Promise of Blood

“Run,” Bystre instructed. “Fall back to the next barricade!” he shouted at nearby volunteers.

Bystre grabbed Nila by the arm. “We have to find Jakob,” he said. He spun suddenly, his plumed hat falling from his head as an Adran soldier appeared from a nearby alleyway. Bystre drew his sword, parrying the thrust of a bayonet. The soldier cracked him across the jaw with a rifle butt. Bystre fell to the ground. The soldier stood over him, bayonet ready.

Nila could barely lift the paving brick she grabbed. She swung it up over her head and brought it down on the back of the Adran soldier’s neck. The man collapsed to the ground without a sound. Bystre held his jaw and tried to shake off the blow.

She pulled him to his feet.

“There!” she said. She caught sight of Jakob running across the street, closer to the barricade. A bullet kicked up dirt in front of the boy, startling him, and he fell with tears in his eyes.

Adran soldiers had taken the barricade. They were barely a hundred feet from Jakob. Nila was half that distance. She lifted her skirts and ran. She could hear Bystre right behind her. The soldiers on the barricade were more interested in securing their victory than they were in a stray child in the street. Nila fell to her knees beside Jakob and swept him up in her arms. Bystre helped her to her feet, and they both ran toward safety.

Nila stopped short when she realized Bystre was not beside her anywhere. She turned to see him staring back toward the fallen barricade.

“It’s lost,” she said.

“Him!” Bystre drew his sword.

“What are you…” She saw it. Field Marshal Tamas stood on the barricade with his men, surveying the street beyond. Beside him, she saw someone familiar. The bearded sergeant who had saved her that night in the townhouse kitchen.

“Bystre, we have to get Jakob to safety.”

“Nothing is safe from that treacherous bastard.”

“General Westeven…”

“The General is dead.”

Nila didn’t know what to say. She knew General Westeven had been wounded at the parley, but the royalists had been told he’d survived. Only he could match someone like Field Marshal Tamas in strategic maneuvering. Now their cause was truly lost.

Nila looked toward the next barricade. Royalists waved her forward to the relative safety. She clutched Jakob to her chest. He held his hands over his ears, and she could feel his shoulders heave as he sobbed.

“Bystre,” she said, pleading. Where was Rozalia? She was their only hope now. She could bring down her Privileged sorceries on Tamas and his army and drive them from the streets.

Bystre snatched up a spent rifle from a dead soldier and checked the bayonet. He dusted the powder from the pan and, clutching the rifle with both hands, charged alone toward the fallen barricade.

The bearded sergeant pointed toward Bystre and lifted his rifle. Field Marshal Tamas turned. He tilted his head, as if bemused by the enraged Hielman rushing toward him. He drew a pistol and pulled the trigger. Bystre jerked and fell, his body rolling once with forward momentum before twitching and falling still. The bullet had pierced his eye at more than one hundred paces. Field Marshal Tamas waved the smoke from the barrel of his pistol.

Nila screamed.

She saw the field marshal gesture toward her and waited for another bullet to come and pierce her brain. It never came. Instead, Adran soldiers ran down the barricade and toward her. She stared at them, in shock, until she remembered Jakob in her arms.

Nila turned to run to the next barricade. She had a lead on the Adran soldiers, but they were far faster. She tripped and struggled on the hem of her dress. Forty feet away, the royalists fired from behind the next barricade to give her cover. Bullets ricocheted off the paving stones around her, the scent of gunpowder making her choke. Thirty feet to go.

Someone hit her from behind. She fell, turning to see Adran soldiers upon her. She screamed and struggled, but Jakob was pulled from her arms. One of the soldiers turned to her, bayonet ready to shove through her belly. He twisted the rifle at the last second and pushed her away with the stock and the soldiers retreated, taking a screaming Jakob with them.

Nila struggled to her feet and staggered after them. They couldn’t take him. Not now, not after she’d protected him this long. She stopped beside Bystre’s body. He lay on his belly, his one remaining eye staring sightlessly across the street. Flies had already started to buzz around the bloody hole in his skull. She fell to her knees and vomited.

Someone pulled her out of the street and into a rubble-strewn alley before the shooting resumed.

Nila sagged against the partially intact wall of a tenement. “You let them take him,” she spat at her rescuer.

Rozalia glanced out into the street, her gloved fingers poised at the ready until some unapparent danger had passed. She let her hands fall.

“This is no longer my fight,” Rozalia said.