A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,155

she is before me.

This demon. This tiny slip of muscled, deadly madness. This murderess, eviscerating one of my legionnaires, then turning to face me with a sneer.

My men surge around me, fighting hers back, leaving the Bitch of Blackcliff and the Blood Shrike to each other.

Don’t give Keris an inch, Blood Shrike. She’ll have something up her sleeve. She always does.

And who is to say I don’t, Soul Catcher?

I force away the memory, for with it comes the words Karinna spoke, what she showed me deep in the Waiting Place. The Nightbringer or his minions could pick such thoughts from my mind. They are a weakness, and today, I can have no weakness. Today, I must be a thousand times smarter and faster and better than I have ever been.

Keris unleashes her fury like she’s been saving it just for me. I will pay you back for every escape, every defiance. She screams the words with the violence of her body, the ferocity of her scims. I will punish you for all of them.

Her savagery is so startling that I stumble, on the defensive. She is not a normal foe, nor a fair one. This is the woman who taught me everything I know about war, survival, combat. The woman who honed killing machines—none more effective than herself.

Though she knows my skill, she does not know my heart. Keris did not witness her parents and sister’s throats slit in front of her. Keris did not watch her last living sibling stare into her child’s eyes as she died, all her hopes dead in the flash of a blade.

Keris is fueled by anger. But mine burns hotter because of grief. And I unleash it.

The Commandant’s weapons of choice are dual scims. She is smaller, so she has to risk getting in close. I keep her at a distance, dodging her thrusts, matching her parry for parry, until I get a hit on her shoulder, and another on the side of her neck.

But she moves too quickly for me to slice at her legs or throat—her weakest spots.

A sting across my face—and the warm rush of blood pouring down my cheek. I jerk my head back as Keris’s blade comes within inches of my throat. At the same time, she whips her other scim across my left side so viciously that even Spiro’s armor cannot stop the blow. If I was wearing my ceremonials, I’d be dead.

The battle still swirls around us, and I catch sight of Harper shoving his scim into the throat of an attacker—barely avoiding the swing of a club at his legs. My men are beating the Commandant’s forces back, outnumbered as they are, and the sight gives me heart.

I move as if blood does not pour down my side, feinting with the scim in my right hand before pivoting around her. My blade is inches from her hamstrings, and I whip it across.

But instead of the satisfying give of metal cutting through flesh, I feel a deep burn in my left wrist. She tricked me. Left her back open so I’d go behind her and leave my left side, my weak side, exposed. Shrike, you fool.

My scim falls uselessly from my hand, and her blade rips through my armor into my hip. I stagger back before she tears me in half, my vision doubling. Get up, Shrike! Get up!

I lift my remaining scim in time to parry a blow that would have taken my head from my body. The force with which our scims meet knocks mine loose, but she slips on a stray bit of mud, giving me a chance to fall back.

Though it does little good. I am weaponless, my scims too far away to reach.

“Shrike!” Harper, ever watchful, breaks free from the battle on Keris’s left side and throws a dagger to me. No. No. Stay away. Stay away, you fool! Keris catches the dagger, but Harper has already thrown another.

Even as he hurls the second blade at me, as I pluck it from the air, I see his chest plate is askew, knocked loose in battle.

“Harper!” I scream, but Keris has turned, the blade she caught hurtling through the air at him. Death with wings.

It sinks into his chest.

A flesh wound, I think. I crawl through the mud toward him. I can fix it. I can sing him back. But another flash of steel cuts through the air. This blade lodges in his heart. He falls.

“No!” I reach him, my knees sinking into