Siege (The Warrior Chronicles, #5) - K.F. Breene Page 0,78

me.”

Sonson turned his palms toward the sky as a grin spread across his face. “Just making sure you thought this through. I’m ready.”

“You’re not alone, Chulan,” Kallon said. “I will follow.”

“If we wait a few hours, we will have nothing in our way,” Rohnan said in his annoyingly calm voice.

“If they aren’t dead, a few hours might be too late,” Sonson said, checking his weapons. “Besides, that is a huge city. We can drag people into the shadows for hours and kill them before anyone would have a clue. Wake everyone up.”

“This land is terrified of the Shadow.” Denessa tightened her sword belt. “Let’s show them why.”

“Chulan, you are thinking with your emotions, not your—”

Shanti slapped Rohnan’s hand off her shoulder again and smashed her fist into his jaw. “You try to hold me back one more time, Rohnan, and I will break your jaw the next time, got that? I’m going in. Those boys saved my life, and more importantly, they saved my soul. I am indebted to them more than I can ever repay. I will sacrifice everything for them. Do you understand me?”

“Just like old times,” Sayas said with a grin, standing by the road patiently.

Rohnan dropped his hand from his jaw and stared at her defiantly.

“Okay, then.” Shanti checked everything over and started jogging toward the city. She didn’t care who followed. She didn’t care if she was completely alone. She would either save those boys, or tear down that city in vengeance.

To her surprise, everyone filed in without a word. Expectation ran around their group and the occasional vicious grin crossed faces. Every member of this collection of people had lost someone at the Graygual hand. They’d suffered, they’d bled, and now they were finally hitting the Graygual where it would hurt the most. They were all ready. This had been a long time coming.

Another surge of tingles washed over her as they made their way through the sparse trees, using the pooling shadows to mask their movement. Silence reigned around them, their footsteps not making a sound to disturb the night. Every one of them was a master at their skill set and deadly with their steel. The Graygual wouldn’t know what hit them.

The girls were already near the gate when Shanti and the others moved into position. She could feel two other women with Ruisa and Maggie, along with three males.

“No Inkna at the gate, huh?” Sonson asked quietly, directly behind Shanti, masked only by a low cropping of bushes.

“They must be monitoring the guards,” Shanti reasoned. “With this level of defense, the Graygual wouldn’t get lax at the entrances to the city.”

“Then putting the guards down doesn’t seem like the best idea.”

“We’ll be through by the time someone comes to investigate.” Shanti moved through the night, fast and stealthy. At a jog, she ran across the open space and to the rear drawbridge. She let her Gift descend more heavily now, feeling for anyone that would see her. The guards were not close, but someone lingered at the top of the wall.

She glanced up in time to see a startled Graygual lean more heavily over the stone, trying to get a better look.

“I got this,” Sonson said with a rough voice.

With a shot of power, he drove a mental spike through the guard’s mind and then reversed somehow, quickly draining the man of energy until he was almost catatonic. The warning and pulse of anxiety from the guard diminished until he seemed dull. If she hadn’t known better, she would assume he was no more than bored and idle.

“Fantastic trick,” Shanti whispered as they reached the open gateway. Another guard, probably seeing the fall of the first, ran toward them.

“I learned that from an Inkna. They are ingenious in warfare. Had they been warriors, we might’ve had difficulty.” Sonson took to the other guard, striking him down as quickly as the first.

“We haven’t met those guarding Xandre yet.” Shanti motioned the rest of the group toward them, bringing them at a dead run.

She slipped inside the walls and took in the battlements at a glance. Stairs led up to the walls on each side. Sonson waited for his people, and then motioned a couple up. “Make those guards look lazy, and keep anyone else away,” he instructed in the Shadow language.

“There are two leaders now, huh?” Shanti asked as she waited for the remainder of her people to pass through the gate and file around to the pools of black, out of

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