CHAPTER ONE
The walls around Disaris shuddered and creaked as she pushed the heavy storage jar away from the hole she’d made as her escape route. A shower of dust rained down on her head as another barrage of stones slung from a Daesin catapult slammed into what remained of Baelok citadel. The walls groaned from the impact, and the tall jar tilted to one side, teetering on its edge until its balance gave up the fight, and it crashed to the floor. Ceramic shards exploded outward, and Disaris shielded her face with her forearm. A sudden, hot pain made her gasp.
She glanced down to see her sleeve split and her arm laid open from wrist to elbow. It was a deep cut, made by a piece of pottery whose edge was as sharp as any blade. For a moment her ring finger and little finger went numb, and blood sluiced down her arm to coat her hand and drip off her fingertips. She wiped the gore on her shirt hem before unwinding her head scarf to use as a makeshift bandage. A frantic check of her skirt assured her the destroyed jar hadn’t torn the fabric. The fate of a kingdom—maybe a world—lay hidden within the folds of that worn piece of clothing. It had to stay together a little longer.
Behind the door of the room where she hid, screams rose above the juggernaut heartbeat of pummeling rock. She tried not to listen, even as sobs climbed up her throat and tears poured down her cheeks, splashing muddy drops onto her hands as she crouched to dig stones and straw out of the opening she’d made in the back wall.
A narrow tunnel, hardly big enough to squeeze a child through, lay behind the mudbrick masonry, leading to an abrupt drop-off to a cavern below. One made by Nature but then altered by the hand of man into a storage room, now abandoned and empty. It offered only the shadow of a promise of escape, if she was lucky enough not to break a limb or her skull when she leapt off the edge. It wasn’t a far distance, but stone was unforgiving. If she lamed herself, she’d die in the dark, alone with only the thumping heart of Daesin catapults to serenade her to her end. Better there than the charnel house the citadel had become.
Her stomach plummeted to her feet, and she abandoned her bid to flee when the flimsy chair she’d wedged against the door to keep it shut abruptly flew sideways to careen end over end across the room. The door banged against the opposite wall and bounced back, its return stayed by a hand gripping its edge.
She was weaponless, but with a quick sleight of hand she hid a shard of pottery behind her back as she slowly stood and retreated against the wall. The time to run was done.
Death stood at the threshold, painted crimson with blood and gilded in the rays of afternoon sunlight that streamed through the pair of broken clerestory windows. Disaris bit back the whine of terror threatening to erupt past her lips. She’d likely die today, if not by the efforts of the Daesin army than by the knife her husband Ceybold gripped in one hand and waved slowly back and forth as if it were a metallic serpent anticipating a last, lethal bite.
He advanced slowly into the chamber, matching each of her steps as she retreated to a corner, still hiding the pottery shard behind her while she held her pitiful bag of belongings, and a cursed treasure beyond price, in front of her with her injured arm. The smile he gave her had once charmed her, offered comfort, and hope. Time had revealed it as nothing more than a beguilement, part of a mask worn by a fanatic. His expression sent ice-water splinters down her back, even in the tremoring room’s sweltering heat.
Ceybold’s smile widened, his delight in her terror obvious, his eagerness to kill a glitter in his eye as bright and bloody as the blade he wielded. “You really didn’t think you could hide from me, did you, Disa?”
Fear coursed through her blood like river rapids, their dull roar in her ears half-deafening her to his words. She eased out of the corner, scraping her back along the side wall as she sidled by degrees toward the open door. Her chances of escaping him were next to none, and his smile widened to a toothy grin as he anticipated the moment she’d bolt. A firm inner voice settled her nerves, repeating what it had uttered earlier: the time to run was done.
“There’s no place to hide for any of us,” she said. “The Daesin army is flattening Baelok around us.” She returned his smile, hoping it conveyed every bit of the hatred she had for him as his did for her. If she died today, she’d do her best to take him with her. “And they brought in the Moon Raven.” She softened her voice, pouring into it every wistful memory of childhood and affection she carried inside her so the words would cut to the bone. “That’s Bron out there.”
They had even greater effect than she anticipated. The smirk slid off Ceybold’s face, replaced by a rabid snarl, and a darkening of his gaze that stripped his features of any humanity. “You bitch,” he said softly. “If your talent weren’t key to raising the Dark and Holy Cruor, I’d have cut your head off months ago.”
Disaris believed him. The Daggermen of Cruor stopped at nothing in their bid to bring their base god back into the world. Blood sacrifices were common, decapitations a matter of course in the singular effort to destroy and remake the world. She’d only survived until now because of her usefulness, and that had come to an end thanks to the army outside. She was once an asset. With the fall of Baelok, she’d become a threat.
Staring at Ceybold now, nearly frothing at the mouth with the anticipation of killing her, it was hard to believe he’d once been a friend to her and the Daesin battle mage destroying the fortress in which they stood. “To think I once called you friend. To think that Bron once did.” She shook her head. “Whoever you’ve become, you’re no longer the Ceybold we knew.”
His bark of laughter carried nothing of humor and everything of loathing. “Fate will laugh at you. If I don’t kill you, Bron will. I saw him from one of the last standing ramparts, directing the catapult teams. He doesn’t know his precious Disa is here.” He pointed his knife at her. “If he manages to knock these walls down on top of us, I’ll die with a smile because you’ll be killed by the man whose name you whisper in your sleep.”
His foretelling, meant to crush her with its irony, stiffened her spine and her resolve. The memory of Bron when she’d last seen him—handsome, imposing, painfully distant—passed before her mind’s eye as she gripped her makeshift weapon in one hand and bent her knees in readiness for what would come. “Better by the hand of such a man than by the teeth of a dog like you.”
The surge of terror coursing through her equaled the explosive speed with which Ceybold attacked, lunging at her with an animalistic growl as he cut the air in front of her with his knife. She was not a warrior, but neither was he, and she refused to stand docile as he attempted to disembowel her.
She raised the satchel she held with her injured arm, its flimsy cloth and meager contents hardly a shield against the arcing blade as it sliced a path toward her midriff. It did, however, buy her time. A second, maybe two, but enough for her to pivot out of the way. The satchel split open, spilling clothing, and a pair of woven reed shoes on the floor.
Distracted, Ceybold glanced down, and Disaris struck with the pottery shard. Ceramic never compared to steel in strength, but the fragment accomplished its purpose. Ceybold lurched backward, but not fast enough. Disaris’s slash struck true, the shard’s trenchant edge carving a bloody furrow from his jaw to his forehead.
He screamed, clutching his face with one hand as blood poured between his fingers. He still held onto the knife with the other hand, swinging it wildly as Disaris dropped into a crouch and scuttled toward the door. She held onto her primitive weapon, prepared to wield it a second time if necessary.
“Bitch! You’re dead!” Ceybold lurched toward her, his uninjured eye glittering with the shine of a cursed slauga hunting a dying soul. “DEAD! Do you hear me, you fucking slut?!”
Whatever else he might have shouted died under the thunder of disintegrating masonry as two of the room’s walls collapsed, and the ceiling fell under the onslaught of the Daesin catapults and their ladings of pulverizing stones. The packed earth floor galloped beneath Disaris’s feet, and she fell to her knees, covering her head with her arms as dust, rock, and splintered wood showered down on her in a bludgeoning deluge. Something hard struck her back, knocking her flat to her belly. Choking and blinded by dust, she gasped out a wheeze of pain and curled in on herself, the smell of her own blood thick in her nostrils and coppery in her mouth from biting her tongue.
The roar of falling debris silenced as quickly as it started, leaving behind only the occasional soft rumble of shattered pieces of wall as they toppled in a slow slide to the floor. Disaris coughed, expelling a thin vapor of dust from her constricted lungs. She slowly unfolded from her huddled position, stunned by the destruction surrounding around her and the fact she hadn’t been crushed under a mountain of rubble. Her arm still bled, and her back felt like a horse had trampled her. Miraculously, she suffered no broken bones.
Late afternoon sun bathed her in a wash of light and heat, and she squinted at the faded blue of the summer sky above her, exposed by the roof no longer there. A quick survey of where Ceybold had stood before the room’s collapse revealed only a pile of rocks and broken timbers. Somewhere under all the detritus her husband’s body lay buried—hopefully as dead as his long-withered soul. He wouldn’t get his wish. He’d died by Bron’s hand; she hadn’t. At least not yet.
She clambered to her feet, swaying for a moment as the world tilted one way, then the other, and her vision blurred. The satchel she held, split open by Ceybold’s knife, still held a few of her things—a comb that had once been her mother’s, a firestick, and a hairpin gifted to her by Bron during his last visit to the village they’d called home before it was destroyed. The clothes, shoes and miniscule rations she’d stuffed in the bag were buried, an inconvenient loss, but nothing more. The satchel had served to save her from Ceybold’s attack. What it still held mattered most to her, and she hugged the damaged, blood-stained bag to her chest before retying it with clumsy fingers into a smaller satchel and slinging it over her shoulder.
The doorway and surrounding wall still stood, a strange and desolate artifact among the chamber’s remains. Beyond its threshold, the labyrinthine corridors of the Spring Palace still untouched by Daesin bombardment beckoned, promising either concealment and temporary safety or death. She remembered the screams for mercy she’d overheard before Ceybold broke down the door.
Whatever lay beyond, she couldn’t stay here, exposed and vulnerable to whatever new storm of ruin the Daesin army chose to unleash on Baelok. She climbed over rock piles, falling twice as she navigated a treacherous path to a part of the palace still standing and in possession of its roof. Roof timbers and crumbling mud brick littered the path, but she scaled those piles of detritus without mishap, leaving a thin trail of blood in her wake.
Shadows swarmed her when she reached the cloisters, and she squinted into the dark until her eyesight had once more adjusted from bright sunlight to the gloom of the chambers and hallways. What met her eyes made a dry sob scale her throat and close it tight.
The dead lay around her like castoff clothes, their bodies crumpled heaps amid dark pools that glistened blackly in the semi-darkness. She’d not been the only threat to the Daggermen of Cruor; she’d simply been the last marked to die. Some she wouldn’t mourn. They had been as cruel and vicious as those who’d turned on them. Others though, had been like her, deceived then imprisoned, executed for the sins of trust, hope, and love. If she managed to live past the next sunrise, she’d grieve them even if she couldn’t bury them.
Beyond the longest hallway, a staircase ribboned down to the Spring Palace’s lowest level where the old baths were built and later converted to storage. There, a gate led to a small courtyard and past that, another gate leading to the first of two perimeter walls surrounding the citadel. Escaping Baelok before the Daesin army destroyed it entirely required reaching the walls and the hostile terrain outside their defenses.
She picked her way past the bodies strewn around her, blinking back tears at the sight of faces stamped with terror while others wore beatific expressions as if the violence visited upon them had been a blessing instead of a defilement.
A loud “thwop” made her cringe and drop to the floor just before she reached the stairs. A second and third “thwop” followed in quick succession, the tell-tale sound of catapults releasing. Disaris curled into a ball and prayed as the once-untouched section of the Spring Palace groaned and shuddered in agony under the barrage of falling rocks. She screamed as the adjacent stairwell folded in on itself, plunging to the floor below it with a deafening crash. Walls bowed inward, then blew out completely, succumbing to a force relentless in its purpose.
More dust and debris rained down on her head, and Disaris buried her face in her mangled satchel, certain that despite her best efforts and resolve to avoid it, today was her day to die. She didn’t move when the chaos subsided, or when the sound of booted feet drew closer, or when the militant voices of soldiers giving commands and asking questions surrounded her.
“I think we found the itzuli. It’s a damn woman.”
“Is she alive?”
“If he can read her, she is.”
“Check.”
“Feel free, idiot. Just remember he said no one was to touch the itzuli until he got here to confirm.”
Disaris sat still as a fawn hiding in tall grass as a predator scouted nearby. She was not so lucky. There was no place to hide, there was more than one predator, and they all circled her.
Another set of footsteps approached, long on the stride, measured and surefooted. The soldier who’d called his comrade an idiot spoke again. “Is this the one you’re looking for, Commander?”
Moments passed before he received a reply and the voice that spoke made Disaris’s heart slam against her ribs. “Yes. Though I hadn’t expected a woman.”
Disaris raised her head, half dreading, half hoping what she’d see as she stared up and up at the figure looming over her. Garbed in dusty armor and cloak, with his hair hidden by helmet and hood, Bron jin Hazarin stared down at her with a speculative gaze that lacked any hint of recognition.
But oh, she knew him. Not just with her eyes but with every part of her being. The angry scar trenching his left cheek was new to her, and the perpetual squint he’d developed since childhood had carved deeper lines into the skin at the corners of his eyes. He looked grimmer, older, even more beautiful than when she’d last seen him.
Even surrounded by a cluster of soldiers, their swords drawn, their spears all trained on her, she barely noticed them. Instead she stared back at the man who’d captured her heart and soul more than two decades earlier, and drank in the sight of him like a person dying of thirst.
“Bron,” she said, his name a reverent orison on her lips
His snowy eyebrows rose, and a flicker of surprise passed through his ice-blue eyes before they widened. Shock flooded his expression. In an instant, he crouched in front of her, his pale gaze traveling over her from head to feet. His gloved hand rose, a fine tremor dancing along its length as it hovered at her cheek. “Disa?” he said, disbelief making his voice catch.
His presence, his question, just the knowledge he was within touching distance, broke the dam inside her. Tears spilled unchecked from her eyes as she pressed her face into his gloved palm. Once more, the world around her listed, and the details of her savior’s face blurred to an ivory radiance as she succumbed to oblivion. “The moon,” she whispered. “The beautiful moon.”
***
At six years old, Disaris jin Gheza fell in love at first sight with the pale, fragile Bron jin Hazarin. Two years older than her, thin as a broom handle and with piercing blue eyes, he’d recoiled from her initial excited greeting as if she were a large cockroach scuttling toward him.
Undeterred by the fact he hid behind his mother and flinched the closer she got, Disaris thrust out her hand and grabbed his, giving it a firm squeeze when he tried to pull away. “I’m Disa,” she said, riveted by the sight of the magnificent boy with his white hair and eyebrows. He looked like he’d swallowed the moon, and its light shone through him. She didn’t wait for him to reply. “I like your name. Do you like frogs?” She tugged on his hand, tightening her grip as he resisted and stared at her owl-eyed. “Come with me. I’ll show you a place where we can catch armloads of frogs.”
He didn’t say no but grabbed his mother’s skirt with his free hand and held on as if his very life was at stake. Disaris dug in her heels. This boy was going to spend the afternoon with her one way or the other.
His mother pried his fingers loose one by one and gave him a gentle shove that almost pitched him into Disaris’s arms. “Go on, Bron,” she said in a soothing voice. “It will be fun, and you’ll have made a friend. Just stay in the shade as much as you can.”
Bron looked more horrified than reassured, glancing back and forth between his mother and a grinning Disaris. “What if I don’t like frogs?”
He gasped and nearly tripped when Disaris yanked him forward and began dragging him down the path that led from her home to the wet weather creek at the bottom of the nearby slope. “You will. I promise,” she declared, clenching his hand as she towed him behind her.
“Be home by sundown, Disa!” Her mother’s familiar directive followed them, and Disaris waved without pausing or turning around. She was afraid if she did, Bron would break for freedom and flee for his house.
To her surprise, he didn’t try to run away. Instead, he followed her down the worn path to a gentle descent that ended at the banks of a shallow creek. Sunlight sparkled off the burbling water, and Disaris imagined she heard the faint laughter of lim-folk within the dappling shade of oak, birch, and maple trees. Maybe they too had come out to see the beautiful moon boy.
At the creek’s edge, the trunk of a fallen oak acted as a ledge where they sat and removed their shoes. Disaris pointed her toes at the shore. “It’s muddy where the best frogs hide. It’s better to be barefoot.”
Bron’s face pinched into a disapproving expression. “Is it slimy?”
“Oh yes!” Disaris clapped her hands, eager to sink her feet into the squishy sludge and catch her first frog of the day. “Very slimy.” She eyed him, suddenly doubting just how lovely her new friend actually was. “You don’t like mud?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. This is my first time hunting for frogs.”
She grabbed his hand again and yanked him from his seat on the tree trunk. “You’ll love it,” she declared and led him to the strip of muddy bank where treasure awaited them.
They spent the remainder of the day catching and releasing panicked frogs, outraged crayfish, and the occasional confused dragonflies whose pearlescent bodies and translucent wings shimmered in the sun. A makeshift lunch of wild plums and bitter dandelion leaves subdued their growling bellies, and they washed their hands in the creek only to dirty them again as they gathered empty snail shells and pink stones polished smooth by water onto a flat rock that jutted out from the banks.
As the sun sank in the west, it hurled a last volley of golden javelins across the creek. Disaris raised her face to the light, closing her eyes against the fading brightness. She opened them once more and spotted Bron nearby, watching her as he stood in the lengthening shadows cast by the palisade of trees around him.
“Come sit by me, Bron,” she called, gesturing to him.
He shook his head. “I can’t. The sun makes me turn red and gives me blisters if I’m in it too long.”
She shrugged and rose from her crouch. “Then I’ll come stand by you.” She skipped toward him, the wet hem of her frock dragging twigs along with it so she make a crackling noise as she approached. He didn’t pull away when she reached for his hand and gave him a wide grin. “See? You don’t have to stand alone.”
He didn’t grin back. “Aren’t you going to tease me about the sun?”
Disaris frowned, confused by the question. She’d considered teasing him when the first frog he caught almost jumped down the opening of his shirt, but thought better of it, afraid he’d give up and go home. She didn’t see what might be funny about getting sunburnt or blistered. “No. Midges make me itch when they bite. The sun makes you blister. It’s the same.”
He tilted his head to one side, considering her, expression still solemn. “You’re right.”
She squeezed his hand, noting the dried mud caked under his fingernails and smeared across his knuckles. Her hand looked just as dirty. A dreaded bath was surely in her future, but her afternoon with the moon boy made it worth that future torture. “I’m right a lot,” she boasted.
“Is that so?”
Bron’s doubtful tone and look didn’t sway her from her declaration. Even if he was two years older than her, she had learned much about the world at the great age of six. She knew things, including the fact it was time to go home, even if she’d be content to stay all night here with her new friend.
Disaris’s mother was the first to behold the evidence of their time at the creek. She blocked the entrance to the house, staring at both children with raised eyebrows as they stood before her, muddy, unkempt, and stinking of creek sludge. “You’re both a right mess,” she said, arms akimbo. “Did you catch frogs or have a mud fight?” Something in Disaris’s expression must have alarmed her because she didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind. That wasn’t a suggestion.” She waved them over to the well and the pair of buckets set nearby. “Neither of you is fit to come inside yet. Pull up water from the well and rinse off your faces, arms, and feet. Bron, I’ll bring you something clean to change into. Tell your mother I’ll wash your clothes and send Disa over to return them.” She pointed a finger at Disa. “You’re still getting a bath tonight.”
Disaris stomped her foot. “Awww, amman!” She dragged the complaint out in a prolonged whine.
“No ‘buts.’ Get rinsed and come inside. Your eitan will take Bron home.”
Disaris cluthced a startled Bron’s filthy shirt sleeve. “I want to go with them,” she begged her mother.
“No.”
When Gheza shortened her responses to single words, everyone in her household heeded the warning. Disaris dropped her argument with a quiet sigh and slouched toward the well, Bron beside her.
As they pulled up buckets filled with water and wiped off the mud with the drying cloths Gheza had left with them, Disaris barraged him with rapid-fire questions. “Can you come over tomorrow? Can I come to your house? Have you ever tasted honeysuckle nectar? Do you know how to climb trees? Can you fish?”
Bron stared at her, silent, until she finally ran out of breath and stopped to inhale. “I can fish, and I can swim,” he finally replied.
“You can swim?” He could have told her he could fly, and she wouldn’t have been more amazed. “Teach me! I want to learn!”
He frowned. “I don’t know. I have to ask my amman first.”
Once they were cleaned off most of the mud and Bron changed into an old shirt that belonged to one of Disaris’s brothers when he was a child, Gheza sent him home with her husband. Disaris stood beside her mother, watching them leave and wishing she walked with them. “Come back tomorrow, Bron!” She bellowed, jumping up and down as she waved goodbye. She muttered a reluctant apology when her amman admonished her for waking the dead with all the noise she was making.
The next morning, she woke with the sun, wolfed down her bowl of porridge and finished her chores in half the time it normally took her. She then took up sentry duty in the front garden, praying Bron would visit, and they could hunt frogs again, or chase hummingbirds, or learn to swim.
He didn’t appear that day or the day after, and Disaris moped about, even when her friend Nazlen came over to play while her mother shared tea and gossip with Gheza. It wasn’t until the third day after their afternoon of frog hunting that Disaris’s gray world brightened again.
She’d finished her task of picking peas and squash to go with the turnips her amman planned to stew for their supper. Disaris hated turnips and trudged back to the house, basket under her arm, thinking up excuses for why she shouldn’t eat the world’s worst tasting vegetable. Distracted by such weighty thoughts, she tripped over a stone in the walkway. The basket flew out of her grasp as she pitched forward, peas and squash flying in every direction. She stretched out her arms to catch herself and ended up scraping skin off her palms for the effort.
Sad that her new friend hadn’t come to see her, dreading the supper awaiting her, and now having to pick up the scattered contents of her basket with abraded hands, Disaris sat in the middle of the walkway, threw the offending stone across the garden, and began to cry.
She was in the middle of wiping her snotty nose across her sleeve when a voice spoke behind her that instantly halted her tears.
“Why are you crying?”
She leaped to her feet and spun about. Summer light, streaked with pink and orange from the westering sun, spilled across the sky, casting a nimbus of light around her visitor. Lit from without by the sun and from within by the moon, the lovely boy stared at her with a wary expression.
Foul turnips and painful palms forgotten, Disaris shrieked her joy. “Bron!” she yelled, and promptly threw herself into his arms.
Chapter 2
The miasma of dust hanging in the air filtered sunlight into a sparkling net that settled on Bron and his vanguard team as they surrounded the only person valuable enough to save from the ruins of Baelok.
Stunned by the unexpected sight of the woman who’d gifted him with her devotion, then turned her back on him, Bron froze at the touch of her fingers on his scarred cheek.
“The moon. The beautiful moon.”
Her voice—long unheard but never forgotten—was raspy and thin, a half smile creasing her gaunt cheeks. Her hand fell away, and her eyes rolled back as she canted to one side in a sudden faint.
“Disa!” Bron caught her before she fell. She sprawled in his arms, still clutching her ragged bag in a bloodied arm as if it were an infant she tried to protect.
He barely recognized her. Coated in dust, battered and filthy, she looked a far cry from the memory he held of her when they last met face to face three years earlier. An ugly memory, one that still twisted his insides when it surfaced in his dreams.
“Do you know her, Commander?” Jarik, his second-in-command, glanced between Bron and the itzuli, his expression incredulous, as if it was an impossibility that the Moon Raven had any connection to the Daggermen’s itzuli beyond that of hunter and hunted.
I thought I did. Long ago. Bron kept that part of his reply behind his teeth. “Yes.”
Disaris was his childhood companion, his first lover, and the reason he’d learned to see the world in a better light. Then she’d gut-punched him by marrying the man who’d once been his friend and was now his enemy and renounced her friendship with a cold, clear-eyed finality that almost brought Bron to his knees.
He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear before scooping her into his arms. She didn’t weigh much more than his armor, and he stood without effort, holding her gingerly, listening intently to her shallow breathing. The injury to her arm wasn’t fatal from what he could surmise in a glance, but the gods only knew what other wounds might be hidden beneath the rags she wore. The thought of Disaris jin Gheza dying in his embrace turned his blood cold with horror. The knowledge that he might have ordered the catapult round to end her life made his throat close.
A thousand question whirled in his mind as he carried her past piles of rubble toward the blasted openings in the palace’s walls. Why was she here among the Daggermen? Where was Ceybold? And how did a woman who couldn’t read until Bron taught her become a coveted code breaker?
They emerged into razor-edged sunlight, and Bron squinted against the glare as he tucked Disaris closer into the cove of his body. “Shield wall and retreat,” he barked and was rewarded with his team’s swift formation into a bulwark with him in its center. They had achieved the first part of their mission: find the itzuli. The second and most challenging part remained: bring her out of Baelok alive and take down anyone or anything trying to stop them.
The path from the ruined palace’s interior to the main gate was a killing field of fallen men, women, and children. Daesin soldiers swarmed what remained of the ramparts and engaged the last of the Daggermen who fought with the same zealotry with which they embraced their religion. Bron and his men jogged for the gate in unison as they maintained the protective shield wall.
A thin, whistling made him instinctively hunch over Disaris who lay in his arms, senseless to her circumstances. An arrow struck one of his soldier’s shields, burying the broadhead tip in layers of wood and iron sheeting. The bulwark moved to the side as one beast. For a moment, a gap opened as the soldier whose shield took the arrow stepped out of sync, only to swiftly close again at Bron’s bellowed “Fill the hole!”
More Daesin soldiers eddied around them, fending off those Daggermen who hurled themselves onto their enemies’ swords and spears with suicidal savagery. Bron sent up a silent thank you to his fellow battle mage outside the citadel. While he disliked invoking an orbis spell or having one laid on him, its uses went beyond intelligence-gathering. The ability for Cimejen to see terrain and surroundings through Bron’s eyes allowed him to send more troops directly to Bron’s location and bolster the defenses held by his vanguard team.
Bron’s line-of-sight narrowed down to the men in front of him, and he peered through the slivers of space between shields, listening for the tell-tale whistle of an incoming arrow. The bulwark heeled to the side once more as another of his team blocked a thrown javelin. The impact shoved the soldier into the defense’s interior, the javelin’s point hammering through the shield to emerge just above his arm straps. A hair’s breath lower, and it would have impaled his forearm to the shield.
Bron muttered a stream of invectives. They were halfway to the gate, and it felt like the remaining Daggermen had turned all their attention on his group as if knowing the itzuli lay hidden within their midst. “Jarik!” His second-in-command glanced over his shoulder, his expression puzzled when Bron motioned for him to turn. The man obeyed, marching backwards now, the space he’d occupied instantly filled by another soldier as the bulwark contracted and continued its relentless push toward the gate.
Jarik’s eyes widened when Bron shoved the limp Disaris into his arms. “Hold her,” he ordered. “And keep moving. I’ll take care of the lice refusing to die.”
He didn’t wait for his second’s response, spinning about to call an order. “Make light!” Two of the soldiers in the back of the bulwark pivoted sideways, opening a gap for him to slip through before closing again. The spell he uttered was as familiar to him as his favorite tunic and just as well-worn. Invisible jets of air blasted from his palms, sending up geysers of pebbles and other debris that pelted anyone close by, blinding them so they faltered in their attacks.
Another spell followed the first, this one birthing a trio of whirlwinds that spun around each other like the palace dancers who entertained the king of Daes. Just as graceful, just as agile, and just as deadly. They sang in whispering voices, arcane lullabies that soothed demons and flung men into walls and each other like poppets tossed aside by bored children. Standing in a protective column of air that warped arrow flight and scattered those projectiles in every direction, Bron assessed the battlefield before him. A ragged line of Daggermen stood on the remains of a rampart, their nocked arrows aimed toward him as they waited for the miasma to clear and allow them an unimpeded view of the battle mage known as the Moon Raven.
He didn’t give them a chance, releasing a third spell – a bow shock wave of air that dropped the temperature around it, made his ears pop, and swatted the archers off the rampart as if they were no more than pesky flies before a giant hand. Cheers from his fellow soldiers followed him as he raced back toward the bulwark. “Forward!” he shouted, flinging himself into the narrow opening made by the same pair of soldiers until he was ensconced in the center.
When Bron held out his arms, Jarik silently returned his burden to his commander and resumed his position in the shield wall. Their rhythm never faltered and they reached the gate without further attacks.
“Funnel down!” This time Jarik called the order, and the square formation narrowed and lengthened into a column, allowing their group to pass through the gate and still keep the Moon Raven and his prize behind a protective barricade of shields.
Once past the gate, they continued at quickstep down the great ramp and past the siege engines the Daesin army had built to conquer the citadel. Bron held onto his patience, suppressing the urge to break from formation and hurtle down the remainder of the ramp with Disaris, tortured by the certainty that she suffered fatal injuries he couldn’t see. The medical camp was so close, yet so far away.
A lancing pain struck behind his eyes, blurring his vision for a moment. Cimejen had broken the orbis spell that allowed him to see what was happening through Bron’s eyes, a welcomed sign that they were no longer in danger from attack.
Bron didn’t waste the opportunity. “Break formation!”
The funnel line broke apart, opening a clear path for him to sprint to the bottom of the ramp where he navigated past small mountains of stone and forests of catapults manned by teams of ten men each.
Army camps didn’t always have medics embedded in their midst. The one Bron transferred from had relied on nearby village healers to set bones, sew wounds, nurse the sick, and help bury the dead. Bron was grateful that the general who commanded this long siege had insisted on a true medical camp, complete with surgeons, litter-bearers and gravediggers as well as tents designated for the wounded, the sick, and the convalescing.
He made for the largest tent pitched closest to the front lines. Inside, the heat was sweltering and thick with the coppery scent of blood. The wounded lay on litters set out in regimented rows from one side of the tent to the other. Physicians worked with women recruited from the camp followers to care for their patients. They swarmed like ants through the aisles as they delivered medicine and bandages to surgeons busy performing all manner of surgeries on patients who either screamed in agony or were grimly silent.
Sweat dripping into his eyes, Bron stood in the entrance, hunting for a place to lay Disaris down and capture a physican to tend her. “I need a bed!”
A trio of healers rushed toward him, their eyes widening when they spotted the woman draped in his arms. Bron recognized one of the group, a phsician named Pyder.
Pyder and his colleagues saluted Bron. “A Dagger wife, Commander?” he said, gesturing to Disaris.
Bron nodded. “Not just a Dagger wife. The itzuli.” He wasn’t surprised when all three gasped. This wasn’t just any patient he held. Disaris was one of two reasons why the Daesin army had entrenched itself on this harsh plain for two years and laid siege to Baelok citadel, slowly destroying it stone by stone.
They led him to a litter set in a far corner before two of them rushed off with promises to return with supplies. Pyder stayed with Bron, gesturing for one of the many nurses to bring him a bowl containing a mixture of water and vinegar. Bron gently laid Disaris on the bed, careful not to jostle her injured arm. Dried tears had striped pathways down her dirty cheeks, and she clutched her satchel in a death grip, distress pinching her features as if she feared someone might try to steal it from her.
She sighed when Bron bent to run his thumb gently over one of her eyebrows. “Disa, can you hear me?” he whispered in her ear. She muttered his name but didn’t open her eyes.
Pyder rinsed his hands and forearms in the bowl of vinegar water, drying them with a cloth the nurse held for him. The other two healers had returned, bearing trays loaded with rolls of bandages, jars of ointments, and vials of tinctures. The tray also held a thin envelope of soft leather.
Bron flinched at the sight. He’d been sutured more than a few times by different physicians, each one carrying their own preferred assortment of needles and threads, all carried in a casing just like this one. Slender steel and linen puncturing and sliding through flesh, stitch after slow stitch, was an experience he didn’t wish on Disaris
Pyder’s apologetic bow distracted him from the tray. “With all of us here, there’s little room to work, Commander. You’ll have to leave, or you can wait and watch over there if you wish.” He pointed to a spot not far from the litter.
Reluctant to give up vigilance, Bron finally moved to the corner the physician indicated – out of the way but still close enough to observe and be there within sight if she awakened.
The cloth wrapped around her arm was blood-soaked, rivulets of red seeping beyond its edges to trickle down her fingers. Pyder carefully unwound the fabric, revealing a deep, jagged slash that ran the length of her forearm. Bron had seen and been dealt enough wounds to recognize the cut had been made with something other than knife. She’d need stitches for certain, and prayers to merciful gods that infection wouldn’t set in.
Pyder and his team moved with speedy efficiency, tightly wrapping her arm in clean bandages to staunch the blood flow while they pried the satchel out of her grip and pulled aside her clothes to check for other injuries. They blocked Bron’s view of her as they worked, Pyder giving instructions for moving his patient one way and then another, cautioning his assistants to be careful of her arm. There was a smile in his voice when he announced, “No other wounds. Just the arm.”
Bron released the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in a gusty exhalation. He might even have prayed. He approached the litter, staring over Pyder’s shoulder as the man unwrapped the new, now-bloodstained bandage from Disaris’s arm.
The physician shook his head and make a clucking sound. “This will need more than ointment and a bandage.” He turned, frowning his disapproval at finding Bron so close. “Do you have to report to General Golius, Commander??
Bron recognized a dismissal, even a polite one, when he heard it. Still he hesitated. “Are you sure that’s her only injury? She looks worse than some I’ve seen bleeding out from gut wounds.”
He hadn’t known her by sight at first, crouched in the shadows of the citadel’s last standing palace, surrounded by rubble and the silent dead, but her voice was unmistakable and sparked his recognition. Her expression when she saw him—joy, disbelief, and the glimmer of something familiar in her eyes had resurrected an old ache in his chest. He’d thought it was the tenebrous surroundings that made her appear so haggard and thin until they moved into the open and sunlight caressed her face. She looked even worse now—gray-skinned, with chapped, bloodless lips and hollowed cheeks.
Pyder sighed. “Blood loss and starvation combined will do that to a person. I can assure you, it’s her only wound. We’ll clean and stitch it, apply a salve, and wrap it. She’ll go to the healing tent then. Someone there will pour a good broth down her gullet. I suspect she hasn’t eaten for some time.”
Bron closed his eyes for a moment, sick with guilt. Starvation was an effective weapon against an enemy under siege. He’d experienced it firsthand as a child, and its memory—with its attendant horror—was as clear now as when he was seven years old, holding desperately onto his mother as she escaped the nightmare landscape his childhood home had become. Had he known Disaris was the code breaker the Daesin army sought, that she’d been behind Baelok’s seemingly unconquerable walls, he would have torn them down with his bare hands to reach her.
One of the assistants had managed to pry Disaris’s bag out of her hands and offered it to him. “Do you want this before you leave, Commander?”
Interrupted from his thoughts, Bron took the pouch, wondering what lay in side for her to be so protective of it. “I’ll send two guard to escort whoever takes her to the convalescent tent.”
There was no way he’d leave Disaris unguarded. Beyond his troublesome attachment to her, she was also an itzuli—the key to winning or losing this interminable war. As many as there were who wanted her alive, there were surely just as many who wished her dead.
Pyder nodded. “Once she’s awake, I’ll send a messenger to let you know.”
Outside the tent, Bron found a quiet spot under the shade of an awning pitched to provide relief from the relentless sun, if not the heat. He bounced the small satchel in his palm. Hardly anything in there, judging by its weight and size. He untied the knotted ends, unfolding them so that what lay hidden inside was exposed.
A fire stick with two or three uses at most, a comb, and one more item that, for a moment, robbed him of the ability to breathe. He held up the wooden hair bodkin, spinning it between thumb and forefinger, hardly daring to believe this was the same one he’d carved more than a decade earlier from a piece of oak. Two of his fingers still bore the scars from the bite of his carving knife.
It had been his gift to Disaris on the occasion of her second woman’s day anniversary, a humble present he’d almost been too embarrassed to give her but which made her squeal with delight when she opened the handkerchief in which he’d wrapped it. He didn’t think her surprise then could have been any greater than his was now at seeing it.
He dropped the grubby cloth to the ground, tucked the hair accessories into a placket under his armor, and handed the firestick to a passing soldier. He doubted it had any meaning other than a source of light and fuel. The bodkin and comb, however, carried value beyond everyday usage. The way she’d clutched the bag earlier revealed a great deal. That the gift he’d given her was a treasure she still obviously held dear made his heart beat with a wonder he hadn’t felt since that organ had died in his chest three years earlier.
“You look to be a mage deep in troubled thoughts.”
Bron glanced askance at the man who’d approached him on silent feet. “The Sun Crow arrives,” he said with a faint smile. “And all shall fear their fate.”
Cimejen jin Orune snorted and rolled his eyes, taking the hand Bron offered in a friendly clasp. “I see you’ve been listening to the newest bard entertain drunk soldiers with tales of our exploits. Moon Raven, Sun Crow. A sorry coincidence that your mother’s name means ‘raven,’ and mine means ‘crow.’ Why don’t they wax poetic about Bron and Cimejen? Perfectly good names.”
“But not nearly so majestic.”
“Horseshit.” Cimejen glanced around Bron at the entrance to the medical tent. “The code breaker’s in there? Her arm didn’t look good.”
Battle mages who fought for the Daesin army often worked in pairs, linked together at times by various spells to gather intelligence, guide each other during covert missions, and lend firepower to teams of non-magical soldiers. The orbis spell Cimejen had cast between himself and Bron had allowed him to see firsthand Bron and his team’s advance into Baelok as they searched for the itzuli. He’d stayed with one of the catapult teams, also acting as a weapons guide so they’d know where to aim and launch their load of stone without killing their own men under a barrage of friendly fire.
For all their usefulness, Bron remained uneasy over such connections, especially when he worked with a mage he didn’t like. He liked Cimejen and trusted the mage would never abuse the power of such spells—he’d regret it if he tried—but Bron would never grow used to them.
He followed the other man’s gaze, wishing he could catch a glimpse of Disaris. “Someone attacked her by the look of it. A knife maybe, but a serrated one. If I’m right, she dodged the worst of it and used a pouch she carried to try and block the slash.”
She’d been alone when he and his team found her. Had the Daggermen saved her for last in the hopes of keeping their itzuli alive for their purposes later? Had her own husband been the one to attack her?
A black anger spread roots, anchoring deep in his spirit. Once Baelock was fully taken, he’d look for Ceybold among the dead. If he still lived and Bron discovered his erstwhile friend had been Disaris’s attacker, he’d kill him.
“She’s either quick, or fortunate, or both.” Cimejen handed him a partially full wineskin. “Drink. You look like you need it.”
Bron accepted the offer, taking a generous swallow of the spiced wine brought by caravan to the two Daesin camps entrenched on the plain. He wiped his mouth and returned the vessel to his companion. “My thanks.”
Cimejen corked the skin, tying it to a ring attached to his belt. “How do you know the itzuli?” He shrugged when Bron’s eyebrows rose. “The orbis spell might not allow me to hear what you’re doing, but I could see what the woman said. Your name is easy to read on another’s lips. It was obvious by her expression that she recognized you.”
Battle mages weren’t as rare as itzulis, but they were uncommon and highly sought after by all armies. Cimejen had been in training for two years before Bron joined the Daesin ranks, and had already gained a reputation as both an exceptional trainee mage and fighter. Bron had fought beside him in several skirmishes between Daesin and Kefian troops since then. He was smart, observant, and wielded his sorcery judiciously. Such a man made a valuable friend and an equally dangerous adversary. Bron admired him and was wary of him. That Cimejen noticed such small details within the restrictions of the orbis spell reminded him to watch his words.
“We were neighbors in the same village when we were children. I haven’t seen her in years,” he replied.
Such an innocuous answer might have satisfied another person, but not Cimejen. “Golius may not believe you’ve actually managed to catch the itzuli. He’ll think you’ve been misled and found a simple hedge-mother.”
Golius could go fuck himself. Bron knew his own sorcery better than anyone, and he’d never been wrong in locating another mage of particular power. “I don’t doubt he’ll question me. And he’ll want to test her skills to see if she’s truly an itzuli.” If she were, she was either a living treasure or an abomination, depending on who was asked. Every itzuli discovered—and those were few across centuries of time—had always been male.
By all measures, Disaris was a prisoner of war, and the fate of those unfortunates was often brutal and short-lived. She, however, was unique in her value. Unless Golius could prove she wasn’t the itzuli used by the Daggermen and sought by both the Daesin and Kefian armies, she was safe from any real harm. Even if she wasn’t itzuli, she was still safe. He’d make certain of it.
“Did she ever give any hint of her ability when the two of you were growing up?” Cimejen’s steady gaze was as golden and piercing as a hawk’s.
Bron shook his head. “Not that I noticed, but it wasn’t like I was looking for it.” A truth his companion was welcome to dissect for any lies. He’d fail. That Disaris had displayed any magical ability at all, especially that of a code breaker, still left Bron reeling.
Weary of Cimejen’s not-so-subtle interrogation, he was about to bid the man farewell when a shriek sounded from the tent. Bron bolted for the source, the familiar cry sending alarm sluicing through his veins as he leaped over litters and cringing patients to reach the corner of the tent where’d he’d left Disaris.
No longer unconscious, she stood on the litter, needle and thread hanging from her partially sutured arm as she held off Pyder and his helpers with a lancet used for bloodletting. She swayed, blinking slowly as she tried to focus on her opponents. She looked even paler than when he left her in the physician’s care.
Relief and joy flooded her eyes when her gaze landed on Bron. “You’re real,” she said in a thin voice. “I thought I’d dreamed you.”
Bron shouldered past the small crowd surrounding her, catching her as her knees buckled. He snatched the lancet out of her hand and tossed it to the physician. Careful with her arm, he braced a hand against her back and the other at her hip, holding her close. “I’m real. Why are you screaming, Disa?”
Suturing hurt, especially when the injured person no longer burned with the fire of battle fever and was nearly immune to pain. But Disaris’s cry hadn’t been one of suffering but of terror, an echo of one he’d heard from her years earlier, muffled by water yet no less desperate.
“They were trying to take my skirt,” she said, still giving that slow blink as she stared at him with the wonder one might display at the sight of a miracle. The idea of it made him squirm inside and turn his cheeks hot.
“What?” Her answer startled him. He forgot the crawling heat of his blush and glanced down, widening the space between them so he could better see her clothing.
Her garb was barely a step up from a beggar’s rags, marked by patches and held together by prayer and faded thread. Caked with dirt, the skirt was fit only for kindling in the camp burn pile and would fall apart at its next washing. Bron couldn’t imagine why she fought so hard to keep it on.
A grim possibility made his heart twist, and his hand lightly caressed her back. “It’s all right, Disa. You’re safe here. No one is trying to hurt you. They just want to give you clean clothing.”
She flinched in his arms, and her gaze fell. Shame painted rosy flags on her gaunt cheeks. “That isn’t why I screamed. My mother sewed this skirt for me. It’s all I have left of her. I don’t want it to end up in a midden.”
The horror of war included rape, and the gods only knew what she’d suffered at the hands of the Daggermen, but her scream sprang, not from the remnants of trauma, but from the desire to hold on to a treasure, no matter how battered or worn. Bron rested his chin on the top of her head and closed his eyes for a moment. He then glanced over his shoulder at Pyder. “When you bring her new garb, don’t take away what she’s wearing. Understood?”
The physician nodded so hard, Bron thought his head might fall off. “Of course, Commander.”
Warmth suffused Bron’s entire body when Disaris leaned her forehead against his chest. “Thank you, Bron.” She held on to him when he lowered her gently to the litter, hands gripping the chainmail sleeves of his hauberk.
“Let the physician finish his work, Disa,” he said. “I won’t be far away if you need me, and your skirt is safe.”
She nodded, then frowned. “My satchel—”
“I got rid of it.” He patted his chest at her alarmed expression. “Your comb and hair bodkin are safe here with me. I didn’t think you’d care about the firestick.”
Her eyes closed, tears darkening her lashes. “For all the death, all the loss, it’s still a good day. You’re here.”
She let him go, and he adjusted the pillow under her head before stepping away so that Pyder could continue his suturing. He finally noticed Cimejen standing nearby but didn’t comment as he left the medical tent for a second time. Bron didn’t stop under the awning he’d occupied earlier. General Golius waited for his report, and for the sake of his rapidly thawing heart, Bron needed to put distance between himself and the woman his dreams wouldn’t let him forget.
Cimejen’s grip on his arm halted him mid-stride. The mage had followed Bron outside, and his eyes held a glint pity. “You poor bastard,” he said and passed him the wineskin.
Bron laughed, then drank, trying not to choke on the bitterness lodged in his throat despite the wine’s sweetness. Fate, fickle and harsh, had deemed that the ties binding him and Disaris together were not yet to be severed.
He fished inside his tunic and took out the hair bodkin, studying it as he ran a thumb down its smooth length to the point still sharp enough to draw blood.
Poor bastard indeed.
**–**
When Bron was ten years old, he went to war with the children in the village he now called home. It wasn’t a sudden decision but one made after months of ostracization, name-calling, and finally a shoving match that turned into an outright brawl between Bron and a boy named Hulgin. Both boys had gone home with black eyes and numerous bruises.