CHAPTER 6

Amara

They came out of the trees on three sides, and I counted them before they'd finished arriving, because counting is the one thing I can always do, no matter what else is falling apart. Six. Six fighters, trained, spread wide, closing on the camp.

The wolfsbane arrow had never been the attack. It was the bell rung before it. These were the attack.

There was a woman on a horse beside Corvus that I hadn't let myself look at until now, and the moment I did, my stomach dropped. She hadn't moved. Everything about her was economy. No wasted motion, no wasted attention. She frightened me more than the six did, more than Corvus did, because Corvus wanted me alive and I wasn't sure she wanted anything at all except to do the work in front of her well.

The second of the brothers saw it the same second I did. He didn't go for Corvus. He went for her. And in the space of his first stride I understood he was right. She was the one giving the fight its shape. Cut the hand, and the fingers forget what they were doing.

Bram broke wide, opening a fresh problem from a new direction, forcing Corvus to split his attention down the middle. Zane went straight at Corvus.... and the man who'd been on his knees in the dirt a minute ago, grieving, undone, was simply gone. What moved now was all edges. Whatever he wore on top, this was what lived underneath it, and it had been waiting a long time for a night exactly like this one.

I could see where the fight was going before it got there.

"Two from the left," I called out. "They're going to fold the line. Don't let them set their feet."

Bram adjusted... and he didn't pause to wonder whether the Omega girl with the stick knew what she was talking about. He just trusted it and moved, and the adjustment was exactly right, and the two on the left found a wall where they'd expected a gap.

"The one on your right wants the fire," I said. "He's going for the light. Take the light and we're blind."

"On it," Zane said... somehow, mid-swing, his voice almost cheerful with strain... and he handled it without ever breaking from Corvus, and I did not have a single second to wonder how a man does two things like that at once.

That was the strange thread running under all the fear, the thing I'd turn over later when there was room to. They used what I gave them. Instantly. No one stopped to ask how I knew. No one wasted a breath deciding whether to believe me. They took it and acted on it and it kept them alive.

The second brother reached the woman from an angle she hadn't covered. She turned to meet him... fast, faster than anyone that still should be able to move... but he was already inside the turn. And then Corvus pivoted, because Corvus had felt the shift in the fight before he'd seen it, and the brother changed his line in the same breath and was suddenly not where Corvus had decided he would be.

What landed, landed clean.

Corvus made a sound.

Not a shout. Something lower than that, surprised out of him... the sound of a man meeting a thing he had not believed could happen to him. He looked down at his own side, at the dark spreading there. Then he raised his head and looked at the man who had put it there.

For one whole moment, nobody in that clearing moved. The fire ticked. The horses shifted. And I watched something rearrange itself behind Corvus's eyes that I had never once seen there in two lives of watching that face.

Then he said a single word.

A name. "Seraphine."

The woman disengaged at once. Clean, total, no hesitation... the way you set down a tool you've finished with. She wheeled her horse. Corvus pulled his own back, one hand pressed flat to his side, and the six poured backward into the trees as fast and as quiet as they'd come.

The camp went silent.

I stood there with a useless branch in my hand and the fire dying at my back, and I had one thought, and only one, for a long, long count.

He retreated.

In my first life, Corvus did not retreat. In my second life, Corvus did not retreat. There is no story, in any life I have lived or any I have heard whispered, in which Corvus pulls back from anything... because Corvus has never in his existence met the thing that could make him. He absorbs. He outlasts. He waits you into the ground. He does not turn his horse with his hand on a wound and leave.

And he had.

I didn't understand it. That's the part that frightened me most, more than the six, more than the woman. I am not used to not understanding things... understanding is the only real advantage I have ever been given.

"They're gone," Bram said to the second brother, coming back from the tree line. "For now."

Zane was breathing hard. He did not look at Reed. He had made the decision not to. "How did he find us this fast?"

"He knew the route before we ever walked it," Bram said. "Someone gave it to him."

The word someone dropped into the clearing and lay there in the quiet.

"We move," the quiet brother said... the first whole sentence I'd had from him since my kitchen. "We talk while we walk."

It was later, with the camp behind us and the dark folded close again, that I finally learned his name. Zane shouted it across the black.

"Aldric. Left. It drops away."

Aldric. I turned it over the way I turn everything over. It fit him. Quiet, squared, older than it looked. I'd been carrying him in my head as the second one, the quiet one, the one who said we're not him. Now he had a name to go with it.

But that was not the thing I carried out of that clearing.

The thing I carried was this. Right before the trees took him... right at the lip of the dark, with his hand on a wound that should not have existed... Corvus had looked back.

Not at Bram. Not at Aldric, the man who'd cut him.

At me.

And I have seen Corvus's face in two lives. I know every expression it owns. The boredom. The cold arithmetic. The faint distaste of a man handling something he considers beneath him.

What was on his face when he looked back at me was none of those.

It was something I had never seen there, in any life, and had no word for... something that lived, for half a second, before the dark swallowed it whole.

It looked like fear.