79
~ LINNA ~
“They’re here,” Linna said. Behind her, Megs argued with Akella, telling the pirate that she was in no condition to stand, let alone to fight. Linna tuned them out.
You must put your passions aside when you fight,the Commander said inside Linna’s head. They stood on the beach outside the palace, where they had been fighting with wooden practice swords. Linna’s knuckles throbbed with the blow she’d just received from the flat of her ku-sai’s sword.
Passions,Linna said, like love?
No,said the Commander. “Love” and “passion” are not necessarily the same. By passions, I mean strong emotions. Fear. Anger. The thirst for vengeance. And yes, love, but only the desperate, hungry kind. The softer side of love, that gentle, steady thrum that anchors your heart, that you can keep while you fight.
But how can I stop being scared or angry if I’m in a fight?Linna asked. She imagined how she would feel if someone hurt Princess Adela, who, at fourteen summers, Linna secretly believed she just might love. Especially if the enemy has cut down someone I love?
You put aside passions by trusting your body to remember the dance without the aid of thought,the Commander answered. Water does not need to think in order to flow down a mountain, neither does the mountain need to think of how to guide the water down. It simply does, because that is its nature. Become like that water, Linna. Let the dance within you simply be. Now, let us begin again.
“Let’s begin,” Linna said aloud, assuming panther prepares to spring inside the dormitory where the Order of Targhan housed its breeding stock and its future witches.
She and Megs stood beside the door, short swords and rune-marked daggers out, while the wood shuddered with the blows of the witches’ battering ram. Behind them, a half-dozen Adessian pirates armed with splintered bedpost clubs, makeshift knives of glass, and their own bare fists stood in a tight knot with somber faces. And behind them was Akella, sword in hand despite the fact that she swayed on her feet and was as ashen as someone who’d been bedridden with Albin’s plague for a week.
Some of them would die tonight. All of them knew that. The only question was who. Linna didn’t want it to be Megs because she was fairly certain she’d fallen for the former Imperial sergeant, even if those feelings would never be reciprocated. Linna didn’t want to die herself because she didn’t trust anyone else to carry through with the original plan of rescuing the Empress and the Commander from the palace. Beyond her own life, Megs’s life, and the Empress and Commander, Linna didn’t really care who lived or died.
When did I become so callous?she wondered. But even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. She’d been angry with Akella from the moment she realized the pirate had been here all this time and hadn’t yet saved the Empress and Commander, and then that anger had been further inflamed by the fact that Akella and Megs clearly had some sort of history together that they weren’t talking about.
It wasn’t right. But she couldn’t help herself. Linna felt how she felt.
All those thoughts ran through Linna’s head in the amount of time it took the witches to slam their battering ram into the door, reload, and ram the door again.
You must put your passions aside when you fight,said the Commander’s voice in the back of her head.
It’s easy for you,Linna told the ghost of her ku-sai. Nothing ever bothers you, even when that Order of Targhan witch that Darien brought almost killed you. The rest of us just feel what we feel; we can’t control it.
The Commander didn’t answer.
Wham!The ram hit the door again. Wood cracked and splintered.
Wham!
Megs shifted her weight, bracing herself for the moment the door gave way completely. Her presence – and Linna’s need to protect Megs at whatever cost – blazed like a bonfire beside Linna.
Wham!More splintering wood.
Wham!
Behind them, Akella said something in Adessian to her sailors. Linna didn’t speak Adessian, but she’d been present for enough pre-battle speeches to guess it was probably the Adessian equivalent of “Give ’em hell, lads.”
Wham!The door buckled inward, white shards of wood reaching out like spider legs from a previously smooth surface.
“Three more blows at most,” Megs said. “Then it will give.”
No one replied.
Wham! Wham!The iron hinges connecting door to frame gave a high pitched screech as screws pulled loose from the wood.
Put your passions aside.
And then the entire door was collapsing inward, leaving a gaping black hole of night. Cold air rushed in, and the first thing Linna was aware of, oddly enough, was the salty tang of an onshore ocean breeze mingled with the scent of the mountainside’s pine trees.
Then the black-clad Order of Targhan women rushed in, and the fury of battle commenced. Sailors rushed forward, screaming in Adessian; Megs grunted with the effort of parrying the long, slender blade of an Order sword; and Linna felt the muscle memory of the Dance of the Seven Cities taking hold within her. Spin left, duck right; tiger’s fury, viper striking, rising stork. The rune-marked dagger in Linna’s left hand bit through leather into a calf muscle, and the witch before her shrieked and dissolved into a pile of dust. Only the black cloak she had been wearing remained.
Then another Order woman was atop her, raining down a fury of blows with her rapier so quickly, so furiously, that even Linna, who was more dextrous with a weapon than anyone she had ever met, struggled to stay ahead of her. But finally Linna drew the witch into a feint, and the rune-marked blade found its mark again. This time the woman only aged a decade and did not die, but in the moment it took her to comprehend what had just happened, Linna landed the killing blow.
A third witch took the second’s place, and the dance to survive began once more.
Linna’s mind was as clear and still as it had ever been. There was no more space for passions, not even the space to wish for herself and her friends to live. There was only the dance.
When her third opponent fell, Linna took a moment to glance in Megs’s direction. A mistake. The second her eyes shifted away, something struck the bare skin of her neck.
A wasp,was Linna’s first – clearly ridiculous – thought. A wasp has stung me.
But she knew enough about the Order witches to realize what had just happened: One of the poisoned darts from their blowguns had found its mark in a small square of unprotected flesh. Even as Linna realized what it was, the poison began to course through her, stiffening her limbs, freezing her face into what was probably pure shock.
Then Linna was falling, collapsing the way the door had when the iron hinges had given up trying to hold it to the frame.
Lina felt the back of her skull bounce against the floorboards, but she was already too numb for it to truly hurt.
It wasn’t as bad as she’d always thought it would be, being poisoned. Mostly it was a warm, numb sensation, spreading from her neck down into her torso and her extremities as if someone had poured warm honey inside her. The Commander had always said it was some kind of paralytic agent, the poison used by the Order of Targhan. It would work the way the paralytic venom of a Terintan sand snake did, gradually slowing and finally stopping first her lungs, then her heart. Then death would come for her.
Quickly, Linna’s eyes grew glassy; she stared at the ceiling while the chaos of the battle flickered in her peripheral vision. It was a low, bare ceiling of dusty wooden rafters, slanting down towards the front of the building. The back of the rafters would butt against the wall that encircled the compound. Idly, she wondered if jumping from the compound wall onto the roof of this dormitory had caused any dust to rain down. She’d gotten so accustomed to the palace in Port Lorsin that she wasn’t used to seeing dust anymore; Empress Kathlyn, whom Emperor Mace had married once enough time had passed after the Battle of the Empress’s Last Stand for remarriage to be respectable, was forever yelling at the palace servants about cleanliness, and the palace was cleaner than it ever had been.
Linna’s vision narrowed, first eliminating the flickers of movement in her peripheral vision, then eliminating her peripheral vision altogether. At the same time, the clashing of steel, the screams of pain, the sounds of metal piercing flesh also began to fade, like something heard only barely from a great distance.
Which would stop working first, Linna wondered – her eyes and ears or her heart?
But then the dusty ceiling was replaced by a pair of legs, and Linna heard a voice she recognized perfectly shouting two words: “Seagull – no!”
Akella – hardly standing, half-dead Akella – stood protectively over Linna’s fallen body, brandishing her Imperial short sword.
She has always been kind to me,Linna thought. I should not be so angry with her.
And then she sank into the darkness of unconsciousness.