The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

not interrupting any delicate negotiations. Lady Rognozi said that you were free as far as she knew.”

“For a wonder, yes. I was going to have a tray sent to my room and read The Triumphs of Aeliona, but I’m certain you can entertain me as well as Fousan for a while.”

She gave him a long, slow look, and he met it. The darkness of the city streets at night was no obstacle to reforged vision, and Branwyn saw clearly how Zelen’s eyes darkened and the pulse under his jaw beat faster. Dinner would be only a prelude, a pause before they resumed what they’d had to leave off two nights before.

The street was quiet now, the crowds dispersed and less drunken or rowdy. Footsteps and quiet conversations were the only sounds.

“I’m hopeful that I can manage to amuse you,” Zelen said. His voice was soft, but there was nothing subdued or timorous about it: it was the brush of skin on velvet, the wingbeat of the hunting owl. “My conversation may not be quite as lyrical, but—”

Behind them, at least two people drew weapons. Branwyn realized as much in an instant. In another, she knew that the last turn had taken them into a lonely part of the street, where the buildings were mostly warehouses and shops with no owners living above them. In a third, she saw Zelen reach for his sword with an air of shock she thought was genuine. She didn’t have time to be sure.

She was spinning already, Yathana out.

The street behind them was blocked. Seven figures in dark clothes stood there, weapons in hands: Branwyn spotted two swords, a few clubs, and at least one crossbow in the back ranks.

This was going to be quite the evening.

Chapter 12

Zelen’s first thought, when Branwyn tensed and dropped her hand from his arm, was of robbers. Even as he drew his sword, he concluded otherwise. They weren’t in the part of the city the larger gangs claimed as their own, and no small band of ruffians would have gone after two fit, relatively young, and well-armed people.

Also, the people who’d been following them were silent. Robbers would have demanded money, and drunks out for blood sport would have gloated. These just advanced, the dark mass splitting into individual armed forms.

With a grace that Zelen wouldn’t have credited if he hadn’t seen it, Branwyn swiveled on one foot, turning her side toward their assailants. A twang cut through the air, and then a light object clattered against the stones where she’d been standing.

Facts flashed across Zelen’s awareness as single words: crossbow and then assassins.

Running wouldn’t help. The city watch was few and far between, nothing to pin his hopes on, but anything was worth a shot. “Murder!” Zelen shouted at the top of his lungs.

Then he threw himself forward, coming in low to the ground and whipping his sword toward the ankles of the closest adversary. The killer sidestepped, but barely, and then Zelen was in among them, where darkness and close quarters gave him the advantage. The assassins didn’t want to hit each other, but he was perfectly content to kill every damned one of them, if he could manage it.

Seven against two meant he had little hope there either.

He turned in time to catch a club on his upper arm rather than the side of his head. The pain was instant and breathtaking. Zelen struck out half-blindly and felt flesh give way before his blade, drawing a hiss from the man it was attached to. As his vision cleared, he pressed the advantage, stepping forward to block a lunge, then whipping his sword sideways and up across his foe’s chest.

A clang came from his side in the darkness, then the beginning of a startled cry, and finally a gurgle. The voice was low, totally unlike Branwyn’s. Thank you, Mistress of Flame, Zelen managed to pray silently before coming around, back to the wall, to cut into the knee of a club-wielding woman.

The strike took the woman down, as Zelen had known it would: she curled up shrieking on the ground. The crossbowman fired again. Zelen hiked a knee into the groin of another assassin—the man he’d wounded first, with the cut on his chest bleeding copiously but apparently not enough to keep him down—and glanced over his shoulder.

Branwyn pulled her blade from the chest of a dying man and leapt sideways as another club came down. Zelen’s heart froze. He knew she wouldn’t make it, but he couldn’t watch. His foe was recovering, another man was coming in with an overhand slash, and Zelen had to turn back, raising his sword in his own frantic defense.

A series of grunts and cries meant Branwyn had escaped grievous harm. In his gratitude, Zelen had no leisure to consider the ring of metal on metal he’d heard before they started, a noise without any apparent source.

* * *

A crossbow bolt hit Branwyn in the neck.

It bounced off, of course, but the impact closed her windpipe briefly, causing a deeply undignified ulgk. More importantly, the man in front of her gaped, and there was a gasp from behind him that meant the wretched crossbowman had likely seen the deflection, too, despite the darkness. There was a flurry of movement in that direction, not coming toward her.

She would have sighed if her breath hadn’t already fallen into the rhythm of the fight. When the man in front of her tried to strike, a swing made slightly wild by his surprise, Branwyn caught the blade, stepped in, and whipped Yathana across his jugular. She sprang past him toward the fleeing crossbowman, but one of his friends was in the way, trying to break her skull again.

That blow was easier to sidestep than the one that had hit before, praise Poram’s darkness and Sitha’s stone. Blunt impacts hurt, even in Branwyn’s metal form, and the muscles on her left side were soon going to start feeling the hit she hadn’t been able to