Mihauna, I didn’t have the reserves for this fight. My power shuttered in my fingertips, running thinner each time I calledto it. I shoved at him, but he shoved me back, the corner of the jamb scraping my skull.
“Do you know why that man is laying on the floor?” I asked him, indicating Marik with my chin as he moaned a few feet away. “He wouldn’t let me leave. I suggest you avoid making the same mistake.”
“Turn around,” Cenek ordered, fumbling for the knife in my hands. A guard bounced into Cenek from the side, hands flung out to catch himself. Surprised, Cenek glanced toward the man, who had landed on the floor and was already pushing to his feet.
Kye blazed in, kicking the fallen man in the side of his head with a heavy boot, then slammed his forehead into Cenek’s.
The captain’s neck snapped backward. He tripped over the men who were still furiously escaping my patch of ice.
For an instant, the hallway was littered with men on the floor, scrambling to find their feet. Without a word, Kye spun around, offering me his hands tied behind his back.
Knife ready, I cut the rope.
And then we were running.
20
Maren
Shouts and pounding feet chased us through the wet halls, and I had just enough within me to freeze the floor after we passed. We turned a corner, and I glanced over my shoulder in time to catch the sight of one of them falling. Cenek and I met eyes, anger burning in the white of his glare. Then he hurdled down the staircase we’d passed, guards on his heels.
“They’re taking a shortcut,” I huffed.
“Where are the horses?”
“I left them at the door.”
A shadow ahead flashed through the torchlight, a guard patrolling this section of the hall. I skidded to a stop, but Kye didn’t slow his pace as the guard’s face suddenly appeared around a corner. Kye cocked his fist, driving it into the Rivean’s chin before the poor man could even understand who we were. His eyes rolled to the back of his head as he crumpled to the floor.
“Fuck,” Kye spat, shaking out his wrist. I grabbed his other hand, yanking him back into motion. The arched stone doors lay ahead. Our way out.
We streaked for daylight. For fresh air and lifeless landscape. Wind in our hair and the crash of the tide in our ears.
And just before we reached it, Cenek and his guards rounded the doors, blocking our way. Beyond him, I caught a glimpse of Kolibri and Sero, still waiting where I’d left them.
Kye’s arm flung across my waist, backing me against one side of the hall. Behind us came the crashing thud of boots, the sighs of swords as they escaped from their sheathes.
“A fine attempt, Prince of Calder,” Captain Cenek called. Kye didn’t answer him. His eyes roamed the ceiling and walls, sliding to the guards behind us, weighing options. Stone pressed into my spine, the back of my dress sodden against it.
The guards behind us moved forward, forcing us to do the same. Ahead, Cenek waited with hands on his hips, a rapacious smile on his lips. Kye braced to fight. I sensed it in his body, the way he rolled his shoulders, flexed his fists. Knowing he’d have more use for it than I did, I pressed the handle of the knife into his palm, and his fingers curled around it in response. Our only weapon against an entire guard.
I panted softly behind Kye, my heartbeat too loud to hear anything but a static fuzziness in the air. I tried to force the frenzied sound of it away but fear suddenly wrapped its fingers across my throat. The buzzing doubled. At the mouth of the fortress, we’d gone as far as we could without them taking us. But we stopped just beyond their reach.
“I should thank you,” Cenek said, a lump already bulging from his crown where Kye head-butted him. “I’ve been waiting for the chance to leave this miserable post. To advance to a position in the capital, or the palace. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift than a prince murdering two pirates in the market square.”
The man beside him stepped forward, the point of his sword level at Kye’s face. Kye’s back smooshed me flat into the wall as a second cornered us from behind. Then another. Six swordspointed at us from all sides, as much as they could cram into the narrow doorway. They stretched, forcing him to turn his head to the side as their blades crept closer through the damp air.
One made a grab for Kye’s arm. Pulled him down to his knees, the point of the swords extending his neck, jaw taut. Another tried to kick the knife from his hand. Kye slashed at the leg, the man jumping out of the path of the knife. The scent of hot metal bloomed from him, wild and tumbling like a wave of heat from the sun.
“If he won’t cooperate, just kill the both of them,” Cenek said. “Bodies can be shipped as easily as beating hearts.”
“It will be my corpse that you send, then,” Kye sneered amid the horde of steel.
Cenek’s smile flickered. “At least your wife seems easier to subdue. Take her,” he said, dropping his voice as he angled his chin toward the guards closest to him. “Maybe he’ll be more rational without her to defend.”
His words should have blanketed me with relief. Cenek wanted to take us alive. But as one of them stepped to my side and snatched my arm, all I understood was the gnashing fangs of panic. The man yanked me from the wall, over Kye’s legs and outside the door.
I stumbled, fighting to stay upright, then wrenched my hand away.
