Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“Trooper! What in the seven hells are you doing here? Your Amazons marched out two hours ago!” A sergeant wearing the Armorican ship jabbed at me with his finger. “Dereliction! Guards! Arrest—!”

I grabbed his out-thrust wrist and twisted it until he yelped. “I am Camjiata’s ward, not an Amazon. Leave me be!”

When I released his wrist, he retreated two steps. A tang of fearful respect charged his scent. “By the Black Bull! Are you the assassin they say killed twenty men in the first assault without receiving a scratch?”

I did not care to dignify this with an answer. “There’s a tunnel in the well that leads out. Best you make haste to block it so no raiders can come through.”

He backed away.

Through the open doors of the half-burned barn, I glimpsed a figure I knew. “Rory!”

I found him doing nurse’s duty among the wounded, moistening faces, offering sips of water. He embraced me with a snarl of relief but pushed me away at once. “I’m very busy. I find I quite like tending the wounded, for I detest the hateful racket of the guns. If you go to the corner, you’ll find some local women sorting through garments they’ve stripped from the dead.”

The local women were a trio of old dames, one toothless, one deaf, and the third the very same old woman who had greeted Rory in his cat body as dominus. She did not recognize bedraggled me, but her weary eye measured me the same as if I had been her own niece.

“Gave a man some trouble to you? Are you harmed, girl?”

I wanted to laugh but the sound would not come. “No. No man harmed me.”

I found a dead Amazon’s uniform that fit me well enough with its sturdy wool jacket and cunningly sewn skirt that could be tied up to different lengths depending on what a woman needed on the march. The cloth was dirty but unbloodied, by which I assumed the woman who had worn it had died from a head wound. My cold steel had returned to a cane. Cupping the locket in my hand, I closed my eyes and breathed down the thread that bound me to Vai.

He was alive.

The barn really stank, not just with ash and blood and piss but with pain, which has a tang as hard as a claw. I found Rory holding the hand of an unconscious soldier. My brother’s sweet smile calmed me, for the groans and whimpers and sobs rubbed like thorns against my heart.

I crouched beside him. “I have to go. Are you coming with me?”

“Shh. I like to hold the hands of the ones whose souls are passing over.”

Curious, I rested a hand on the unconscious man’s cheek. When I closed my eyes and sank my thoughts as into a soundless ocean of smoke, I could first feel and then almost glimpse the delicately wavering glimmer of brightness that sparked through the man’s body: the flickering brain, the subsiding heart. The settling darkness of death’s tide hauled him out to sea. The soldier took in a shallow breath, and then not another. In the dark ocean of death, a shark glided past to snap up the man’s soul and carry it to the other side.

Rory released the lifeless hand. “It brings them comfort to know they aren’t alone when they depart. I love to hunt, Cat, but there’s just something wrong with all this. It tastes bad.” He closed the dead man’s eyes and arranged the hands atop the chest. “You wouldn’t rather stay here? There are so many who need aid and comfort.”

“I have to find Drake.”

With a sigh he rose. “I know better than to try to stop any female when she’s determined to go out on the hunt. Very well.”

“You stay here, Rory. I can see the noise and confusion trouble you.”

“Vai told me to keep an eye on you.”

“Is that what he told you? To keep me out of the fight?”

He laughed, a startling sound amid so much suffering. Yet not one head turned our way. No one cared if people laughed; it was better than crying. “You don’t know him well if that’s what you think he would say. He told me once that any person who knows the stories of hunters who captivate spirit women in the bush knows that a man does not try to cage or leash a spirit woman, because if he does, she will vanish back into the bush and nothing he can do will stop her. He asked me to walk beside you, Cat, as he would do if he were here. Goodness, you’re being very snappish, and I must say that you stink of blood.”

I shuddered, for there was a chasm in my heart blessedly veiled in darkness, and I did not want any light to shine down there.

“Calm, Cat. Calm.” He stroked my arm. “I better come with you or you’ll do something foolish. Probably you already have.”

At the doors children were digging out precious bolts and bullets from the walls and collecting them in a sack. In the courtyard riders gathered. General Camjiata emerged from the stone house, writing on a scrap of paper. He handed paper to a messenger and pen to an aide, then saw me. With a nod he indicated I should accompany him.

“I have to find Drake,” I said as I took the reins of a horse led up by an orderly.

“Cat, you’ll never find him in this chaos. Stick with me, and he’ll turn up. He always does.”

“I’m not sure he will this time. I think he’s gone rogue.”

He did not answer, for we were already riding out of the estate. I had no grasp of the time, only that it was now late afternoon and the thrust of the battle had raged away to the southeast. The land was a sweep of trees, fields, and pasture. No doubt this bucolic landscape made a restful scene on ordinary days. Now it crawled with soldiers and was strewn with bodies, discarded weapons, and lost hats and tassels. Camjiata was right: Alone, I had no chance of finding Drake or Vai among so many tens of thousands.