There was a coastal crossing. Civilians moving east through the raider conflict, families and traders and children who had no part in the politics of what was happening around them. My unit was supposed to hold the northern approach. We held it. I made a tactical decision. I split the formation to push a flanking group back before they reached the crossing.
The southern approach went unguarded for eleven minutes.
Forty-three people died in those eleven minutes.
I survived because the elders sealed me rather than let me die from the wounds I took afterward. I did not ask them to.
“You’ve been carrying that for a century,” Selah says.
“It hasn’t become lighter.”
She reaches up and takes my face in both hands—a gesture so entirely unexpected that I go perfectly still—and kisses me. It is not impulsive in the way her first kiss was, urgent and startled by itself. This one is deliberate.
When she pulls back, she doesn’t flinch.
“Then let it be lighter now,” she says.
I have no answer for that. I am not certain one is required.
Rennic’s voice cuts up from the harbor road before I can find one. Three short bird calls echo, the signal we agreed on.
I look past Selah toward the water. Beyond the dark horizon, moving without lights, are the silhouettes of ships slide out of the black.
Dark elf rigging. Four vessels. Maybe five.
I spread my wings and take the cliff in a single bound.
11
SELAH
The gambling night is loud enough that no one hears the harbor bell until it rings three times. Then four. Then it stops entirely.
I’m standing near the back of the common room when the sound cuts off, a cup of rirzed wine in my hand that I haven’t touched in an hour. Brinna has half the inn on their feet, cards and coins scattered across four long tables. The air is thick with pipe smoke and laughter and the desperate energy of people who have decided tonight they will win back everything they’ve lost.
It’s almost convincing. But I see the way Corvin keeps moving through the room without stopping, and the way Rennic’s eyes keep pulling toward the windows, it almost looks like a normal night.
The bell stops.
Rennic’s gaze finds mine across the room.
Then the front doors come off the hinges.
The first dark elf through the doorway doesn’t slow for a single breath. He moves through the room the way a blade moves through water. Three more come through behind him before the screaming starts, and then it’s all screaming, chairsoverturning, the card tables going sideways as the crowd surges away from the entrance.
Brinna’s voice cuts through everything. “Down! Everyone get down and follow Wynn to the cellar, now?—”
Someone grabs my arm, and I nearly swing before I see it’s Corvin. He doesn’t say anything. He pulls me low through the crowd while the room erupts into chaos behind us. Glass breaks. One of the assassins vaults a table and cuts down a smuggler who moves too slowly. I hear the sound it makes and don’t look back.
The cellar entrance is behind the kitchen. Corvin gets it open and starts pushing people through two at a time, then three, then shoving them in groups because there’s no time for single-file. Brinna materializes from the chaos with her skirts hiked to her knees and her face entirely calm, counting heads as they go down.
“You’re not going,” Corvin tells me.
“I wasn’t planning to.” I am absolutely planning to do whatever gets the most people out of this building alive, but we can argue about it later.
Outside, something hits the harbor square hard enough that I feel it through the stone floor.
Then Droza screams.
