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

expected and which used the other man’s grip against him. Zelen might have been able to break free then. He didn’t test it.

As Hidath yelled his alarm, Zelen brought his hand up, palm first. The blow itself was light, no more than a slap, but what hit the guard’s forehead wasn’t just Zelen’s skin. It was the pendant, shining red and black, that pressed into the space between the guard’s eyes.

“Help me, please,” Zelen said quietly, and not to the men at arms.

The grip on Zelen’s wrist dropped away. Hidath stood entranced a heartbeat. Then he screamed.

He didn’t stop. The sound kept coming while he stood there. It was high, wavering, strange from a large man but not womanly or childlike so much as inhuman, the noise that metal or wood might produce just before it snapped if people could hear it.

How long, Zelen wondered, had the man been making that noise inside his own head?

That horror didn’t bear contemplating, not least because there wasn’t time. Zelen dove, barely ducking Nislar’s clumsy, half-stunned grip, and grabbed his sword from the floor. He kicked out as he rolled up, catching the guard in the ankle, but didn’t take him down. The other man was a professional. He stayed on his feet, alert enough even to take a swing.

Zelen blocked hastily on the way up. His sword stopped Nislar’s, a heavy but keen-edged short blade, an inch away from his neck.

Once more, Zelen struck out with the pendant, but missed Nislar’s forehead. The guard blinked, then slapped Zelen’s hand away, sending Letar’s sigil clattering to the floor. Zelen used his sword for momentum and pushed himself hastily backwards.

Hidath was still screaming.

Around came Nislar again, sword slashing down as Zelen leapt sideways. A chair splintered beneath the blow. Zelen took a step back and found himself against the desk. “We could always not do this, you know,” he said, sidling along its surface. “You leave, find a nice tavern, come back when all the evening’s festivities are over. I’ll put in a good word for you if the subject arises.”

He blocked another swing. This one didn’t come as close, but he still felt the strength in it. Nislar’s face was blank, intent, and the pendant was gone.

That meant Zelen had a free hand.

A second of groping on the desk brought his fingers into contact with the largest of the cat statues, a white marble piece the size of his palm. Zelen backed away from a thrust, grabbed, and threw the thing directly into Nislar’s face.

It hit him in the nose. Zelen the healer heard the sound of rupturing cartilage, noted the spray of blood, and winced in sympathy, knowing precisely how much trouble and pain it would cause to fix that. Zelen the swordsman saw his moment and took it: a step inside Nislar’s range, a slash to the inside of the sword arm that cut a tendon, then one to the back of the leg, and the man was down on the floor, groaning and bleeding.

“I’m sorry,” Zelen said. “I can’t stay and fix those.”

Sword bared and dripping blood, he turned and ran out of the room. He didn’t know where Gedomir had gone, or where the other guards were, but with Branwyn and Tanya both likely still in the old wing, he didn’t want to take any chances.

* * *

Compulsion, Yathana said after the guard’s blade had met Branwyn’s. The man had shifted his stance to work with the close walls, taking advantage of his shorter weapon. He was good, and thus still alive. On him, not her.

Yathana’s speech was faint, a sign of the effort she was using to hold on to the world after Branwyn’s transformation. Been on too long for me to undo it in battle.

That was just what Branwyn needed to hear: a reason to try to leave the man alive. She growled. It was pure frustration, but the guard, who’d evidently heard a few things about Sentinels, gulped.

“Fine,” said Branwyn, and swung inward, grabbing the guard’s arm with her other hand. She’d use the swords as a lever, dislocate his shoulder while she kicked his legs out from under him, and then be on the sorceress before she got clever.

That was the idea. The guard was too smart by half for a man under compulsion, though. He dropped his own arm as Branwyn moved, sending her weight further forward than she’d wanted, and slammed a fist into her kidney. It hurt his knuckles—he cursed practically in her ear—but it hurt her more, despite her metal form.

Mercy had very few rewards.

Branwyn spun back around, striking out with her fist in a punch that hit the guard in the shoulder and carried him a clear foot back down the corridor. He fell onto his back, arm at an angle that didn’t bode well for his chances of using it in the future.

The sorceress took a few paces back as well. Her eyes were wide with fright. They looked very much like Zelen’s, but Branwyn couldn’t care. It was the setting that mattered, not the gem. Branwyn saw the woman’s fear, grinned, and went after her.

At her first step, the stone of the floor reached for her. Fleshy tendrils coiled around her leg, gray like the stone they’d been but with the coiling litheness of serpents.

“Now you learn, abomination,” the sorceress said. “Your masters aren’t the only beings that can reshape the world.”

Behind her, the light pulsed in rhythm with her words. Branwyn, alternately kicking and slicing at the tentacles, couldn’t be sure, but she thought that it might be brighter—if brighter was the term.

You’re not wrong, said Yathana. It was almost a moan now, as Branwyn had heard from wounded soldiers calling out for water or Mourners or simply an end to pain. She feeds it. Tears the world. I don’t know. It’s worse. She’s making it worse.

“Of course she is,” said Branwyn.

The tendrils were persistent, but yielded easily enough to her feet or Yathana’s edge. While Branwyn