Even after the words were out, Ferdinand wasn’t sure why he’d done it.
The wrinkles around the accuser’s eyes flattened out with angry glee as his entire forehead folded upward.
“Ah! You admit our captain died on your blade.” The ring of steel cut through the wet groans of the injured. “And you shall die on mine.”
The other men scattered, no longer holding Ferdinand in place. Ferdinand held up his rope-tied hands, placating, and tried to back up, but promptly ran into the injured Mirande behind him—and the pirates hiding behind her. There was only about a foot of distance between himself and the accuser’s blade tip. Barely enough room to grab the dagger in his boot they’d yet to take from him.
“He willnot!” Geneva’s voice cut into the threat, along with her body—angled, tense, regal. “Ferdinand is to be taken alive.”
Amazingly, the gold-toothed pirate had the audacity to turn and grin straight in the face of the longest-serving Warlord of them all. “That isn’t an order I’ll take from you. Revenge is an order from the stars and of higher priority than anything you say.”
The pirate returned to his advance on Ferdinand, who still held his hands up, apparently boxed in. His best defense appeared in his mind—a quick kick to the man’s middle to create space, and then a dive to his boot knife to finish him off with a strike to the neck, chest, stomach… whatever was the most readily convenient.
If it didn’t work, he’d be dead. If it did, he’d be breathing, but short his only remaining weapon. Though given Geneva apparently did not want him in the stars yet, it would be worth the loss of his knife.
But before the pirate could again raise his sword, Ferdinand recognized a hardening to Geneva’s features over his opponent’s shoulder. Her sky-light eyes flickered with an edge as sharp as any blade, her brows and mouth pulled into twin taut lines. Her right hand twitched at her side, and Ferdinand knew she’d released a blade from her wrist sheath.
Fixing his breath, Ferdinand didn’t react. Didn’t move. Only stared down this man who would take his life for his captain’s.
Just as the pirate’s sword paused on the upswing—maximum torque built and ready to release, the man’s whole body coiled with enough ferocity to remove Ferdinand’s head from his body—Geneva’s wrist flicked, as quick and deadly as the bite of a Harea Asp.
A knife stuck straight out of the soft spot between where the pirate’s skull met the column of his neck. The man hung there for one breathless beat before crumpling onto dusty mountain dirt, his sword clattering unevenly on a rock or root. As his body hit, Geneva crouched and served an assassin’s smile in a rousing spray of blood that doused her, Ferdinand, the earth and brush, before settling across the man’s leather jerkin in a ferocious beaded line.
Geneva shot to her feet, dagger dripping blood, and faced the stunned-stiff crowd of pirates and mercenaries.
“Would anyone else like to disobey me? Do it now, before I clean my blade.”
No one dared move—breathe, blink, twitch—all brought too much attention. Even the horses were statues.
“Good.” Geneva wiped the flat of her knife in one long warning streak across her trouser-clad thigh. “Now let’s get this cargo hidden and sorted and prepare for the main Ardenian and Torrentian party.”
The collective clamor of men and women grateful to still have their blood on the inside after watching a colleague be cut down so publicly rose, and a satisfied Geneva turned to Ferdinand.
He braced himself for one of her feral smiles. Or a jab about what he owed her now. Instead, a line of worry creased between her brows and she immediately dabbed at the pirate’s blood smeared across the ivory section of his garnet-and-gold uniform. “Are you all right?”
It might’ve been involuntary, but Ferdinand started nodding, all speech missing from his tongue. It seemed to be enough and he thought she might walk away, to start directing everything. But instead, Geneva sheathed her own knife, and, without a word, bent to his boot and retrieved his hidden dagger from its sheath.
She grinned up at him—it was a slight tip to the lips, all emotion in her eyes and only seen by him. “You’re my son, and I know you better than anyone in this world or the stars. You would do best not to forget it.”
The implication was clear—now that we’re together again.With him as a prisoner.
Geneva stood, his dagger in her hand, that semblance of a grin falling away, the ruthless expression of the mask-less Warlord slipping back in place. She opened her mouth to yell another order—
WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH.
Arrows rained in cluttered succession from the dense junipers and pines.
THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.
Each arrow speared the jugulars of the Warlord’s men surrounding the cart.
Geneva spun and shot Ferdinand’s own knife into the trees, where a good hundred men in the aubergine and gold of Pyrenee rolled out like morning fog. She caught an archer—the arrow taut on his bowstring going up and wide—but better, she caught the attention of the attacking soldiers just enough that they hesitated, and suddenly her men and women were drawing their swords.
In that pause, the Warlord unsheathed one of her swords, too, eager to charge—which was when Ferdinand kicked out a foot to trip her. Geneva stumbled over his boot toe, falling forward, free hand catching herself as her sword arm splayed wide. The moment she landed, Ferdinand caught her shoulder between his bound hands, wrenching her back as one arrow and then another—THWACK THWACK—lodged into the dirt where she’d been.
“Stay still. They want the vials.”
More arrows rained down as Ferdinand further protected the woman who had been his mother under the thick drape of his Ardenian uniform’s reinforced cloak. Those still standing bore the brunt of the arrows, those already aground spared. And then, after a time, the flurry stopped, the footsteps of the Pyrenee soldiers moving in.
