Chapter 72. The Look She Wore Was the One I Knew: A Girl Watching the Worst Thing Happen

Chapter 72: 72. The Look She Wore Was the One I Knew: A Girl Watching the Worst Thing Happen

I know what this meant...

Somewhere... someone was waiting for all of us to be exactly where we were.

I’d been so focused on Sharon that I almost missed what Eveline did next, and I’ve regretted it ever since... because it was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen.

She’d been standing near the wagon with her sword drawn when I gave the order, and I’d half expected her to trip over her own feet.

Instead, she crouched, tucked her tail beneath her, and exploded. It looked like somebody had fired her from a catapult.

She shot across the camp in a pale blur, leapt over the stone breastwork without a pause, and hit the slope on the other side at a dead run.

The northern slope was steep and rocky, thick with pine and tangled scrub. Anyone else would have picked their way up it.

Eveline went straight up the middle, bounding from boulder to boulder with a series of long, flat leaps that carried her over thirty feet at a time.

Arrows rained down around her. I watched at least four of them hit the ground exactly where she’d been a split second before.

She didn’t even look at them.

She reached the tree line in about six seconds. A bow twanged, a shadow stirred, and a man in a green cloak stepped out from behind a trunk with a crystal-tipped arrow nocked and drawn.

He looked at her. And his mouth opened.

She hit him from the side so fast that he never finished the thought.

I saw her sword flash once, a short, flat strike with the hilt, and the archer folded like a dropped coat.

She caught his bow before it hit the ground and snapped it over her knee in the same motion. The second archer had already turned toward Sharon, who was still battling the soldiers on the road.

He sighted along his arrow, and I knew he was about to lose.

Eveline spun around.

That was her mistake... I knew it the instant I saw it.

She was so keen to stop the second shot that she pivoted too fast and too hard, and she didn’t look where she was going.

Her shoulder slammed into a heavy tower shield that had been propped against a boulder, one of the spares that Alicia had set aside.

The shield toppled, hit her ankle, and tangled with her feet. She lurched forward, trying to regain her balance, and her arm flailed out to catch herself.

It was a stupid, small, ridiculous accident, the sort of thing that happens to every one of us a dozen times a day.

She went sprawling, face down, directly in the line of fire, with her sword skittering away across the stones.

The archer released.

The arrow hummed through the air with a thin, hungry whine, a streak of blue light heading straight for the back of Eveline’s neck.

And then... A shadow crossed in front of her.

I don’t know how Sharon covered that distance. She’d been fifty yards away, surrounded by a dozen men, with her sword in her hands.

I fucking swear that I took my eyes off her for two seconds. But when I looked back, there was an empty circle in the road where she’d been standing and a trail of broken, groaning soldiers behind it, and Sharon herself was leaping the last few yards up the slope with her free arm out, catching Eveline around the waist and shoving her hard to one side.

The arrow hit Sharon in the right shoulder.

I heard the sound from where I was standing. It was a dull, sickening crunch, like a hatchet buried in a log.

The crystal tip punched through her leather brigandine and sank deep into the muscle, and the blue light flared along its shaft... drinking.

I saw it drag a faint orange glow out of her, a bright line of Aether pouring into the stone like water down a drain.

Sharon grunted. That was all.

A grunt.

Then she snapped the arrow shaft off with her left hand, took hold of the crystal head where it stuck out of her shoulder, and pulled it.

It came out with a spray of blood and a nasty wet sound. She dropped it on the ground, and she crushed it under her boot, and without so much as a glance at the wound, she turned and cut down the nearest black-armored soldier in a single stroke.

"Whitehare," she said, through clenched teeth. "Get up!"

Eveline didn’t move.

She was kneeling in the dirt with her hands out in front of her, staring at the blood that ran down Sharon’s arm.

It was dripping from her fingertips, spattering the rocks. Eveline’s face had gone as white as paper.

Her ears had dropped flat against her head, and her whole body was trembling in short, jerky bursts, like a candle in a draft.

’Oh no,’ I thought. ’She’s gone.’

I’d seen that look before... It was the same look she’d had in the training yard when she’d realized she’d forgotten her report.

It was the look of someone who has just watched the worst thing in the world happen and is going to keep watching until it consumes her.

I was too far away to reach her. And I was too far away to do anything but shout.

So I shouted at the top of my lungs.

"EVELINE!"

I put every ounce of breath I had into it, and my ribs screamed in protest. But at this point... I didn’t give a fuck about it.

I saw her head jerk, just slightly... toward the sound.

"The third archer!" I yelled. "Left slope, forty paces!"

"He’s drawing on Alicia right now! You promised to cut that lane!"

She stared at me across the battlefield with huge, empty eyes.

"Breathe!" I shouted. "In for four!"

"You know how it goes! In for four, and then go!"

For a second, I thought she hadn’t heard.

The wind carried my voice away, and the battle roared and clanged around us, and she just knelt there... shaking, with her mouth half open.

Then I saw her chest move.

It was a slow, deep, shuddering intake, and her lips shaped the numbers with it. ’One. Two. Three. Four.’

Her shoulders squared. And her eyes were focused again.

The tremor in her hands stilled, bit by bit, until her fingers curled into fists. She gave one sharp, definite nod, and she looked at Sharon’s bloody shoulder and then at the dark forest and said something I couldn’t hear.

Then she vanished.

SWOOOSH!

I mean it quite literally.

One moment there was a rabbit knight kneeling on the hillside, and the next there was a patch of disturbed air and a ripple in the grass, running upslope in a perfectly straight line.

I’d never seen speed like that... The grass bent flat in her wake, and the gravel kicked up in a long spray, and the pines at the top of the slope swayed as though a gust had passed through.

The third archer never saw her coming. He was a thin man in a hooded cloak, crouched behind a boulder with his bow drawn tight.

He had just released an arrow toward the wagon when a boot arrived in the side of his head. It was a high, spinning kick, delivered at a speed that seemed to defy the laws of nature, and it lifted him clear off his feet and slammed him into a tree.

Eveline landed lightly on the balls of her feet and snatched his bow out of the air. She glanced at it, tossed it away, and sprinted the other way.

She wasn’t finished.

Down at the water’s edge, at the foot of the great black cliff, I could see a tall figure in a long gray robe standing on a flat rock with a rod in his hand.

It was a brass rod, much like the one from Blackthorn, with a glittering blue crystal on top, and he was waving it in slow, complicated circles.

Every time he moved it, one of the monsters on the shore changed direction.

’There’s your puppeteer,’ I thought.