49. The Gauntlet
The Gauntlet
The servants’ passages dumped us into a side courtyard that smelled of smoke and blood.
Fires burned everywhere. The barracks were gone, collapsed into heaps of glowing embers. The stables were ablaze, horses screaming inside. Smoke rolled across the grounds in thick waves that cut visibility to twenty feet.
“Stay close,” I told the survivors. “Don’t stop for anything.”
We moved in a tight group, fighters on the outside, the wounded and the nobles who couldn’t fight in the center. Maise took the left flank. Grit took the right, shadows pooling at his feet like spilled ink. Ygritte watched our rear, chains coiled loose around her forearms.
Baldir and Armand stayed in the center, protecting the other heirs. Their job was to survive, and mine was to get them there.
Behind the heirs came the rest: servants from House de Blaise who’d been caught in the attack, soldiers who’d lost their units, kitchen staff who’d grabbed carving knives when the mercenaries came through.
Thirty-odd people who didn’t belong on a battlefield, stumbling through smoke because staying behind meant dying.
The first mercenaries found us near the collapsed stables. Four of them, moving through the smoke, blades drawn. They saw our group and charged without hesitation.
I met the first one head-on. His sword came down and I stepped inside it, letting the blade pass behind me, driving my own weapon up under his chin. He gurgled and dropped .
Maise took the second with a savage cut that opened him from shoulder to hip.
Grit killed the fourth before the man finished his first swing. The third hesitated, and Ygritte’s chains wrapped his ankle and yanked. He hit the cobblestones face-first and didn’t get up.
We kept moving.
◇ ◆ ◇
The path to the main gates led through what had been the practice yard. Now it was a graveyard.
Bodies lay everywhere. Mercenaries, guards, young nobles who’d never had a chance. The ground was slick with blood that reflected the firelight in dark mirrors.
A boy in fine clothes sat against a wall, hands pressed to his stomach, trying to hold in things that weren’t supposed to be outside. His eyes found mine as we passed.
“Help me,” he whispered.
I kept walking. His guts were in his hands. He’d know it soon enough. Can’t save everyone. Save the ones you can.
Behind me, someone in our group was crying. I didn’t turn to see who.
The gates were ahead. I could see them through gaps in the smoke, iron bars standing open, torchlight flickering beyond. We were almost there.
Then the crossbow bolts started falling.
“Cover!”
I shoved the person nearest me behind an overturned cart. Bolts cracked into wood and stone, a deadly rain from positions we couldn’t see through the smoke .
“Where are they?” Armand shouted.
“Rooftops. Four positions, maybe five.” I scanned the smoke, trying to track the angles. “They’ve got the approach bracketed.”
“Can we go around?”
“No.” The gates were the only way out. The walls were too high to climb, especially with wounded. “We go through.”
“That’s a killing ground.”
“I know.” I looked at our group. Twenty-two people still standing, half of them too hurt or too rattled to fight. “Grit. Can you give us cover?”
He studied the smoke, the distances, the angle of fire. His shadows had already spread wider, darker than they should be in firelight.
“I can try.” More words than he’d spoken all night. “Won’t hold long.”
“Just need to block their line of sight. Ygritte, anyone gets close, put them down.”
She nodded, chains uncoiling from her arms with a soft metallic hiss.
“Everyone ready to run?” I asked.
A chorus of terrified nods.
“Then run.”
◇ ◆ ◇
Grit’s shadows exploded upward.
They formed walls. Thick curtains of darkness that hung in the air between us and the rooftops, blocking sight lines, turning the killing ground into a maze of shifting black.
Bolts flew into the darkness and vanished.
A few found targets anyway, but most disappeared into shadows that swallowed them whole .
We ran.
My legs burned. My lungs burned. The Knight Brand burned between my shoulder blades, demanding more, always more. It wanted me to stop and fight, to climb those rooftops and kill the men shooting at us. I ignored it. Survival first. Vengeance could wait.
A bolt caught one of the survivors in the leg. She screamed and fell. Maise grabbed her, hauled her up, half-dragged her toward the gates. Another bolt took a guard through the chest. He dropped and didn’t get up.
Ygritte’s chains lashed out as a mercenary stepped from cover to get a better shot. The links wrapped his throat and yanked. He hit the ground hard and stopped moving.
Fifty feet to the gates. Thirty feet. Twenty.
The shadows began to fade as Grit’s strength gave out. Bolts started finding their marks again.
Ten feet.
I grabbed a noble girl who’d frozen in terror and threw her through the gates. Both hands on her shoulders, launching her forward into the arms of whoever was waiting on the other side. Then we were through.
◇ ◆ ◇
The Sword-Kin held the gate approach.
I’d seen them fight before, in training exhibitions and sparring matches where they held back most of what they could do. This was different. This was the Sword-Kin unleashed.
Danzing stood at the center of the line, Doomfall carving arcs of red light through the smoke.
The greatsword was too large for any normal man to wield one-handed, but Danzing swung it like a willow switch, and where it passed, men came apart.
His Brand blazed on his shoulder, a wheel of swords spinning in harsh white light, and every swing carried enough force to crack the cobblestones on the follow-through.
Five mercenaries rushed him at once. Doomfall swept through all five in a single horizontal cut. Bodies fell in sections. The stones beneath his feet split where his blade finished its arc.
Tormund anchored the left flank, and I finally understood why they called his Brand the Bull That Breaks Mountains.
His skin had gone full bronze, gleaming like polished armor fresh from the forge.
A mercenary’s axe struck his forearm and the axe head shattered into fragments.
Tormund grabbed the man by the face and threw him into two others hard enough that all of them stopped moving.
A crossbow bolt hit his chest dead center. It crumpled against the bronze like parchment against iron.
Tormund didn’t flinch. He waded into a knot of mercenaries and started breaking them. I watched him catch a sword blade in his bare hand, squeeze until the steel snapped, then drive his fist through the swordsman’s breastplate. The man folded around the impact and didn’t get up.
But even from here, I could see the bronze beginning to thin. The gleam on his skin had started to dull at the edges, the color fading from mirror-bright to tarnished copper at his extremities. The Brand of Taurus demanded payment for invulnerability, and the payment was time.
Tennyson held the right flank, and the ground in front of him had become a crematorium.
The Brand of the Sun blazed on his chest, visible through his shirt, bright enough to leave afterimages.
Fire poured from his hands in rivers and sheets, turning the gate approach into a wall of white-hot flame that mercenaries couldn’t pass.
One tried anyway, charging through with a shield raised. The shield lasted two heartbeats. The man behind it lasted one. Tennyson didn’t even look at him, just kept pouring fire into the approach while mercenaries burned and screamed and died.
Haim worked the gaps with the quiet focus of a man who’d been killing longer than I’d been alive in either life.
His Brand of Justice didn’t grant the raw power the others had.
It granted certainty. Every strike found its mark.
Every parry came at the perfect angle. He moved through the chaos like he could see two seconds into the future, and mercenaries died around him in ones and twos, cut down by a blade that never missed.
Cain was everywhere and nowhere. The Brand of the Hanged Man flickered on his neck, inverted, and his body multiplied across the battlefield.
Eight Cains. Twelve. Twenty. Phantom copies that struck with real steel, daggers spinning from a dozen hands at once, mercenaries falling to wounds from attackers they couldn’t track.
The copies flickered like candlelight, not quite solid, but their blades cut just fine.
“Get them through!” Danzing roared without looking back. “Servants and soldiers first! Get the heirs clear!”
The survivors streamed past. I watched them go, counting heads.
Kitchen staff with carving knives. Soldiers missing pieces of their armor.
Servants still carrying the bags they’d grabbed when the barracks burned.
They ran through the gap the Sword-Kin held open, ran toward the road and the darkness beyond, ran because six warriors with awakened Brands had decided they would live .
The last of the common folk made it through. The last of the soldiers. The nobles came next, the ones too young or too rattled to fight, herded forward by Baldir’s voice.
“That’s everyone who isn’t a combatant,” Baldir said, appearing at my shoulder. “Servants are clear. Our soldiers are clear.”
“Good.” I turned back to the gates. “Now go.”
“The Sword-Kin—”
“Know what they’re doing.” I met his eyes. “They’re buying time for you and Armand to escape. The heirs of House de Blaise. That’s what matters to them.”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“You can. You will.” I grabbed his arm. “Your father sent them to protect you. If you die here, their deaths mean nothing. So run, Baldir. Run and make it count.”
For a moment, I thought he’d argue. His hands flexed at his sides, and I saw the conflict written across his face, duty against honor, survival against loyalty.