Chapter 9 #2
Terror singing through her veins, Disaris leaped up and helped Luda stand. A glimpse of outside revealed a patch of wholesale chaos, but they couldn’t hide inside a house that heaved and shuddered and was crowded with fanatics wanting their enslavement or their death.
It might have been morning, or noon, or even twilight.
Disaris couldn’t tell. Black clouds roiled overhead, and out of their depths a trio of whirlwinds spun down, twisting ropes of howling wind that ripped trenches through the estate grounds, ripped trees up by their roots and hurled them in the direction of the house.
Slate tiles snapped off the roof, spinning like sharpened crescent moons.
One embedded its edge in a Daggerman’s belly while another decapitated a Daggerman trying to escape the maelstrom of flying shrapnel alongside his comrades.
His headless body staggered drunkenly before collapsing, while the head rolled to stop and stared at the grotesque spectacle with blinking eyes.
Bolts of lightning cleaved the clouds to spear the ground.
One struck a group of Daggermen clustered together.
Behind the questionable shelter of a pair of ale casks, Disaris and Luda hid their eyes from the brightness.
When they could see again, a pile of smoking corpses lay where the Daggermen had once stood.
With the lightning came fire, graceful arcs of flame that encircled what remained of the fencing surrounding the property. What the wind didn’t take, the fire consumed with a ravenous roar. It washed toward the house in a blackening wave.
In the madness, Disaris saw Cimejen standing with a vortex of flame, unharmed by its destroying touch. His hands moved in a carefully choreographed dance as the fire flowed around and away from him like a dancer teasing her lover.
Bron, she thought. Where’s Bron? That thought was followed hard on the heels by the surety she and Luda were about to be burned to ash as a tide of flame rushed toward them and the house behind them in a wall of heat.
Suddenly both she and Luda were yanked to their feet and hurled to one side.
She was lifted a second time, the world around her pitching one way, then the other.
Bron held her in one arm with Luda thrown over his opposite shoulder.
He sprinted away from the house, which had become an inferno.
He set them both down a short distance away, where the heavens didn’t spit out vortexes of death and a battle mage didn’t sling fireballs at anything that moved.
Blood streamed from Bron’s nostrils, and he panted as hard as a lathered horse. “Are you both all right?”
Before either she or Luda could answer, the chilling twang of an arrow being fired sounded.
Bron pivoted, shoving both women to one side.
A second soft “thwump” followed the first. The first arrow embedded itself in the ground next to Disaris’s foot.
She turned at the sound of an agonized scream and spotted the archer who’d fired the arrow.
He was a column of flame, staggering in a zigzag pattern before falling to the ground, still clutching what remained of his bow.
She spun away from the grotesque sight, only to face one far worse that made her heart seize in her chest.
Bron stood before her, looking down at the arrow extending from his right side. He touched the shaft, then looked up at Disaris. The blood pouring out of his nostrils was joined by that bubbling past his lips. She caught him as he fell to his knees with a wet exhalation.
“Bron!” She cradled him as he sank to the ground, all his strength draining away as quickly as his blood.
“My gods, Bron! Look at me.” She stroked his face, impossibly paler than before.
“Don’t you dare die.” Inside, she screamed and screamed until she thought her head might burst. “Do you hear me, my love?” she said softly.
“I will marry Ceybold again. I swear it.”
He coughed and more blood spilled past his lips. He reached up to clasp her hand. “Stop making bargains with that bastard, Disa. You did it again years ago, didn’t you? Rejected me to save me. Stop it.”
She almost lost her hold on him when Cimejen slid on his knees next to them. “Move,” he snapped and pulled Bron from her arms. Stunned, Disaris instinctively shoved back and tried to hold on to Bron.
Cimejen shoved her again. “Let me help him, itzuli!”
Help. Her thoughts spun, and she recalled a bit of conversation she and Bron had about a battle mage’s powers. His were wind and lightning. Cimejen’s had been fire. And healing.
Please, she prayed to any god listening. Please.
Cimejen placed his hands on Bron’s side, around the embedded arrow. “You owe me for this, jin Hazarin. What idiot goes into battle without donning his armor?”
Bron’s lips were blue under the crimson wash of blood. His eyes shifted to where Luda knelt beside Disaris. “We meet again, dear one.”
Tears spilled from Luda’s eyes. “Oh Bron,” she whispered, and her hand joined Disaris’s in stroking his head.
Cimejen’s hands began to glow, and he too paled as life-giving power flowed out of him and into his fallen battle-brother. “So much fucking blood,” he muttered. “What are you, a pig?”
No one laughed. Disaris and Luda prayed. Cimejen cursed.
Bron’s eyes squinted when he stared at Disaris, as if he struggled to see her. She forced back her own tears so his face wouldn’t blur in her vision.
“I have always loved you,” he said, the words barely there.
Please, she continued in silent supplicance. Please.
She smiled at him. “As you should, moon boy, because I’ve always loved you.”
He returned her smile. “The moon rises.”
She swallowed down the knot in her throat as her tears conquered her will. “And a star waits.”