Let’s do it now, Mena thought. She let Elya choose the moment, felt it just before she was going to, and agreed. Nawth got closer than ever before, and Elya reared back, spinning to avoid his grasping, big-knuckled hand. The move put Mena in striking position above Howlk for the first time. She swung but not for him. She aimed for the metal chain on the frekete’s neck. The combined motion of their bodies was too much. She missed. Caught Nawth’s shoulder instead. She thought the strike-even though awkwardly landed-would cut through the coarse muscle all the way to the bone. It didn’t. Instead the blade dented his flesh, barely drawing blood. It was as if she had hit him with a fighting stick, not a honed edge at all.
Nawth grabbed for Elya. She just managed to corkscrew away, diving toward the ice in the process. Mena would have lost her sword if she had not had the leather straps from its hilt wrapped around her wrist. She fought to get control of it, to keep it from cutting her or Elya. She lost all sense of the world for a few seconds, and then it snapped back into place. Elya spread her wings and went into a more controlled fall. Nawth was right behind her. He raked the air with his good arm, trying desperately to grab her tail, which snaked around just out of his reach. He was acting on his own, frenzied. He paid no attention to whatever Howlk was shouting at him. He ignored the way the Auldek tugged the steering harness. Howlk even reached forward and yanked on the chain that held Nawth’s amulet to get control of him back.
The thought passed from Mena to Elya so fast it felt simultaneous. Elya flipped over, angled her wings to break her speed, lifting slightly. Upside down, sword in hand, Mena kicked free of her stirrups. She yanked loose the thigh buckle that secured her to the harness. She fell free and dropped onto Howlk’s back.
She landed hard and almost glanced off to the side. She wrapped around the startled Auldek and caught hold of a handful of his long hair. Gripping it, she lunged forward, over his shoulder, and struck the chain on Nawth’s neck with all her might. It snapped free and dropped away.
In the moment that Howlk stared wide-eyed at Nawth’s bare neck, Mena yanked back his head, slipped the cutting edge of her sword right along the rim of his neck guard. She let go of his hair, grabbed the back edge of the blade with her free hand, and yanked the blade into his neck with all the might she had. The man’s eyes-startlingly blue-looked up at her, a childlike disappointment in them. His hands came up as if he wanted to explain something to her, but they got no farther before his body started to convulse.
Mena shoved him, which pushed her body back away from them. The three of them fell, drifting slowly apart. She watched the distance between them grow, and then looked past them to the ice field far below, the armies just eating into each other. For a few moments none of it seemed to have anything to do with her. The fact that she plummeted toward the earth with the air raging at her ears and her arms and legs kicked about by the force of her fall did not matter.
And then Elya appeared beside her. She touched Mena with the bottom of her muzzle. That brought Mena back. She grabbed Elya’s neck, loving her like mad, and slipped around and back into the saddle. Elya slowed their descent enough for them to watch from on high as Nawth and Howlk crashed down in the center of the Auldek formation. The soldiers beneath them were squashed on the ice, and those around them sprang back, sending a shock wave out around them. There was too much fighting for all the soldiers to understand what had just happened, but the freketes swarmed down, landing one after the other around their fallen comrades, making the circle of confusion wider. Mena did not need to watch them.
She checked what was happening elsewhere. There was not much daylight left. She caught sight of the sun biting into the horizon and knew the battle had just minutes more before both sides realized they had to withdraw. It was hard to make sense of the scene from above, but she knew what she was looking for and saw it. The Auldek in the foremost square of troops-near where the two had fallen-had pressed forward against Perrin’s troops. She knew they would because she had instructed them not to truly engage. To fight a slow backward retreat, cautious and defensive, just staying alive. The second thing Rialus had told her was about their hidden armor. No use wasting lives trying to injure soldiers who could not readily be injured.
Instead, it was the units facing the quota slave ranks that truly pressed the attack. From above, she could see that it was working, more so on the left than on the right flank.
What she did then she explained to Elya in images so that she would see it all and fear none of it. Passing over the crash of the two front lines, they swooped low over the right flank of quota warriors. Seeing the spot she wanted, she had Elya dip nearly to the ground above a patch of clear ice. At what she gauged to be the right moment, Mena pulled free of her harness for the second time that afternoon. She went over backward. Her legs kicked free of the stirrups and passed through the sky above her, all the way over until she was chest down and skimming off Elya’s back. She hit ice knowing she had to roll. She did. Rolled and slid.
She came out of it with the King’s Trust in her hand. She took out the nearest man by severing his leg at the knee. He went down screaming, splashing crimson across the ice. The next nearest she slashed across the chest. Another she hit awkwardly with the side of her blade, breaking his wrist instead of severing it.
As the soldiers pulled back to take her in, she got her footing. She gripped the sword in two hands and steadied herself. The fury that she recognized as Maeben came into her. It had been a while, but the screeching wrath of the goddess scorched through her veins now. She knew she would remember what she was about to do later with horror at herself, but in that moment it did not matter. She had a purpose in the world, and the blade in her grip was the instrument with which she wrote it. She blocked a spear thrown at her, cowardly, and charged the fool who had thrown it.
It got bloody after that.
When Elya returned, only a few minutes later, Mena was the center of a swirl of red desolation. Her blade was warm with the work, dripping. The ring of soldiers facing her tripped and stumbled on the bodies she had cut down. Elya swept in emitting a hiss so fierce the enemy soldiers dropped to the ice on hearing it. Mena sheathed the King’s Trust and caught Elya at a run. She leaped just in time to grab her stirrup loop. She held on, though her arms wanted to pop free of their sockets as Elya lifted her into the air. A frekete pursued them. Elya grabbed Mena and darted away as nimble as a skylark, dodging thrown spears and arrows with a grace that made Mena grin.
Pressed into the creature’s citrus-smelling plumage, arms aching and feet running in the air above two armies clashing, Mena laughed like a madwoman. Battle joy. A short-lived euphoria, but in the moment there was nothing else like it in the world. The princess laughed so hard it became crying. The two blended so that she could not separate one from the other, or tell apart the emotions that wracked her.
Battle joy. Battle shame. She owned them both. She always would.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Dariel’s second arrival in Avina was markedly different from his first. This time he walked down the city’s wide thoroughfares near a vanguard of escorts. Mor strode in front of him, Birke and Anira at either shoulder. Others from the Sheeven Lek river party made a wedge around them, and still more of the People who had met them outside the city increased their numbers. Dariel gripped leashes securing Bashar and Cashen to him, both of them excited by the commotion, stomping about, large pawed and awkward in their growing size.
For this entrance Dariel wore no bonds. He was not the prisoner that Sire Neen brought as a token for the Auldek, nor the one stuffed under Tunnel’s massive arm. No bit clogged his mouth. Instead of bruises and an inflamed lip he wore a face tattooed with the spots of the Shivith clan. A rune rose from the center of his forehead, a declaration for all to see. And there were many who wished to see it.
The throng they cut through grew as they progressed. More and more people crowded the streets, pushing in to get a look at him. They were quiet, eerily so. The signs of belonging stood out even more than usual because many gathered in clan groups. Whereas Dariel was used to seeing the People as a collage of individuals, some tusked and others tattooed, some with metal whiskers and others with pale flesh, here most seemed to have segregated themselves, making blocs of individuals sharing skin tone or altered features.
They strode past groups of wolflike Wrathics, all of them looking like Birke’s kin. A small clump of Fru Nithexek stared, their eyes somehow rounder than normal, seemingly unblinking. For a time several Shivith youths ran alongside them. They called to one another in amazed voices, shouting that the Rhuin Fa was one of their clan. The Rhuin Fa was Shivith! Their voices were harsh in the relative silence, and before long others cuffed them into silence and held them back to fade into the distance. On one section of street, Dariel and his group had to physically plow through a sea of light blue birdlike faces, all of them staring at Dariel. He could not read whether
