7 - NOMARCH

The man—who had incredibly bright blue eyes—threw a knife.

The speed at which he got the thing out, cocked it back, and launched it straight at Justinia baffled me. It was so fast, so casual, that all I could do was watch as it spun through the air, catching the light of the sun, glinting, its lethal point blurring—

Justinia slapped it out of the air with one of her handaxes.

Somehow, she’d been even faster.

The knife spun off to the side, clattered against the road.

The moment it did so, all six of us burst into simultaneous movement.

Well. I say all six of us, but in truth, in the moment, I didn’t do much.

Time seemed to stop. My thoughts slowed. The pounding of my heart rattled my bones. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t a fighter. All of my instincts screamed at me to run, to turn around and sprint in the opposite direction. If I died now, the dream of the Order would do so with me, and all of their patience and effort would be wasted—and Marak would rule unopposed.

But even if I’d wanted to run, I wouldn’t have been able to. I felt rooted to the spot, imprisoned by my own inability to even process what was unfolding.

Justinia, however, had no such issues.

She lunged forward, caught Blue Eyes by his ankle, and hauled him off of his side with sheer brute strength. Blue-Eyes let out a squawk, reached for something at his hip—maybe another knife—but before he had a chance to do anything more, Justinia chopped into his skull with one of those vicious little axes of hers.

I’ll never forget the sound of her axehead cracking against bone.

Blue-Eyes went stiff. His legs jerked and spasmed. Should’ve worn a helmet, I thought to myself, and nearly laughed.

It was the first time I’d seen someone killed.

The brutality of it took me off guard. I tasted bile at the back of my throat and might’ve been sick if I wasn’t hyper focused on what happened next.

What happened next was this: the nomarch drew her sword, its crossguard fashioned into the spread wings of a golden eagle. Then, perfectly calm, as though she’d been in this position a thousand times before, she leaned over the side of her horse and swung her sword at Justinia’s head.

Justinia, who wore no helmet, and who wasn’t even facing the nomarch, was about to die.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Somehow, Justinia ducked. The sword passed harmlessly overhead. When the nomarch pulled it back, readying for another swing., Justinia’s arm shot out and she hooked the head of one ax over the edge of the nomarch’s sword. She yanked. The sword flew out of the nomarch’s hand. The nomarch’s eyes went wide.

A second later, Justinia threw her second ax.

It spun end over end. It did not have far to go.

It buried itself in the center of the nomach’s face.

The nomarch gurgled. Her other hand fell away from the reins. She tilted in her saddle, reached for the ax, as though still fully conscious and eager to pull the thing out of her face, and then slumped over. Her horse wheeled away from Justinia and began to trot in the opposite direction.

Leaving just two Autarch officials left.

The young boy, the one with the standard, was staring at Justinia with wide, terrified eyes. I wondered if that was exactly how I looked at the moment. We two seemed equally shocked by the outbreak of sudden violence, and were equally useless.

The other survivor, however, a cold-eyed woman with a sword in one hand and a shield strapped to her other arm, was now riding hard toward Justinia. The distance between her horse, a great, black beast, and Justinia, was rapidly dwindling.

Justinia was about to be stampeded.

Except, of course, she wasn’t, because as she’d already proven, she seemed completely aware of everything that was happening. She threw herself forward into an acrobatic roll, clutching her one remaining ax in a tight fist, and got out of the horse’s way.

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I was so surprised by Justinia’s speed and reflexes that it failed to occur to me that I, too, needed to get out of the way.

I was lucky that the horse stampeded past me.

I was less lucky when the rider jabbed the edge of her shield at my head as she passed.

The shield was solid wooden reinforced with a steel exterior. It slammed into my skull just above my right ear.

Stars exploded across my vision. Next thing I knew, I was on the ground, staring up at a bright sky full of soft, white clouds. I squinted across the harsh light of the sun. My ears were ringing. I could taste metal and realized a moment later that it was blood—that I’d bitten badly into my lower lip.

I tried to pick myself off of the ground, but the world chose that moment to start spinning wildly around me. I got to my hands and knees, wobbled, then threw up all over the grass. By the time I made it to my feet, the woman who’d hit me was no longer on her horse; now she and Justinia were circling each other maybe ten feet away. The woman lunged and tried to put the tip of her sword through Justinia’s belly. Justinia skipped aside and battered the women’s shield with her axe. She caught the rim of it—just as she’d caught the nomarch’s sword—and tried to similarly yank it free, but this woman was ready for that and managed to hold on to it.

I staggered to where the blue-eyed man’s corpse was turning the grass red. I bent down to free his sword from his scabbard—a mistake, because as soon as I tilted forward, my balance decided to give out on me, and once again everything started spinning. Still, I fought my way through the dizziness and freed the sword. Then I stared at its double-edged blade. What, exactly, was I going to do with a sword? Probably nothing. I’d never even held one before. It was surprisingly light, and I gave it a testing swing, and then turned back to where Justinia and the growling woman were still dueling.

Justinia was fast, skilled, and vicious.

Her opponent seemed just as good. The two were going back and forth, back and forth, swinging at each other, dodging, grunting and heaving as they sought to gain the advantage over each other. The Autarchy woman had her back to me. I took a step forward. Didn’t know how to actually use a sword but I figured that if I simply stabbed her with the pointy part from behind, that could only be helpful.

Three, maybe four steps separated me from the fighting women.

Could I even do it? Force sharpened steel through another human being? The thought made me nauseous. I tried to imagine metal sliding wetly through flesh, grinding against bone…

A rustle of cloth behind, followed by a soft foot fall.

Fuck. I’d forgotten about the boy.

I wheeled around just in time to see the flash of metal.

A sword. He’d just swung a gods damned sword at me!

I stuck my own sword out. Metal clashed against metal. A jolt shot up my arm, went into my shoulder, jarring my bones. Our swords were stuck together.

We made eye-contact. His eyes were even wider than they had been earlier, and I imagined that I probably looked the same, albeit a bit more dazed. The situation seemed suddenly comical, even a little stupid. I didn’t know this boy, he didn’t know me. We had no reason to be fighting—and what were we even fighting about? Probably he just wanted to get back home to his family and friends in one piece. Probably he had hopes and dreams just like everyone else—just like me. And, more than likely, under different circumstances, we’d have been able to meet in a bar as strangers and sit down at a table with a mug of beer each and have a good talk about life and its mysteries.

And yet here we were, grunting and heaving, pushing against each other, and trying to spill one another’s guts.

“I don’t…want…to do…this,” I hissed beneath deep breaths. Fighting, as it turned out, was an exhausting activity, and I hadn’t even really done anything. Didn’t help that, previous to that moment, I’d forgotten how to breathe at all.

“Then…don’t!” cried the boy, and then he stepped in, still pressing his weight against the sword, and slammed a knee up into my balls.

Sudden, crippling pain. I let go of the sword and backed away, then fell to the ground, teeth gritted so hard I thought they might explode in my mouth. I could smell the grass, could taste it. I could smell something else, too, something acrid, something embarrassing—I’d pissed myself. Gods damn it, I’d been knocked unconscious, pissed in my own trousers, kneed in the balls, and now some golden-haired boy was going to bury several feet of steel in my intestines.

What an awful day.

And what an awful start to my grand destiny.

The boy stood over me. He lifted his sword.

Get on with it, I thought to myself miserably.

Suddenly, the boy had an ax planted in the middle of his face, straight through his mouth and nose. Broken teeth and blood fell. The boy took a weak, disorientated step backward, tripped over his own feet, and hit the ground.

Justinia wandered over to him a moment later and, with one of the worst sounds I’d ever heard, ripped her ax out of his face. Casually, as though none of this was a big deal, she wiped the blade against her own trousers, frowned down at its edge, and then slipped it back through one of the loops at her waist.

I sucked in several deep breaths and got back to my feet. There was a terrible, dull ache right between my legs; I could even feel it in my belly. I wanted to throw up—but I had already had and suspected there was nothing left in me to even conjure up.

Justinia was already walking away from me, toward the corpse of the woman she’d been fighting just before.

The moment didn’t feel real.

The sun was bright. Birds were chirping. The grass was swaying in a cool, pleasant wind.

And four people were dead. Three corpses were scattered around me in the grass, feeding the earth with their blood. The fourth—the nomarch—was hanging awkwardly from her horse, stirrups not allowing her to actually fall off. The horse, no doubt confused, was trotting around in a circle.

“I think,” I said, “that I need to sit down.”

And then I collapsed.