Touch of Iron (The Living Blade #1) (32 page)

Garreth’s good eye flickered behind her.

“Fuck. Kids are back,” he yelled to Diaz, who lunged forward, plunging his sword deep into another man’s chest with a frown.

“Who?” His black eyes scanned their faces. For a brief second he looked confused.

“It’s bloody Nora!” Garreth cried.

He cut down into the man next to Nora so hard that the head banged off her shoulder, ripped neck spraying her with blood before the body collapsed. The man behind him stepped up to fill the hole, screaming, “To me, to me!” Their tide of dumb luck was turning. The attackers around them were realizing that something was wrong. They weren’t dying where they should be, hacked into pieces by Garreth and Diaz. And just as a predator sensed the weakness in its prey, they converged. Calla shrieked as the bodies pressed in around her.

Nora locked eyes with Diaz over the shield wall. She was breathless from the crush around her, squashed so tightly against Garreth’s shield her own knife was cutting into her rib cage, arm trapped between shield and body. If they opened the wall, more than just Nora, Owen, Shade, and Calla would come pouring through. If they didn’t open the wall…

She felt a tremor of fear pass through the crowd—fear and bloodlust, rage and greed, all amplified by Calla. Nora’s knees buckled under the force. She’d go under. Go under and get trampled.

“
Diaz!
” She mouthed his name, too winded to speak, vision narrowing on the darkness of his eyes.

He was weighing the odds, the fucking half-wight! A pilgrim master did what must be done. Nothing more and nothing less. And right now, the lives of the many outweighed her own and the lives of those with her. She saw the conflict behind his eyes.

“
Diaz!
” She was drowning in the mass, Owen’s forearm in her hand her only lifeline, slick with sweat.
Come on!

“If Shade dies, Bashan will go fucking ballistic,” Garreth shouted.

Come on!

“Master Diaz!” Owen yelled, his mouth painfully close to her ear. “If you and Garreth push through the wall and meet us, the line behind you will hold long enough for them to close the red gates!”

Diaz blinked.

He nodded and slammed his shield into the man next to Nora, and she heard the grinding noise as his nose broke.

“Do it!” he ordered Garreth.

Garreth muttered something under his breath. Diaz pretended not to hear, giving orders to the men around them.

The squeeze behind Nora was reaching a breaking point, meaning something had to give or she’d break. Garreth hunkered down behind his shield and glowered at her with his one good eye.

“Turn your pretty face, girl,” he said and pushed forward, squeezing her between his shield and the men behind her.

A
s the line was closing
the gap left by Diaz and Garreth, they managed to shove Calla through to the safety of the circle beyond. Nora saw the young woman turn back and look over the shield wall, her blonde hair falling about her face like a halo. Tearstains marked her pretty cheeks as she held out a trembling hand. But Owen’s outstretched fingers were out of reach. And then Nora was swallowed by the press of men around them.

Diaz pushed through the howling crowd, stronger than Garreth, taking the lead. Nora, Owen, and Shade were sandwiched between the two men. Nora wrangled her knife free and started slashing at anyone who came at her and her brother from the side. Behind Diaz, Shade did the same. They inched forward in single file, fighting against the current until they broke through to the other side and suddenly no obstruction lay before them. They ran down a side street to regroup.

“Shade, take my shield and lock with Garreth,” Diaz ordered. “Owen, take Garreth’s spear and ram it hard at anyone who comes too close. But don’t ever let it go! Noraya—” He sighed. “You’re with me.”

They arranged themselves into a tight circle. Diaz and Garreth were its front curve, Nora and Shade flanked them, and Owen was directly behind her. Next to her, Diaz, having passed up his shield, unsheathed a second short sword with a curved blade. He looked down at her. Sweat lined his brow and he was bleeding from a cut across his left upper arm. Not even an hour ago, they had stood on the balcony together.

“Now what?” Garreth was hacking down a man who had followed them.

“I think I know how to stop the men at the red gates,” Owen said. Nora looked over her shoulder at him. Owen scratched the drying blood on his face, staring at the closed main gates down below. “Won’t be easy, though.”

“Go on.” Diaz nodded at Owen in encouragement.

Owen told them.

Shade whistled through his teeth. “That’s insane.”

“Fits right in with everything else tonight, then,” Garreth said.

Nora blushed. She and Diaz shared a look.

“There’s a mill being built on the outer walls,” Nora explained. “Shade and Garreth could get the things we need there while we hold the attackers at bay. The miller was using the stones from the wall and the buildings around it, so the wall must be weakened there. It must be where the attackers are coming through. The gap won’t be too large. We three could easily hold it. They’d have to squeeze through the bottleneck and right onto our swords.”

Diaz nodded. “We could buy Bashan a little more time to form a counterattack.”

“How do we get down to the outer walls?” Shade asked. “I hate to ruin anyone’s day, but we’re kind of a minority here.”

Garreth spat. “Hack and slash, boy, hack and slash. That’s what we’ve been training for.”

“What? Down the broad causeway? Five of us against dozens of them? I don’t recall that lesson.”

“There are ways around here, passageways we could use to get from here down to the outer walls without being seen,” Owen said, gesturing at a crumbled wall next to them.

“Or we could go over the rooftops,” Nora said. “Straight line down. We’d be faster that way.”

“Yeah, faster at breaking our necks,” Shade said.

“He’s right,” Owen said. “It’s too dangerous. Some of the houses could collapse with us on them.”

“Besides,” Shade added. “I’m not doing anything else you say, Nora. You’re fucking crazy.”

“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” she snapped.

“Passageways would take too long.” Diaz came to a conclusion, having heard all the options. “We fight down the causeway. We can do it if we focus. These men aren’t trained fighters. They’re rabble used to attacking sleeping villagers. Most won’t dare attack us unless they highly outnumber us.”

“They
do
highly outnumber us,” Nora pointed out.

“Then remember your training,” Diaz said.

“You want me to roll at them?”

He scowled.

“Not funny. Or appropriate.”

She fought down a giggle and kept her face straight.

“I’ll improvise.”

“Please don’t,” he said.

It was decided. Nora braced herself. She took a deep breath and tightened her grip on the hilt of her knife. Owen was breathing heavily down her neck. Diaz nodded and they stepped out of the cover of the side street.

Over the next few minutes they advanced quickly onto the causeway; then they were spotted and advanced only by the inch. Diaz and Garreth shredded through the incoming attackers, Nora matching Diaz step by step, picking up whatever the tide of the fight brought to her. She ducked a swing and buried her knife into the man’s ribs. He fell, and Owen’s spear jabbed him viciously in the back to make sure he wouldn’t get up. She blocked another sword aiming for Diaz’s throat and grabbed the man’s wrist, pulling him forward onto Diaz’s waiting second blade. A man knocked into Shade’s shield next to her, screeching something at Shade in a high pitch. She kicked the man’s knee out from under him, and Shade stabbed down as Nora blocked a downward cut that would have sliced through Shade’s extended arm. It rattled off her knife and slammed into the shield instead. Shade swept his blade back up, tearing the attacker open.

Next to her, Diaz’s twin blades were moving as if he were two men, blocking, chopping, thrusting, and slashing independent of each other. Whenever they bore down on a single target, that man fell in seconds. Blood was spattered over his face and forearms, but he didn’t seem to notice, black eyes fixed on the men coming at him.

Nora’s arm grew heavy. She looked down quickly to make sure not to stumble over one of the dead. Behind her, she heard and felt Owen’s ragged breathing. A cold sweat trickled into her eyes, stinging, and she had to blink it away, as her hands were busy with carnage. Owen’s spear buried itself into the face of another man. His opponent fell, collapsing with a wet scream of agony. The man’s sword hand was flailing, and Nora hacked at the arm’s elbow joint. Blood fountained from the stump in a hot red shower. A sword flashed toward her throat, and she knocked it back with an awkward swipe of her free arm, pushing the attacker onto Diaz’s blade while punching a hole into the man’s side. Another few minutes of this and she wouldn’t be able to lift her arms anymore. A badly parried sword thrust cut deeply into Shade’s arm and he grunted, shield faltering for a moment. Nora slashed across the attacker’s face. Shade’s shield came back up.

They wouldn’t make it down the causeway like this, let alone anywhere close to the wall where the mill was.

“We won’t make it,” she panted next to Diaz.

“We will make it,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I won’t make it,” she said.

The closer they got to the outer wall, the heavier the onslaught became. They were little more than halfway down the causeway, and already signs of fatigue were creeping in. It would only be a matter of minutes before someone made a fatal mistake.

“All right,” Diaz said. “We move into the next side street. Catch our breath.”

T
hey found temporary shelter in
a crumbled ruin of a house, recuperating from the broiling madness they had just faced on the causeway. Nora let her hands drop. She was bleeding from a dozen small wounds. Owen collapsed and leaned his head against a wall, gulping air like a fish on land. Shade followed suit.

“That was fucking insane!” Owen panted.

Diaz turned to look at Nora, eyebrows arched high. He had a cut across his thigh that bled freely but was too shallow to slow him down. Sweat washed down his blood-striped face, and he smudged it with his blood-soaked arm. Nora held up a weary hand.

“I did not swear this time,” she explained, trying to find her breath.

“It was insane,” Owen repeated. “How are we even alive right now? It’s a fucking miracle!”

“Swearing is a sign of stupidity and blah, blah, blah,” Nora said.

Owen grinned.

The sound of running feet thudded by the house. They all froze. Down the street, a woman shrieked shrilly. Owen and Shade got up without a word. Nora eyed the pile of stones and tiles from the caved-in roof. She stepped back, took a run at it, and scrambled up to the edge of the broken beam.

“Noraya!” She didn’t turn to look at Diaz’s disapproving face.

“It’s only three tiers down. I can see the mill from here.”

Men spilled forth from a gap just under the skeleton of the windmill on the top of the wall. A lot of men. But the gap was so tight, only two men at a time could pass through the funnel.

“Come down!”

“We can cut across here.” She pointed. “It’ll be easy to hold the gap.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Owen started. “One false step—”

But she was already balancing across the beam onto another rooftop. A few steps and she was down another tier of the lower courtyards. She accelerated her pace, arms spread wide for balance, muttering, “Don’t look down,” under her breath. Eyes fixed on the mill, she started running, jumping over a gap between houses and rolling off her momentum in one fluid movement. The night breeze whipped her hair behind her. This was easy. They should have done this earlier.

A shingle slid under her foot. She lost her balance and skidded on the slope of the rooftop, more shingles loosening like an avalanche. Despite leaping to the side to gain a foothold on the stable part of the roof, it felt like she was running on the spot. Slate shattered loudly in the street below her. There was a shout. She had been spotted. New plan. She stopped trying to reach steady ground—or, well, roof—and let herself slide on the stream of shingles, leaping off the rooftop as they washed over the edge like a stone waterfall. She made it over the street and onto the lower roof of the house on the opposite side.