I didn’t get to see what happened next. The archer behind me had fired another arrow. The whistle and thud of it sounded at my back, but it hadn’t struck me. It hit Brande in the hindquarters. My horse stumbled three paces before regaining his balance, and then he reared with pain. He rose straight up onto his back legs, and because I had my bow in my hands, I didn’t have the grip to stay on him. I plummeted to the earth as the archer’s next arrow pierced deep behind Brande’s front shoulder.
Shooting to my feet, I wound up once more and fired, hitting the archer with such impact it knocked his body backwards off his horse. But one of the others reached me, sticking out his foot and kicking me in the chest as he rode past. I hit the ground again and rolled backward, choking and struggling for air while I came to a stop. As I wheezed, I heard the thump of feet hit the ground nearby, as though one of the men had jumped off his horse. His boots stomped over to me, but the moment his hand gripped the back of my neck, I grabbed my dagger and spun, slashing across his thigh.
He stumbled back, clutching at the gaping wound. It caused a lull just long enough for me to glance ahead at Ava. She’d been knocked off her horse too, and now she had her sword drawn a good thirty yards away with Albus at her side, though the men looked far more hesitant to fight her than they did me. They wanted her alive.
The other two men who reached me flung themselves off their horses, while the one I’d slashed unsheathed his massive broadsword. He wasn’t the only one who was armed either. The second had an axe, and the third a war hammer that I imagined weighed at least half what I did. I scrambled sideways as I struggled to my feet, putting all three of them in front of me where I could see them. The one I’d cut was bleeding profusely, but I doubted it was enough to make him useless.
I reached my feet and held my dagger in my hand, watching closely to see what they’d do. They outnumbered me, and they were bigger and stronger, but each of their weapons was heavy. It would take them as long to wind up for a blow as it would for me to dodge, and that’s where my survival lay. In dodging. If I got caught once, I’d be done for.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, the one with the axe lunged forward, gripping it and rotating his torso as he came at me. I ducked around him as he swung diagonal, the bit of his axe cutting deep into the dirt where I’d been standing. Not a split second later there was a grunt from behind me. The man with the war hammer raised it with both his hands, and I had just enough footing to dash forward. I rolled toward the man pulling his axe out of the ground, sticking my dagger out as I did so it sliced through his calf, and the man’s shout mixed with the war hammer’s metallic clank as it made a small crater in the earth.
At the forefront of my mind was the intense desire to glimpse behind me and see how Ava was doing, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of these three for a moment. I had each of them in front of me again, my heart pounding as I prepared for the next attack. It came when the man with the broadsword ran at me, point of the sword first in such an unpredictable manner that I didn’t know which way to dodge. Not until the last moment. He swiped left, only to gain momentum to swing it hard around right. The feign nearly caused me to make the mistake of cutting left and throwing myself right into the blow, but as my feet skittered left, I caught the trick. In mid-motion I couldn’t change direction, so I dropped straight onto my back as the thick blade went sailing through the air above me.
The man used the momentum of his swing to heave the sword upward, taking it in both hands as it reached the apex above his head to bring it down with all his might. I rolled away from him, hardly avoiding the tip of the weapon as it struck the dirt, but the other two hadn’t been standing idly. As I stopped rolling, the axe man’s heavy boot stomped down on my arm, trapping it against the ground so that I couldn’t make another swing with my dagger. The shadow of the war hammer appeared high above my head, and I was so trapped that even though I turned onto my side to hug the boot holding me down, trying to keep the hammer from landing straight on my chest, the dull edge of it scraped against my back as it met the ground.
I tried to ignore the agony as I reached with my free arm behind the boot and grabbed my dagger. I brought it back, slamming the point of it into the leg of the man keeping me pinned. He fell backward, but before I could recover the dagger from his leg or move out of the way, a different boot connected with the already bruised spot on my back. I arched out of sheer pain, only to see that the other man was raising his broadsword. From my side, I kicked my leg up, getting him in the stomach so that he dropped his heavy weapon. As the man with the war hammer wound up again, I grabbed the broadsword, scrambling out of the way as the hammer smashed into the dirt once more.
I reached my feet and raised the sword defensively, watching the man I’d stabbed pull my dagger out of his leg and toss it away. The man with the hammer roared in frustration. He rotated at the hips as far back as he could, and because he wasn’t near enough to strike me, as he turned forward again he released the hammer from his grip. It came flying at me with such speed and force that I couldn’t have dodged it if I wanted to. The weapon bypassed the sword and collided with my already cut shoulder. I spun in a full circle from the impact, dropping the sword, and I hardly got a chance to register the intense and crushing pain of the blow before the man whose sword I’d taken grabbed the neck of my tunic, holding me in place so his fist could catch me square in the jaw.
He didn’t let me fall. He held me up, pulling his fist back again and sending it crashing into my stomach. Then he let me go, and I buckled over, staggered a few steps backward and fell to my knees. He picked his sword up off the ground while the other recovered his war hammer, and this was it. I was done for.
Unless…
Through the pain and the panic, my hand shot instinctively to the inside pocket of my vest. I didn’t have time to be afraid of the consequences, because if I didn’t do this now, I was dead. I grabbed the leather-wrapped necklace and pulled it out, undoing the bindings as fast as my fingers could. Right as the man with the broadsword began to wind up, I grabbed the pendant in my bare hand.
A cold spark shot up my arm, and it was so excruciating as it barreled across my chest and through the rest of my body that my hand clasped shut around the necklace. The pain traveled down my limbs, straight through to every end of my body and back again, and each direction it had gone reconnected at my chest. It felt like my heart was exploding. Every muscle tensed except my lungs, which released all the air I had in an agonized scream as the pressure built and built until I couldn’t contain it anymore. Until, all at once, it burst.
A pale blue lightning erupted out of me. It shot into the three men around me, and they stiffened at the current for a split moment before collapsing into convulsions. What was left of the surge barreled into my head, settling in my mind like a thrilling static fog. I don’t know how, but before I could even blink, I’d crossed the thirty yards to Ava on a bolt of lightning and without taking a step. I stopped behind the man dueling with her and grabbed the back of his head, releasing a fresh current and not even stopping to make sure it would kill him because I knew it would. Another blink and I was ten feet away at the second man that Ava had knocked down. I sent out a stream of sparks that wrapped around him, gripped him, and with a flick of my wrist I’d thrown him head first into a nearby boulder. The other one Ava had knocked unconscious, and I sparked to him in the span of a second and filled him with current. I looked around, examining the bodies to make sure none of them had any fight left.