Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 (11 page)

His eyes were focused upward with a tactical precision—he was looking at the sky, at the enemy. That is, until she had blocked his vision with her head and a riot of curls that had managed to escape her regulation bun, despite her best efforts to corral them. A sad smile plastered on her face, a smile at Ezekiel’s defiance. Useless defiance, but defiance all the same. Sara wasn’t one to ignore a threat. But even she couldn’t fight this. If the Kade assassins in the sky didn’t slaughter them immediately and she escaped into the swamp, she knew two things: she would be forced to leave Ezekiel behind, and the damned swamp would kill her anyway.

The flesh of the animals was poisonous. The plants were carnivorous. The earth was treacherous and the sky was suffocating Everything in the swamp was trying to kill them. In fact, this clearing was the most peaceful time she’d had in the swamp yet.

Sometime between when the captain had come over and Ezekiel had regained consciousness, she had resigned herself to the fact that death from sky assassins was preferable to a slow death from the swamp. So she didn’t look up as she waited for arrows to fall or a blade to pierce her back. Long minutes passed, and Ezekiel’s determined gaze never wavered from the sky to the right side of her face.

But nothing happened. No arrows fell. No shouts emitted. No swords came down. Instead, Sara saw hope bloom in Ezekiel’s eyes while his cheeks began to shine with silent tears that tracked down his face.

“What?” she breathed.

“Look,” commanded the captain from where he stood by her and Ezekiel’s side.

And for the first time, Sara Fairchild followed his command without reproach or hesitation.

She looked up and her heart flipped. She didn’t dare believe it.

And what she saw in the sky brought tears into her eyes, too.

Tears of hope. Tears of change.

On the largest of the floating objects above them, a large flag tossed in the wind. On that flag was a crest—a golden lion rampant on a banner of blood red. The crest of the Algardis Empire.

The crest of the Empress Beatrice Athanos Algardis.

The crest that represented safety. The crest that represented home.

Cheers erupted all around Sara as the mercenaries realized that they were saved. The ragtag band of stragglers tumbled into the clearing, jumping up and down and waving their arms as finally the rains abated, and Sara was able to more clearly see and define the objects above for what they were as they descended from the clouds and through the canopy—airships.

Half a dozen of Algardis airships came down upon them from the sky above.

S
ara let out a shaky breath that she didn’t know she was holding. The airships swept forward until each one rested about twenty-five feet above the earth with a distance at of least six yards between it and the next airship. Without delay, rope ladders descended from the side of each vessel and men quickly scaled their way down to the ground.

Before the first boots hit the ground of the wet swamp, Sara looked up at Captain Simon as she felt an emotion akin to disbelief sparking up within her, surely displaying itself in her eyes while her brow furrowed. “You knew they were coming. You knew the airships were in the area.”

He raised a red eyebrow, presumably at her tone. “One would think you would be happy about that.”

Her stony stare said she was anything but.

He paused a moment and then spoke carefully. So carefully that Sara had to look at his stance and the way his hands gripped each other tightly in front of his waist to try to gauge his temperament. Oh, she knew he was angry. But the captain was as smooth a liar as he was as consummate a coward. His face was a mask that she couldn’t search for clues—a wrinkle in his brow, for instance, that might indicate confusion, or a twitch in his mouth that would indicate doubt. None of that appeared. His tone, like his face, was stripped of emotion. The words that flowed from his mouth were almost dull in their even cadences. Neither tight with anger nor hissing with fury.

So Sara watched him. The whole of his body, or at least what she could see of it. She had been trained in the art of enhanced interrogation. Torture, if you wanted to be less polite about it. Because of that training Sara could see the close to invisible signs in his stance, the occasional jerk of a fingertip before he stilled, and the almost impassive look he gave her. She watched as a thick vein in his neck throbbed with checked anger as he sawed off each word in emphasis.

“I led my people to safety.”

Saying it forcefully won’t make it any more true than false
, she thought wryly.

Sara knew that the bite that laced each of his words was meant to tell her that she should be careful.

He clearly had no idea who he was dealing with or what she had been through. If she could face down her dead mother and not break, she could certainly deal with a cowardly and arrogant captain, although she wasn’t quite sure which trait she despised more at the moment.

Although she was about an inch shorter—and seated on the ground, to boot—Sara stared at her pale and sweating captain without flinching. Her eyes locked on his like a hawk sighting its prey, and there was no doubt in her mind who was predator and who was prey in this relationship. What she lacked in height, she made up in demeanor, and Sara didn’t bother to hide her emotions or restrain her temperament. She wasn’t an angry person by nature. She’d had a happy childhood. Strict, but fair. Still, she’d never been able to abide fools, and when Sara Fairchild couldn’t stomach someone, that person
usually
went running in the other direction.
Fast
. She had no compunctions about following her instincts, and distaste could easily morph into outright dislike if the mood suited her. She didn’t randomly kill individuals for the fun of the activity. But she didn’t shy away from what she had to do either.

As long as whatever “had to be done” didn’t a) summon her to the edge of the abyss where her berserker nature waited, and b) involve her mother in any way. The latter was no longer a problem. The former? She was seeing more and more every day that perhaps the berserker inside of her was less a curse and more a blessing in disguise. Although, she had yet to test her berserker nature, and she had no desire to do so anyway. But she was convinced that dying on the field of battle was a far more preferable end to the one she had been facing every day of this hellish march. Various specters of death had claimed many of her comrades in the swamp. A slow death
—
by starvation, or poison, or putrefaction, or simple suffocation
—
was never one she would willingly choose over dying on the field of battle. None of those was a noble death. None of those befitted the daughter of a Fairchild, a noble line of soldiers and warriors. No. If she was going to die, she wanted to die with a blade in her hand and the roar of battle on her breath. At least then she would know she had died righteously.

Unlike my father
, Sara whispered to herself in a small corner of her mind. She didn’t voice it. But she knew. If she could die in the service of her empire, even as a lowly mercenary, it might right a small bit of her father’s shame. It might take the censorious whispers of the Fairchild name from the streets. It might help them to once more be on the right side of the law.

But for now
, Sara thought with clinical detachment,
I will not die. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not before I find out why my father disgraced our family and our empire. Not before I find out what the mercenary company is hiding and why I can’t find any record of his fall. This day is not the day to die. This is the day to be subservient to a disgusting coward of a man I must call my captain.

A man that she couldn’t forget was a battle mage himself. With more skill and more experience in field combat, if none of the necessary compunctions of morality and leadership that were supposed to come alongside that experience.  Disgust at that roiled above her like a tremulous and unseen cloud, but Sara didn’t even flinch. She also didn’t bow to his demeanor, even though that would have been the prudent thing to do. Her idea of subservience was not socking in him in the jaw like he so assuredly deserved. Instead, she glared up at him with fierce eyes and a defiant tilt of the chin. Somehow, she held her tongue. That part wasn’t in her nature. The inner side of her mouth twitched as she fought to keep her lips closed and her teeth from either baring in a grimace or opening to allow traitorous whispers to issue from her lips. She could feel the muscles in her whole body clenching from the effort it took to restrain herself.

Her mother’s voice appeared in her mind as if she stood at Sara’s shoulder and leaned down to whisper,
“Be careful, Sara-girl. Pride comes before the downfall, and showing your anger to a man who is your superior will get you worse off than you are now.”

Once upon a time, her mother would have never let such cowardly drivel cross her lips. That had been before she was beaten and broken by the system. A city that hissed her name like a curse. An empress that turned her back on a family that had served honorably for generations. A guild that had used every under-handed trick and outright thievery to wrest her husband’s land, titles, and money from a grieving widow’s hands. A world that had turned its back on her.

All of that, however, hadn’t made her mother turn her back on the world. She still cared for the sick as she could, turned no one away from her doorstep on a bitter cold night’s eve, and nodded in recognition to everyone who did the same to her. But it had stolen the joy of life from her and the
innocence
that her mother’s presence exuded with every passing moment. You couldn’t be innocent when you were thrown out on the streets and forced to face the world as it was. Hard. Bleak. Unforgiving.

Sara had never really considered herself innocent, not even as a child. Naïve? Yes. Unworldly? Absolutely. But innocent? No. Innocence was for children who hadn’t been taught how to hold a blade in their hand at the age of three. Innocence was for a child who hadn’t cut the throats of a cow, a chicken, a pig, a horse, and a human cadaver, all before the age of ten so that her father could show her how a knife felt going through skin and, what’s more, what death felt like. Her father had been a strong believer in giving her experience. Experience to know that when her blade swept out to bring death, it was through a living being that it would cut. A living being whose soul would leave their bodies as the light in their eyes dimmed. A living being whose blood would spurt in an arc no matter how shallow or deep she cut their necks. A living being whose empty shell of a body would fall to the ground with one swift cut from her blade.

Now her mother’s voice was whispering in her head to watch herself. Not just in her words but in her
mannerisms.
Sara knew what that meant—it was in the defiant tilt of her head, in the brazen hatred in her eyes, in the strong and unbowed arrow of her back. But for Sara Fairchild, that would be like trying to change her very being. Besides, she was too tired and too over-wrought to be
careful
. Who was he to warn her away with tone and inflection? She’d faced down worse men, the kind who’d wanted her dead. Compared to that, what could the captain do? Demote her? It wasn’t like she wouldn’t welcome it; demotion meant a lower rank with fewer responsibilities. That would free her to pursue her cause, the cause of finding out the true reason behind her father’s death. She didn’t allow herself to hope, not even in the deepest reaches of her heart, that she could clear his name. All she wanted was the truth.

So Sara was a little tired of lies and deception, especially from red-headed captains with egos too big for their britches. When Sara spoke this time with stiff shoulders, it was with a glint of ire in her eyes. Let him think she was challenging him. Let her see what
he
was made of.

“You led us on a march of death knowing that salvation and yes,
hope
, could have kept the mercenaries alive for just a day or an hour longer. Too many of them gave up their lives because they never dreamed of escaping this perilous swamp. They saw no way out and no reason to go on. You
knew
that,” she said.

Anger sparked in his eyes. “It was my
leadership
that got us to the rendezvous point.”

“It was your
cowardice
that got us here,” she hissed back, “You knew all along that there was hope for salvation. But you didn’t see fit to share it with your troops. You let us believe we were slogging through an endless swamp with no visible aim, just so you could seem the proud messiah upon arrival.”

A tic in his jawline told her she was right. Sara snorted. She was no fool. She’d stopped believing in the perfection of mercenary or imperial soldier leadership when her father was executed and she was cast aside like so much vermin beneath their boots.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the airship soldiers were getting closer. They were having a tough time with the mud, but their trajectory said they were heading straight for Sara Fairchild, the captain she was arguing with, and the forgotten as well as dying curator in her arms.

The captain saw the incoming soldiers as well, judging by the flicker of his eyes as he glanced away and back towards her. However, that didn’t stop him from stepping towards her with a terse growl. His fist clenched by his side, he said, “You may have your opinion, young mercenary, but I had my orders. As your captain, I’d advise—nay, I
order
you to watch your tongue.”

“You watch yours,” Sara snapped back quickly. She’d borne a grudge against the man since she had learned he’d hidden while his men and women died by the hundreds on the field of battle, and now this...it was just all too much for her. But fortunately for Sara Fairchild, she’d always had impeccably bad timing, and as of that moment their ability to have a tense but semi-private conversation was up. The landing party was just steps away. Sara might have disagreed with the captain personally and professionally, but she wasn’t stupid enough to do so in front of Algardis soldiers. She had once dreamed of becoming one of their fabled rank, sworn in service to the empress and the empress alone. But she was a mercenary now and a mercenary alone. So she would honor her duties and respect the captain in public...for now.