King's Dragon (Crown of Stars 1)

Two arrows stuck out of Sanglant’s back, quivering, points embedded in mail. One shook loose and fell harmlessly away. Militia men knelt, shooting with their bows, aiming out over the wall toward the bridge where Eika crowded in from the eastern shore. It was too confused in the square fronting the gate to hope to shoot Eika safely without chancing to hit Gent’s defenders.

The defenders were hopelessly outnumbered. Already the Dragons had been borne back by the force of the unexpected assault and the sheer weight of numbers and ferocity. The Eika gave no quarter. Beyond that, she could make out no pattern to the battle swirling at the gate except that of iron-helmed Dragons fighting desperately to form back into ranks.

She heard, distantly, the creak of the wheels that moved the gates. Then screams. She smelled smoke.

In a staccato pattern arrows thunked into the wood just behind her, like a sudden spatter of drum beats, sharp and final. Sanglant grunted and swore and stopped. She turned her head. An arrow stuck out from his left leg, just above the knee. As she watched—as if time obeyed different laws here—a drop of blood welled up through leather and leaked out, following by a second and then a third, sending a trail of red down the curve of the knee. Red blood, just like her own, like any human’s blood.

She could not get any breath in to her lungs. She was going to choke.

“Break it off.” Sanglant let go of her.

Obedient, she gripped the arrow, one hand braced against his leg, the other clamping down over the fletching. Blue, she noted idly; the feathers were stiff as metal, digging into her skin. The shaft was strong. Somehow, she snapped it in two and tossed the end away.

He grabbed her and tugged her on.

“My lord prince!” A militia man called to them from the safety of a lookout post built into the wall. Sanglant pulled her inside, where the white-bearded militia man threw back a hatch to show a trapdoor beneath.

“This way, my lord,” he said. Liath was unable to catch her breath. She stared at the man’s brown cloak, strangely fascinated with its plain weave and ordinary texture. It had been patched on one shoulder with a piece of material that did not match in color, as if taken from a different batch of dye.

Sanglant leaned against the closed door, panting, for this moment safe from arrow fire. Liath heard the sounds of the battle, swords chopping at mail, at iron-rimmed shields; the alarm, a thin horn rising like a clarion again and again, alerted the people of Gent.

Sanglant pushed away from the door and crossed to an embrasure. He had not let go of Liath, so she perforce had to follow. The archer standing there moved aside instantly. Together, she and Sanglant stared out the thin slit of a window toward the eastern shore of the river.

The angle of the lookout post was such that the embrasure’s line of sight took in the river’s bank where the bridge touched the eastern shoreline. Eika poured onto the bridge, but even as they watched the tide slowed, stemmed by the half-closed gates, by the resistance from within the city, by the narrow path itself, the roadway and bridge, that forced the Eika warriors close together.

But although they slowed down, they still moved inexorably forward, howling and keening like wild beasts.

On the eastern shore, swathes of fog concealed patches of field. A shadow lay over the land, wreathed with mist, there on the far shore.

Neither fog nor mist. Something about it: a pattern, a shifting, the way her eye wanted to slide away from it. It was an enchantment. She forced herself to look hard at it, to not believe it was shadow and fog but rather concealment.

It dissolved, or not dissolved as much as faded from her sight and resolved into four figures. Two of them were Eika warriors painted and outfitted like the rest of their kind, red serpent round shields resting casually against their legs, two-bladed axes cradled like infants in the crooks of their arms. Between the two warriors stood an Eika remarkable for his scrawny stature and his apparent nakedness: He wore only a ragged loincloth and a gold belt. In his hands, he held a small wooden chest. A leather pouch hung from the belt.

But beside these three stood one other, one unlike the rest by stature alone, by some indefinable quality Liath could not name, yet recognized. She could not tear her gaze away; he was a huge Eika whose face and arms and chest had the scaly sheen of a creature clothed in living bronze. He had no tunic, nothing covering his chest—not even the garish painted patterns sported by his warriors—only layers of necklaces, beads, shells, and bones strung together and mixed in with chains of gold and what looked like gold and silver coins, holes drilled in their centers and strung on thin ropes of metal. His stiff trousers were sewn of cloth dyed a brilliant blue, belted by a mesh of gleaming gold that draped in delicate folds to his knees. He wore gold armbands, like twining serpents, around each thick arm. His hair glinted bone-white in the sunlight, braided into a single braid that hung to his knees.

Beside her, Sanglant sucked his breath in between his teeth.

“There!” said Liath. “Do you see him?”

“I see him.” He shook his head as if to shake away an annoying insect. “He is the one whom I felt all along. His is the power.”

“He is the enchanter.” She felt the power, just as Sanglant did.

Sanglant leaned forward into the embrasure, suddenly intent, staring hard toward the distant Eika. His lips parted. “Tell me your name,” he whispered.

The Eika enchanter shifted, head turning so abruptly that Liath shuddered. It was as if he had heard. He looked around and focused that fast, looking toward them although certainly he could not see them, concealed as they were by the timbered walls and the narrow confines of the lookout post. Certainly he could not know the prince watched him from there.

And yet, why not, if he was truly so powerful an enchanter?

She thought, then, that he spoke a word in reply, but she could not see him clearly to guess at the syllables he spoke, and she certainly could not hear above the clash of battle raging in the city beyond.

“Bloodheart,” said Sanglant in a low voice, staring out as if the two of them watched each other, tested each other. “We will meet, you and I.”

Beyond, on the shore of the river, the Eika tide swelled. The knot shoving forward on the bridge broke loose and Liath tore her gaze away from the Eika enchanter to see the gates shoved open and more Eika flood into Gent.

Jerking back from the embrasure, Sanglant turned to Liath. “Go to the cathedral. Save those you can.” The militia man waited, nervous, taut, at the trapdoor.

“Where are you going?”