I had seen it used only once, but this was different. It was faster, brighter, and the runes ignite in sequence up its surface with urgency. Vaedrin’s composure fractures as the artifact burns hot in his hand, and the light it throws doesn’t move toward me.
It moves toward his soldiers.
One of the men at the north edge stumbles back. The relic’s light holds on him, then shifts, spreads, finds the soldier beside him, the one beside that. Three of Vaedrin’s own people, lit up in the relic’s cold glow.
Vaedrin goes very still.
“Compromised bloodlines,” I say, and I am surprised by how steady my own voice sounds. “That’s what you said.”
The soldier at the north edge looks at Vaedrin. Then he looks at the men beside him. Then he takes two steps backward, and the careful geometry of Vaedrin’s perimeter begins to come apart.
It happens fast after that. Two of the soldiers nearest the light begin arguing in the quick, low register of people who are suddenly very afraid of each other. A third backs away from both of them. Vaedrin turns on his remaining soldiers and the authority in his face curdles into something less composed, less certain, more like a man trying to hold water in his hands.
From the square, I hear Brinna’s voice murmuring through the noise. Her words carry the frequency she uses when she is organizing something and does not want the wrong people to hear her doing it.
The ground shakes as Droza takes advantage of the confusion. A few of his wingbeats scatters the nearest soldiers, and the gold light bleeding through the cracks in his skin throws shadows across the square that move the wrong direction.
Vaedrin’s eyes find mine. He still has the relic in his hand.
14
DROZA
Chaos erupts in the square. The first dark elf I put down doesn’t have time to scream. The second one does, briefly, before the sound cuts off against the harbor stones. I don’t stop moving. The tether is a burning thread in my chest, pulling northwest toward the square, and every second I’m not following it feels like swallowing glass.
The gargoyle merchants hit the eastern docks the same moment I came through the inn’s back wall. They are loyal enough to the city to fight for it.
The plaster dusts off my shoulders as I clear the debris, and the two dark elf soldiers on the other side make the poor decision to raise their weapons in my direction. It takes little effort to get them out of the way.
Rennic appears from somewhere to my left when I’m done, shaggy hair wild and smoke-streaked, a blade in each hand that he looks genuinely surprised to be holding.
“The cellar route is clear,” he says, and then looks at what’s left of the soldiers and adds nothing else.
“Where is Corvin?” I ask.
“Square. North end.” He points. “Vaedrin had him on his knees when I last?—”
I’m already gone. The harbor district is burning in patches. Dark elf soldiers move between the market stalls in groups of two and three, and the gargoyle merchants are not subtle opponents. Their leader has already cleared the lower docks with the efficiency that comes from centuries of knowing how breakable most things are. I pass two of his people working through a knot of soldiers near the fish stalls and don’t slow down. They don’t need me.
The tether pulls harder.
Selah is somewhere ahead, and she is not afraid right now. She is something sharper than afraid. She must doing something I am going to hate.
I reach the north end of the square in time to see Corvin still upright, which is more than I expected. He’s moving toward the square under his own power, one hand pressed to the side of his head, blood running freely from a cut above his ear. When he sees me his expression does the particular thing it does when he is relieved and unwilling to say so.
“Vaedrin,” I say.
Corvin points southeast without slowing. “He ran when the relic started turning. Took two soldiers with him. Selah went after him.”
The tether that lives underneath my ribs starts moving in a direction I don’t bother naming. I leave Corvin to Brinna, who is already materializing from somewhere with her hands full of purpose, and I follow the tether southeast into the burning mouth of the harbor district.
I find Vaedrin at the seawall.
He has his back to the water and the relic clutched against his chest. The two soldiers flanking him are facing the wrong direction entirely because they are watching me instead of Selah,who is standing twelve feet to Vaedrin’s left with a blade she did not have an hour ago. She got it from someone. She gets things from people constantly, without asking, which I have stopped being surprised by.
Vaedrin sees me and his composure does something I have never seen it do before. It slips.
“Don’t come any closer,” he says, and the register in his voice is almost right but not quite. The relic is pulsing in his grip, throwing cold light across the seawall in uneven pulses.
