Page 50 of The Shattered King

I woke choking on death.

The deep black of night filled my room; there were no candles or fireplace embers to drive it back, no moonlight through the window. Panic drove me to alertness; I threw on my dress and ran to the door, sure something had befallen Renn—

A trumpet called from the castle wall. One, two, three ...

We only panic if it sounds four times.

I let out an obstructed sigh, curling my fingers into my skirt.

A fourth peal rang out into the night.

Ice curled in my veins. Distant shouts battered the window, followed by four more bellows of a trumpet.

I hurried into the hallway and threw open Renn’s door. I expected Bay and Sall to be on watch, but it must have been early enough in the night that Ard and Sten still maintained their posts. Or had. They moved in a flurry. Renn’s bedchamber door had been thrown open.

I rushed in and seized Ard’s arm. “Four trumpets. What does it mean?”

“Siege,” he replied without hesitation. “Get your shoes. We need to leave now .”

My blood stopped flowing. Siege?

But it was the middle of winter. The skirmishes ... they’d slowed to nothing. And King Nicosia, he’d threatened spring , hadn’t he?

Sesta ... Sesta was here ? But so many of our men had been sent to the northern border ...

In my mind’s eye, I saw King Nicosia turning toward me, his eyes locking on mine in the gallery.

I flew back into my room. Stomped my boots on and clasped my cloak around my shoulders as the trumpet sounded again—one, two, three—

It cut off halfway through the fourth bellow.

Death made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

I paused for only a moment as it dawned on me. It had been a warning, the wisps of death I’d sensed in the bailey and the castle. A warning of what was to come.

Future-sight was not a gift of craftlock. And yet in that moment, I felt deep in my bones that the lot of us were about to be slaughtered.

We were not ready.

One of my bags was still packed from Fount; it held my mother’s knife, and I would not leave that behind.

I slung the bag over my shoulder and darted into the hallway, colliding with Renn.

The both of us stumbled, but he caught my upper arms, his grip overly tight, his undereyes dark with exhaustion. Seeing me, he whispered my name.

I grabbed his forearm. “It’s everywhere, Renn. Death. How are so many dying when we have the castle wall?” The whole point of the great walls around the city and the keep was to protect against invaders.

Ard came barreling up the corridor like a bull and looked nearly as crazed as one. “Soulbinders!” he shouted, raising gooseflesh across my skin. “An entire army of soulbinders and warbirds. They’ve flown straight into the bailey!”

Time stopped, like all of us were merely a painting, framed and set on the wall. Eons stretched between each beat of my heart, each breath of my lungs.

Soulbinders. Sesta embraced magic. They would have skilled crafters in all areas of craftlock. Masters in it.

A human soul to a bird’s ... Had they flown over our defenses, then? Pierced Rove and its fortress as easily as a child might a tower of wooden blocks? How?

Time returned, striking me square in the chest as Sten shouted, “Move, move! Now. ”

We barreled through the dark halls, winding in patterns that had me lost. Down a set of stairs, past loggias—

The sound of screams crystallized in my ears as we passed the open windows. Ard pushed Renn against the far wall, shielding him with his body. Sten did the same to me.

A silhouette of a man against the night sailed toward us, his arm raised, hand attached to a massive bird. He flew right through the open archway, dropping from the bird before drawing a sword—

Blue uniform, silver collar. A Sestan dragon.

Ard slammed into him and shoved him over the balcony. The bird screeched and fled; an arrow struck the stone near us and clattered to the floor.

“Go!” he barked.

We came around a corner, where several sconces had been lit. Servants passed in a frenzy, some carrying belongings, others confused—

Death burned my nostrils. I looked up, at the end of the corridor, just as a blue-clad man brought his sword down on a maid, right between her neck and shoulder. Crimson sprayed, and she dropped to the floor.

My legs went numb.

Ard drew his sword.

Silver markings at the soldier’s neck glinted in the firelight. It didn’t feel real, before. Now, it did.

Sesta. Sesta was here. Its dragons filled the castle. They would slaughter our men and open the gates to more—

Renn grabbed my hand and pulled me down a narrow hallway. Its shadows seemed to curl inward, gawking at me, suffocating. A flash of silver—but that was Renn’s blade. He had a sword, too.

Sten’s voice broke me from my trance. “ Move! ” he shouted, no longer trying to be quiet.

Down the hallway, into another. Bodies—bodies littered the floor—

Someone groaned.

I wrenched myself from Renn and dropped at the woman’s side. Talla, the seamstress. I dowsed into her lumis—saw a deep lake bubbling with oil and ink. Poured magic into it; conjured a net and caught a dark blob—

My body jerked, severing my connection, disorienting me. “There’s no time, Nym!” Renn pleaded.

Talla’s eyes opened. Blinked. She was still hurt, but she’d healed enough. Enough—

Ard rushed up behind me, his sword slick with blood. He shoved me and Renn forward with his large hands. We ran; I tripped over another body. Even in the panic, I recognized where we were going. The tunnel. The same we’d nearly entered when King Nicosia had come for negotiations.

Now he’d come for war.

A scream echoed through the halls. Wet choking. Death clung to my skin like sweat.

We neared the hidden door that would lead us down. I turned my head toward another casualty.

Lonnie.

“No!” I pulled from Renn; he dropped his sword to reach with his other hand, but I twisted from his grip and ran to her. Blood pooled on the stones around her, but she was breathing, she was still breathing—

I dowsed as her blood seeped into my skirt. Moved quickly, her scales familiar to me. Shifted weight from one to another. In reality, she started coughing. Alive.

“Nym!” Renn pleaded.

I looked up at him. At Sten and Ard.

No more trumpets. Had they all been killed?

“ Nym, ” Ursa cried. “ If you don’t help them, who will? ”

A sad smile curved my mouth.

I would never have him, anyway.

“Get him to safety,” I said to Sten and Ard.

Renn’s face blanched. “Nym, no—”

Ard seized the prince’s arm and dragged him to the door.

“ No !” he screamed.

Sten hesitated. To him, I said, “I can help them. Go.”

Ard wrenched the door open.

Sten nodded numbly. Turned his back on me and shoved the prince through the door, even as he screamed my name. A tear ran down my cheek as I watched them go.

Picking myself up, I hurried down the hall to another body.

I knew it to be a corpse before I touched it; death ran its chill along my jaw and down my neck when I neared.

I found a room with an open door, three dead servants within.

One still alive, bleeding out. His lumis was an array of ramps and tunnels, stone marbles running along them, spilling out where a ramp had broken.

I repaired it, clicking it back into place.

Picked up marbles and set them on their ramps until they were rolling again.

The man breathed in a gasp of air as I bolted from the room and down the hallway.

Corpse, corpse ... alive. I healed her.

Turned down one way, only to come to the backs of two Sestan soldiers fighting someone.

I turned on my heel and bolted down the other way, through a short hallway and down stairs, spilling into the Lords’ Hall just as the door to my right burst in, snapping the wooden crossbar holding it shut, crushing the two desperate Canseren soldiers trying to hold it closed.

A dozen Sestan men poured in like a water glass tipped over, viciously attacking like the dragons they were named for.

The sword of one came clean across my torso before his shoulder knocked me over.

I hit the ground hard. My blood warmed the stone beneath me.

Closing my eyes, I shifted into my lumis.

I fit puzzlelike pieces together until they re-formed stones, then shoved them back into place.

Straightened one of Ursa’s green blocks, remortared a crenel.

The gash in my stomach stitched itself closed.

In the Lords’ Hall, however, I remained down.

My hair had fallen over my face, masking it, and the blood I’d lost still soaked my dress and the floor beside me, granting me the semblance of a fresh kill.

Soldiers packed the Lords’ Hall; steel struck steel as death swirled feral through the room.

I dared not move and draw attention to myself, only shifted my eyes, looking down, looking up—

Prince Adrinn, wearing only his nightclothes, stabbed his blade through the chest of a Sestan wearing two silver marks on his collar.

Spun and encountered another before the first body fell.

From the open door, someone shouted, “He’s the heir!

Kill him!” And three more men garbed in blue and black rushed for the prince, pouncing on him all at once. I trembled, dared to pray—

One blade nearly took off Prince Adrinn’s arm; two more stabbed through his gut, dropping him. One of the soldiers stabbed him through the diaphragm for good measure.

The dragons cut through the last in the room before rushing into the hallways, hunting down those who had retreated.

The moment the last left, I shoved myself off the floor and bolted across the room, dropping to Prince Adrinn’s side. Blood soaked his clothes and dribbled out his nose and the corner of his mouth. Death coated him like dark paint. Like shadows. But his eyes quivered, staring at the ceiling.

I grabbed his face and returned to his menagerie, nearly fainting at the sight of it. Every cage warped, smashed, toppled. Every animal on the run or dead at my feet. Every door open. Black swallowed the edges of the lumis, gray tendrils reaching down—

“Gods, no.” I poured magic into a cage, trying to straighten its bars—

The menagerie spun and vanished as the Lords’ Hall returned to me. Prince Adrinn gripped my wrist, having pulled it from his skin.

“Take care ... of my brother,” he gargled, blood spilling past his lips.

His hand dropped, leaving a bloody print in its wake.

“No!” I cried, and dowsed again, but the magic wouldn’t take. I couldn’t enter his lumis.

Dead. Gone. Irredeemable.

Tears filled my vision as I forced my shaking body to leave the heir’s side and crouch near the next closest victim, a soldier.

I moved by rote, my mind and body turning numb and cold.

I dowsed into him, renewed his life. Shoved a sword into his hand and barked at him to go, and he did.

The next body, dead. Next, dead. Next ..

. I’d expended too much energy to fully heal him, but I redrew the fine lines of his sketch-like lumis until his heart grew steady and his gouges sealed.

Four. I was able to save four in a room of three dozen. Only four, and they left me lightheaded and weary.

I couldn’t do this much longer.

“ Go, Nym! ” Ursa pleaded.

I looked once more at Prince Adrinn. His face had gone white, lips blue.

Nearing footsteps woke terror. I launched into the hallway, the same way I had entered, and sprinted down the halls over new and old corpses. Approached the hidden door—Lonnie was gone. Where had she—

I hadn’t even heard a pursuer. He grabbed my hair and launched me back into his chest, a dagger at my throat. Silver glinted in the corner of my eye. I seized his hand, trying to pull the blade away from my skin.

“—pretty thing like you, lost?” he was saying, his vowels over-rounded in the Sestan dialect.

He said something else, but I didn’t hear it. He wore no gloves. My fingers touched his skin.

When I dowsed into his lumis, I did something I’d never done before.

I went straight for his death lines.

The shadowy threads marked numbers in long, bronze equations slowly churning around one another.

I followed the first to a three and grasped it with both hands.

The metallic number wouldn’t budge. I called magic into my hands, but still it resisted me.

Screaming, I tugged on the magic with everything Ursa and I had, shoving it through my ethereal form and into that number until it snapped from its line, booming as thunder.

Reality dropped on me as the dragon fell, his dagger making a hair-fine line across my neck. I whirled around as he hit the stone floor, his dead eyes so much like Prince Adrinn’s.

So simple, so easy.

Why ... why had it been so easy to kill him?

The hallway spun—from the overuse of magic or from the realization that I, a healer, had murdered a man, I wasn’t sure.

But I could not stop, not here. Dazedly I stumbled to the hidden door.

It took me three tries to open it. Three tries, and it creaked on hidden hinges, letting in a gust of winter-cold air.

I still had my bag on my shoulder, spotted with blood from too many fallen to count, my own included.

I slipped behind the door. Used all the weight in my body to pull it closed.

The way was entirely dark; I felt forward on quivering legs to the steep stairs.

Sat, not trusting my balance. Dragged my backside down one at a time.

I descended perhaps six steps before I had to stop and lean my spinning head into the stone wall.

So tired. Nausea turned my stomach. Death kissed my skin, and the scent of blood stuck in the back of my throat. A chill coursed over my abdomen from where a dragon’s blade had torn the bodice.

“ Nym. ” Ursa was very distant. She must have been tired, too. “ Nym, keep moving. ”

I would. I would, in just a moment.

I’m not sure if I dozed or not. The onset of true darkness warps thought and time alike. But I heard another shriek, more pounding boots, and forced my heavy body down the stairs, thump, thump, thump ing along, unable to summon the strength to stand.

You’ve survived worse, Nym, my dizzy thoughts whispered. You can keep going.

I dragged myself down the stairwell, through the packed-earth corridor, and into that cave-like chamber before my strength gave out, sinking me into deeper, darker blackness.