Lyara huddled within the ring of wagons, pressed shoulder to shoulder with the other camp wives, unable to take her eyes off the blade in her hands. It shook, she couldn’t force herself to stop trembling, but this dagger…. it was a work of art.
The handle was dark polished wood, comfortable in her small hands—unlike any other knife she’d ever held. The blade was long and lean, sharp on both edges, with a wicked point at the tip. But the metal mesmerized her. It gleamed in the sunlight, not silvery steel but a mottled, pebble-stone pattern of blues and purples. Like a colorful lake upon which rain fell gently, like the shell of a whimsically styled tortoise.
How could something meant to maim and kill be this beautiful? She felt as if another world had suddenly materialized before her eyes. Art had leapt beyond the canvas and onto something where it should have no right to belong.
Her oil painting had no right to sit squashed in her pocket, either, but even though both Dradge and Seren had tried to stop her from running back to the tent to fetch it, she’d done so anyway, covering herself by snatching up her entire satchel. She could pretend to know what to do with this dagger—she liked to pretend that, especially now—but that painting was the closest thing she had to a real weapon.
Someone shouted beyond the ring of wagons.
Maierva, at Lyara’s side, flinched and pulled closer to her. Lyara awkwardly shoved the dagger back into its sheath, paranoid she’d accidentally stab someone with it. Still, she kept it gripped in her fists—one on the handle, one on the hilt—ready to draw it at a moment’s notice.
Seren stood atop one wagon, back to them, surveying the field beyond. She’d yet to see him release the sword hilt. Dradge had left one squad behind—twenty-seven not counting Seren, with two Fidelis, to defend seven women. She almost wondered why he hadn’t tried to stop her from coming on this trip in the first place, but right now Edras might be even more unsafe for her than this.
An eerie tune rose in the air. Guttural, musical, it was a cacophony of voices wailing and growling as one. It cut straight to her soul, searing the very idea of courage and pinning terror against her spine. Surely only monsters made that sound. Centaurs made that sound.
The ground itself rumbled, and then outside the wagons, a stretch of grass—a stone’s throw circle around them—dropped out of sight, leaving a moat of stone spikes in its wake. Seren stumbled and ended up balanced on one knee above her.
The centaurs charged anyway.
Soldiers lined the field opposite the moat, but the beast-men leapt toward the wagons. The first fell, screaming as he impaled himself on the spikes, and writhed in his own blood and fury, refusing to die. Lyara clenched her eyes shut and clung more tightly to Maierva’s arm than she meant to.
Open your eyes! Some treacherous voice shouted in the back of her head. This is the life you wanted to live, open your eyes, damn you, and face it!
Wood splintered, horses whinnied, and Lyara gasped as the wagon before her shattered under the monsters’ weight. Two centaurs had crossed the moat of stone, treading across the bodies of their own people. Men in uniform littered the ground, a brown-cloaked Fidelis sprawled among them. She didn’t know what had become of Seren.
The beasts’ eyes gleamed with rage, their flanks splattered with blood, and the nearest jabbed the soiled blade of his pole-arm at Lyara’s head.
She screamed, voice lost to the din, and curled into a ball on the ground as she unsheathed her dagger—incongruous actions, the brainless instincts of a terrified girl, but it was all she knew to do.
Get up! Fight!
Maierva’s body slumped against her. The pike had caught her in the neck and collar bone, shattering it; the woman blinked, mouth open in silent terror as blood spurted from the wound. Lyara pulled her into her arms, that shock of anger and horror was just enough to smother her fear.
The centaur raised his pike again and she screamed at him, pointing her little dagger at his chest as she tried to drag Maierva away, somewhere safe—there were only wagons, there was nowhere to go.
“Stop it!” she shrieked, tears streaming down her cheeks. She met the monster’s gaze, held it as her trembling hand clenched that beautiful dagger, blubbering like a witless fool but it was all she could say. “Stop it!”
The monster froze, blood-splattered face twisted into a snarl, his blade poised and ready to strike. He had an odd white stripe in his black head of hair. From her angle he loomed above, more monster than man, but that face—aside from the horse’s ears and teeth—was human, with human eyes. She could read those same as she’d read anyone.
He’d thought about what he was doing. He’d hesitated.
Seren leapt down from the wagon above to land between her and the centaur, and with that fake Ìsendorál severed the pike in two. There, he wavered—his hands were trembling, too.
The centaur snarled, then drove the splintered remains of his weapon at Seren—the man leapt back, the shaft piercing through his leg to pin him to the ground. Seren screamed, but more screamed with him—a war cry. Soldiers, armed with swords and spears, climbed over the wagons, flanked by another Fidelis who threw a burst of fire at the beasts.
The centaurs called to one another—their language was so fluid, Lyara shockingly had to compare it to the one in which Féderyc had spoken to heal—but they turned and ran, back over the moat, treading the bridge crafted from bodies of their own kin.
She sagged against the ground, on her knees, tears still falling though she didn’t quite know why, and she almost let herself grasp for a sense of relief. But Maierva lay beside her in a puddle of her own blood.
Choking on a sob, Lyara pulled the woman into her arms. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. The stream of blood that had spurted from her neck with her heartbeat was now a trickle. Lyara embraced her anyway, heart too broken to accept there was nothing she could do.
This could have easily been her. Maybe it would have been her, if she were taller. In a just world it wouldn’t have been either of them.
Slowly, her gaze lifted. More bodies than Maierva’s lay in the grass. One woman was just as still, two others crawled weakly, the rest scrambled to help in whatever way they could. There were more alive than there were dead—is that what a soldier would see?
Behind her, Seren sputtered curses. He was trying to stop the blood gushing from his leg with his bare hands, but they trembled too much and the precious fluid oozed between his fingers.
Panic was in his eyes, raw pure panic.
Like a heartless monster, Lyara left Maierva’s body on the ground and crawled to Seren’s side. His gaze darted from her face to the wound.
“I can’t do it, can I?” That was almost a whisper, he leaned against the wagon wheel at his back, his eyes unfocused as they drifted towards the grey sky. “We’re a country of brutes… always have been… have always had to be… I—!”
She slapped him across the face. Mostly because she wanted to, but it snapped him out of it. “Tell me what you need me to get!”
He blinked. “Bandages. Ah, a tourniquet.”
Lyara used her dagger to cut the hem off her sturdy working dress. She tied that tight around Seren’s leg, above the wound, then cut some more cloth from her skirts to use as bandages. Her tall boots would keep her from being indecently exposed. She packed those around the pike shaft, stopping the flow of blood as best she could.
“…thank you,” he said softly. She couldn’t tell if it pained him to say that, or if he was simply in pain altogether.
She nodded, unable to hold his gaze. “Thank you as well. For charging a centaur for me.”
He looked up, dazed, but had a ragged smile. “Can you imagine what Dradge would do if I let you die? I’d rather face the centaur.”
Three short horn blasts carried over the field.
Lyara scrambled to her feet, hope and fear shooting through her at once. Dradge’s company had returned, their numbers close enough to the same as when they left. She had to think they’d won. At least for now.
Dradge’s stallion broke from the group, galloping towards their lump of wagons. His crimson cloak streamed from his shoulders, but he was too far away for her to read his expression. The dark whispers of her soul drew her gaze downwards, fixing it on the blade Seren had discarded in the grass.
His eyes were closed, his arms folded across his lap, his face betraying his relief.
Lyara snatched up the sword, squeezed between the wagons, then ran across the field—fake Ìsendorál in one hand, her dagger in the other—to meet her husband.
Dradge leapt from the saddle, his horse charged past riderless, and he ran to her and gently cupped her cheeks in his hands. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes no matter how hard she tried to hold them back, but he didn’t believe her until he’d run his hands over her shoulders, her stomach, her sides.
Gods, she was covered in blood. Her cotton dress was stained with red, it caked her hands, surely it was on her face as well. It’s not mine. She couldn’t find the strength to say it out loud. It’s not mine.
Finally, Dradge breathed a deep sigh and pulled her close. She sobbed against his armored chest, ashamed to do it, grateful to have the chance.
“I can’t stay,” he said softly into her hair. “The centaurs are regrouping, the men will lose confidence if I don’t come back.”
She drew in a snotty, shuddering breath and leaned out of his embrace.
He glanced at the sword in her hand. “Why do you have that?”
“Seren’s hurt, he can’t carry it any longer.” An exaggeration. That man would find a way to get this back if he wanted it badly enough, even if he had a pole-arm rammed through his thigh. “But someone needs to.”
He started to shake his head. “I’m not here to mess around with prophecy—”
She dropped her dagger and pulled her oil painting out of her pocket. It was crumbled now, an edge torn, and stained in Maierva’s blood. She unfolded it anyway, holding it up between them, desperately blinking away her remaining tears to seem brave.
Dradge looked first at her, then the painting and his gaze lingered there. His eyes widened, slightly, and his hand drifted upwards to unfurl the curling end. Surely the canvas was too mangled for him to be distracted by her technique. “…this is what you see?”
“This is what everyone sees.”
That spark of fear threatened to take hold of him again. “Gods Lyara, all this… it isn’t the sort of thing a person should lie about, is it?”
She lifted Ìsendorál, blade pointed at the ground, and pressed the hilt against his chest. “I’m not asking you to lie. I’m asking you to carry this sword and be the man you’ve always been. What comes after… well, don’t think about it.”
He gazed into her eyes for a long moment then laughed, face alight. He wrapped his hands around the hilt—they enveloped hers where she still held it, and she let go. “For you,” he whispered, then leaned down to steal a kiss before charging back across the field, sword in hand.
She grinned, knees suddenly weak and wobbly, and let herself sink to the ground beside her dagger. That first step might have been for her, but the next was for his men and the rest were for his country. As it always had been, as it should be. It was an honor to rank so high among them.
In a matter of minutes he’d barked orders, restructured the fractured groups of wide-eyed soldiers, and led them back across the field. Centaurs waited in a dark mass on the opposite side of the plain—she couldn’t see them well and she didn’t want to. Instead she drew in a breath, placed her hands in the grass at her sides, and tried to pray.
The words were so hard to find.
Protect him. That was the most she could muster. The desperate plea of a bona fide heretic. Protect him.