The first jar arcs over our line and breaks against the south curtain. The caster behind it puts a spark to the wash and the stone catches in a long ribbon of pale blue flame that climbs the dry vine choking the wall. The smell hits me before the sound does. Old timber waking back up, the particular sweetness of char that has been waiting to be relit. I am for one bad second thirty-one years old. The corridor above the lower block. The roof coming down. A voice through a wall I could not reach. Theren's hand closes on my shoulder, hard enough to bruise.
"Captain."
"I have it."
"Don't lie to me. Not now."
"I have it."
I do because I have no other option. I find Vesh across the yard and lift two fingers. He pulls his three best off the east flank and goes for the casters, because casters die first or wedie slower. Drogan I send to the south curtain with men and wet cloaks and the order to keep the fire on the outer face. The civilians in the lower vault are behind a warded door and four soldiers I trust more than I have admitted to myself. Corrine should be with them by now.I don't let myself think the word should.
The fortress remembers. The old timbers above catch in the same pattern they caught before, and a beam high in the gatehouse comes down trailing sparks the color of an ending. Two of Drogan's men go under it. One gets up. The other does not. Drogan does not look away from the one who does not rise. He only drags the living man clear by the back of his coat and shouts, "Mourn later. Breathe now."
The eastern column tries us again. I meet the front of it at the breach where the masonry breaks open and do the work I am for. The man is fast and trained, but I am faster because I have decided I will be. I take his sword arm at the elbow with a short stroke that costs me a step and put my pommel through the hinge of his jaw, and he is on the ground before the man behind him has finished raising his blade. That one I don't bother with cleanly. A sound comes out of me, low, not a word.
I turn into the next, and the next, and somewhere past the fourth I understand that I'm cutting a corridor toward the south curtain, because that's where the broadcast runners came up from, and the stair is the back route to the lower vault, and Corrine is on the back route to the lower vault.
I get to the foot of the south stair. She's not in the vault. She must have stopped short when the child was cut off from the lower door, because she is at the foot of the stair with the second crystal in one hand, the child pressed against her hip with the other, and a council household guard in dark gray is six strides from her with a wet jar in his fist.
I'm not likely to reach her. Theren reaches her. He is between her and the guard before I have finished working out what to do, and he takes the guard down with a movement so economical I would, on any other morning, have admired it. He doesn't see the second guard.
The second guard's blade goes into him under the ribs on his left side and out the back of his coat. I hear the sound it makes from twelve meters away. He stays standing until he puts his own blade through the second guard's throat. Then he goes to one knee, and the knee gives. He is down beside Corrine in the cinders with one hand at his side and his face the wrong color.
Corrine catches him before his head touches stone. She puts the child behind her, and her free hand goes under Theren's cheek to hold his head up off the ground. She looks up, and finds me.
I close the distance through three men. I don't remember any of them. There is a noise in my head, and the noise is not the battle. The noise is older. I go down on one knee beside her. Theren's pulse is at his throat under my fingers, fast, wrong. His mouth moves.
"Forward," he gets out. "I said. You were. Forward."
"Don't."
"It's all right." His eye finds Corrine, then me. "I was. I was where the line was thinnest."
Corrine has her hand pressed flat where the blade went in. There is a great deal of blood and not enough of it on the outside. That is the part that makes my hand go cold. Wounds that bleed inward kill quietly.
"Drogan," I say, without turning. "Drogan."
He is at my shoulder before the second call.
"Take him below. The healer in the vault. Four men around him on the stair. If a council guard touches him on the way down, I want the council guard's name."
Drogan does not argue. That alone tells me how bad it is. He and one of his mercenaries lift Theren between them with a care that looks strange on hands built for breaking bone, and Theren makes a sound. Corrine's mouth tightens.
"If you die after making us carry you," Drogan tells him, "I will complain about it at your funeral."
Theren's eyes open by a fraction. "You complain about everything."
"Yes. Do not rob me of tradition."
"Go," she tells him. "Go, Theren. Don't be stupid about it."
"You also." His head turns toward her. "Don't be."
They take him down the stair. Corrine is still on her knees in the cinders. The child is silent against the wall, watching. I take her elbow and bring her upright, and she lets me. I do not let go.
"The vault."
"The crystal?—"
