51
Linna screamed, feral and wordless. The Empress’s rune-marked blade clattered to the ground and her face went slack with shock as her belly flowered with red. Her mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Slowly, as though moving underwater, the Empress turned her eyes – those leaf-colored eyes Linna had always found so beautiful – to the Fesulian long knife protruding from her gut. She wrapped both her hands around it and pulled it free. For a second – or two seconds, or five seconds, or ten, Linna could no longer tell – the Empress stared at the blade in her hands, the blade coated almost to its hilt in her own blood.
She stumbled backwards. One step, then two.
“Empress – no!” Linna sobbed, catching her mistress as she collapsed sideways.
Linna was scarcely aware of the commotion behind her, of Akella clashing with not-Ammanta, of the four guards shouting as they rushed into the bedchamber with drawn swords.
Only when not-Ammanta skewered a guard with one end of her double-tipped spear did Linna turn around, but by then it was too late.
“No!” she told them, turning away from the Empress. “It’s not really –”
Rennus twisted Ammanta’s mouth into a wolfish grin, staring directly at Linna as the remaining guards fell upon her. One sword after another impaled Ammanta’s armor-less body while Linna watched helplessly.
Ammanta’s eyes had been cold, glassy, like the soldier Linna had killed in Castle Tergos. But as she fell, her eyes became her own for a moment – wide, shocked, and confused. Seconds later, they went cold again.
This time, though, it was the coldness of death.
“It wasn’t really her,” Linna whispered, but of course the four guards were too preoccupied to hear her.
“Linna.”
The Empress lay in the shape of a crescent moon beside Linna. Both hands were pressed to her round stomach, where blood flowed freely. Linna put her own hands on top of the Empress’s, but it didn’t seem like it would matter. Already, the Empress’s hands, nightgown, even the rug beneath her were all crimson, soaked through with blood.
“Empress?” Linna asked, voice cracking. The elixir was still coursing through her veins, still making her unnaturally strong, but Linna felt anything but strong at the moment. She felt like she was nothing but the child they all took her for – weak, helpless, and foolish.
The Empress swallowed thickly and managed a smile. “Empress, yes… For… a few minutes… longer, perhaps,” she rasped.
Linna looked at the blood pooling on the rug. A wound like that… it all depended on if the blade had hit the gastric artery or not. If it had, then the Empress might have three more minutes to live. If it had not, she had perhaps fifteen minutes.
“Surgeon!” Linna shouted at the guards. “The Empress needs a Wise Man surgeon – now!”
Three of the guards just stared at their fallen sovereign, stupefied. But the fourth snapped to attention. “Gery, Benny,” he said, accent marking him as a Westerner. “Bring back the first Wise Man surgeon you can find.” He paused. “Or a Brother-healer, if you can find one of the ones that ain’t gone mad. Go!”
Two of the guards – Gery and Benny, apparently – shook themselves out of their daze and rushed from the room.
“What happened here? At the castle?” Linna asked.
The guard looked Linna over, taking in her winter coat and muck-stained boots. His face was familiar to her, but she didn’t know his name.
“You were out of the castle when it happened?”
Linna nodded.
“The bloody Brotherhood,” he said, lip curling as though that was explanation enough. “Half of ’em went mad all at once, started appearing out of thin air, slittin’ throats, stabbin’ folks in the back, pushing soldiers off battlements. The other half are more or less useless, cowering in their rooms or behind Wise Men unless you give ’em direct orders.” He crossed the room as he spoke, going to the Empress’s huge round bed and yanking a sheet from it. “Here. Press this against the wound.”
Linna looked down. She’d been using her bare hands to try to staunch the flow of blood, and now the Empress’s blood soaked her up to her elbows. She accepted the sheet from the guard and pressed it hard against the place where Ammanta’s knife had bitten.
The child,Linna thought. Oh gods, the child.
She’d been so focused on the Empress that it had taken until this moment to process that the stab had gone directly into the Empress’s womb. Even if a surgeon arrived in time and the Empress managed to live, how would the child inside her survive?
The guard glanced at Ammanta’s body and shook his head. “Sorcerers and Adessians and Terintans,” he grumbled to himself. “Should’ve known this whole campaign was cursed from the start.”
“It wasn’t Ammanta,” Linna said. “I mean, it was her body, but…”
She glanced around for Akella, but the other Adessian implied by the guard’s comment was nowhere to be found. Typical. Linna would worry about that later. She returned her attention to the guard. “Ammanta wasn’t… one of the Brothers skinwalked into her body to get close to the Empress. Brother Rennus,” she added. She should’ve said it earlier, when the guard had sent the two named Gery and Benny out to find a surgeon or a healer, otherwise they might return with the very Brother who was responsible for the Empress bleeding to death on the floor of her bedchamber. “Brother Rennus did this,” she said again, louder this time. “Not Ammanta.”
The guard grunted distastefully. “Never liked that smarmy runt,” he said, then turned from the corpse back to Linna. “Your name’s Linna of Terinto, right?”
Linna nodded, but then amended, “Linna of Port Lorsin.”
He looked prepared to argue, and for a moment Linna thought she’d have to defend her choice of place name, but then he shrugged. “I don’t know how you and the pirate got through the barricade, but I’m glad you did. You saved the Empress’s life.”
“We’ll see about that,” Linna said, glancing down at the Empress.
“My name’s Gileon. Of Winebury – quiet little village on the northern shore of the Bay of Korent,” said the guard. He gestured to the sitting room, where the other guard who remained stood beside the cracked door leading into the corridor. “The other one up there’s Alen of Boling. You need anything, call for us. We’re going to make sure the only people who get in here are Gery and Benny with a surgeon, alright?”
“Yeah. Alright.”
Gileon nodded, gave the Empress a last, grim look, and left Linna with the Empress and Ammanta’s corpse.
Linna glanced down at her mistress, who was unconscious now, breath coming in shallow little gasps. For a brief second, Linna fell backwards through time, to another moment in the East, when the Empress’s camp had been ambushed by the much larger forces of Lord Hermant.
I command you to go, Linna. I’m not worth dying for.That was what the Empress had said then. And Linna had obeyed.
But this time, she would stay at the Empress’s side no matter what. Even if it meant dying with her. Linna owed the Empress that much. Brother Rennus had manipulated her into taking his bait and leaving Pellon so that all the people who might have stopped this attack – the Commander, General Alric, and finally Linna – were far from the Empress. What happened to the Empress was as much Linna’s fault as it was his.
The Empress’s eyes fluttered open. “Linna? What’s happening out there? Did the mountain men get inside?”
“Shhh,” Linna said. She hesitated, then gently stroked the Empress’s cheek with the back of her hand. It was something she had always wanted to do, something she had seen the Commander do before, when she had watched the two of them together when they thought they were alone. “Save your strength, ma’am,” Linna whispered, struggling to keep the emotion from her voice. She needed to be strong for the Empress. “Help is on its way.”
The Empress’s breathing grew more labored by the moment. Linna glanced down at the sheet. It was practically soaked through. And it wouldn’t be enough if help didn’t arrive soon.
“Stay alive, your Majesty,” Linna said. “Please.”
The Empress moaned. “The… baby.”
“I know,” Linna said. “Don’t speak, Empress. Save your strength.”
Linna thought again of the soldier she’d killed, the one she’d impaled through the stomach in almost exactly the same place Ammanta had stabbed the Empress. The poor soldier. Linna knew now he wasn’t a madman and he wasn’t a traitor. He was just some farm boy whom Rennus had possessed, controlling his body like a puppet master to get to the Empress.
There was a commotion in the sitting room, and Linna looked up. One of the two guards who’d gone to fetch help reappeared, pushing a Brother and a Wise Man ahead of him.
“Where’s Benny?” asked Gileon, glancing around for the second guard he sent.
“Still out there,” Gery panted. His chest heaved, as if he’d been running hard. Gileon and Gery spoke together in hushed tones, bodies tense and weapons drawn. One of them took a buckler hanging across his back and slipped his left forearm into the straps.
Linna could easily have extended her hearing to eavesdrop on their conversation, but she didn’t care what was happening outside the Empress’s chambers.
“Here!” she called, waving over the Wise Man and the Brother.
The Wise Man reached the Empress first, and Linna felt a rush of relief to see it was none other than Wise Man Jesker, the same Wise Man who’d healed the Empress when she’d gotten sick on the journey to Pellon.
“Move, girl,” Jesker told Linna, shooing her away with a flick of his wrist.
“Wait,” Linna said. She pointed at the Brother. “I don’t want him anywhere near the –”
But Jesker, already dropping to his knees beside the Empress, cut her off. “He has nothing to do with whatever madness has come over the rest of them. He saved my life in the great hall not ten minutes prior to our arrival here.”
“You’re sure?” Linna said.
“Do you want us to save the Empress’s life or do you want to interrogate Brother Anthon?” Wise Man Jesker barked.
He glared at Linna, challenging her to contradict him. She glanced between Jesker and the Brother. Brother Rennus could no longer be trusted; therefore, the Brotherhood in general could no longer be trusted, because the Brotherhood took orders from Rennus. Yet she trusted Jesker, and Jesker said this particular Brother was trustworthy. If all Brothers were traitors, that would mean that back in Port Lorsin, Brother Evrart was also a traitor, and that was something Linna could not imagine.
Reluctantly, Linna took a step backward. “Alright.”