Geneva.
Koldo scanned the masses again. The Ardenian wings were flattening the sides, collapsing the battles raging there, and allowing the Torrentian innocents to scatter as the soldiers took on the Warlord’s men—neutralizing them with arrows first, blades second, and herding the Warlord’s seconds into complete inaction before ending them completely.
But the Warlord herself—that was more difficult to discern.
The sandy battleground was as flat as hardtack. The elevations weak. The adversaries wore similar clothing. The roaring firepit added another dimension in its blaring danger, and its ability to obscure what was beyond it.
Even with Koldo’s wild determination and trained vision, it took her three passes before she found Geneva.
Not in the saddle, but on the ground. Wearing sandblasted trousers and a belted tunic. Double swords in her hands, just as she had at the Itspi—her preference as long as Koldo had known her. Geneva was up near the Hand itself, her long, brown hair whistling in the ember-dashed air downwind of the firepit.
Even at this distance, Koldo registered a smile upon her beautiful face as she descended upon a target. The general’s eyes shifted toward Geneva’s mark.
Koldo’s heart bottomed out.
Geneva and her swords and smile were advancing on Ferdinand.
A crack of fear tore through the general’s gut.
It was a warning. For as much as she could compartmentalize, prioritize, focus on the task at hand no matter how bloody it may be, none of it mattered when it came to him. The boy she’d dreamed about for fifteen years. Ached for. Hoped for. Believed in more than herself.
In the pinprick of a moment, everything else—every battle cry, death wail, scrambled retreat, lunge-and-cross, all of it—disappeared.
There was only the love of her life—the love she had left—standing there, staring down the woman who’d raised him.
Geneva was wielding those twin swords and a thirst for revenge. Geneva was here for Luca, first and foremost, Koldo knew that, but it appeared she would not let either of her children go on without retribution.
But Ferdinand was not hers to claim. And he would not be her sacrifice.
The general flattened herself down against her charging horse and buried her heels into the animal’s flanks as hard as she could, the only thing in her vision the son she aimed to save.
Sunset hair. Green eyes. Body of a bear though he was an Ardenian tiger, through and through.
Ferdinand had been leaning over a corpse. Geneva had called his name—Koldo was sure of it by the way his head whipped around and he rose to his full height. His weapons flashed against the dawn as he whirled to face her. One sword. One dagger. Both bloody.
He had no armor.
Nothing else to protect him save for the years he spent with this woman he’d known as mother.
Koldo’s heart leapt from the depths of her star-born soul as her horse charged past the outskirts and into the camp itself, her one and only priority her son. Drawn from its sheath the sword she’d named in his honor—Seme,old Torrentian for “son”—the general charged straight for where they tussled near the massive Hand itself.
She hurtled past fallen men, dodged turned-over carriages, and cut down anyone storming upon her flanks with everything at her disposal. Her sword, her knives, the surrounding obstacles and terrain. Everything was in play, nothing was wasted, her target clear.
Ferdinand’s weapon was raised. He was trying to talk Geneva down, appealing to what heart she had left. It would never work, but it was buying Koldo time and she would take it.
Geneva’s crossed swords clanged, the shine upon them catching and deflecting the light. And then she was advancing, putting him on his heels. He maintained his distance, wheeling around.
“Keep that space, boy. Hold your space.”
It was a curse, a prayer, an order he couldn’t hear. Koldo hadn’t trained Ferdinand, and that was the problem—Geneva had. She knew his weaknesses better than he knew them himself. And she knew his strengths. He had no moves she hadn’t seen. No moves that she hadn’t taught him. Which meant Geneva understood exactly the best way to attack him and win.
Koldo dug in her heels one last time.
She leaned into her horse’s swirling mane, three feet of Basilican steel jutted out toward Geneva. The general needed Geneva to see the threat and make the space, lest she lose her head to Koldo’s blade, or be stomped straight over by her horse.
As she closed in, Geneva’s attention turned to the thundering hooves of the horse, catching upon the sword, the rider, the threat.
It worked.
