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‘Will you follow us?’

‘If we can, my Queen. But we must be certain to hold until we see the portalway failing.’ He paused, and then added with his usual terseness, ‘It will be close.’Advertisement

Yan Tovis wanted to tear at her hair. ‘Then I begin-and,’ she hesitated, ‘I will talk to Pully and Skwish. I will-’

‘Do not defend what I have done, sister. The time to lead is now. Go, do what must be done.’

Gods, you pompous idiot.

Don’t die, damn you. Don’t you dare die!

She did not know if he heard her sob as she rushed away. He’d dropped his cheek-guards once more. Besides, those helms blunted all but the sharpest sounds.

The Road to Gallan. The road home. Ever leading me to wonder, why did we leave in the first place? What drove us from Gallan? The first shoreline? What so fouled the water that we could no longer live there?

She reached the ancient shell midden where she and the witches had sanctified the ground, climbed, achingly, raw with desperation, to join the pair of old witches.

Their eyes glittered, with madness or terror-she could never tell with these two hags.

‘Now?’ asked Pully.

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‘Yes. Now.’

And Yan Tovis turned round. From her vantage point, she looked upon her cowering followers. Her people, crowded along the length of beach. Behind them the forest was a wall of fire. Ashes and smoke, a conflagration. This-this is what we leave. Remember that. From where she stood, she could not even see her brother.

No one need ever ask why we fled this world.

She whirled round, drawing her blessed daggers. And laid open her forearms. The gift of royal blood. To the shore.

Pully and Skwish screamed the Words of Sundering, their twisted hands grasping her wrists, soaking in her blood like leeches.

They should not complain. That but two remain. They will learn, I think, to thank my brother. When they see what royal blood gives them. When they see.

Darkness yawned. Impenetrable, a portal immune to the water that its lower end carved into.

The road home.

Weeping, Yan Tovis, Twilight, Queen of the Shake, pulled her arms loose from the witches’ grip, and lunged forward. Into the cold past.

Where none could hear her screams of grief.

The mob hesitated longer than Yedan expected, hundreds of voices crying out upon witnessing the birth of the portal, those cries turning to need and then anger as the Shake and the islanders among them plunged into the gate, vanishing-escaping this madness.

He stood with his troop, gauging the nearest of the rioters. ‘Captain Brevity,’ he called over a shoulder.

‘Watch.’

‘Do not tarry here. We will do what needs doing.’

‘We got our orders.’

‘I said we will hold.’

‘Sorry,’ the woman snapped. ‘We ain’t in the mood to watch you go all heroic here.’

‘Asides,’ added Pithy, ‘our lads couldn’t live with themselves if they just left you to it.’

A half-dozen voices loudly objected to her claim, to which both captains laughed.

Biting back a smile, Yedan said nothing. The mob was moments from rushing them-they were being pushed from behind. It was always this way, he knew. Someone else’s courage, so boisterous in its refuge among walls of flesh, so easy with someone else’s life. He could see, in heaving eddies, the worst of them, and set their details in his mind, to test their courage when at last he came face to face with each one.

‘Wake up, soldiers,’ he shouted. ‘Here they come.’

The first task in driving back a charging mob was two quick steps forward, right into the faces of the foremost attackers. Cut them down, pull back a single stride, and hold fast. As the survivors were thrust forward once more, repeat the aggression, messy and brutal, and this time advance into the teeth of the crowd, blades chopping, stabbing, shield rims slamming into bodies, studded heels crunching down on those that fell underfoot.

The nearest ranks recoiled from the assault.

Then retaliated, rising like a wave.

Yedan and his troop delivered fierce slaughter. Held for twenty frantic heartbeats, and then were driven back one step, and then another. Better-armed looters began appearing, thrust to the forefront. The first Letherii soldier fell, stabbed through a thigh. Two of Brevity’s guards hurried forward and pulled the man from the line, a cutter rushing in to staunch the wound with clumps of spider’s web.

Pithy shouted from a position directly behind Yedan: ‘ More than half through, Watch! ’

The armed foes that fell to his soldiers either reeled back or collapsed at their feet. These latter ones gave up the weapons they held to more of the two captains’ guards, who reached through quick as cats to snatch them away before the attackers could recover them. The two women were busy arming others to bolster their rearguard-Yedan could imagine no other reason for the risky-and, truth be told, irritating-tactic. pqdm.com