the enormous number of Marat still fresh and unbloodied, now moving quickly over the plains toward the fortress. "Hold," she told Giraldi. "Hold as long as you can. Send someone to make sure the Civilians have started running. Tell the wounded to arm themselves to fight as best they can. Tell them-" She swallowed. "Tell them it looks bad."
'Yes, Countess," Giraldi said, his voice numb. "Heh. I always figured my last order would be 'pass me another slice of roast.'" He gave her a grim smile, turned to swing his sword at a climbing Marat almost absently, and headed off to follow her commands.
Amara climbed back down off the wall, taking absent note of the courtyard. Fidelias and his men were nowhere in sight, probably gone again, safely lofted up by their Knights Aeris. At the barricade, more Marat had pushed through, and though they had trouble advancing over the corpses fallen on the ground, yet they came on, despite the desperate cries of the Alerans pitted against them.
She drew her sword, the sword from the fallen guardsman in the Princeps Memorium, and stared at its workmanship. Then she looked up, at the Marat pushing through the gates, sure that in time she would see their hordemaster, here to claim the fortress for himself.
Bernard stepped up beside her, still looking tired, but holding a double bladed woodsman's axe in his broad hands. "Do we have a plan?"
"The hordemaster. I saw him. I want to take him down." She told him about the dagger at his waist, the second horde coming on.
Bernard nodded, slowly. "If we get to him," he said, "I'm going to try a
woodcrafting on you. Take the knife and run. Get it back to the First Lord, if you can."
"You're exhausted. If you try to work another crafting it could k-" She stopped herself and took a slow breath.
"Pirellus was right," Bernard commented. "The good part of being doomed is that you have nothing left to lose."
Then he turned to her, slipping an arm around her waist, and kissed her on the mouth, with no hesitation, no self-consciousness, nothing but a raw hunger tempered with a kind of exquisite gentleness. Amara let out a soft sound and threw herself into the kiss, suddenly frantic, and felt tears threaten her eyes again.
She drew back from the kiss far too soon, looking up at him. Bernard smiled at her and said, "I didn't want to leave that undone."
She felt a tired smile on her own mouth, and she turned from him to face the gates.
Outside, there came a blaring of horns, deeper, somehow more violent, more angry than the first ones had been. The ground began to shake once again, and shouts and rumbles outside the walls rose into a tidal wave of sound that pounded at her ears, her throat, her chest. She thought she could feel her cheeks vibrating from the sheer volume.
The final defense at the gate began to crumble. The Marat began to force their way into the courtyard, their eyes wild, weapons bloodied, pale hair and skin speckled with scarlet. One armed holder went down before a pair of enormous wolves and a Marat fighting with nothing but his own teeth. A great herdbane pinned a crawling Aleran to the ground and with a birdlike bob of its head seized the Aleran's neck and broke it with a quick shake. The Marat poured in, and there was sudden bedlam in the courtyard, lines disintegrating into dozens of separate smaller battles, pure chaos.
"There," Amara said, and jabbed her finger forward. "Coming through the gate right now."
Atsurak strode through the gates, his beasts all around him. With a casual motion of his captured Aleran spear, he thrust it through the back of a fighting legionare and then, without watching the man die, withdrew the spear to test its edge against his thumb. Several Alerans rushed him. One was torn to shreds by one of the huge birds. Another dropped to the earth before he got close to Atsurak, black-feathered Marat arrows sprouting from both eyes. No one got within striking distance of the hordemaster.
Bernard growled, "I'm going in first. Get their attention. You come right behind me."
"All right," Amara said, and put her hand on his shoulder.
Bernard gripped the axe and tensed to move forward.
Sudden thunder shook the air in a roar that made what came before sound like nothing more than the rumbling of an empty belly. Screams, frantic, howling cries, rose in a symphony. The