Kiegan took a vicious bite from one and reared back, the thing still hanging from his arm, and slammed it into a stone wall without hesitation.
“With me.” Fear materialized from the smoke, touching my shoulder as he came to my side, the same way he would anyone else in Bismyth, and the two of us ran together into the breach.
I hacked at small monsters. Fear and I closed up back-to-back to fight together so the small things could not get around us. We did the work of slashing one apart and then another. My arms ached, but I didn’t stop. I killed one, and it seemed there were two in its place.
I felt, for a strange moment, the echo of Stonehaven. The way I had been awed by them. I had stood within their protection and wished I was one of them.
I was part of it now. Part of Bismyth.
“Herd them together!” Fear shouted, and we worked together, following Fear’s lead and drawing them into a walled courtyard. Then at the right moment, he yanked me up with him as he flew.
“Fire!”
Dragons loosed flames on the gathered mass of monsters. The heat reflected off my face and bare skin, and I almost dropped my sword as the hilt went hot in my hand. I sheathed it as Fear and I moved on to the next monster.
I lost track of Fear again.
I tried not to. His instruction to stay close had been correct. I had vulnerabilities in a fight. But I kept finding myself pulled toward where the need was rather than where he was.
A few surviving fast ones found me in a side street off the main square. Three of them were coming from different directions in the quick staggered sequence I’d seen them use against Kiegan. The first hit was a feint. I didn’t take the bait and went instead for the second before it completed its pass and caught it on the end of my sword.
Two left. They were coming back.
Then something I could not see was behind me.
It was almost on top of me when I felt the vibration beneath my feet. Something big at my back and two monsters still ahead of me.
I had just enough time to understand I was in trouble.
“Left.”
I went left.
Claws swept through the place I’d just been. I felt the air pass over me, but I was already gone. My heart was beating horribly fast. “Nice of you to come. It’s quite the party.”
“You’re welcome,”Lightbringer told me. Ancient. Dry.
“I didn’t say thank you.”
She should really take more of an interest. If I died, she’d go back to the Dreaming without ever flying.
“You should have.”The voice was clipped. Informational. The tone of someone giving directions to a person they found irritating but had decided to assist anyway.“The monster has a blind spot on its left. It’s wounded and can’t see.”
I turned to face the monster that had almost killed me. It was enormous, all teeth and claws, writhing forward.
Lightbringer, more agitated, commanded,“Come from the left, child!”
I moved to the left. The monster’s head swung to follow me, and I rushed forward into its blind spot. When I struck, it was moving forward; the monster practically impaled itself on my sword. I pulled loose, ducking claws. It wouldn’t go down that easily.
“Don’t let it pin you against the wall behind you,”Lightbringer instructed, and I was trying to figure out where to go when she said, incensed,“Move forward and left! Into that open space before you get pinned.”
I moved.
The part of my mind not actively occupied with surviving registered, with distant incredulous amusement, that I was taking tactical advice from a dragon who had reached the limit of her patience watching my technique.
Lightbringer kept talking with the air of someone deeply inconvenienced by their own expertise. I kept listening, and somewhere in the press of the next ten minutes I stopped being startled that she was there.
I nearly ran into Maura.
