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The man made a choked gargle. “You’ll kill me if I don’t tell you? That would be a fucking kindness compared to what he’d do. I’m Edmund Knowledge-seeker. Who areyouthat you’d dare to come right into our settlement?”

My brother moved in the early morning light and I held my breath.

“Oath-bringer,” Edmund rasped. “I’ve heard of you. Shit. You’re huge.”

“Which one is his house?” Rhyder repeated. “War is coming to this land. Your Prophet’s time on this earth is growing late.”

“Kill me then,” Edmund said. “I’m not looking Ronan in the face and telling him I led you to his fucking door.”

With a snarl, Rhyder knocked the other man out and took my hand, looking around the corner at all the neat settlement homes.

A man walked onto the porch of a home a few doors down and I recognized the house shamefully as the one I had been peeping into. The man was barefoot and in a pair of jeans, buttoning his long-sleeved shirt as he looked out into the mountains. Behind him, the door was open, and I saw a flash of pink inside. The woman from his bed.

“There,” Rhyder hissed. “I know that’s the Apostate. Stay behind me.”

He drew an arrow from a nearby quiver and set it alight, then threw it, high in the air so it hooked with a solidthumpon Ronan’s roof, setting it ablaze.

Then Rhyder charged forward, flicking both knives in his hands as he stalked toward the Prophet.

“You have been weighed and found wanting in the Allfather’s eyes, Ronan Demon-rebuker.Apostate. Go to Hell where you belong.”

Ronan’s face didn’t change expression, but I saw him look toward the other end of the porch where freshly sharpened knives sat on a table, as if judging how much time he had.

And then Ronan moved, not toward his weapons, but toward the open doorway, leaving himself even more vulnerable to Rhyder’s deadly knives.

Weighed and wanting, Rhyder chanted.

Weighed and wanting

In the name of the Allfather

My brother raised his arms, his massive shoulders for the killing blow.

But when Ronan’s body covered the doorway, the woman’s scream inside suddenly echoing horribly in my skull, he ripped the flaming arrow out of the roof and swung it at Rhyder, just barely meeting the sharp point of Rhyder’s knife, forcing it away from him, the tip of Rhyder’s knife only making a shallow cut across the Prophet’s bare chest.

My twin growled in frustration, swinging his other knife, and when Ronan blocked that the arrow splintered into pieces.

Ronan’s leg shot out, knocking Rhyder slightly off balance.

“Since when does your shithole little Congregation send only one man and his wife to Holy War?” he said coldly and fuck, he’d already found the one chink in my brother’s armor as Rhyder looked anxiously over at me.

Just then I heard Edmund’s voice.

“Shoot to kill?”

And he was there on the other end of the clearing aiming a heavy bow and arrow right at Rhyder.

“Not the girl!” a woman’s voice called, and I saw Ronan’s wife in the doorway, handing two heavy butcher knives to her husband.

Then everything was a blur as my brother rushed at me, grabbing me in his arms, shielding me as he ran.

Edmund’s shot went wide, but Ronan’s hit, the butcher knife lodging in my brother’s calf, but Rhyder was so big he only stumbled a bit but kept going.

As we disappeared into the woods, I heard the alarms begin to ring and Ronan’s voice calling loudly:

“Where the fuck is Cenhelm and why wasn’t he at the guard house?”