gate gaped open, and another group squared off for its control. Nine armed slavers in leather on one side and four of Jason’s people on the other. Neither was willing to make the first move. Jason’s people were good and looked desperate, but the slavers outnumbered them two to one.
He had to get through that gate.
Richard grabbed Charlotte’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ll have to cut our way through. Stay behind me.”
He strode toward the fight. A slave spun into his way. Richard knocked him aside and thrust himself between the two lines, holding his sword lightly at an angle.
The slavers surveyed him, spreading out. He heard Jason’s people move back.
Here, poised on the threshold between violence and peace, was his true place. Generations of warriors, stretching back through time to the fierce native clans that had first fled into the Mire to escape a magic catastrophe, had stood just like him, balanced on that sword’s blade between life and death. Here he was in control, serene and at peace.
In that brief moment, when their lives and his came together, he truly lived. But for him to experience life, his opponents had to die.
The first slaver moved to his right. Richard struck, piercing and cutting with a surgeon’s precision and speed honed by countless hours of practice. He spun in a fluid movement and stopped, his sword held at a downward angle.
The slavers looked at him.
The second, fourth, fifth, and seventh of them fell. They made no noise; they simply crumpled to the ground.
The remaining slavers froze for an agonizing second and rushed him. He melted into the moment, striking without thought, completely on instinct.
Too soon. It was always over too soon.
The last slaver stopped short of his sword. The thrust never connected. The man lingered upright for the space of a breath and sank to his knees, struggling for air. Behind him, Charlotte’s magic coiled back into her body.
She stood very still, her eyes opened wide, looking at him as if they had met for the first time.
He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or horrified or perhaps both or neither. Regret stabbed at him, but then it was better that she knew his true nature. They had to move. He took her hand, and they ran to the gate.
“Thank you,” he told her. “That was brave of you, but also unnecessary. Please don’t do that again. I don’t want to accidentally injure you.”
She pulled her hand out of his fingers. “I’m not helpless, Richard.”
Did she find his touch repulsive? He sliced through the lock securing the gate. “I know you’re anything but. But you’ve done your part, and it’s my turn. Save your reserves. We may need them.”
They went through the gate, and Charlotte gasped. Above them a corpse hung from a pole. A boy, Jack’s age. His eyes had been gouged out. His mouth was sewn shut. His nose was a broken mess of flesh and cartilage on a face scoured with burn marks. A sign hanging around his neck read, “We’re always watching.”
He had seen this before—the slavers’ favorite visual aid to discourage escape. He had pried Jason out of a hole in the ground just before he was about to end up on such a pole. Anger, hot and furious, burned in him, then died down to a simmer.
“He was alive,” Charlotte whispered.
“What?”
“He was alive when they mutilated him. Those are predeath wounds.”
Darkness whipped out of her. The hair on the back of his neck rose.
Charlotte clenched her fists. “I’m going to kill every slaver we find.”
He noticed the set of her jaw and the thin line of her lips. Her eyes burned. He recognized this fury. It and he were old friends, and he knew it was useless to get in its way. “As you wish,” he told her. “All I ask is that we move up the hill toward the bookkeeper.”
Ahead, the streets unrolled before them, climbing up a low hill. They marched upward together.
THE house sat recessed from the street, a stately, respectable, two-story mansion, flanked by carved columns and palm trees. A brown horse was tied to the side, flicking its ears and casting nervous glances at the street.
Richard glanced back behind them. No movement. They had left a trail of dead bodies, and half of them belonged to Charlotte. She killed again and again, driven by an overwhelming need to stop the slaver savagery from happening. He was like that too, at the start of this mess. Back then, every new mutilation and atrocity infuriated him. He had seen things so wrong and shocking, that the only reaction he could manage was to destroy those who committed them. It had become his moral imperative and the only possible human response.
He saw it now in Charlotte. She was trying to cleanse the city. He wasn’t a mind reader, but he knew exactly what went through her head. If only she could manage to kill every slaver in their way, the pain would stop. If she didn’t kill, she would have to process the full horror of what she had seen in the past five days, and it would rip her to pieces.
It had taken him several months before he realized that killing slavers accomplished nothing. They were the immediate tormentors, but no matter how many he cut down, as long as somewhere, someone wealthy was getting wealthier from that torment, new slavers would always take the place of the old. Charlotte would come to realize this too, but for now she needed to act, and act she did. He had known that many plagues existed, but seeing them in all their terrifying glory was an educational experience.
She was walking oddly now, as if her feet hurt when she rested her weight on them. Her lips were pressed together into a thin, hard line. Her skin was pale, her eyes very bright. She looked feverish. She must be expending too much magic. There were only two ways from here: she would stop exerting herself and recover, or she would drain herself and die.
“We’re almost done,” he told her. “No more, Charlotte. Save yourself.”
Charlotte nodded.
He cut into the door, carving the lock out of it with precise strikes, and pushed the heavy wooden halves open, revealing a large hall with a staircase curving to the second floor.
His mind barely registered the three crossbowmen crouched behind an overturned chest of drawers. He saw the crossbow bolts coming at him and automatically flashed, throwing his magic in a pale shield in front of him. The bolts bounced off. He dashed forward.
“Die,” Charlotte ordered, her voice exhausted.
The three crossbowmen choked. He jumped over the chest and cut them down with three strikes.
Behind him, Charlotte slumped over and leaned against the column. Damn it all.
SHE was spent. The last spark of magic burned dimly within her. If Charlotte let it go, her hold on life would slip. She was almost tempted to do it.
How had it snuck up on her so quickly? She had expended a lot of magic, but she never felt tired. She felt light and all-powerful, as if her body had become a burden, and she was disconnected from it. And then, in the last five minutes, as she climbed the steep street to the house, reality crashed back into her. Her body felt so heavy, so constraining, as if every pound of her flesh and bone had become three. Her feet ached. She wanted to vomit just to lighten the load.
The moment her magic flowed out to strike at the bowmen, her legs failed. Too much of herself had gone out with the magic. She had to lean against the column, or she would fall.
Richard loomed over her. She glimpsed anger in his eyes.
“No more.” His clipped voice held an unmistakable command.
She felt the magic of his body, a vibrant life force shivering just inches from her. All she had to do was reach for it. Her magic whimpered, eager for sustenance. That’s how plaguebringers were born—the exertion drove the healer to seek an alternate source of fuel and siphon off the nearest life to keep on killing.
