Jacques tastes terrible, like dirt, and salt, and something sour, and I want to throw up. But before I can do so much as gag, Jacques all but throws me to the ground with a yelp. I collapse in the grass, unable to catch myself in time—though at least I don’t hit my head. My body aches, but my mind is intact enough for me to go for Martin next, and I stumble to my feet. As Jacques swings out Jacques’ fist—at me?! No, Peter, who’s lunging at Jacques—Martin slides from Jacques’ back limply, and I leap out to catch his head like it’s a football or something.

Well, touchdown. I got him. I scramble to grab him by the shoulders next and begin dragging him desperately out of the area, my muscles straining as I fight to pull his dead weight through the field. We’re by some woods, I realize, and my instincts scream for me to hide him among the trees. As I struggle to reach the nearest bushes, I watch as Peter’s sword sinks into Jacques’ side, Jacques’ huge fist striking nothing but air. I flinch as if it’s happening to me, muttering blanket apologies to no one in particular. A few of the guards are taking on another orc, and Leon has a single opponent of his own, who strikes the earth with a quake-like thud with their huge wooden club. A guard stumbles, and I look away right as a big axe comes slicing down toward him. The crack of bone, the gurgling of blood, the shouts, I block it all out, concentrating on moving Martin.

This I can do—I can do this. At least, I hope I can.

I look up just in time to see an orc headed my way, a scowl etched across their bloodied face, but they don’t make it far, as Leon intercepts them, swinging his sword hard enough to sink it into their side with disturbing ease. As the orc lets out a heavy cough and turns their attention to Leon, I avert my eyes, swinging my gaze back down to Martin’s face, focusing on the peacefulness there and what I can control, and I keep dragging him backwards with me into the shadow of a tree.

It’s truly dark out now, thankfully, so I feel we already have good cover. I manage to get him around a spindly bush, but I don’t stop there, pulling him slightly downhill into a dip in the ground. Adrenaline removing all thoughts from my head, rending me all action, I scramble around to collect some branches that I can use to hide him, breaking some off nearby bushes as quietly as I can, and even scrape dirt loose to dust over him in a sad attempt at camouflage. I continue until my hands are stained, my nails blackened, my fingers and arms stinging from the effort. The sound of yelling, booming voices and footfalls, and the panicked whinnies of the stagecoach horses are all muffled to my ears as I focus solely on Martin, on me, on keeping us out of sight.

I can’t fight. It’s up to them now.

I crawl between a tree and bush nearby, muddying my face with my hands, and wait, my eyes locked on Martin’s unconscious body, now well hidden. Don’t die. Don’t die. Not here. Not in Alvione. Not anywhere.

The metallic musk of blood finally reaches me. Human, orc, who knows, but it’s not mine, and everyone bleeds the same. There is less yelling now, probably fewer people who can, but now there are pained groans too, undoubtedly the heaves of deathrattles woven in beneath the meaty thunks of weapons connecting with flesh and the hard snapping of bones.

I’ve never been in a fight before, not in school or in life, and I’ve certainly never been in any type of medieval battle. It sounds more like a horror movie than an action flick, and my brain betrays me with replays of what I’ve unfortunately seen already: iron slicing through skin, expressions of pure terror, the axe coming down on that guard. I’m reminded of Iliyan with a sword through his middle, of blood on lips, on bodies, on faces.

It’s getting quieter now. I can make out Peter’s voice, so I at least know he’s still alive, and there’s no franticness in his tone, not even now, so I hope that means things are turning in our favor. But I can’t know that for sure, I can’t know if it’s safe to come out, and I can’t really fathom that this is a fight we’d win.

There were at least five orcs that I saw and surely more I didn’t see, and they were double the size of the men we’d brought with us. I wonder how many guards are left. I wonder if Leon is still alive. I wonder if Martin will wake up sooner rather than later.

And then I hear it—the hurried, light steps of someone nearing us. Though they sound human, I tense anyway, but then they pass us, and I see a glimpse of a man in the Alvione guard uniform, that signature crimson, fleeing.

Shit. Not a good sign. But let him run. I would run if I were him. Hell, I basically did.

Unfortunately, he’s followed by the loud thuds of a following orc, who enters my line of sight next. Their strides are not clunky, but almost elegant, huge and at twice the pace of the unarmed guard’s. I watch helplessly as they catch him, not much further into the trees than I am, and lift him with ease. Both are unarmed, ignoring the sword sticking out of the orc’s gut like a toothpick, but that makes it even more clear how this will go. This time, I don’t look away—even my eyes feel frozen in place—and I barely flinch as the orc swings the man like a baseball bat into the trunk of a tree. The sound is like nothing I’ve ever heard before—like the crack of lightning mixed in with the crunch of an axe splitting a log—and the man goes limp.

I’ve seen another person die. I don’t know what to do with that, what to make of it, but I’m out of time, because the orc is headed back my way, the guard’s corpse discarded on the ground like an unfavored doll. They don’t see me, but they are moving in a straight line toward where Martin is hidden, and I realize with a surge of panic that they’re going to step on him.

Against my better judgment—really, despite any thought at all—I feel my legs surge to life, and I spring forward, throwing myself over Martin as if that’d do a damn thing, and the orc finally sees me. They look at me with a flash of surprise, confusion, though not enough to break through the clear determination to kill and keep killing, etched across their face in hard lines.

I’m gonna fucking die.

Stolen novel; please report.

My girl-in-a-big-city training kicks in, and I scream wordless nonsense. It doesn’t stall the orc’s stride as they continue toward me, and I think it again—

I’m gonna fucking die. Martin’s going to fucking die.

Then, something I can’t explain, something my mind struggles to comprehend: the thick branch of a nearby tree swings down and collides with the orc, shoving them away. They stumble and fall onto their back, and a burst of wildflowers explodes through their chest, through their hands, through every bit of exposed skin, the multicolored petals dripping red but somehow still intact.

“Rose?” a voice gasps. I turn to her—Miri. Her skirts are dirtied, but she seems otherwise unscathed, her eyes sparkling with a bit of green before the glow fades and they return to normal.

“Miri,” I reply stupidly, staring up at her.

“We must leave,” she says. “There is no hope for the others.”

No hope? I look back down at Martin, and before I can feel concern for Leon, for Peter, for the guards, I feel relief for Martin. At least he’s still alive.

I think.

“We must leave.” Miri’s words sound wrong to me, selfish, fucked. And I realize that I can’t just give up on Peter and Leon. Before I can say anything, she looks me over and adds, “Are you injured?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think so. But Martin . . .” I motion to where he’s lying beside me. Miri blinks as she realizes he’s half-buried there.

“Why did he not teleport you both away? What happened?”

“I don’t know. He got knocked out so fast.”

Miri scoffs, and for the first time, I see a bit of an attitude on her face. “Useless,” she mutters. “We cannot carry him. It will slow us down. We must leave now.”

I stand, trembling. “I can’t do that.”

“Well,” she says, a distasteful frown contorting her face into a mask of bitterness, “you will have to.”

Miri is a spy. The thought comes crashing in with certainty. All that matters to her is my survival. Not what I feel or what I want. Just that I live. And that isn’t good enough for me.

Martin needs me. Peter and Leon too. I need them. We’re friends now, aren’t we? My friends.

My eyes travel to the now dead orc on the ground, to the sword buried in their side, loosened slightly from the flowers that have pierced through their skin. I walk over stiffly and put my hands around the hilt.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

I can still hear the others fighting. They’re not dead yet. And in that moment I decide that I won’t hide anymore. I won’t be the kind of person who leaves people behind. I won’t flee while they’re still fighting. Even if I’m fucking useless with a sword, the orcs don’t know that, and maybe I can use that to my advantage.

With a lurch, I pull the sword from the corpse. It’s heavy, so fucking heavy, but I manage to right it and find some kind of balance in doing so. There isn’t much to say about it—the blade is simple, silver, stained so badly by blood that it looks dyed red in parts. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a weapon. “Stay with Martin.”

“What?”

“I’ll yell if I need help.”

“I cannot leave you to face them alone.”

I stare down at the dead orc, and my mind races at her words. Miri could have done so much more. So why doesn’t she? Her power is insane—and if she had helped them fight, they might have been in a better situation now. But she must not be able to teleport, or she would have grabbed me and taken me elsewhere against my will by now, so I still have some control here.

I can’t pretend to know her intentions; I only know my own. And I’m going back in there before I can talk myself out of it. Because Martin will be safe here—that’s what I try to convince myself—even if Miri follows me instead. Please, let him be safe here.

Ignoring the wide-eyed look on her face, ignoring my fears for Martin, ignoring the turning in my stomach, I begin toward the noise, the fight. My steps are heavy, the sword weighing me down, but the still surging bits of adrenaline rushing through my veins keep me moving forward until I break through the trees and see what’s left of my people and the orcs.

Dead guards litter the ground. A few orcs have been downed as well. None of them appear to be moving, and the vast amount of blood in the surrounding area makes me feel they won’t be any time soon, if ever again. It’s a bizarre scene, one my brain still struggles to see as anything other than some dark fantasy film projected out before me. But I snap to as I see Leon pulling his weapon from one of the dead orcs, his clothing spattered a dark red. When he sees me, his eyebrows scrunch up with concern, and his mouth falls open, but he doesn’t say anything. Peter is soloing some orc that doesn’t look done quite yet, even as their comrades lie dead or heaving with gasping breaths from their injuries as they try to get themselves ready to get back into the fight. Four left. Four orcs. I guess there were more than I saw at the start.

And three of us. One of whom can’t use a sword (me).

But I raise it high anyway as I see the orc throwing their large fist at a clearly exhausted Peter, and I let gravity take it down into the orc’s side. It barely marks a mark, slicing only maybe a few inches in, but it’s enough to throw off the orc’s aim, and Peter stumbles away, out of its range.

I did it. I did it? It all happened so fast.

Peter looks at me with surprise. “Rose?”

Leon seems even more confused. “‘Rose’?”

I manage to tear the sword free from the orc’s flesh and swing it back around to hit them again, but then they look at me and I realize it’s Jacques.

And though I’d given Jacques my name in an attempt to get Jacques to see me as a friend, I find my strategy from before backfiring on me—because now Jacques isn’t just some orc to me. Jacques is Jacques. And I hesitate.

That’s all it takes. The sword clatters from my grasp as I’m lifted up in the air roughly, Jacques’ thick fingers squeezing around my midsection. Jacques’ eyes are bloodshot and angry, and I know Jacques is not my friend.

I’m dead, I realize. I shouldn’t have hesitated. I shouldn’t have even tried. I open my mouth to scream out for Miri, but Jacques’ grip is too tight, smothering me, keeping the air from my lungs.

I look at Peter, at Leon, I think of Miri, of Martin, and for some reason, my mind conjures up the image of Snowy, purring in my lap, my fingers trailing through her soft white fur. She always liked me better than Adam.

I did this to myself.

If Jacques is breaking my ribs, I can’t tell, but I certainly can’t breathe, and though I know Peter and Leon will likely do something to help me, I can’t see too well anymore, and it’s not just because it’s night—I realize I’m blacking out.

Then there is the sound of something whizzing through the air, and I find myself gaping down at Jacques hand, at the blurry sight of an arrow suddenly lodged in it. It’s a pretty arrow, I think, such pretty feathers, and then I’m falling to the ground again, and everything goes dark.