41

E lizabeth knew the moment she heard the tree fall that Reddington was up to his usual tricks. She had no intention of being predictable, either. This was war. Wynchesters played by their own rules and had wiles of their own in store.

"She cut me!" The soldier Elizabeth was fighting jumped backward, forgetting to parry in his shock.

"Of course I cut you." After she'd wounded or disarmed no less than two dozen soldiers in a row, were these men somehow still befuddled at the thought that a woman could fight back?

Reddington replaced the injured man at once.

She took advantage of the closest soldier's distraction and flipped his sword out of his hand, garnering even more surprise.

Tommy claimed the soldiers' dazed expressions were in part due to the Wynchester women's costumes. Elizabeth did look nice in pantaloons. She could feel Stephen's hungry gaze on her, four stories overhead.

Or maybe that was his anxiety she felt. He had a lot of that, too.

"Ah-ah," she cautioned when the soldier before her attempted to pick up his fallen sword. She whipped her own blade between him and the fallen sword.

He ignored her and attempted to snatch up the handle anyway.

She sliced open the back of his calf for his trouble.

"Yowch!" He hopped backward on one leg, unleashing a string of venomous, curse-filled insults as he limped back to camp.

Another soldier immediately took his place. Which made things tricky, since she was concurrently dealing with three others.

Unluckily for Reddington, no faux soldier could ever come close to meeting Elizabeth's skill with a blade. Unluckily for her, there were seventy more of the relentless vermin left to conquer. They needn't be legendary swordsmen to tire her out from sheer numbers alone.

Aside from a single unfortunate misstep—which Elizabeth knew Stephen had not missed from his lookout perch—she was holding her own with ease.

But her limber parries and fluidity of motion would not last forever. At the moment, there was the barest whisper of discontent in her hips and joints, but it could flare into full-on rebellion at any time.

"How are you doing, Kuni?" she called out in Balcovian.

Her sister-in-law had been muttering a steady tirade of colorful curses herself, the majority of which were either completely made up or amusingly inaccurate translations. Elizabeth made a mental note to have Kuni define "snoodish shalloon" later.

After they won. Which of course they were going to do.

" Alles goed ," Kuni shouted back.

All is good. Really, Balcovian wasn't so very complicated. At least, not the list of close cognates Elizabeth had managed to memorize. She might not have Philippa's gift with linguistics, but Elizabeth and her siblings all spoke English, French, and sign language. Balcovian was trickier, but half the battle of learning a new tongue was believing that you could .

She hoped the same sheer determination would carry her through today.

"Graham?" she called out. "How about you?"

Her brother was really the one Elizabeth wished to check up on. Kuni could not only hold her own, but in fact was holding herself back. Like Elizabeth, for Kuni the hardest part of this battle was defeating enemy soldiers without killing them, which would have been the most efficient path to take. The rest of Reddington's men would have surrendered by now, if they realized their lives depended on it.

Yes, yes, the agreement was no murdering, and now there were children in the audience. But—

"Should've… taken you up on… fencing lessons," panted her brother.

Damn it. Exactly what Elizabeth was afraid of. She and Kuni could fight battles in their sleep, but Graham—despite being impressive physically—was not used to hand-to-hand combat. He was more of the "let me climb this sheer wall and leap from parapet to parapet in order to spy through windows" persuasion. The only time Graham ever touched a sword was when he was annoyed Elizabeth had left one on the dining room table. Again.

He and Kuni were fighting back-to-back. Graham's longer sword kept soldiers at bay. Those who ventured too close received a bite from one of Kuni's daggers.

The situation would have been even worse for Reddington's men if Kuni still had a reserve of daggers. Unhindered by narrow arrow slits, she could throw a knife between the eyes of her enemy from twenty yards away. If she still had knives to throw. And if she were allowed to aim between the eyes.

" En jij ?" called Kuni. And you?

"Seventy percent," Elizabeth called back in Balcovian. "They don't stand a chance."

More like sixty-five percent. Or sixty. Certainly a far cry from the one hundred percent she'd signed up to Stephen to stop him from worrying. Sixty percent was no problem. Sixty was a normal day. A good day. Any day she could swing a sword at an enemy was a great day. Elizabeth would not complain about sixty percent. The trick was to win this fight before her thermometer dipped any lower.

"How many soldiers are left?" she called out in Balcovian.

Back-to-back, Kuni and Graham turned around so that he faced Reddington's camp. Graham had uncanny spatial ability that allowed him to register details and count vast numbers in the blink of an eye.

"Forty-nine," he answered.

Good God, they'd barely dispatched half of them? The whispering in her joints grew to a murmur.

"How's Stephen?" she asked as her sword crashed against an enemy soldier's blade, spinning the handle up and out of his hands.

"Impressively competent," replied her brother.

Despite being no doubt anxious and worried, Stephen was also capable of single-handedly manning a 360-degree command center with bells from each floor and telescopes and whispering walls on every side and dozens of levers and pulleys that detonated disasters he'd designed out of nothing more than an empty apothecary bottle and a piece of thread.

She loved that his machines had been such a boon to the mission. The trapdoor was brilliant, as were all the other tricks, from false portraits to hot paint catapults. When they finally beat Reddington, the first thing Elizabeth was going to do was tell Stephen he—

"By the bobbled horse-flowers," gasped Kuni.

"What is it?"

"We're out of daggers!"

Elizabeth tossed over the sword in her left hand without breaking stride from her current parries.

Long black braids swinging, Kuni caught the blade by its hilt and immediately employed it in the destruction of her enemy's dapper red coat. She and Graham were still fighting back-to-back… or at least, Kuni was still fighting. Without a blade, Graham was reduced to his fists. He was quick and strong, but speed and power were no match against the slice of sharp steel.

"Augh!" Kuni cried out.

Shite. "What happened?"

"Lost the sword," she gasped. "Hadn't practiced with that one and I—oh!"

She and Graham rolled out of the way as two soldiers swung at them in unison.

With a burst of tenaciousness, Elizabeth bloodied the arms and chests of all four of her attackers, giving her siblings a few seconds' respite before new replacements arrived. She tossed her final sword to Graham, who handed it immediately to Kuni.

In seconds, the tip of Kuni's blade met her opponent's cheek.

"Huzzah!" cheered Graham.

Elizabeth felt less like exultation. Four new soldiers were bearing down, and they had swords in their hands.

She bit her lip and risked a glance overhead at Stephen's turret. She couldn't see him, but she knew he was up there worrying her head was about to be chopped off and stuffed onto a pike, which normally would be a laughable concern, but under these circumstances—

A blade arced through the air and stuck into the ground an arm's width from her body.

"Last sword!" came Stephen's distant shout.

"One is all I need," she murmured, and yanked the blade up from the grass.

The sword wasn't one of hers, which meant wielding it wasn't quite as natural as breathing. But all she needed was a blade.

"Aargh!" Kuni yelled again. "There went my last weapon, too!"

"Go to the murder room!" Elizabeth called out in Balcovian. "If they make it inside, the traps will take care of them. I'll hold them off as long as possible to give you a head start."

How long was "as long as possible"? Sixty percent had now come and gone. She was at fifty-five. Maybe fifty.

And there were forty more soldiers left to go.