more substantial, that I could trust myself to lean against them. My arm was stinging something ferocious and dripping all down my sleeve. “Here’s how it’s going to go. I distract them while you take your chances and make a run for it, all right? Fiacre’s not an idiot, so if you explain the situation to him, I’m sure—”
An arrow whizzed past the side of my head, nicked my ear, and embedded itself in the far wall. The courtyard just beyond the wall, where the fallen guard had torn a hole in the screen, was filling with soldiers, all of whom were wielding those damned longbows.
I stepped abruptly away from Temur, hoping the loss of support wouldn’t leave him stumbling. I had a kind of plan, though it’d only just come to me a moment ago—about the time I’d realized that the chances of us both getting past had been ground right down to zero, and the chances of me holding off a palace army by myself were… Well, easier to say that if our endeavor had been a play, there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house.
I wasn’t any kind of sentimental myself though—unlike Greylace, I didn’t have a collection of lace hankies for every occasion—and if this was truly where my play ended, so to speak, then I was sure as hell going to make it one hell of a finish.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it would sure as bastion prove useful. One might even call it poetic.
“As soon as their attention’s on me, you go,” I said, resigning myself quickly to not explaining the plan. Temur was a smart man. He’d figure it out for himself.
I heard a shout from behind me. Whether it was Temur or whatever man was unlucky enough to be fighting him, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t pay attention to that at the moment. Another arrow hit the wall next to my hand and I jerked it away. Things would have been so much easier if I could have just closed my damned eyes.
I was about to do something I hated, and it kind of took all my concentration to do it.
The thing no one tells you about having a Talent is that it’s a giant pain in the ass. I kept mine good and hidden for as long as I’d been able to, so long that most who found out after they’d known me still didn’t really think of me as a magician. It was why I’d up and refused the title of Margrave, back when they’d been handing them out like caramel apples after the war. General, I told them, suits me just fine. I didn’t want anything to do with being a magician, but that damned plague hadn’t taken into account who wanted a Talent—cultivated it in their bloodlines like a fine wine—and who didn’t. And after the plague, I was pretty sure I was never going to use my Talent again, no matter how useful anyone called it. Mine was a nature-based thing, the same as Josette’s, which meant we could use them pretty much anywhere and that it was real hard to stick any kind of limitations on us. Not for the first time I was really starting to wonder how they’d managed to wrap up both Fiacre and Marcy, both neat little powerhouses in their own right, and the others no slouches themselves though Ozanne was a healer, and Marius’s Talent had something to do with light. Casi and Val didn’t have any Talents to speak of. All the same, I was thinking they’d better have had a good explanation ready for why two of Volstov’s lieutenants could get snapped up that easy.
It just plain made us look bad.
Maybe the Ke-Han’d used an old trick and grabbed just one of our own to use as a hostage against the other five. I wasn’t any kind of magical scholar—needed Greylace for that, or Marius, in a pinch—but I had a feeling it was easier to neutralize just one magician, then threaten to kill him if the others so much as blinked.
Which might have meant that I was about to do a real stupid thing right about now, but I figured we’d already kicked up so much fuss by this time that it couldn’t worsen matters one way or another.
At least, I really hoped it couldn’t.
There was an underground water vein beneath the palace. It bubbled up in places as a