in the High Hall of the Aenu. We shall show the world a duel such as it has never seen. This I swear.”
The Night Angel slapped the thin blade to his back, where it dissolved into his skin. He bowed to Garuwashi and then to Feir, and then he disappeared.
“You don’t understand,” Garuwashi said, still on his knees, but the Night Angel was gone. Garuwashi turned wretched eyes to Feir. “Will you be my second?”
“No,” Feir said.
“Very well, faithless servant. I don’t need you.”
Garuwashi drew his short sword, but for once in his life, Feir was quicker than the sa’ceurai. His sword smacked the blade from Garuwashi’s hand and he scooped it up.
“Give me a few hours,” Feir said. “The Hunter is distracted. With five thousand flies in its web, one more may go unnoticed.”
“What are you going to do?” Garuwashi asked.
I’m going to save you. I’m going to save all your damned stiff-necked, infuriating, magnificent people. I’m probably going to get my damn fool self killed. “I’m going to get your sword back,” Feir said, and then he walked into the Wood.
11
A high, tortured howl woke Vi Sovari from a dream of Kylar fighting gods and monsters. She sat up instantly, ignoring the aches from another night on rocky ground. The howl was miles away. She shouldn’t have been able to hear it through the giant sequoys and the deadening morning mists, but it continued, filled with madness and rage, changing pitch as it flew with incredible speed from the Wood’s center.
Only then did Vi become aware of Kylar through the ancient mistarille-and-gold earring. She’d bonded Kylar as he lay unconscious at the Godking’s mercy. It had saved Cenaria and Kylar’s life, and now Vi and Kylar could sense each other. Kylar was two miles distant, and Vi could feel that he held something of incredible power. She could feel him reaching a decision. The power departed from him, and he felt an odd sense of victory.
Suddenly, it was as if the sun were rising in the south. Vi stood on shaky knees. A hundred paces away, at the enormous sequoys of the Dark Hunter’s Wood, the air itself turned a brilliant gold, radiating magic. Even to Vi, untrained as she was, it felt like the kiss of a midsummer’s sunset on her skin.
Then the color deepened to reddish gold. Every dust mote floating in the air, every water droplet in the mists was a flaming autumnal glory.
When Vi was fifteen, her master, the wetboy Hu Gibbet, had taken her to a country estate for a job. The deader was some lord’s bastard who’d made himself a successful spice merchant and decided not to repay his underworld Sa’kagé investors. The estate was covered with maples. That autumn morning Vi moved through a world of gold, carpeted with red-gold leaves, the very air awash in color. As she stood over the corpse, she had mentally retreated to a place where glorious crimson leaves weren’t paired with pulsing arterial blood. Hu beat her for it, of course, and to those beatings Vi had mentally acquiesced. A distracted wetboy is a dead wetboy. A wetboy knows no beauty.
The howl ripped through the wood again, freezing her bones. Moving fast, terribly fast, it Nigh changed pitch higher and then lower and then higher, all in the space of two seconds, as if it were flying to and fro faster than anything could possibly move. Everywhere it went, it was followed by the faint, tinny sound of rending metal. Then came a man’s scream. More followed.
There was a battle in the wood. No, a massacre.
All the while, the wood pulsed with magic. The flaming red was fading to yellow green and then to the deep green of vitality, the scent of new grass, fresh flowers.
“Kylar has given it new life,” Vi said aloud. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew Kylar had put something into the Wood—and that something was rejuvenating the entire forest. Kylar himself felt invigorated, well in a way he hadn’t felt in the week she’d shared the bond with him. Whole.
Vi felt something wrong behind her. Her hands flashed to the daggers at her belt. Then she was on her back. Even as air whooshed from her lungs, a crackling ball of blue energy hissed and spat through the air where she’d been standing a moment before.
The most Vi could do was gasp, trying to catch her wind. It was several blind seconds before she could sit up.