Princeps’ Fury

“Quiet,” Amara hissed, looking around, certain that someone was going to notice the muted commotion any second. “We’re going to get you out of here, but we’re going to get as many people out as we possibly can. Stay alert. Everyone who can fly in a straight line needs to be ready.”

“Open the cage!” someone rasped.

“Be ready,” Amara responded. “I’ll be back.” Then she slipped over to the next cage, and repeated the conversation. And the next. And the next.

The Vord discovered her as she reached the fifth.

She had just shushed the final stone cage filled with captives when one of the lizard-form Vord twenty yards away raised its head, whuffling in through its nose, and let out a shriek that vibrated from the stones of the courtyard.

It must have smelled the blood still on me, she thought. Most animals would react strongly to the scent of bleeding prey. She should have taken a moment to clean herself better-but it was too late for that.

Speed was everything now.

Amara dropped the veil to call upon Cirrus for speed, and slammed open the bolts to the cage before hurling herself back down the line to the next cage and repeating the process.

“Alerans!” she cried, the words oddly elongated to her altered perceptions. “Alerans, to arms!”

She slammed open the bolts to the last cage as a chorus of Vord shrieks arose around them. The captive windcrafters began shoving their way out of the cages in their wake, screaming cries of their own.

“Alera!”

“Fight, you miserable bastards!”

Only Amara’s heightened senses allowed her to see the flicker in the air above her, where the Citizens were caged under multiple layers of counters to their furycraft. There was a small explosion of sparks, where steel had met steel-and another burst of sparks, where a second arrow had struck another of the hinges on the hanging cage with impossible force and precision, and a dozen Citizens were abruptly dropped fifteen feet to the wet stones of the courtyard floor.

Sparks exploded from the second cage of hanging Citizens, and more cries went up.

“To me!” Amara cried, leaping up onto the nearest cage. “Alerans, to me!”

“Cursor, look out!” screamed someone in the darkness.

Amara whirled, sword in hand, to find the Vord that had first raised the alarm bounding toward her. She waited until it was in the air to lean far to one side, striking with Brencis’s sword, and felt the blade crunch through the Vord’s chitinous armor. She had misjudged her balance, though, crows take those bloody collars, and she fell to the stones with the Vord, bleeding vile, dark fluid, scrambling to find her.

There was a crack like a miniature thunderbolt and the creature dropped as still and dead as if crushed by an enormous hammer. One of Bernard’s arrows protruded from the base of its skull, sunk all the way to the green-and-brown fletching.

Amara looked up to see her husband leap from a low rooftop to the back of a wagon, bow in hand, and from there to the courtyard beside her. He strode to the nearest wooden cage, presumably filled with metalcrafters, and ran his hand along the top. It immediately groaned and warped and fell to pieces, freeing the prisoners inside.

“Are you all right?” Bernard asked, extending his hand to her, his eyes wide with fear. “Are you hurt?”

She took it, and he hauled her to her feet. “I’ll… yes, all things considered. I mean, I’m fine. The blood isn’t mine. It’s Brencis’s.”

“Oh,” Bernard breathed, his face sagging in nearly comic relief. “Good.”

Pleasure washed through her from the collar bound about her thigh at his approval. “Oh,” she breathed. “Love, please. Be careful of your words.”

Bernard blinked at her, then seemed to understand. His face clouded and he stepped in close to her, setting his bow aside. He growled in his throat, seized the steel collar about her throat and snapped it clear of her neck with his bare hands. “I never found the key to the first one,” he told her, kneeling. The collar about her thigh was rather a tighter fit, and his fingers felt warm and rough, sliding beneath it. “Hold still. It could cut you.”

She saw him pause for a heartbeat, and she had a wild thought that he was being tempted. He didn’t have to take the collar off her, did he? No one could except for him, after all. What if he simply left it on her? The collar pulsed with pure bliss again at the very thought, and Amara swayed on her feet, struggling to remember why that would be a bad thing-

And then there was another sound of snapping metal, and her thoughts were abruptly clear again.

“Foul thing,” Bernard spat, rising with the broken steel circlet in his hand.

“Vord!” screamed one of the prisoners still trapped inside a wooden cage.

One of the lizard-forms had swarmed over a nearby wall and leapt down onto one of the water-drenched cages holding the miserable firecrafters, raking at them with its talons.

Bernard spun, lifted the steel circlet, and threw it with fury-born strength. The metal struck the Vord in midlimb and ripped through it like paper. The Vord fell, shrieking and spraying filthy-looking blood all over the courtyard around it.

Amara tossed her sword to one of the freed metalcrafters as more Vord swarmed over the walls. She pointed at the other cages, and snapped, “Free them!”

“Yes, my lady!” shouted the man. He spun to the nearest suspended cage of earthcrafters and slashed it open with the fine steel blade, the bars parting in a shower of sparks, before he moved on to the one beside it.

Bernard had taken up his bow again, and Amara watched as he calmly shot a pair of oncoming Vord from the walls. “We can’t hold them,” he said. “Get the windcrafters and get them out of here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Amara retorted. “We’re all leaving together.”

“There are too many of them. Our people aren’t armed. Half of them can barely stand,” Bernard said. A vordknight buzzed down from above, and he shot it through the center of its chest. It fell to the ground like a wounded pheasant, and one of the freed earthcrafters smashed it with a heavy iron bar ripped from the walls of the cage that had recently held him.

But more Vord were coming. Many more. They swarmed over the walls from every direction, and the thrum of vordknight wings quivered in the air all around them, before materializing into half a dozen of the winged horrors, diving upon some of the still-dazed, defenseless prisoners.

A sphere of white-hot fire erupted abruptly in the air-not among the Vord, but immediately above and behind them. For an instant, Amara thought that the firecrafter’s aim and timing had been badly off, but the wash of heat blackened and curled the Vord’s relatively delicate wings, and the eruption of hot wind from the firecrafting sent them spi

“Bloody crowbegotten bugs!” roared a gravelly voice, and a blocky old man, his silver hair still shot with streaks of fiery red limped into sight, being supported by the slender, bedraggled young woman Brencis had called Flora.

“Gram?” Bernard said, surprise and delight on his face.

The old firecrafter squinted about until he spotted Bernard. “Bernard! What the crows are you doing in the south?”

Bernard shot one of the crashed vordknights who had survived the fall and risen to its feet in the courtyard. “Rescuing you, apparently.”

“Bah,” Gram growled, and Amara finally placed the old man as the previous Count of Calderon. He raised his hand and waved it in a circle, and a sheet of fire arose atop the walls surrounding the courtyard, a red-hot curtain that came from nowhere and drew howls of pain and protest from dozens of as-yet-unseen Vord. “Move to the Vale, Gaius says. Retire in wealth and comfort, he says. My ass, the crowbegotten old confidence man.” He squinted at Bernard. “Figure us a way out of this mess, boy. I can’t hold this for more than half an hour or so.”