❧ Sharalyn
Humans preferred the darkness for their crimes. That much at least was plain.
Daskin steered me toward the outer wall of a storefront where the tavern’s lantern light thinned into gloom. Rain rendered the night nearly impenetrable, each drop striking with a vulgar heaviness, as if the world itself sought to drown us.
I stumbled on the lip of the porch. His hand shot out to steady me. It landed on my shoulder—then wandered lower. His palm pressed against me in a manner neither courteous nor necessary. I lacked the balance to pull away; disgust was my only defense.
I had been a fool.
The mead—if such it was—had tasted sour and bitter, nothing akin to elven mead or spring-sweet wine. Yet I had accepted every round they pressed upon me. It had seemed discourteous to refuse, particularly since the man who stank of rotten barley and sweat had promised to lead me to one who could help. Now I saw that the only guide he intended me to follow was himself.
Even their drink was deceit.
I consumed all of it, thinking to purchase their trust. Instead, my thoughts wavered, my limbs betrayed me, and my senses faltered. Now the tavern’s roar receded, but sharper threats rushed in to take its place:
—the sucking of boots in mud
—the iron plunk of rain against rooftops
—the strained gurgle of a pipe to my right
—and just behind us… footfalls.
Not Daskin’s. Not his men’s. Another.
Steel rasped faintly. Metal sliding into metal, muffled but unmistakable. I froze. My stomach heaved. I retched.
The rest unfolded with cruel speed: bile scalding my sinuses, the acrid reek of vomit, Daskin’s shriek of disgust, the glint of Kyle’s blade, the incantation forming on my tongue—and then, failure.
My body rejected every command. I had been careless, and now I would pay the price.
“Gar-cín bor.” I tried to bind the man’s hands with words. My muddled thoughts betrayed me. Instead of stillness, his own arms jerked outward and tangled with his companion’s wrists, as though the two attempted a graceless dance.
The astonishment on their faces might have been comical—had I breath to laugh. Instead, I retched again, bile forcing its way through my nose, and collapsed to my knees. My chest burned, as though pressure from my own hand might still the fire rising within.
A boot struck my ribs. I toppled into the mud like a broken bird.
Light flashed behind my eyes. Once, as a child, I had eaten the wrong herbs and learned that vomiting could scatter sparks across one’s vision. But this was no trick of the body. This light was real. Too bright. Too near.
The hair on my arms rose. The air crackled with tension I knew too well—magic. Or lightning.
A scream split the night. At first, I thought it mine, but I had no breath to give it shape. I could only fight to rise from the muck, to keep from drowning in bile.
Then hands caught at my ankles. Cold. Merciless. They dragged me through the filth, muck grinding between my teeth, choking me. My spine bent wrong as they hauled me up—then dropped me like refuse.
Pain blurred my senses. Yet through it, truth seeped in. Someone was striking them. Someone other than I.
Still retching, too weak to stand, I pressed my face to the ground and spat.
A violent crack resounded—timber splitting, nails shrieking free. The men screamed louder now, their cries edged with panic.
Lightning tore the heavens open.
“MOVE!” a man’s voice thundered. Urgent. Commanding.
Heat engulfed the air. Fire surged, alive and furious. I rolled instinctively, dragging myself sideways, my knees sinking deep in muck as the world blazed.
Lars tore free of Kyle’s grasp, the spell I had cast unraveling. He lunged at me, kris in hand, even as his cloak caught fire.
I stumbled backward and fell hard. By that clumsy fortune, his blade only gashed my shoulder rather than piercing my chest. Pain flared white, hot as the lightning above.
I reached for a knife. For a spell. For anything. But my body betrayed me—blurred mind, lead‑weight limbs, nothing answering when I called.
Lars cast aside his burning cloak, eyes fixed on me with predatory certainty. Drunk though I was, I understood at last the full measure of the peril I had entered.
Behind him, Daskin’s tunic blossomed into fire. Kyle bolted into an alley, fleeing without hesitation. Lars advanced. He thrust his dagger toward my belly.
Pain tore through me. I screamed.
Sound fractured, echoing—and then it was not only mine. Lars screamed as well, our voices twining in a hideous harmony. For an instant, I thought it a hallucination.
The blade withdrew, glistening in the rain light, then rose again—hovering inches from my face. Poised. Deliberate. Inevitable.
Wind pushed the hood I wore back until it hung heavy on my shoulders. Lars saw my ears.
Fear. Anger. Pain. All of it at once, breaking across his face.
His fingers convulsed, twisting at impossible angles. Yet still, impossibly, he clung to the hilt.
Then my body was no longer my own.
A force wrapped around me—swift, merciless, unseen. It seized me like a current snatching driftwood, yanked me into a crouch, then hurled me skyward.
Air vanished from my lungs. Thought scattered. I soared.
For one suspended instant, rooftops wheeled beneath me—rain-slick, surreal. And there, in the blur of storm and fire, I saw him.
A figure stepped from the shadows, calm and resolute. His arms outstretched—one hand flung flame in golden roots that lashed at Daskin and Lars, the other cast a tide of darker energy toward an outhouse.
Then—release.
The bubble holding me collapsed. I plunged into a trough of water. The impact stole every fragment of air. Cold swallowed me whole. I rolled out, coughing, striking the road with a bone-jarring thud.
Wind roared down the street. Whoomph. It overturned the trough, pinning my legs beneath its weight.
Daskin fled into the shadows. Lars stumbled after him, howling, clutching his ruined hand.
And then—him. The man from the shadows. The one who had turned storm and flame against my attackers.
He was running toward me. Swift. Certain. Unstoppable.
My face tingled, and my belly seared as though I had swallowed embers. The wound in my shoulder radiated such heat I expected to see fire devouring flesh. Pain reduced me to little more than shivering breath.
I tried to raise my hands, to carve a rune, to form even the simplest ward. But my fingers trembled, unsteady as reeds in the wind.
He stopped—only three paces away.
“Jike-ka-dog-vale-lator!”
I gasped.
The words meant little, but his mocking cadence was unmistakable. Orcish.
He was an orc. Disguised as a man.
My mind deserted me. Not a single defensive spell surfaced. Blood roared in my ears, drowning thought. I was utterly helpless.
He approached slowly, his palms moving through the air in a strangely placating rhythm. Had it been anything but an orc, I might have taken the gesture as one suggesting peace. But when an orc meets an elf, only one leaves breathing.
Rain plastered my hair flat, completely exposing my ears. He knew what I was. We both did. There would be no escape.
“Khe ku ohay,” he said—in my language?
Cruel, I thought, to hear my own tongue used as a prelude to my death. I shut my eyes, bracing for the spell.
“Damn! Damn it! I’m sorry. I meant—Keedar-tulna-phercin!”
My eyes snapped open. What?
Why was an orc stumbling through Elven? And why persist in this ridiculous human guise if he meant to kill me?
My vision doubled, tripled, then steadied into two of him before returning to one. I heard him groan. “Well… crap!”
A window above us creaked open. A woman leaned out, shrieking for silence, her tirade escalating when she noticed flames creeping along her awning.
The orc—this assassin—covered his face with one hand, muttering curses in what sounded less like menace than frustration. Overhead, the shopkeeper doused the fire with a piss-pot while I struggled to drag my leg free from beneath the overturned trough.
My belly ached. Fiercely.
The orc persisted, mangling my language like a child learning new letters: “Ni gar-tul-na… uh… I have come to… uh… no, not pher… uh… Oh, yeah! Help… beri… cin?”
Despite everything, my lips curved. His expression was so earnest, his attempt so clumsy, I almost forgot to fear him.
“You have come to help protect me?” I asked, my voice thin.
“YES!” His relief was so absurdly human that I let out a weak laugh.
“Why did you not simply say as much?”
My vision wavered. His form shimmered within it, his voice warbling as though heat rippled between us. He flicked his hand, and the flames crawling up the storefront vanished into steam.
“I thought hearing it in your own tongue might calm you quicker.”
When he reached toward me, I flinched—then understood.
“I… my belly…” I tried to tell him of the poison. “Seregon vi nín gûr.”
He frowned. “What? I… I don’t understand.”
For a long, swaying moment, I only looked at him. Something was wrong. His head tilted slightly away, as if he were attending to some other point in the street. His eyes—clouded, veined, strange.
“You are blind?”
“As a bat!” he declared, grinning as though announcing a triumph. He flung his arms wide as if blindness were worth celebrating.
The absurdity broke something in me. I giggled. He chuckled in return, and then, as though we were comrades caught in rain instead of enemies born of blood, he sat down beside me in the muck.
My shoulder burned, my stomach ached, but I wiped tears from my eyes with my good hand and thought: For an orc who means to kill me, he is not a bad man.
That was when we both saw the blood.
It streamed freely from beneath my tunic, crimson rivers lost to the rain.
“You’re hurt!” he cried.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I am.”
And then the world tilted, the storm spun away, and I lost consciousness.