit lucky marksman. If that’s how this fight is going to go”—he bellowed a short cry as he dug his scythe into the ground and pushed to his feet—“I’ve half a mind to regret standing back up.”
Seering pain or no, it was best to let the shaft dangle from his body like a poorly hammered nail. The proper protocol for arrow wounds eluded him anyway, and he lacked the time to pull that memory from wherever it sat in his brain, assuming he knew it at all. He advanced toward the bustling crowd of Red Sentinel soldiers, scanning the horde.
He heard Helspira scramble to her feet behind him. “Where are you going?”
“I have to find Benjamin.”
“You need to find the cleric,” she said.
“No time.”
“If what you said is true, the enemy will be on us any second. You need—”
“I need to find Benjamin,” Sikras murmured, fingers biting into his palms. “Turns out, our enemies have been here the whole time, and now there are more on the way.”
Sikras entered the fray of readying men and women, Helspira’s pleas fading with the clanging of priming chainmail and steel. He tugged at his collar, an irritating trail of sweat snaking down the side of his head. When he wiped the moisture from his skin, it was cold. Clammy. Every step forward felt like it lowered his blood pressure, but he marched through a sea of scurrying bodies that seemed to move in slow motion.
Panicked voices, clanging swords, and an annoying metallic taste in his mouth bombarded his senses. He walked, lightheaded from both physical pain and the war waging between his mental and emotional state. How could he have made such an egregious miscalculation? This was the art of reading people. The one skill he thought he had mastered.
Sikras put self-deprecation on hold when he spied Benjamin in the distance, still wrapped in his blood-red cloak and Helspira’s scarlet scarf. He had drawn his sword, planted his feet, and stared in the direction of enemy soldiers both alive and dead as they charged through the squealing wooden gates that creaked open like the petals of a slow-blooming flower.
Skeletal warriors, in various stages of decay from bones to still-rotting flesh, advanced before living fighters who held scrap-wood shields and rusting steel high above their heads. Some Red Sentinels met them head on, while others scrambled to don their armor and find their blades in the ambush.
The sound of metal on metal joined the cries of the gutted as bodies fell left and right. It seemed for every enemy who fell, another appeared from the mouth of Stow’s Peak’s gate.
Through the fray, Sikras trudged toward Benjamin, pulse rapid yet weak.
He found him mumbling a quiet prayer to his god. “Dionus, guide my sword arm. May my blade know your precision and my swings know your sister’s mercy.” Benjamin’s prayer came to an end seconds before his sword found the stomach of a middle-aged man who crumpled, staining the snow with his blood.
Before Benjamin could raise his weapon again, Sikras seized his arm. “We have to leave.”
Benjamin spun, somehow managing to look incredulous despite having no facial expression. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“You want to abandon the R.S.? Abandon Nyllmas?Again?” His voice hitched, rage building. “How much longer will this go on?”
