Page 39

Wake up, sweet girl. The kettle’s on.

A standard greeting to all her trainees, not one personal to me.

“Come back to the Crimson Order, Raven.”

My body answered before I did, recoiling at the field name.

I remembered a cottage door opening and a wolf greeting me with that field name, giving me pause. Then he asked me:

Aren’t you tired of all this, Ruby?

I stepped back onto my heels, and then I stepped back one full pace, so there were eight between us again.

“My name,” I said, “is Ruby.”

Her smile faltered.

“Ruby,” she said slowly, as if tasting something that had turned bitter. “Your mother had given you that name.” She straightened. “Fine, Ruby Mays, come to me. Now.”

“No.” I stepped away from her, closer to Conan, sensing his presence behind me. “Never.”

For several seconds, nothing made a sound. Not even the twenty-some operatives in red standing frozen across the meadow, or the wolves bristling among them.

All warmth left her face, wiped away like chalk from a slate. What remained underneath was someone hard and unyielding. “Then you’re no use to me.”

She raised her hand and made a motion.

The surroundings erupted in noise.

Operatives surged forward and wolves met them with snarls. A howl sounded behind me on the ridge that drove straight to my heart. Conan. Wounded and coming anyway.

I didn’t turn to look. I couldn’t risk it. Not with my grandmother’s right hand reaching for her left sleeve.

Left sleeve, four inches, folding blade. I’d carried mine there since I was nine years old, because that’s what she’d told me.

She came at me faster than any woman her age should be able to move. I got my arm up in time, and her blade opened a line of fire across my forearm instead of my throat. I twisted away and drew my knife. We circled each other in the trampled frost while the battle raged around us.

“Weight on your back foot,” she said calmly, as if we were in the training hall. “You always favored it despite what I told you.”

She feinted high and cut low. I’d seen the move a thousand times. She’d drilled it into me until I did it in my sleep. I blocked it, and she was already moving into the next one, because she knew every block I’d make. She’d taught them.

At the edge of my vision, gray coats held their line at the tree edge. They weren’t advancing. Mervyn sat his horse among them, reins gathered, watching. Whatever he’d come here for, he wasn’t about to bleed for an old woman’s grudge.

An operative broke from the fighting and came at me from the side, blade raised. He never reached me. A dark gray wolf slammed into him from nowhere and bore him to the ground, a strip of red cloth bound around his ribs. Conan planted himself between me and the rest of the meadow, snarling at anyone who came close. Keeping it just the two of us.

That glance cost me.

Her knife hand snapped down across my wrist, and my blade spun out of my fingers into the frost.

“Never take your eyes off the target,” she said with a sneer. “I taught you that too.”

She lunged, knife leading. I caught her wrist in both hands and stopped the blade an inch from my ribs.

She didn’t pull away. She smiled.

“Hold on, Raven,” she whispered, her face inches from mine. “No matter what.”

Then she twisted her arm inside my grip, and put her whole weight behind it.