Page 28 of The Demon Kept Me

"Whatever comes," he says, low, against the thunder.

"Together," I finish. "Come on. Let's go save our home."

25

MALVEK

He comes at the height of the storm, and he comes at both throats of the valley at once.

I feel it before I see it — the shift in the dark, the massing of men where there was only rain a moment before. Pike is no fool. He knows we've split our strength between the mill and the dam, and so he strikes both at the same breath, a wave of hired knives boiling out of the treeline toward the grinding house while a second force drives upriver for the weakened timbers. He means to overwhelm us everywhere, to give us no moment to send help from one fight to the other. Divide, and drown.

It's a good plan. It would work against a lonely demon and a frightened flock.

He does not have a lonely demon anymore.

"Mill's mine!" I roar over the thunder, and I mean it as a promise to my people and a warning to his. "Garrik — the dam! Take your half and hold those timbers, we cannot lose them! Go!"

And then I stop holding back the thing I have kept chained since the binding took me.

The chaos-magic comes up out of me like a river finding the sea, and it does not come gently. My markings blaze so bright they throw shadows on the rain. The first rank of attackers reaches the mill yard and I meet them the way my people were forged to meet an enemy — without mercy for their weapons and without murder for their lives, breaking bows and blades and knees, hurling men back into the mud with waves of force that crack like the storm overhead. They have brought siege against a watermill: a ram slung between two carts to stave in the great doors, ladders, pitch, and fire kept live under oilcloth against the rain. I take the ram apart. I put my hands on the yoke of it and I tear the iron from the wood and the carts collapse into ruin, and the men who brought it scatter before a creature out of their darkest telling.

But there are so many of them. Pike has spent his grain-money well; for every hireling I put down two more come through the rain, and they are not all cowards, and they do not all break. A blade finds my side. Another opens my shoulder. A thrown axe catches me across the ribs and I feel bone go, and still I hold the mill yard, because behind me is the grinding house and the flour and every soul who ran to me for shelter, and a Volvath does not yield the ground he has sworn to keep while breath remains in him.

There is a moment, deep in it, when a hired blade slips past my guard and a farmer I have known by name for many a season — a quiet man who never once met my eye across his grain sacks — steps in front of the blow meant for my blind side and takes it on the haft of his own axe. He does not flee. He plants his boots beside mine in the mud and the rain and he holds, and I understand that whatever I gave this village in all my grinding their bread, they have chosen, tonight, to pay it back in the only currency that counts: they will not leave me to bleed alone. It steadies something in me past what any wound could shake.And I am not alone in the holding.

They fight beside me, my village. Bren's older cousins loose hunting arrows from the mill roof, steady and deadly, picking men off the ladders. The blacksmith stands at my shoulder swinging his great hammer and bellowing like a bull. Farmers I've fed year after year wade into hired killers with axes and threshing flails and the terrible fury of people defending their children, and every one is worth three of Pike's paid men because Pike's men fight for coin and mine fight for home. The demon of every rumor holds the center, and Ashbrook holds the flanks, and together — bleeding, battered, outnumbered — together we do not break.

Then I see him.

Pike. In his fine coat gone dark with rain, slipping through the chaos at the yard's edge while his men die to keep my eyes elsewhere, and he is making not for the fight but for the small side door of the millhouse — and in his gloved hand, shielded from the rain, is a lit brand.

I understand his true stroke in a heartbeat, and the cold of it is worse than any wound. The flour. The mill house is thick with it, weeks of milled flour hanging as dust in the air and heaped in sacks to the rafters, and any miller alive knows the secret terror of his own trade: flour dust takes a flame like powder. One brand in that room and the whole grinding house goes up in a blast that would flatten it to the foundation and everyone sheltering near it with it. He doesn't need the dam to kill the mill. He means to blow it to splinters and let the curse of the demon take the blame.

"PIKE!"

I go through his men to reach him. I do not go gently. I reach the side door as he wrenches it open, and I catch the wrist that holds the brand and I crush it until the fire falls from his fingers and gutters out in a puddle, and then we are both through the door and into the mill house.

He fights like the coward he is — quick, vicious, aiming for the wounds already opened in me, a hidden knife coming up for my throat. But a merchant, however cruel, has never stood in an infernal war-line, and I have stood in a hundred. I take the knife across my forearm rather than my throat. I put him into the grain scale hard enough to bend it. He is fast and he is desperate and he lands blows that would fell a lesser creature, and still, step by step, I drive him back across the mill floor below, because he threatened her home, and a demon does not forget a debt.

Beneath us, through the floor, I feel it — the first cold tongue of floodwater licking at the mill's foundation. The dam is failing. The river is finding its way. We are running out of time, all of us, and somewhere out in the storm Wren is at those timbers with the water rising, and I cannot be in two places, and it is tearing me in half.

"Your dam is breaking, demon," Pike pants, grinning through bloodied teeth, reading my face. "Feel it? Too late to stop it. You've already lost. All this — and you drown with them."

"Then I'll not drown alone," I tell him, and I mean him, and I see the grin falter.

Outside, over the thunder and the clash and the roar of the swelling river, I hear Wren's voice ring out across the dam — clear, unafraid, calling the count for a bucket line, ordering the fight against the fire and the flood both, holding her half of the valley together with nothing but nerve and lungs. Alive. Fighting. Holding.

It is the sweetest sound I have ever heard, and it gives me the last of what I need.

I catch Pike's next blow, and I do not let go — and then, beneath our feet, the swollen river throws itself against the wounded dam, and far off through the storm comes a sound like the valley's own bones beginning to break, a deep splintering groan of old timber giving way as the first great crack races through it. The whole mill shudders. And in the half-heartbeat my eyes cut toward that sound — toward Wren, out there on the failing dam — Pike twists in my grip like the eel he is, wrenches his coat out of my bloodied hands, and bolts. Not deeper into the mill, where he is trapped, but out the side door and into the storm, running for the riverbank and the dark trees beyond it. I take one step after him and the floodwater surges up through the floorboards, and I am forced to choose in an instant between hunting one coward through the dark and reaching the woman I love before the dam takes her. It is no choice at all. I let Pike run, and I go to Wren.

26

WREN

The dam is dying under my feet and I won’t let it take the valley with it.

I've got maybe thirty villagers on the timbers with me — the half Malvek sent upriver, Garrik at their head — and we are waging a war on two fronts at once. Pike's men come at, trying to drive us off the dam long enough for the river to finish what their saws began. And the river itself comes at us from below, brown and vast and furious, hammering the wounded structure, finding every cut support and leaning its whole terrible weight against them.