Megs gritted her teeth and slid the hunting knife between two ribs just left of his breastbone.
When it was over, Megs laid him back down and put the hunting knife back beneath his belt where it belonged. Once she’d found whatever was left of her people, she would come back here and bury him.
She pushed to her feet. In another pile of bodies, she caught a glimpse of Ryland. Next to him was Wymer.
The fighters had stayed behind, Rom said. To give the others a chance to escape. But Megs felt bile rising in the back of her throat. Fighters. A few were Imperial Army veterans like herself, but most of them weren’t. Wymer and Ryland were both farm boys from nameless villages; Aldusa had been a midwife in Fontan; Rom had been a fishermen.
She’dbeen the one who turned them into soldiers. She’d been the fool arrogant enough to think she could turn farm boys and fishermen into an army that could defeat mountain men. And they had been fool enough to believe her, all of them dying for her arrogance.
She should have led them all west years ago, across the Emperor’s wall and into the Northeast, or the Capital Lands, or, gods, even Terinto.
“Let’s go,” Megs said, her voice flat, emotionless now. “Mother Moon willing, some of them made it to the evacuation point alive.”
Zandra nodded and turned north.
Megs faced Linna before heading after Zandra. “You don’t need to come any further. Your path is not ours, and I don’t know what we’ll face when we reach the rendezvous point.”
“The fight against the forces of corruption in the East is a burden that the entire Empire must share,” the girl said, using that oddly formal, highborn speech again but colored with her Terintan lilt. Then Linna’s lip curled back in apparent disgust. “Clovis and men like him are worse than the tribesmen could ever be. At least the mountain men fought for a homeland. Clovis and his gang betray their kinsmen for nothing but coin.” She met Megs’s eyes. “He tried to turn me back into a slave. I have my own score to settle with him.”
Megs hesitated, but only for a moment. “Alright,” she said. “The rest of my people are hiding in an abandoned mountain man burial site about a half mile north of here. Let’s hope they made it without being spotted.”
#
Megs didn’t linger long enough to count the bodies at her camp, but she saw enough mountain men amongst the dead to know her fighters had put a significant dent in the clan’s fighting force. If she had to guess, she’d say that there couldn’t be more than a dozen tribesmen of fighting strength still alive.
Three against twelve. She hoped Linna’s injury didn’t mean they were really two against twelve, but judging by the way Linna had bested Zandra earlier, she doubted they would be.
They made their way north as swiftly and silently as they could. When the forest grew hazy with smoke, Megs at first assumed that it was the smoke from the camp drifting towards them. But no, that didn’t make sense. In the Sunrise Mountains, wind always blew from across the plains, west to east. Never south to north.
Which meant that the smoke wasn’t coming from the fire behind them. It had to be coming from somewhere ahead of them. Zandra, still in the point position, must have come to the same conclusion, because she increased her speed to a jog.
The smoke thickened, making Megs’s eyes water and her throat burn. She wasn’t even sure where they were anymore. But Zandra must have known, because she veered left, moving up a small hillock towards a cluster of boulders at its peak. Megs and Linna followed.
A cold hand gripped Megs’s stomach as soon as she reached the top and saw the sight below her. A motley assortment of a dozen mountain men and Imperial veterans, Lieutenant Clovis among them, stood in a semi-circle around the entrance to the barrow. Clovis was injured, one arm in a makeshift sling. His other hand held a torch. Clovis and all the others stood wordlessly watching the smoky fire of green fir branches burning at the mouth of the barrow. One mountain man used his fur cloak to fan the flames towards the entrance.
Smoking her people out. As if they were nothing more than rats who’d infested a grain silo. Either her people would come running from the barrow, coughing, eyes watering, or, given enough time, they would die inside from the smoke inhalation.
Zandra was already using hand signals to suggest a path forward, but all Megs could think was Azza is in there. Gods, not again.
And as if that one thought was a sledgehammer breaking open the makeshift dam that had held back all of the pain, all of the despair that had accumulated in her heart since she left Druet Village nearly eight years earlier, a torrent of rage flooded into Megs.
She was tired of being rational, of being careful. She was tired of driving swords and knives into the hearts of the people she loved. She was tired of the brutal tribesmen occupying Imperial villages, hanging trophies of those they killed in trees as both a declaration of victory and a grisly warning to those who would oppose them.
She was tired of snakes like Clovis, who appeared under the guise of camaraderie and friendship but held murder in their hearts.
Megs drew her sword and vaulted from the boulders that hid them, a wordless war cry of fury boiling up from her throat. The tribesmen and ex-soldiers turned in surprise as one body, pulling forth weapons, but she struck down the one closest to her before any of them had managed to draw a blade or lift a club. Both hands gripping her now-bloody short sword, she screamed at the next one and charged.
“Megs, no!” Zandra shouted from the boulders, now behind and above her. Megs was faintly aware that an arrow whizzed past her and skewered the throat of the giant tribesman ahead of her, but the man’s gurgling cry barely registered; she was too busy swinging at – and missing – the next mountain man before her.
Linna materialized at her side, the steel of her sword flowing like water as she parried a strike coming from her right before gutting the mountain man Megs had just missed. Far in the back of Megs’s mind, a part of her awed at the way Linna moved, somehow so graceful that she looked more like a dancer than a fighter.
Where did a petite Terintan girl learn to fight like that?
But Megs didn’t waste time on the question; she was too busy striking and dodging, thrusting and slashing, bellowing like a rabid beast the whole time. At some point, she became aware that Zandra had taken a place on her other flank, abandoning her favored bow for her short sword and rune-marked dagger.
Which was how Megs realized that she’d made a tremendous mistake.
Out of her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of Zandra’s dagger. It glowed with a soft, silvery light.
Oh, no.
One amongst these mountain men and ex-soldiers was shadow-infected. Megs had rushed into this battle with such reckless anger that she hadn’t bothered to check her dagger for the telltale glow and gentle vibration first.
Zandra must have felt the blade begin to hum, because she glanced away from the burly ex-soldier she was fighting for the briefest of moments to glance at the dagger in her hand.
It was a fatal mistake. The ex-soldier capitalized on Zandra’s distraction and lunged forward, driving a tribesman’s spear so deeply into Zandra’s torso that its bloodied tip emerged out her back.
Zandra’s mouth opened in a silent O of surprise, eyes going wide.
“Nooo!”Megs screamed, leaping between Zandra and the ex-soldier. She slashed at him; he dodged, spinning to the side and releasing the spear shaft to smash his bare fist into Megs’s temple. She stumbled back, colorful spots sparkling across her vision. Something tripped her – a rock, maybe – and then she was falling.
The ex-soldier’s face came into view above her. He raised his fist a second time, and Megs was too dazed to stop him. She felt the crunch of her nose breaking, and then everything went black.