Chapter Fourteen #2
“Oh, not much. Just the emotionally devastating, backstabby part.”
Helspira stepped forward, one hand outstretched. “Sikras, please, it’s not—”
“Vessik knows we’re here.”
Rowan shoved past Helspira, brows furrowed. “What did you say?”
If looks could’ve killed, the banneret would’ve burst into flame when Sikras’s gaze landed on him.
Once upon a time, his looks could’ve killed when coupled with a whispered spell.
How lucky Rowan was that he could no longer pull off incantations of that power without risking death to himself. “Vessik. Knows. We’re here.”
A muscle twitched beneath Rowan’s eye, and his fingers bunched into fists. “How much time do we have?”
Accosted by a sudden headache, Sikras pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Rowan. All I got was a cryptic note on a mostly dead bird.”
The banneret stood in stiff, skeptical silence, attention on Sikras, as if he awaited some sort of retaliation.
Sikras stared back, shoulders tight. Maybe he should’ve retaliated. Maybe he should’ve punched Rowan in his fucking face. Instead, his shoulders slumped, and he sighed.
When Sikras made no move to attack, Rowan bolted past him, shouting something into the air—rallying his soldiers for the impending attack most likely. It sounded like nothing more than a flurry of distorted far-off echoes.
Helspira took a tentative step forward, both scrolls clutched in her hands. “Sikras—” Her voice was strained, tight. “I ...”
Whatever she had planned to say, it never came.
Sikras waited patiently, hopefully, but when no additional words left her lips, he invited them.
“This is the part where you tell me it’s all a misunderstanding.
And I’ll believe you when you say it, too, because I’m wrong about a lot of things, Hels, but I’m not wrong about people. I wasn’t wrong about you.”
Silence. Unshed tears glistened on the surface of her organic eye. “I—I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what to tell myself. So many people are dying. Nyllmas’s people. I just wanted to be a hero for my kingdom, for my home.”
Her admission met his ears but failed to sink in. “Were you really going to risk sending Benjamin to his death?”
His query was a quiet whisper, not a loud demand, and yet it looked as if it deafened her to a point of physical agony. “No. Yes? I—I don’t know.”
“Really?” Severing eye contact, Sikras focused on the snow. The single word faded into oblivion, more an emotionless statement than an outcry of disbelief. That was that then. Great. Okay. “I guess you were right. Maybe I’m not as good at reading people as I thought.”
The numbness deepened, expanding outward from his chest toward his fingertips. He turned and walked away.
“Sikras, please—”
Her plea sounded so far away. So foreign. He kept walking.
Helspira charged forward and shouted, “I’m not like you. I can’t just choose one or two lives over an entire kingdom as easily as I choose what meal to have for dinner. We’re talking about families—families like mine—and he’s killing them. You can’t blame me for being torn!”
Something in her words penetrated his wall of detachment and anchored him in place.
Before him, a flood of steel bodies assembled in a chaotic blur.
Behind him, a person he thought he knew.
What an idiot he had been. How well could he have possibly known someone he met less than a week ago?
Only a fool would’ve formed a bond that quickly.
Only a fool would turn around.
And yet ...
Sikras slowly spun and found her pleading eyes.
She opened her mouth to speak, whether to plead her case further or offer an explanation, he wasn’t sure.
He didn’t even know if she could say anything to ease the sting.
Whatever it was Helspira had intended to say became lost when her unspoken words turned into a scream at the sight of an arrow sinking into his shoulder.
And here he thought he was dead inside. Too numb to feel. You know what was easy to feel? A fucking arrow in the shoulder.
An agonized wail pierced through his clenched teeth as he fell to his knees.
“Sikras!” Helspira bolted forward, kicking up snow, and slid to the ground beside him.
The world whirled as adrenaline flooded his system. For a moment, nothing but blinding white blurs and an ear-piercing echo existed. When realization struck and clarity returned, Sikras arched his back, a second agonized groan forcing its way up and out his throat.
“An arrow? Really?” Sikras instinctively reached to touch it, to rip it from his shoulder, but immediately abandoned the plan when touching the shaft sent a ripple of agony through his torso.
“Fuck me, I thought Vessik’s ‘army’ was comprised of the downtrodden, not artfully skilled warriors trained in the ways of gods-damned archery! ”
“It wasn’t a skilled archer.” Helspira placed a gentle hand on him and inspected the arrow. “If it were, they’d have used a barbed tip, and you’d be bleeding out from a severed artery right now. It looks like it missed anything vital.”
Sikras bit back another pained grunt. It certainly didn’t feel like it missed anything vital.
It felt like it somehow managed to skewer every internal organ, as if it planned on roasting them on a spit over an open flame.
“Great. Shish-kabobbed by a talentless albeit lucky marksman. If that’s how this fight is going to go”—he bellowed a short cry as he dug his scythe into the ground and pushed to his feet—“I’ve half a mind to regret standing back up. ”
Seering pain or no, it was best to let the shaft dangle from his body like a poorly hammered nail.
The proper protocol for arrow wounds eluded him anyway, and he lacked the time to pull that memory from wherever it sat in his brain, assuming he knew it at all.
He advanced toward the bustling crowd of Red Sentinel soldiers, scanning the horde.
He heard Helspira scramble to her feet behind him. “Where are you going?”
“I have to find Benjamin.”
“You need to find the cleric,” she said.
“No time.”
“If what you said is true, the enemy will be on us any second. You need—”
“I need to find Benjamin,” Sikras murmured, fingers biting into his palms. “Turns out, our enemies have been here the whole time, and now there are more on the way.”
Sikras entered the fray of readying men and women, Helspira’s pleas fading with the clanging of priming chainmail and steel.
He tugged at his collar, an irritating trail of sweat snaking down the side of his head.
When he wiped the moisture from his skin, it was cold.
Clammy. Every step forward felt like it lowered his blood pressure, but he marched through a sea of scurrying bodies that seemed to move in slow motion.
Panicked voices, clanging swords, and an annoying metallic taste in his mouth bombarded his senses.
He walked, lightheaded from both physical pain and the war waging between his mental and emotional state.
How could he have made such an egregious miscalculation?
This was the art of reading people. The one skill he thought he had mastered.
Sikras put self-deprecation on hold when he spied Benjamin in the distance, still wrapped in his blood-red cloak and Helspira’s scarlet scarf.
He had drawn his sword, planted his feet, and stared in the direction of enemy soldiers both alive and dead as they charged through the squealing wooden gates that creaked open like the petals of a slow-blooming flower.
Skeletal warriors, in various stages of decay from bones to still-rotting flesh, advanced before living fighters who held scrap-wood shields and rusting steel high above their heads. Some Red Sentinels met them head on, while others scrambled to don their armor and find their blades in the ambush.
The sound of metal on metal joined the cries of the gutted as bodies fell left and right. It seemed for every enemy who fell, another appeared from the mouth of Stow’s Peak’s gate.
Through the fray, Sikras trudged toward Benjamin, pulse rapid yet weak.
He found him mumbling a quiet prayer to his god. “Dionus, guide my sword arm. May my blade know your precision and my swings know your sister’s mercy.” Benjamin’s prayer came to an end seconds before his sword found the stomach of a middle-aged man who crumpled, staining the snow with his blood.
Before Benjamin could raise his weapon again, Sikras seized his arm. “We have to leave.”
Benjamin spun, somehow managing to look incredulous despite having no facial expression. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“You want to abandon the R.S.? Abandon Nyllmas? Again?” His voice hitched, rage building. “How much longer will this go on?”
“You don’t understand. The Red Sentinel wants you dead. They—”
“I’ve been dead for four fucking years!”
Four years of repressed anger. Four years of anguish.
Four years of torment, it all came out in a single fury-filled shout that startled birds from branches and competed with the loudest clashing steel.
Frozen, Sikras clung to his scythe, unable to do anything other than stare at Benjamin with wide unmoving eyes.
“I’m sick of this stagnancy, Sikras. What is my second chance for if I continue to do nothing with it?
” Benjamin wiped the blood from his blade on his cloak.
“I took an oath to aid my kingdom. Our queen. Saelihn is our friend. If you want to run, then go, but I can’t sit back another four years and pretend a life of boardgames and playing music to empty rooms is worth living. ”
Around them, Red Sentinels screamed. The manipulated men and women of Stow’s Peak screamed with them. Blades found flesh, bodies hit the earth, and suddenly the pain in his shoulder was secondary to that in his chest.
But who was more masterful at suppressing unwelcome feelings than Sikras ‘Catseye’ Nikabod? Wordless, he stood beside Benjamin, one hand on his scythe, the other poised to start a spell.
“What are you doing?” Benjamin asked, a sudden sheepishness in his tone.
“What’s it look like? I’m killing peasants with my brother-in-law.”
“Just like that?”
“Assuming I don’t pass out.”
“You do look horrifyingly pale,” Benjamin admitted. “And is that an arrow sticking out of your shoulder?”
Sikras faced him with a confident smirk. “A sea of arrows couldn’t stop me from standing beside you.”
A low rumbling laugh echoed from Benjamin’s jaw. “I appreciate the gesture, but maybe you should stand behind me instead.”
The snow vibrated all around them, and a wave of buried corpses emerged from beneath the blanket of white powder like seedlings—maniacal, bloodthirsty seedlings.
“How is he raising so many?” Sikras snarled, muttering the spell for shadow blades as he stepped backward to avoid the lazy swing of a half-dead woman. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“We may be outnumbered, and they may have the element of surprise”—Benjamin slashed a civilian’s torso with one fluid swing—“but we still have them bested in skill.”
Hopefully Benjamin was right. As Sikras peered across the growing number of enemies, it seemed skill was all they had in their favor. As the battle waged on, and the rolling wave of magical recoil zapped through his frame, Sikras grimaced through the pain, teeth grinding.
Any confidence of Vessik surrendering faded with each body that fell.
Much as it pained him, he had to face the facts; if he had been wrong about Helspira, maybe he was wrong about Vessik too.
Wherever the kindhearted version of his dear childhood friend had fallen, it was apparently too deep for Sikras to pull him back up.