A full night, and a day, and part of another night had passed by the time Gwenna finally hauled herself out of the surf onto the slick stones. When she tried to stand, her legs wobbled beneath her, dropping her back into lapping waves where she sat for a moment before reaching out to grab Talal’s wrist, dragging him up onto the rock.
“That was … harder than I expected,” the leach groaned, sinking to his knees.
Gwenna could only nod.
Hook and Qarsh had crept above the horizon sometime around noon. Gwenna’s Wing, however, slowed by the barrels of supplies and their own weariness, didn’t make land until almost midnight. Gwenna had inwardly debated going for Qarsh, but Hook was closer, and besides, they needed a little time to get their feet back under them before going toe-to-toe with whoever was flying the birds. The west coast of Hook provided as safe a landing place as any, and so she’d aimed for a miserable little stretch of rocky shingle wedged between high cliffs. If she remembered the spot correctly, no one was likely to be there in the middle of the night.
“We need a perimeter,” Annick said.
The sniper shook her head to clear the water from her short hair, then stood unsteadily, managed half a dozen steps, then collapsed onto the stones. It was a good reminder that, despite appearances, Annick wasn’t invincible. She needed food and rest just the same as anyone else-she just refused to admit it.
“Forget the perimeter,” Gwenna said.
“We’re vulnerable without a proper perimeter.”
Gwenna snorted, then lay back on the uneven rocks. “You can’t even stand, Annick. None of us can. Let’s just concentrate on getting the barrels up the beach while not drowning. It would be a shame to swim all this way just to pass out in the surf.”
Overhead, the clouds had finally cleared. Gwenna could pick out constellations-the Jade Peaks, the Smith, the Serpent-stars so bright they might have been on fire. She shouldn’t have been glad for the starlight. The Kettral worshipped Hull for a reason-his dark cloak covered their approaches and retreats-but after two nights swimming, floating between the bottomless dark of the ocean and the endless overturned hull of the cloudy sky above, it was a relief to lie on the hard rocks, to look up at the hard stars.
The water lapping around her legs was warm enough that she could have fallen asleep right there, halfway between the land and the sea. There was, however, that whole drowning thing to worry about, and Annick was already trying to drag the barrels up out of the surf by herself. Each one weighed almost as much as the sniper, and she was struggling, rope over her shoulder, straining forward as though leaning into the wind. Gwenna groaned, hauled herself to her feet, staggered over to the barrel, put her shoulder to the wood, and shoved. The small stones shifted beneath her feet, but she refused to stop until the thing was clear of the waves, up the shingle, then tucked beneath the overhanging limestone cliffs. The second barrel was even heavier, but the work put a little life back into Gwenna’s legs, and by the time they had all the gear stowed beneath the cliff, she was starting to think she might actually survive the night after all.
“Water,” she said, prying off one of the lids, then handing a full skin to Talal. “And food. Then sleep.”
Talal took a long draft from the skin, bit into a strap of cured beef, and chewed thoughtfully.
“You think we’re safe here for the night?”
Gwenna coughed out a laugh. “I don’t think we’ve been safe since before Hull’s Trial, but this spot…” She glanced out at the narrow strip of broken stone once more, at the greedy sea. “I’d say it’s as good as any. We’re out of sight from the air. It’s too rocky to land a boat. They can’t patrol everything on foot.” She shrugged.
“They,” the leach said, leaning hard on the word, the obvious question left unspoken.
“Kettral,” Annick said flatly. Instead of eating, she’d been tending to her bows, unrolling dry string from the barrels, checking the mechanical action on the flatbow to see that it hadn’t been damaged. It occurred to Gwenna suddenly that they were all moving about as though the stars shed as much light as the sun. It was hard to remember what it had been like before Hull’s Hole, before drinking from the eggs of the slarn, but she was pretty sure it would have been tough to see her hand in front of her face. Did the bastards who destroyed the Widow’s Wish share the same advantage?
“We don’t know they’re Kettral,” Talal said. “Not for certain.”
Gwenna raised her brows. “Soldiers flying on a bird? Lobbing Kettral munitions?”
The leach frowned. “Could be civilians. Someone who found the birds and the bombs after the Eyrie tore itself apart.”
“Unlikely,” Annick said.
Gwenna stared up into the night sky, trying to reason it through. Whoever carried out the attack on the Wish had managed not only to wrangle a bird, but to fly one; fly it effectively. And then there were the munitions to consider. You didn’t need to be a genius to set off a starshatter, but to hit a ship from any height, to calculate the ordnance necessary to sink a vessel of that size …
“The good news,” she said finally, “is that the birds are here. One bird, at least. As for the rest of it-we always knew there might be Kettral left on the Islands, a Wing or two gone rogue.”
“I was hoping for pirates,” Talal replied. “Drunken pirates.”
Gwenna half smiled. It was the sort of crack that Laith might have made. Then she thought back to what had happened to Laith. Her smile withered.
“And what have we all learned,” she asked grimly, “about hoping for shit?”
* * *
It was still dark when Gwenna woke to the smell of smoke.
Annick was curled in a bony ball just a few feet away, while Talal sat up outside the cave, keeping watch. Over his shoulder she could see the bright stars of the Smith’s hammer dipping into the waves. A couple of hours until dawn, then. An odd time for someone to be lighting fires. Large fires.
Gwenna sat slowly, suppressing a groan. A few hours of sleep on the stones and the muscles of her back and shoulders were twisted into knots. She stretched her neck one way, then the next, buckled her blades across her back, and moved out to the front of the cave.
“You smell that?” she asked.
Talal nodded. “I noticed it not too long ago. Thought about waking you, but it’s pretty far off. Nothing urgent, and I figured you could use another hour of rest after that swim.”
“After that swim I could sleep for a week.” She twisted at the waist, cringing as the muscles seized, then relaxed. She knuckled them for a moment, then took a deep breath through her nose, sorting the before-dawn scents of the island.
There was salt, and beneath the salt, sand. The warm green reek of vegetation farther up the cliff, hanging vines and twisting shoots, languid and sinuous. It still amazed her, whenever she paused to think about it, how much, how well she could smell. It was like she had lived her whole life blind, and then woken one day to a riot of shape and color. There were a few fish rotting down the beach. She could make out the shit of the seabirds dried by the sun, crusted on the rocks above. And she could smell the smoke.
“Could just be someone up early,” Talal suggested. “Kitchen fires over on Buzzard’s Bay.”
Gwenna closed her eyes, dragged the air over her tongue, testing it, tasting it. Someone was burning wood and dung, but not just that. There were other smells twisted into the scent, stranger and less wholesome. Even after a year away, the training came back to her easily. Paint was burning. And hair. And flesh.
She exhaled heavily, suddenly eager to have the air out of her lungs.
“It’s not just kitchen fires.”
Talal studied her for a moment, then nodded.
“Are we going?” Annick asked.
The sniper had risen silently to join them while Gwenna was still puzzling over the smoke. Annick hadn’t slept much longer than Gwenna herself, but if she felt worn out or sore from the swim, she didn’t show it. Her smoke steel blades were already buckled, and she had her shortbow in one hand, the quiver strapped across her back.
“We’re in no shape for a fight,” Talal observed. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s been going on for months. Another day won’t change it.”
“You’re probably right,” Gwenna agreed. The smoke was stronger now. Thicker. It reminded her of Andt-Kyl, of the burning of an entire town. “On the other hand, some days are more important than others.”
“You think this is one of them?”
“Only one way to find out,” she replied.
* * *
The trail up to the ridgeline was rocky and steep, so steep in places that Gwenna found herself searching for toeholds in the pocketed limestone, balancing on precarious buttresses, hauling herself over tiered ledges using whatever purchase she could find.
At least it’s not more fucking swimming, she reminded herself.
By the time she reached the crenellated ridge, however, swimming sounded like a relief. You might drown in the water, but the waves wouldn’t cut you to pieces one nasty slice at a time. Her palms were bleeding, and her knees. She could smell her own blood on the stones, and Talal’s, and Annick’s.
“I remembered this being easier,” she muttered, straightening up. “There was one time…”
The remaining words died in her mouth. From atop the ridge she could see almost the entire island of Hook, the dark waters of the sound beyond, and still farther to the north, the low-slung bulk of Qarsh. That is, she could have seen Qarsh if she’d thought to look at it. Instead, her gaze was glued to the conflagration raging below, a massive fire roaring through the streets of the island’s only settlement. Hook had been a shitty little town even in the best of times, a haven for pirates and smugglers, criminals whose luck had run out on the mainland, whores, drug peddlers, and fishermen, both the enterprising and the insane. It was an amusing irony of the Islands that Hook was allowed to persist just across the water from the empire’s most powerful military force, but the Eyrie had decided there were uses to a civilian settlement on the island, regardless how corrupt, and so the small town had survived, even prospered in its twisted way.
It wasn’t prospering anymore.
“Someone’s burning down the whole west end of the town,” Gwenna observed quietly. “I guess they got tired of the smell.”
“The fire was set on purpose?” Talal asked. “You’re sure?”
“Look at the flames,” Gwenna said, gesturing. “They started in three places at the same time. There. There. There.”
Talal glanced at Annick. The sniper just shrugged.
“How long ago?” the leach asked.
“Not long. None of the buildings have collapsed yet.”
They hadn’t collapsed, but they were getting ready to. Half a dozen roofs had already fallen in. Flames lapped from windows and gaping doors. Timber framing groaned as the sudden strain torqued it out of place and crucial beams gave way. Buzzard’s Bay itself was bright with borrowed fire, slick waves reflecting back the shifting red and yellow, as though the water itself were burning.
“Someone’s pissed off,” Gwenna said. “I think we can be pretty sure of that.”
“It’s Hook,” Annick replied. “Someone’s always pissed off.”
“And the Kettral aren’t there anymore,” Talal said. “To keep them in line.”
Gwenna nodded slowly. The Eyrie had never really bothered to police the southern island, and it wasn’t unusual to find bloated bodies floating facedown in Buzzard’s Bay, to hear screaming from inside the garish taverns built out over the water on rotting stilts. The Kettral didn’t care about the private vendettas of pirates and profiteers. Open conflict, however, was destabilizing, and whenever some overzealous captain took it upon himself to turn the Island into his private kingdom, the Eyrie’s response was invariably quick and conclusive, the message clear: Kill each other if you want, but do it quietly.
Obviously, no one was sending that message any longer.
“Not our problem,” Annick concluded. “We’re here for the birds, not to bring Hook back into the Annurian Empire.”
“Republic,” Gwenna said absently.
Talal was still studying the town. “We could take a look,” he said.
Gwenna watched the fire rage a moment. Probably Annick was right. Probably the hot, smoldering violence that had always plagued Hook had finally exploded. On the other hand, whoever started that fire had taken some care to see it done right. It wasn’t a stretch to think it might have something to do with the assholes on the birds, the ones who had sunk the Wish.
“We go down,” Gwenna said finally, “find a few poor bastards who aren’t throwing water on the blaze, and figure out what the fuck’s going on.”
* * *
It was worse up close.
Up close, Gwenna could hear the crackling of the blaze, the cries of anger, and terror, and pain. The townsfolk of Hook raced back and forth in a chaotic effort to extinguish the fire, but they were doing a piss-poor job of it, screaming recriminations and bellowing threats instead of working together. When she emerged from the cover of a narrow alley on the unburning edge of the town, Gwenna could feel the heat on her face, hotter than the noonday sun, even at a distance.
No one so much as glanced at her. Not at her, or Annick, or Talal. It made sense-a few unfamiliar faces didn’t mean much when half the town was burning down. Skulking, if you didn’t do it right, tended to draw attention, and so rather than skulk, Gwenna and her Wing moved through the streets quickly, purposefully, as though, like everyone else, they were going somewhere. The important thing was to keep moving. To keep moving and keep listening, trying to pull the useful information from the noise.
Unfortunately, while there was a great deal of noise, the inhabitants of Hook proved short on useful information. It seemed common knowledge that someone had set the town ablaze intentionally. People understood that the western end was burning while the eastern half was relatively safe. A few opportunistic fools, arms piled with dubious treasure, were trying to organize raids into the burning streets. It was idiotic. Gwenna could tell just from the sound-a greedy, growing roar-that no one going in now was likely to come out alive, but she hadn’t crossed the Iron Sea, swimming the last few dozen miles, just to wag her finger at looters.
There was an abrupt surge of noise a few blocks to the north-shouting, screaming, chanting, then a vicious explosion, then relative silence.
“That was a flickwick,” Gwenna said.
Annick pointed. “North. By the docks.” She switched to Kettral hand sign, hooking a finger. Move out?
Gwenna glanced at Talal, then nodded.
“Docks. Three approaches. Annick, west. Talal, east. Rally point is the ridge above the beach.”
It wasn’t far-maybe a hundred paces-to where the buildings gave way before a broad open square fronting the docks. From the head of the street, Gwenna could see the whole harborside, the western shore ablaze, the east lit only by a few lanterns and lamps flickering in the windows. What looked like most of the population of Hook had gathered in that square-maybe two thousand men and women crammed together, faces smudged with smoke and soot, streaked with sweat, fitfully illuminated by the fire raging through the town. Despite the fire to the west, they were all looking north, toward the harbor.
Well back on the center dock, high as a house, talons lodged in the rotting planks, perched a kettral; huge, silent, black eyes glittering and gelid. Gwenna hadn’t seen a bird up close for nearly a year, and for a moment she, like the townsfolk before her, could only stare. In the stories told across Annur, the kettral were cast as glorious flying mounts, huge horses with beaks and wings. So wrong, Gwenna thought, gazing up at the bird. The kettral had been trained to accept human riders, but that training did nothing to obscure the more ancient, enduring truth: they were not mounts, they were predators.
With an effort, Gwenna shifted her eyes from the bird to the five men who stood on the dock just in front of it. Despite their Kettral blacks, the Kettral swords buckled over their backs, the Kettral bows held ready in their hands, Gwenna recognized none of them. They’d formed up in a standard diamond wedge, and it was clear why: twenty feet in front of them lay a dozen bodies. A few were still feebly convulsing, twitching, trying to drag themselves clear. Most were perfectly still, the flesh slack, mangled, tossed aside.
The situation was as obvious as it was ugly: the mob came for the men with the bird, tried to attack, then ended up flattened by a few flickwicks. The five Kettral-if they were Kettral-had a good position. Any halfway decent sniper could take them down, but it didn’t look like there were many snipers in the disoriented mass. Most people, clearly rousted from their beds by the growing fire, were barely clothed. Aside from the Kettral, only one man that Gwenna could see carried a weapon-a sailor, judging from his gait. The man lugged a bare saber, but was otherwise naked, his cock swinging in the wind; interrupted while pissing, or fucking, or sleeping off his drunk. He didn’t look like much of a threat, especially not to a Wing of Kettral.
Gwenna shifted her eyes back to the men on the dock. The one in front, a tall, wide son of a bitch with a shaved head and skin almost as pale as hers, was raising a hand. He smiled smugly, as though he were a popular atrep preparing to address a gathering of his most fervent supporters.
If he expects to make a speech, Gwenna thought, he’s going to be disappointed.
Between the fire and the mob she could barely make out voices a few feet away. When the Kettral opened his mouth, however, the words emerged hard-edged and clear, as though he were speaking directly into her ear.
Which meant that one of them was a leach. Gwenna hadn’t expected a milk run when Kaden asked her to go back to the Islands. It had been obvious, even from Annur, that there would be blood on a lot of blades before the whole thing was over. This, however, was looking worse and worse. She gritted her teeth.
“Your town is a shithole,” the man began, smiling all the time as though offering the most fulsome praise. “It is a shithole, but we didn’t want to burn it down.”
The mob surged forward at that, men and women bellowing their rage and shame. They’d almost reached the dock when one of the soldiers raised a starshatter above his head. The fuse was already burning-a hot, bright point of light against the darkness beyond. The crowd trembled, hesitated, then recoiled, as though the whole mass were a single creature, one that had learned through hard discipline to avoid that horrible, brilliant light.
The speaker smiled even more widely, white teeth bright in the fire.
“So, as a gesture of good faith…” He extended one hand, palm up, slowly and dramatically toward the western portion of the town. “… we have only burned half of it. At least for now.”
There were shouted protests. Accusations. Screamed curses.
“No one here did nothing ta you!”
“My husband’s dead. He’s dead! He’s dead!”
“If you didn’t want to burn the town, then why did you burn it, you bastards?”
The speaker put a cupped hand behind his ear at this last question.
“Why?” He cocked his head, as though to hear better. “Did someone ask why?” He waited a moment, through a few more curses and questions, then nodded vigorously. “Ah, I think I understand the difficulty. Elsewhere in the world, this would not be a problem. Elsewhere people have a notion of law, crime, and consequence. Here on Hook, however, you have been … deprived of such notions.”
He leaned back on his heels, tucked his thumbs into his leather belt, and smiled even more widely. He wasn’t much to look at-a wide, heavy face, lips that twisted up cruelly whenever he wasn’t talking-but the son of a bitch had the voice of a trained orator-rich, and strong, and supple. He had the voice, and obviously he liked to use it.
“It’s not your fault, of course,” he went on. “No people can be expected to circumscribe their own … baser impulses without the outside imposition of law, of order. Formerly, the Eyrie let you all run amok because it suited their purposes to have you disordered, fragmented. A grievous lapse,” he said, shaking his head. “A lamentable lapse. Fortunately, we are here to introduce you to these notions. This,” he went on, leveling a steady finger at the flames, “is justice.”
For a few moments, the mob just stared, first at the man in Kettral blacks, then at the flames consuming their miserable homes. To Gwenna’s ear it was all a lot of horseshit, long on talk and short on explanation. On the other hand, no one was trying to kill the bastard anymore, so he had to be doing something right. In fact, when Gwenna turned to scrutinize the faces around her, she found them filled with fear and resentment, but no confusion. Protest they might, but they understood why the men in black were burning their homes. She shifted her attention back to the dock.
“When you harbor dissidents,” the leader said, allowing himself a flourish of rhetorical anger, “this is what happens. When you take rebels into your miserable cellars and hovels, we will burn them down.” He spat onto the dock. The gesture looked fake, somehow, like a performance he’d rehearsed back in the barracks. “You should be grateful. The shacks we burned weren’t fit for the rats you shared them with. Try to do better when you rebuild. And when those creeping vermin come to you again begging for help and hiding, remember that I’ll pay a gold Annurian sun for every head. On the other hand, the next time a field of our yellowbloom is burned, I’ll be back to torch a dozen more houses.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”
The mob started to growl once more, but another voice cut through the rumbling discontent.
“You want a head, you bastard?”
Gwenna spun to find a woman standing on a flight of low stone steps almost directly behind her. She was tall, taller than Gwenna herself, long limbed and dark skinned, hair shaved down to the scalp. She was fine-featured, almost aristocratic in her face and bearing, but though she spoke with chin raised and her dark eyes flashing, Gwenna could smell the fear on her, a bone-deep fear held just barely in check. At first glance, in the night and fickle firelight, she appeared unarmed. As the mob stared, however, she pulled a blade from over her right shoulder. A short weapon, smoke steel and carried in the Kettral style. Despite the blade, however, the woman wasn’t dressed like the men on the docks.
Instead of blacks, she wore a sleeveless tunic and dark breeches, practical enough in the hot island weather, but a little too loose for good fighting attire. She knew how to hold the sword, which was more than you could say for most of the idiots swaggering around Hook, and had chosen her position well-high ground, back to a building, double escape routes-except for an open right flank, where a long alley offered a perfect angle of attack. It took less than a heartbeat to see it, but seeing was the easy part. What did it mean? The woman defying the Kettral on the dock was almost Kettral herself, but imperfect, like someone who’d been spying on the Eyrie for years without taking part in any of the actual training.
“If you want a head,” she shouted again, voice fraying on the sharp edge of her growing panic, “then why don’t you come and take mine? I’m not hiding in a cellar, you murdering bastards. I’m right here. You want my head? Come and take it.”
She had the attention of the men on the dock-that was pretty fucking obvious. Her sudden appearance had scraped the condescending smile off their leader’s face, and two of the soldiers behind him had half raised their bows. It was a pointless gesture; the woman could step back into the open doorway the moment they put an arrow in the air. The men on the dock seemed to understand this, and neither bothered trying to get off a shot.
People shifted, moving clear of the coming violence, opening a straight path from the Kettral to the lone woman on the stairs, an empty avenue, as though for some emperor’s procession. The frightened woman held her ground. Which meant she was either very stupid, or had an end beyond simple taunting in mind.
“I hope you’re pleased, Qora,” said the Kettral leader, drawling the long first syllable of her name. “People died here because of you.” The tone was casual, almost lazy, but Gwenna saw the man shift. She caught a whiff, below all the smoke and sweat, of the sudden eagerness pouring off him.
Qora shook her head grimly. “I don’t remember setting any fires.”
“You should have realized when you chose to use civilians as shields that shields get battered. They get broken.”
Qora’s face tightened. “No one’s fooled, Henk. They see who’s doing the breaking, and for what. People know a tyrant when they see one.”
“And do they also know a coward who hides behind children?”
She spread her hands. “I’m not hiding now. If you want me, here I am.”
So-a trap. Obviously.
Gwenna glanced over the square again, evaluating the angles and approaches. The woman-Qora-was trying to draw the Kettral south, off their dock. Into what? There were a few good spots to plant charges, but charges wouldn’t discriminate between attackers and civilians. Not necessarily a problem, but this woman seemed keen on the distinction.
A sniper then.
Qora knew that the men on the dock would have someone covering them, maybe several someones. She was clearly hoping that her appearance on the steps would lure those someones out, that the hidden Kettral with the bows-wherever they were-would get into position to take a shot at her. There was one obvious choice. Gwenna looked back down that street to the east, the open flank on Qora’s right. If there were Kettral hidden in the alleys, that’s where they’d move to take their shot. Which meant that if Qora was setting a trap, she’d have someone waiting down that very alley, someone ready to hamstring the sniper right … there.
Qora’s companion was tucked back into a shadowy doorway, but his blade was drawn. A smoke steel blade. As traps went, it was clumsy, obvious-Gwenna had run through the whole thing in a few heartbeats-but you had to admire the woman on the steps for playing bait, facing down five Kettral and a bird in the hope of flushing one or two of her foes into the alley. You had to admire her, and you had to do it fast, because she was about to get all kinds of killed.
Two bowmen-the Kettral snipers Gwenna had known would be there-stepped into the long alley forty paces back. Gwenna waited for the man with the sword, Qora’s hidden companion, to spring the trap. He didn’t. Instead of leaping from the shadows, he froze in place. The snipers, advancing down the alley with their bows half drawn, didn’t notice him, and as they approached, stalking forward, eager for their prey, the lone man melted back into the shadows, disappeared.
“’Shael’s shit on a stick,” Gwenna muttered, turning to signal to Annick.
Before she’d dropped her hand, Annick’s arrows were in the air. A moment later, the snipers in the alley collapsed. Of Qora’s cowardly companion, there was no sign. Gwenna scanned the crowd slowly, loosening her focus, ignoring the individual faces, searching for unexpected movement in the mass of people. Where there were two snipers, there could well be another.
It only took a few heartbeats to find what she was looking for. A dozen paces back, emerging from a side street-two men moving against the drift of the larger current, pressing toward the woman on the steps when everyone else was trying to get clear. A third was coming in from yet another angle, all of them moving slowly, but with more purpose than the situation seemed to require. None carried bows, but you didn’t need a bow to kill a woman, not if you got close enough-and they were definitely closing.
“Well, fuck,” Gwenna said, more loudly than she’d intended.
She eased her belt knife in its sheath, eyes still roving over the scene.
The Kettral on the dock didn’t move, but they had more than three accomplices seeded through the crowd, she realized. Four, five, six … Gwenna had figured on one extra Wing scattered about the square, but there were at least two, both of them clearly intended to cover the main act out on the dock, both now converging on the woman on the steps. Qora didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she was stealing glances up the side street toward where her companion had disappeared, slipping away while their shitty plan tore apart at the seams.
Briefly, Gwenna considered letting the woman die. It hardly made sense to start putting knives in people until she’d sorted out who, exactly, was who, who needed killing and who just needed a swift kick in the ass. On the other hand, the basic contours were clear enough-the men with the birds were burning buildings to try to get at the others, the rebels. Qora was a rebel. Hull only knew how many more rebels there were, or where they were hiding; both pieces of information seemed useful.
“Well, fuck,” Gwenna said again, sliding her knife between the ribs of the first Kettral as he passed.
The man’s eyes widened, but pain stole his breath. He reached briefly, weakly, for the blade, fingers dumb and fumbling. Gwenna wrapped an arm around his waist, as though he were a friend with too much to drink-she’d learned that trick from a Skullsworn assassin a whole continent away in what seemed like another life-then lowered him gently to the stones. She hadn’t given Annick another signal, or Talal, but how much of a ’Kent-kissing signal did you need? It ought to be pretty clear that it was time to start killing people.
When she straightened up, she saw they’d followed her play. One of the other Kettral was folding slowly over, grasping at an arrow in his chest. Then a second stumbled, coughing up blood. More were coming, though, and Annick didn’t have angles on all of them.
“Qora,” Gwenna called, trying to get the attention of the woman on the steps without alerting the entire square. “Qora.”
Qora looked down. Her eyes were wide and baffled, ablaze with the still-burning fire to the west, hot with her own fear and rage. Gwenna motioned her toward the nearest street.
“Time to go.”
The woman’s only move was to lower her sword at Gwenna, an unfortunate gesture that drew every eye in the crowd. Another Kettral, just a few feet away and closing, turned to stare at Gwenna. When he saw the bloody knife in her hand, he drew a sword from beneath his cloak.
Gwenna shook her head. “I’m on your side, you asshole,” she hissed to the man.
He hesitated, glanced back up at Qora, who was staring down at both of them. Gwenna stepped in and cut his throat. People were starting to shout, to scream. Behind her, on the docks, the men with the bird were moving. Things were ugly and about to get a whole lot uglier.
“I wasn’t really on his side,” Gwenna growled, meeting Qora’s eye. “And it really is time to go. Now. The crowd’s seeded with them.”
Qora shook her head, took half a step back toward the doorway behind her. “Who are you?”
“Look, bitch,” Gwenna snapped, losing her patience. Off to her right, a man began to charge. Annick’s arrow took him in the eye. “You’re spunky, but you’re stupid. Now get off the fucking stairs and let’s go.” She stabbed a finger down the nearest street. “That way.”
Just behind Gwenna a woman started screaming, pain mingled with panic. She was just one of the baffled folks who had stumbled outside in the middle of the night to see half her town burn. She had nothing to do with the unfolding fight, but the sound seemed to jolt Qora from her confusion, and she vaulted off the stone steps, finally showing a touch of the competence Gwenna had hoped for.
Instead of following, however, Qora paused, staring up that alley to the east. “There’s someone else,” she hissed. “Jak-”
“Forget him,” Gwenna said. “He’s gone.”
“He was supposed to-”
“I know what he was supposed to do. He didn’t do it.”
Qora hesitated, jaw clenched in an agony of indecision, then let herself be led. Together, they raced down the muddy street. Within a dozen steps, Gwenna could hear the clatter of their pursuers. She grabbed the woman by the elbow, dragging her down a side street as more arrows thunked into the wooden walls. Talal was there, his own blades bare, one wet with blood.
He pointed to a low wall between buildings, just high enough to scramble over.
“There,” he whispered. “Straight shot out of town on the other side.”
Gwenna shoved the other woman toward the short wall, but she yanked away, twisting back toward the square. “Jak!” she whispered desperately. “My partner. Where is he?”
“How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna snapped. “East somewhere.”
“I have to find him. Go back for him.”
“No,” Gwenna said, taking the woman by the arm once more, sizing her up. Qora was an inch or two taller than Gwenna herself, but slender, light enough to knock out and carry if she kept up with the idiotic heroics. Gwenna shifted, wrapping an arm around her neck, but Talal stepped forward.
“Describe him,” he said. “Jak.”
Qora’s eyes were huge as moons. She twisted her head to look at Gwenna, then turned back to Talal.
“Short. Strong. Pale. Shaved head. Twin kettral inked on his shoulders…”
It wasn’t much of a description, but Talal nodded, then darted off down the alley before she could finish.
Gwenna hissed her irritation, started to call the leach back, then muzzled her objection. Talal could take care of himself, his assurance had calmed Qora, and they’d be more likely to confuse the pursuit if they split up.
“Get to the rally,” she growled after him. “And don’t fucking die.”