“Don’t talk about yourself that way, Greythorne.”
She cut him a sidelong glance as she pulled her bow out. “We both know you’re the incompetent one.”
“Well, that’s bad news for you then,” he chuckled, mirroring her and pulling out his own bow, “considering I taught you everything you know.”
“Everything?”
“More than you could ever pay me back for, at least.” He returned the smirk she had given him as the two of them settled into a more covert position amongst the rocks.
Cas readied an arrow, though she hoped she wouldn’t have to use it.
And there was a decent chance she wouldn’t; Laurent had already made his way to within throwing distance of the gate, and she had barely noticed him doing it. Of the three of them, he was easily the most adept at stealth. He never talked much about the life he’d lived before joining up with her and her makeshift family, which had led to Zev concocting wild stories about the grumpy half-elf being a disgraced spymaster from some distant realm.
Ridiculous as those stories usually were, there was certainly a clandestine sort of grace to the way Laurent moved; Cas kept losing him in the shadows as he weaved closer to the Oblivion mists.
The ones marching in front of that gate have no hope of noticing him, she told herself, trying to stave off the anxiety attempting to unfurl itself inside of her. She tucked her head to her chest for a moment and breathed in deeply.
“Look,” Zev whispered, pointing.
Cas lifted her gaze and looked, and she saw something that made the hairs on the nape of her neck stand on end: Those mists were suddenly billowing more violently along the edges, building like a wave that pulled away from the shore only to crash back against the gate and the stone walls that stretched out from it.
And then parts of the wave spilled over that gate and those walls.
The soldiers started to yell to one another in what sounded like Melechian. The king-emperor’s language. Cas’s gaze was momentarily drawn toward the noise, and when she glanced back to where she’d last seen Laurent, it was just in time to see one of those tendrils of mist swallowing him up. When the mist receded once more, he was nowhere in sight.
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears as she watched and waited for him to reappear.
He didn’t.
Chapter Three
“Where is he?” Cas breathed. “Where is he?”
Zev was silent as he drew his bow, studying the wall. The fingers of mist were reaching out over it, once again, as if feeling around for any other intruders that had gotten too close to it.
“I’m going down there,” Cas said, pushing away from the rocks she was crouched behind. Her personal anxieties were overruled by her concern for Laurent. She had to do something. “You stay here and stay ready to provide that cover fire.”
“Cas, wait—”
“You’re a quicker shot than me,” she said, “you could end all three of those soldiers on your own before I had properly aimed at one.”
The flattery quieted him long enough for her to get away, just as she’d hoped it would.
She ran as fast as she could in the near-darkness, feeling her way along until she found a section that sloped relatively gently down to that path below. She started down it without hesitating, moving so quickly that she tripped towards the bottom, scraping her boot in a loose clutch of rocks. Several of those rocks bounced noisily free. The soldier closest to her jerked his head toward the sound. Cas leapt the remaining distance to the path below. She landed lightly, rebalanced the stolen sword in her hand, and lifted her gaze toward the soldier.
Their eyes met.
The soldier bellowed out an order for her to halt!
He received an arrow to the throat in response, courtesy of Zev.
The other two moved to check on their fallen brother-in-arms, forgetting about her—if these two had seen her at all. Cas spotted a low section of that stone wall that stretched out from the gate, and she sprinted for it and vaulted over it before those soldiers had a chance to stop her.
It was like jumping into deep, dark water. She seemed to fall forever before her feet finally hit ground made of smooth rock. Pressure suctioned against her from all sides, and she looked up and found that she could no longer see the moon, or even the sky that held it, and her eyes instantly teared up as the fog of Oblivion washed over her. The tendrils of it swirled around and around. She stared into the black abyss before her, briefly paralyzed by the thought of running into whatever people or monsters had made those shadows they’d seen from above.
But nothing came for her right away.
So she curled an arm over her masked mouth, squinted her eyes against the burning, and trudged forward.
She found Laurent on his hands and knees just inside this miasma, his hand clutching his coat, pulling it up on top of the mask that covered part of his face. As she reached him and dropped to her knees beside him, he shook his head and pointed. It took her watering eyes a moment to focus on what he was pointing at—the Air crystal had bounced out of his grasp. It rested in a shallow depression in the ground, some ten feet away from them.
She tried to help him up first, but he shoved her off and waved her toward the crystal once more.
All business, as usual.
Gritting her teeth, she turned and lunged for the crystal. She snatched it up and then attempted to go back to Laurent’s aid—only to end up colliding with a hard body. She smacked into it with enough force that it sent her flailing backwards.
Her right shoulder slammed into the ground. Pain fired down her back, but she kept her senses about her and managed not to drop either the crystal or her sword as she rolled onto her knees and fought her way up into a kneeling position.
A man loomed over her.
He was not one of the soldiers from the other side of the gate; he was dressed differently than those soldiers, in black leather armor reinforced by metal bands across his broad chest. A black cloak fluttered like raven’s feathers around him. His head was wrapped in a thick scarf, and every other inch of his body was covered in some way, save for a strip that revealed a pair of blue eyes and beige skin. Against the blackness, those eyes were oddly bright. Arresting, really, and inhuman and harsh and yet…beautiful. If Oblivion was an ocean of nightmares, here was a reminder that morning still existed, even here, and that there was still a sky above it all. A cold, steely blue sky that she couldn’t stop staring at—
At least until he attacked her.
He drove forward, whipping a broad sword from the sheath at his hip, and as she jumped up and tripped out of his reach all she wanted to do was introduce her fist to those beautiful blue eyes.
She nearly managed it, too; with a ferociously quick step she was back in front of him, hurling a punch that missed his eyes but managed to catch his jaw as he twisted away.
“You—!”
She drove an elbow into his side, followed by a kick into his stomach, while he was busy trying to curse at her. He staggered away. She spun back out of his weapon’s reach and fell into a more proper sword-fighting stance, setting her feet and lifting her blade as her gaze narrowed on him.
“Who are you?” His voice was too muffled by his face-covering to make out much of an accent, but she would have guessed it was one of the northernmost realms that once made up the kingdom of Alnor. “And what the hell are you doing here?”