Restoration (52 page)

By the time thirteen of the hidden warriors lay dead beneath me, a few of the troop had recovered their wits and were trying to reform their party. One on one they could not touch me. Three on one kept me busy. Each time I seemed to be in trouble, I thought of the seven hundred helpless souls murdered in their dark prison, and my anger gave strength to my arm and power to my enchantments. Even so, some of the Derzhi slipped away and rode for the gate and the Prince. I could not allow it.

I wrenched out an arrow that had pierced my left shoulder, set the bloody shaft afire, and threw it with such force it pierced the archer's neck. A last sweep of my blade beheaded one warrior and unhorsed another, and I soared upward and flew toward the lake. One by one I cut down the escaping Derzhi, unheeding of their groans and screams. I called up the wind and the water, causing a monstrous wave to climb out of the muddy basin and sweep two horsemen into the lake. Another was trampled when I drove his horse mad with stinging bees.

By the time I reached the sluice gate, Aleksander was engaged with two of the gate guards who were pressing him hard. Two Derzhi were on the ground—one dead, one injured—along with an outlaw missing his head. The remaining Danatos guard fought two outlaws at once, while a man with a painted face worked on the gears and latches of the gate, ducking and dodging the flying weapons and hooves when the battle came too near him.

Aleksander caught his first sight of me. “Great Athos, save us!”

“They're coming for you,” I shouted to the grimly smiling Prince, who used the occasion of my arrival to skewer one awestruck opponent while I unhorsed the other.

Aleksander pulled his horse around to look for his next opponent and kicked the unhorsed Derzhi in the head lest the man stab the preoccupied Pherro. “What in the god's holy name have you done to yourself?”

Lungs burning from the heavy fighting, I forced myself to inhale before trying to speak, and even then I could not afford to waste strength on explanations. “At least twenty more coming around the lake. Over a hundred of the garrison unaccounted for.” Where were they?

I touched earth between the two struggling outlaws and the remaining gate guard. The Derzhi guard staggered backward and dropped to his knees. Before the gaping warrior could make a god sign against evil, I cut him in half. None too soon. The first rider of the larger party rounded the end of the earthwork, sword raised and heading straight for the Prince. As he blazed past me, I pulled him off his horse and severed his neck. A second rider followed close on his heels. This one swerved to avoid me. The wind rose at my command, and I raised my bloody sword one more time, but before I could take flight, a dark shape streaked screaming across the sky and flew into the man's face. The warrior's mount reared and threw him to the ground, where he lay unmoving. The bird circled once, and after a blurring moment, Blaise was running toward us.

“When I saw the fire—and you—I decided there was no more point in holding the watchpost,” he said, staring at me unabashed. “Stars of the heavens, man, what have you—?”

“Get everyone away,” I said, still heaving, warm blood dribbling from my shoulder, though I felt no hurt from it. “You were betrayed.” I hacked off the head of the unhorsed Derzhi, and then spread my wings, ready to take on the remainder of the Derzhi riders. Feyd and Roche and the rest of the raiding party were riding over the lip of the meadow, and I yelled for them to follow me.

“Seyonne!” Aleksander called after me. Though his command was quiet, somehow my name on his tongue reached me in the grim place where I had existed since I'd seen what was done in the mine.

I held the wind under my wings so as to hover over him, my gold fire bathing his worried face. “My lord?”

“Watch your soul, my guardian. I would not buy my life with it.”

“They should not have left the mine unguarded,” I said. “They killed them all, my lord. Seven hundred, less twenty they saved to stack and burn the others. I have no mercy left in me.”

 

The battle was joined again a few hundred paces from the gate. Feyd struck his blow for Parassa, for lost Suza and four hundred years of humiliation. I sent Blaise hunting for the rest of the warriors, while I killed again and again. Aleksander fought with deadly success, but only until the first Derzhi dismounted, knelt, and begged quarter. “Not one more drop of blood,” he shouted, dashing to every duel, halting the slashing swords with his own if his voice was not enough. “Not one more hair will be touched.”

He forced the seven surviving Derzhi to kneel and place their hands on their heads while the outlaws disarmed them and led their horses away. And then he rode before the line of prisoners, back and forth, as if to make sure that each one saw his face—especially those who wore the gold trappings of nobility. One of the kneeling Derzhi spat at the Prince, but Aleksander stayed the hand of the Manganar raider who raised his hand to strike the man. “Rope these seven together. While we take care of our fallen, they will gather my brothers and bury them,” he said to the raiders. “I'll leave no Derzhi warrior for vultures, no matter his crimes. When the work is done, we'll take the prisoners down to the mine and see how they should be judged.”

As the prisoners set about the grisly task, and the raiders stripped the bodies of weapons and tended to their own dead and wounded, I touched earth near the Prince. Everyone withdrew hastily, leaving us alone in the center of the battlefield. “You need to find out where the rest of the garrison is waiting,” I said. “Your prisoners know. Did you see the smug looks on their faces?”

Aleksander dismounted, crouched down beside a fallen Derzhi, and began cleaning his hands on the man's ripped cloak.

“Of course, I saw it. They expect me to torture the information out of them, but I won't. They'd die before they told me—or near enough. If things are going to change, then it must begin now. I want these seven to carry the tale of it to Zhagad.” Before standing up again, he rolled the dead warrior to his back, closed the staring eyes, and straightened the cooling limbs, laying the man's sword on his chest until the outlaws could collect it. “I hoped you would agree.” He stood up and faced me square on, his whole posture a question I could not answer; I did not yet know who or what I was.

“Then we'll have to learn what we need to know some other way,” I said, yielding the point. Reluctantly. Abandoning wings and light, I shifted back to my own form, rubbing my head to try to clear the muddle.

Aleksander nodded, satisfied, and then he mounted and rode off toward the others, encouraging the outlaw fighters, ignoring the scowls and curses of the Danatos warriors, watching carefully to see that they did not break their parole. Impatient at the delay, I stood at the top of the embankment, where I could see, trying to find the missing piece of the night's puzzle. Blaise returned after a while, reporting that he saw no evidence of the other Derzhi. “Perhaps the garrison has been reduced,” he said, sitting down on the grassy hillock and offering a waterskin.

I sat next him and took the cool leather pouch. Only as I drank did I realize how thirsty I was. “It doesn't make sense,” I said. “They can't be sure we'll go back to the mine. We've no reason to but to help the last twenty before they're thrown on the pyre with the dead. But if not here and not at the mine, then where else could they be planning to hit us?”

“Gods of night, would they do that? Burn the living?” Blaise paused before taking another swig from the waterskin for himself.

“There is no evil one human will not work on another,” I said. And no betrayal. Who had told the Danatos that Aleksander was coming?

“Blaise!” Roche called from the sluice gate. “Pherro says he's ready to open the sluice.”

Blaise glanced at me as he stood. “Have a care, Seyonne.” He dropped the waterskin in my lap, then slid his way down the steep embankment toward the gate and his men. “We've got to make sure Farrol has everyone out of the mine first,” I heard him tell Roche. “I'll go find out. When the Aveddi starts down, he wants you and Pherro to stay behind ...” They walked off together, leaving me to solitude and worry.

Who was the traitor? Despite my suspicions, I could not accuse Gorrid just because he hated Aleksander. Everyone at Taíne Keddar bore some grievance against the Prince or his father. The matter of the slaves was the biggest stumbling block to pinning this villainy on one of Blaise's people. No matter their feelings about Aleksander, none were callous enough to jeopardize the outcome of the raid for personal vengeance. This was not some angry outlaw running to the Danatos unthinking. Someone had conceived a plan. That eliminated Gorrid. He was not a complex thinker; he hated Aleksander, but he hated the Derzhi even more, and his loves and hates would always define his actions. So who was it? I could not leave this world until I knew, if I had to prick young Feyd to sleeplessness for three days.

The last vestiges of daylight faded from the sky, my friends and enemies left indistinguishable in the murky borderland of night. My senses were tuned with every scrap of power I could muster, listening for hoofbeats, for muffled voices, for harness bound with strips of leather to mute its telltale ring, for swords and knives being carefully unsheathed. The missing warriors were poised to cut our throats, but where? I riffled through the exchanges of the day. Through Feyd's recitation of the plan. Through the meeting with Roche and Gorrid outside the mine. Through weeks of listening to the outlaws at Blaise's fire at Taíne Keddar. In the fifth time over, I knew the answer.

“Roche!” I said, slithering down the embankment and calling to the quiet young Ezzarian as he helped a group of his men and women load up the sizable pile of confiscated Derzhi weapons by tying them to backs and belts and saddles. “Who scouted this raid?”

The dark-haired man buckled a fine leather sword belt atop three others around a Kuvai woman's shoulder. “Admet,” he said. “After our bungling at Andassar, he said he wanted to check the terrain for himself, so he came out here three days ago to see to it.”

“And who was with him?”

“No one. Easier for one to keep hidden.”

“Alone? But he can't travel the way you do.” Admet was human, not a joined Ezzarian.

Roche glanced about noting who was in earshot. “Did no one ever tell you the location of Taíne Keddar? That was the beauty of this plan. The valley is only a few hours' ride—for anyone—from Syra.” He shook his head. “That's why we thought we could get so many slaves away safely, because with Blaise, Gorrid, Brynna, Farrol, and me taking them through the ways, we could have had them in Taíne Keddar in half an hour.” The young Ezzarian pulled another sword belt from the pile, jerking on it impatiently when the long sheath caught in the tangle. “No, Admet came on his own to do the scouting, and he was right in every point. I suppose we fouled it up some other way this time.”

Admet. And Feyd had said that Admet was to lead the fighters to the sluice gate. “Have you seen Admet tonight?” I asked. “Maybe he can give me some idea as to whether the garrison was in place that day or if they've moved out since.” Or how the Danatos got wind of the Prince ...

Roche took a bundle of knives from a stocky youth who had rolled them in a dead man's shirt, and he stuffed them into a saddle pack. “He brought us word of the extra guards at the sluice, but then Brynna took him back to Taíne Keddar to help make ready for the slaves. Admet can't fight you know—not with his back the way it is. He was a slave himself as a child. The Derzhi broke him. Left him crippled.”

And so a great deal became clear. “So he guided the four fighters to the sluice ... and then he came to fetch Aleksander.”

“That's right.” Roche called after me as I turned to walk back up the embankment. “It was good you were here, Seyonne. You saved us again.”

I just shook my head. Seven hundred dead.

Admet, the wily Suzaini strategist. A complex thinker. A man who might believe he could punish Aleksander while somehow managing to rescue the slaves. Gods ... that was it. He'd made a bargain with the Danatos.
We'll hand over the Kinslayer, but you'll allow us into the mine ... leave it unguarded. We'll trade one man for seven hundred. And you'll get to keep the mine, for we'll set the trade at the lake and leave before breaking the sluice gate.
The Prince alone was to be taken. Not the other fighters.

But the Danatos had been wilier than Admet.
We'll take the Kinslayer, and we'll leave the mine unguarded, but you'll never take our property. We'll kill them first. We'll take the prize and leave you nothing ... nothing ...

“No!” As the pieces settled into position, I was appalled at the image I had built. Of Admet hating Derzhi so much that he believed them stupid and could not distinguish one from another. Of the Danatos first lord, denounced by his own mother for his continuing dishonor, swearing to abide by the agreement, while planning from the first how to twist it to his advantage. Of Admet riding home after his clever bargaining, smug in his success. And of some Danatos spy who followed the broken Suzaini on his human path ... all the way to Tame Keddar. First ensure the capture of the Kinslayer, and then wipe out the Yvor Lukash. Seven hundred slaves were nothing. For this, the Emperor would yield them half the Empire.

Mad with rage and terror, I shaped wings and shot into the sky, crying out for the others to abandon their useless tasks and follow me. I knew where the remaining Danatos had gone.

Taíne Keddar was in flames. The houses and tents were already ash, the ancient olive trees but dark, twisted scars on a sky of garish orange and red. By the time Aleksander, Blaise, and the other riders crested the encircling ridge, I had surveyed the valley and found it devoid of life. Flames licked at a few dark forms lying here and there amid the burning fields and groves. Everyone else—the attackers, as well as those who lived in the valley—had disappeared.