7 #3
My triumph fades as a huge shape blocks my view. The biggest soldier I’ve yet to encounter, thick with muscle and taller than Vawn. He’s a wall of power, gripping a giant ax.
I spring backward and resume my defensive stance, taking a second to scan him for potential weaknesses. Over his purple uniform, he’s wearing armor—slabs of heavy, layered leather reinforced with metal plates and strips. Chain mail protects his thighs and upper arms.
Against a big man like this, my greatest advantages are usually my speed and agility. If I can dart around him, I can leap onto his shoulders from behind and maybe slit his throat or choke him out.
I feint to the left, then dodge right, dashing past him—
But he grabs me. His big hand clamps around the back of my neck and he lifts me bodily, as if I weigh nothing. Holding me high in one hand, he swings back the ax.
He’s going to chop me in half.
“Stop!” The prince’s voice splits the air, halting my attacker’s blow.
I don’t wait for a discussion between them; I reach around and stab my opponent through the wrist that’s holding me.
The blade doesn’t go in very far, but it’s enough pain to make him drop me.
He bellows and swings his ax, but I drop and roll just in time.
I throw myself behind him, spring to my feet, and climb up his back like a spy climbing a wall.
I toss one leg over his shoulder, holding onto his helmet while he roars and lunges, trying to dislodge me.
The instant I manage to get my right leg over his right shoulder, I’ve won. I’m riding him piggyback, and he should realize how dangerous that is, but he’s distracted by Vawn charging him from the front, brandishing his own knife.
I stab both claw knives into the top of the helmet, not caring if they pierce bone. Leaving them stuck in the crystalline surface, I wrap my arms around the soldier’s head and twist with all my strength.
His neck snaps.
I ride the big brute to the ground, yank my knives out of his helmet, and sheathe them. Then I pick up his ax. It’s far too heavy for me to wield comfortably.
“You want it?” I ask Vawn.
He shrugs. “It’s not my weapon of choice, but if I can carry it to Zeletas, we can sell it.”
“True. It’s a solid piece, well-crafted.” But I’m not looking at the ax—I’m scanning the trees. The archer with the crossbow is nowhere to be seen. And I know there was a fifth soldier, the one on the wyvern.
“This isn’t over,” I tell Vawn. “You should have run when I told you to.”
“If I had, you’d be dead.”
“Maybe not. I might have figured something out. I’ve faced big warriors before.”
“But not without glyphs.”
I shoot him an irritated look. “Shut up and look for enemies. Where’s the carpet?”
“Safe for the moment. Badly torn, though.”
“Fuck. Do you think he can still fly?”
“You’ll have to ask him. Nicely.”
“I’m nice.”
Vawn snorts. “You lack charm, darling.”
“And you had to create a perpetual glyph to make yourself charming.”
“It only amplified what I already possess,” he replies.
The back of my neck prickles with awareness. I grab the top of Vawn’s head and shove him down just as a crossbow bolt zips through the trees.
“Fuck,” he gasps.
I’m already sprinting toward the place the bolt was shot from, drawing a knife as I run.
I hear the ratcheting of the crossbow mechanism as another bolt is set in place, as the string is hauled back—and I crash into the clump of bushes, grappling with the archer, stabbing recklessly anywhere, everywhere.
There’s a buzz and flicker of shield magic, but I keep going until it fails and the blade punches through, raking flesh.
The archer has a woman’s shape. Her nails are short and square, painted with glyphs for accuracy, shielding, and strength, along with some symbols I can’t discern because we’re struggling in a blur of limbs, rolling over and over in the undergrowth.
She grabs my short hair, the tips of her nails raking my scalp, and I feel a sudden haze in my brain, a dizzying shift as vertigo throws my skills into chaos. Nausea spins in my throat and my head.
She disoriented me with one of her glyphs.
Closing my eyes against the vertigo, I reach up to the hand in my hair and pinch one of her nails, pressing it against my scalp and using my own skull as leverage to break it.
She shrieks as the nail cracks, but she has the presence of mind to secure me in a deadly chokehold.
I reach back, scratching at where her eyes should be but only finding the rough surface of the helmet. I kick wildly, too disoriented to figure out how to break the chokehold, vaguely realizing that this could be the moment I die.
Suddenly my attacker screams, a horrible, high-pitched keening of pure agony. She collapses, releasing me and falling back against the ground. I roll free, then look back, trying to get my eyes to focus so I can figure out what happened.
The prince stands over the archer, holding the bloody ax. My attacker’s fingers tremble helplessly above the severed stump of her left leg. Vawn must have chopped it off while she was choking me.
Her legs and mine were perilously close together. He could have easily cut off my limb instead, or at least wounded me. Whether it was luck or precision on his part, I’m glad I escaped unscathed.
“Where’s the other member of your group?” I ask the woman.
She only sobs without answering.
“He probably stayed with the carpets and the wyvern,” I theorize. “Tell us who you serve, and maybe we’ll let you live. Who is trying to destroy the royal family?”