Chapter 5

Only a beast may wina battle against a beast.

~ Kar’ruk proverb

“They locked us in?” Frayvar asked as more shouts came from outside, punctuated by the clangs of swords. “It sounded like they were on the verge of letting us go. That’s the only reason I didn’t leap in and save you when that brute had you pinned.”

“That’s the reason?” Kaylina walked toward the window, struggling to push aside the lingering effects of the root. “Not that he’s twice your weight, has muscles harder than steel pillars, and wears armor instead of a rumpled taybarri shirt?”

“My shirt doesn’t affect my fighting prowess.”

Kaylina wasn’t tall enough to see out the window. She gripped the bars with thoughts of pulling herself up, but the wall offered no footholds. Even when she felt perky, she didn’t have the strength to hold her body weight up for long.

“His muscles might have been a consideration,” Frayvar added. “And his sword.”

“All of him.” Even if she hadn’t been in control of her tongue, and her thoughts had been addled, she had no trouble remembering that Vlerion hadn’t budged during all her struggles.

“Yeah.”

A boomless substantial than the last thundered. It sounded like Grandpa’s blunderbuss and brought memories of pirate raids and defending the Gull from the wooden decks surrounding the elevated eating house. Vlerion wasn’t the first man that Kaylina had cracked in the head with a sling round.

“Can you boost me up?” She would have asked her taller brother to look out the window, but curiosity made her want to see for herself what was going on.

“My muscles aren’t harder than steel pillars,” Frayvar grumbled, but he did come to assist her.

“Oh, I know. I’ve helped you carry the stock pot to keep you from dumping boiling water on your sandals often.”

“When it’s full, that pot is heavy for everyone.” Frayvar lifted his hands in the air as he considered where to grab her, then tried her waist, as if he might heft her like a vase.

Feet not raising an inch, Kaylina rolled her eyes. “This from the mind of a mathematical genius. Squat down so I can stand on your back.”

Grumbling again, he did, making a stool. The grumbles turned into grunts as she stepped up. Even through her boots, she could feel the frailness of his build and vowed not to stay up for long.

She gripped the bars, shifting her weight off Frayvar as much as she could as she peered out. Finally, she could see.

Twilight had fallen, but streetlamps burned along the road, a canal that passed the jail, and a bridge that was… half missing. Rubble littered the cobblestones on one side, and men fought on the half of it that was still intact. That could not be a stable perch.

Kaylina shook her head grimly. The rangers had marched her and Frayvar over that bridge on the way to the jail. What if the explosion—had it been a keg of black powder?—had gone off when they’d been on it?

Two of the fighting figures wore black—Targon and Vlerion. They crouched back to back at the base of the bridge, not ten yards away from the jail. Men and a few women in a hodgepodge of chain mail, leather armor, and rusty plate—the pieces were mixed as if they’d been selected at random—attacked the rangers with swords and cudgels.

Three archers and a woman who was reloading a single-round blunderbuss stood farther down the canal, using a lamppost and a tree for cover while leaning out to fire at the rangers.

A war horn rang out somewhere in the city. A warning to desist. The attackers did not.

“For the righteous and virtuous!” someone bellowed. “For the commoners!”

Another archer stood at the corner of the jail building. He fired not at the rangers but at the other bowmen. An ally for Vlerion and Targon. But someone in black clothing with a knife crawled out of the canal—was there a boat down there?—and crept through the shadows toward the archer.

Kaylina bit her lip, not certain if she should call a warning or not. On the one hand, rangers were law enforcers in the kingdom, as well as defenders of its borders, and she should have felt loyal to them. On the other, Targon and Vlerion hadn’t given her any reason to love them, and if this was a class battle, she didn’t want to side with the aristocrats. There wasn’t a drop of noble blood in her veins. Besides, the aristocrats had advantages enough.

But they were outnumbered in this battle…

More men with knives climbed out of the canal. They glanced at the fight at the base of the bridge, then headed for the jail instead.

Given the number of enemies, the rangers should have gone down quickly, but they had the better training. Far better training.

Kaylina stared as Vlerion somehow sensed an arrow zipping toward his head and deflected it with his sword at the same time as he used a dagger to parry an attacker’s cudgel. Not glancing at the archer, he kicked the closer foe back and spun to his side to protect Targon from another swordsman.

His movements were so fast that they blurred, making them hard to follow. Targon was competent as well, extremely competent, but he didn’t have the same preternatural speed as Vlerion. Far greater speed and grace than Kaylina would have expected from a big man. Something about the way Vlerion moved his feet and whipped his limbs about, blocking every attack and deploying several of his own, made her think of panthers chasing prey in the reeds along the marshy shoreline back home. He didn’t seem quite… human.

She snorted at herself. What else could he be? Half Kar’ruk? He didn’t have horns and fangs.

Further, Vlerion’s face wasn’t savage as he fought. No, it was the opposite. Enough light came from a lamp burning at the base of the bridge for her to see his expression. He looked like he was concentrating, his focus absolute. No battle lust burned in his eyes, nor did he show any sign of fear or anger or aggression of any kind. His lack of reaction in the face of his enraged foes was strange. The words not quite human came to mind again.

In contrast, Targon grunted, cursed, and let out a triumphant, “Got you!” as he took down an opponent in front of him.

The rangers were frustrating their attackers, who snarled, spat, and maligned aristocrats as they swung their weapons. As their numbers diminished, their blows grew more desperate. Kaylina couldn’t believe they were still attacking. They had to realize that, even with archers trying to pepper the rangers, they weren’t going to win. One man kept glancing toward the jail, as if expecting something to happen there.

Those glances cost him his life. Vlerion swung his sword horizontally and took off his head.

Kaylina swore as it thudded to the ground and rolled into the canal. Again, she reminded herself not to insult Vlerion.

A barge floated down the river toward the destroyed bridge, and she imagined the crew being confused—and horrified—as a head bumped against their hull.

Several of them were out on deck, watching the battle. No, they were fiddling with a large rectangular object on the deck, something taller than they. Was that a cage? Yes, a black animal moved inside. Something bigger than the panther she’d been imagining. A cragwalker? A bearslayer? A trained yekizar? Some deadly animal she’d only read about in books, that was certain.

Frayvar groaned and shifted. “How much longer do you need a front-row seat to whatever is happening out there?”

“Another minute. I think that barge is part of it.” Biceps and forearms quivering, Kaylina pulled herself higher, pressing her face to the bars for a better view.

A clang sounded as the cage door opened, slamming to the deck. With a lion-like roar, the muscled black creature ran out and sprang for the street—for the battle. A yekizar.

On powerful limbs, it bounded toward the fray, its golden eyes catching the lamplight. They were focused not randomly on the crowd but on the rangers.

A chill swept through Kaylina. Her books had never spoken of that kind of intelligence in the beasts of the north, that they could recognize and choose their prey.

Different roars sounded in the distance, from the same direction that horn had been blown. Those she’d heard before. Taybarri.

More rangers had to be coming to help, but would they be in time? The yekizar might be too much even for Vlerion.

He glanced toward it as he knocked two attackers away, one gripping his bleeding side as he stumbled and fell into the canal. That made room for Vlerion to spring out of the knot of men, landing in a crouch facing the approaching beast. Again, his face was impassive. Eerily calm.

Mesmerized by the battle, by him, Kaylina almost missed movement to her left. Someone darted across the cobblestone street between the jail and the canal. Another shadowy figure. No, two of them. They carried small boxes instead of knives. The archer who’d been helping the rangers had disappeared. Or had he been killed?

One of the men stopped under the window of a cell near hers, placing a box against the wall. No, those weren’t boxes. They were kegs.

He ran to her cell and left another box. With the help of his allies, four more kegs were placed.

The screech of the yekizar rang out as it reached Vlerion. He dodged lightning-fast swipes from forelimbs ending in claws like daggers, then angled in from the side to slash his sword toward the beast.

Though Kaylina wanted to see the rest of his battle, the flame of a match flared, a man lighting a fuse on one of the kegs. He moved quickly to the others, including the one placed beneath her window.

“Back, back.” Kaylina jumped down and grabbed her brother, pulling him to his feet.

“What?”

With no time to explain, she yanked him to the far side of the cell. “Cover your head.”

A great explosion almost drowned out her last word.

Even closer than the thunderous boom that had started everything, it not only made the floor quake, but the cell wall blew inward. Stones tumbled from the ceiling and Kaylina cursed her decision to leave home as she wrapped her arms protectively over her head and knelt against the bench, wishing there were cover in the empty cell.

More explosions followed the first. Those guys were blowing open every cell in the jail. As more stone tumbled down, the entire ceiling threatening to cave in, Kaylina worried she and Frayvar would be buried.

She glanced toward the exterior wall, wondering if they could get out that way now, but thick smoke hid everything.

More clangs, another roar from the beast, and the firing of a blunderbuss promised the battle hadn’t ended, but she couldn’t see it. A shadow stirred in the smoke, and a cloaked woman peered into their cell.

“Hurry, hurry,” she whispered. “Everyone out.”

Frayvar looked at her and didn’t budge. “We’re not with you, thanks.”

Someone else appeared beside the woman, a man with blood dripping from his fingers, bruises mottling his face, and an arm gripped to his ribs. Those wounds hadn’t come from a sword fight—and the bruises were at least a day old. He had to be the prisoner who’d been tortured. Evdar Wedgewick.

“We saved you,” he rasped. “You owe us.”

The woman waved the words away. “You don’t owe us, but we’ll accept fresh blood for the cause if you’re game. Don’t stay and let the rangers round you up.”

A pained screech, the sound of a dying animal, filled the night. Had Vlerion gotten the best of the yekizar?

“You can come with us,” the woman added in a whisper. “We’ll hide you!”

She waved again before she and the man ran to the next cell.

The rubble stopped falling from the ceiling. Great cracks ran along it, and the night sky was visible through holes, but it hadn’t fallen completely. Not yet, anyway. Kaylina pushed herself to her feet, gripping Frayvar to help him up.

“Maybe we should go with them,” she whispered, not daring to speak loudly since the battle was dying down. Their opportunity to escape would be brief. But should they use it? A hint of a plan formed in her mind. “We could find out where their bases are and…”

And what? Report back to the rangers? Become spies for them? She didn’t even like them. But… if she and Frayvar helped the rangers, that could clear them of all suspicion of being tied in with the murder. Had her babbling under the root’s influence done that? She didn’t know. Mostly, she remembered ranting about her family life.

Frayvar grabbed her arm, making her realize she’d taken two steps toward the hole in the wall.

“They were about to let us go,” he said. “We don’t need to run. We absolutely do not need to join a rebellion or whatever is going on up here. We don’t know anything about it. And do you want that big brute chasing after us for real?”

He flung a finger toward the bridge, and she had no doubt which brute he meant. Frayvar might not have seen the battle, but he’d been flattened by Vlerion. He understood the ranger’s capabilities perfectly well.

“No.” Kaylina couldn’t see Vlerion and Targon, but the smoke was thinning, the sounds of chaos lessening. Nearby, snorts, chuffs, and whuffs meant the taybarri, and however many rangers were riding them, had arrived. “But if we have the opportunity to leave and don’t take it, we might regret it later.”

She glanced toward the door—the locked door.

“You gave them our names and the name of the eating house, Kay. If we disappear, the rangers could have the Kingdom Guard sent to Grandma and Grandpa’s door to question them.”

Kaylina didn’t want to imagine the authorities doing anything vile to elderly law-abiding subjects, but Frayvar was right. If they fled, it would be suspicious, and they might no longer be deemed law-abiding subjects themselves.

“They’ll let us go,” Frayvar repeated. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Except for being ignorant tourists?” She bristled as she quoted Vlerion.

“That’s not a crime. Besides, if we run, you won’t get your sling back.”

Shit. That was a good point.

“Fine.” Kaylina pushed rocks and dust off the bench and sat with her arms folded across her chest to wait.

Frayvar arched his eyebrows. “Are you sulking or scheming? I can’t always tell.”

“I’m debating what to do next to make sure I get my sling and our honey back.” She well remembered that her pack and their trunks had been left in the castle courtyard and hoped nobody had stolen them.

“So, scheming.” Frayvar sat beside her. “Good.”