Chapter 106. My Lesson Was Used in Combat, and I’ve Never Been Prouder or More Terrified

Chapter 106: 106. My Lesson Was Used in Combat, and I’ve Never Been Prouder or More Terrified

The attack began at the first gray of dawn, and from the lip of the east gully, I had a better view than I’d ever wanted.

We were already in position.

Garrick had led us down the slope in the last hour of darkness, with our boots wrapped in rags and our weapons muffled, and we crouched now among the boulders at the mouth of the culvert, about two hundred yards from the palisade, watching the gate.

The sky had gone the color of dishwater. A thin mist lay over the floor of the hollow.

Somewhere a bird started up and stopped, as if it had thought better of it.

Then Sharon walked out of the mist.

She was alone, walking at an easy pace down the old village road with her sword on her shoulder and her cloak off, like a woman strolling to a market.

The two guards at the gate saw her at about fifty yards, and one of them said something, and the other one raised a horn.

She didn’t even bother to slow down.

At twenty yards, she broke into a run.

At ten, she dropped her left shoulder, and the whole front gate of Site Nine, a double door of timber braced with an iron-bound crossbar thick as a man’s thigh, burst inward with a crack that rolled across the valley like thunder.

The first guard went down under the door.

The second got his horn halfway to his lips before Sharon’s pommel found his jaw, and the horn went spinning away across the dirt.

"Move!" Holt hissed beside me. "That’s the signal!"

"Wait," I whispered. "Where’s Eveline...?"

A bell started to ring, high and frantic, somewhere inside the palisade. Men were shouting and running.

I saw black armor surge out of the tents, and I saw Sharon spin to meet them with her bad arm tucked against her ribs and a cheerful, bloodthirsty grin on her face.

Then I saw a streak of gold go along the base of the wall, so fast that it looked like a trick of the light.

She came in from the side.

She hit the first tent in a long, low rush and slashed through the guy ropes without slowing, and the whole canvas collapsed on top of two knights who had been pulling on their helmets.

A crossbowman on a platform swung his weapon around to track her, and she cut the rope that held up his scaffold from forty feet away, with a throw of her short blade that I’d have sworn was impossible.

The platform tilted. The crossbowman made a high, undignified noise and slid off the edge.

"Four," I heard her gasp, over the din. "Two... Six..."

She was counting the names. I couldn’t hear the names, only the rhythm, but I knew it the way you know a song from the other side of a wall.

Then her boot caught a tent rope.

My heart stopped.

I saw it happen the way you see a glass tip off a table, slowly and with perfect clarity. Her foot went out, her arms flew up, and the ground came rushing toward her at the speed of a flat-footed horse.

A knight in black armor, who had been running at her with a spear, lunged to finish her.

She tucked her chin.

I saw it, and I swear I felt it in my own back... Her arms crossed over her chest.

Her shoulder met the dirt, and she rolled up the curve of her spine like a wheel, came out of it onto one foot, and drove the other boot straight up into the underside of the knight’s jaw with a crack that I heard from two hundred yards away.

He went over backward. His helmet rolled off and wobbled in the dust.

For about a second, the whole gate area went silent.

"DID YOU SEE THAT?!" Sharon bellowed.

She was laughing so hard that she nearly dropped her sword. "THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT! THAT’S MY GIRL!"

"I FELL ON PURPOSE!" Eveline shouted back, in an outraged, delighted, breathless voice that carried clearly across the hollow. "I MEANT TO DO THAT!"

"SHE MEANT TO DO THAT!"

I clamped my hand over my mouth, and Dessa, beside me, was shaking so hard that she had to bite her sleeve. Even Garrick’s shoulders were moving.

"That’s the signal," said Holt, in a strangled voice.

"I know."

"We should go."

"I know."

I couldn’t look away.

I watched Sharon cut through the last knights at the gate, and I watched a young soldier drop his weapon and raise both hands, and I watched Sharon turn on him with a face like a thundercloud.

"No!" she roared. "It’s too early!"

"I haven’t had breakfast! You don’t get to surrender before I’ve had breakfast!"

"Ma’am, I’m very sorry..."

"Run away and come back at noon!"

The soldier ran. I’m told he’s still running.

Sharon and Eveline went in through the shattered gate side by side, one hard and loud and red-haired, the other small and fast and gold, and vanished down the main stair into the smoke.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

Eveline was fine. She’d been fine for exactly four minutes.

I knew that, and it didn’t help at all.

"Okay," I said. "Culvert. Now."

The culvert was a throat of black stone, about four feet high, running east to west under the foot of the slope, and we went through it hunched over with our hands on the slimy walls and Garrick’s lantern swinging in front.

The grate at the mouth had been rusted shut for years. Wynn took the hinge off with a single twist of her pry bar, and none of us said a word about how easy that was.

Inside, the air smelled of old iron and wet stone. Ankle-deep water ran over the floor, and every few steps a drop of cold slid down the back of my collar.

After fifty yards, the roof lifted slightly, and Garrick slowed and held up the lantern.

"Look," he said softly.

There were drawings on the wall. Chalk, mostly, long faded to ghosts, but I could still make them out: a lopsided sun, a row of stick goats, a house with a crooked chimney, and a very large fish with a very small smile.

Some of them had names scrawled underneath in a child’s blocky letters. ’TOBIN. RUTH. RUTH. RUTH. MARTA’S DOG.’

About halfway along, I found a V, and it was upside down, and I didn’t say anything, and neither did he.

"We used to come down here after the spring rains," Garrick said. "When the water was low..."

"You could stay for hours and nobody found you." He put a hand on the wall and took it away. "I’d forgotten I told her she could draw."

"You didn’t mind?"

"I was seventeen... I thought it was the worst thing in the world, having a nine-year-old sister." He smiled faintly. "Come on... We’re losing time."

We moved on.

As we went, I let my attention slide inward, to the place where the Triune Link lived, and felt it open like a window.

Alicia, ten feet behind me, a warm, steady gold.

Laura, just behind her, quick and bright as a struck match.

They were both calm.

Both focused.

The panel flickered, and I let it.

[Triune Link: Stable.]

[Alicia: 3 meters. Condition: Excellent.

[Laura: 4 meters. Condition: Excellent.

[Eveline Whitehare: Not linked.]

I read that last line twice.

It was true, of course. It was just fact.

But I’d spent the last three days sitting next to her on a rock, and somewhere in that time I’d gotten used to the idea that I’d always know where she was, and now there was a gap in the world—the exact shape of a rabbit girl—and I couldn’t feel anything in it.

The fear came up through my chest like cold water. I imagined the front gate, the main stair, and a corridor in the dark with two people and nobody to watch their backs.

’Stop it,’ I thought. ’She’s with Sharon.’

’Sharon’s an SSS.’

’She’ll be fine.’

’She’s your friend,’ said another part of me, quieter. ’You can be scared for a friend.’

I let that be true for about three steps.

Then I put it away and kept walking.