We came around the same rubble pile from different directions at full speed, both pulling up at the last moment.
We stared at each other for one second.
She looked as dangerous and glittering and leanly graceful as ever, her braids whipping around her shoulders, the leather armor blood-streaked and ash-marked.
She had been fighting for hours before we arrived, and she looked terrible. She still looked extraordinary. Deeply irritating, both things simultaneously, and I had no time to dwell on either.
Relief crossed her face before she could stop it, quick and genuine. “Finally. Try to keep up.”
She looked beyond me.
“Fear’s here,” I told her, because it seemed relevant.
“I don’t care.” She took down something that had gotten too close to a cluster of mortal children being shepherded toward a building with a heavy door. “All I care about is that Obsidian isn’t dying today.”
“More monsters on the left.” I told her and reached out and grabbed her shoulder, tagging her in just the same way I’d seen Bismyth operate. “With me.”
“You’ve lost your damn mind,” she said, and yet, she still went with me.
The Wrack at the left corner of the breach was the largest I’d seen that day, the kind of creature that might have broken the wall. It had two Obsidian fighters pinned and a mortal man on top of a half-collapsed building throwing stones at it, which was either brave or stupid but was at least keeping it from finishing the job.
Maura assessed it in the time it took me to understand she was assessing it.
She went right. She didn’t tell me to go left. She simply went right and left the other side open with the complete certainty that I would be there.
I went left.
The Wrack tracked her—she moved like something that should be tracked—and I prepared for the lunge.
Lightbringer was in my mind.“Don’t hesitate. As soon as it commits, strike deep.”
I didn’t hesitate. Then my blade was trapped in the Wreck’s neck, and it flung its head so hard that it almost whipped me away through the air, but I kept hold of the hilt. As it whirled, it opened itself to Maura on the other side. She buried her sword in its throat, and it finally collapsed between us.
“Not bad.” Maura looked over the monster to me. “You’re becoming useful.”
Fear landed hard a few paces ahead, wings folding as he shifted back to human mid-motion, with the seamless transition of someone who had done it ten thousand times; the dragon becoming the man effortlessly. He had a blade in hand before he could be fully identified as a man.
Maura was already there, cutting through the chaos between them with the same fluid certainty she’d always had, her blade catching the light as she dropped a fast monster that had gotten too close to his landing.
For a breath, between one crisis and the next, they registered each other’s presence unguardedly, as if they were relieved to see each other alive. Then both of their faces shuttered.
“I thought you’d be too busy winning over the kingdom to make time for us,” Maura said crisply.
A winged monster lunged between them from the left. Fear dispatched it without looking away from her. “You knew I would come.”
“I hoped.”
He stepped past her, already back to the battle. His last word—because Fear always had the last word—almost vanished into the smoke and chaos. “Always.”
The fight ended in the gradual lessening of the things that needed killing, the sounds shifting from active chaos to something quieter and more terrible as the wounded were tended and the dead collected.
For the first time, I felt the ache in my body, the slow release of adrenaline and terror, and the wounds: my raw shoulder from the cobblestones, a cut along my forearm I hadn’t felt happen. The smoke was thicker near the breach, the smell of it mixed with the ozone-rot of the creatures and the salt of the sea and the iron of blood.
Lightbringer had gone quiet when the fight ended. The warmth was present, patient, utterly uninterested in speaking first.
I was going to have to speak first.“So you’ve been watching. Were you so moved by my incompetence you had to help?”
There was long enough of a pause that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. I listened to the sea moving beyond.
