And the Kez cavalry
Tamas searched the line of cuirassiers. In a powder trance, he could see the faces of each man, even at this distance. But picking out one face among so many was nearly impossible. “I wonder where Beon will position himself,” Tamas said. He pointed with his small sword to the southwest. “There, likely, so that he can sweep with his cuirassiers around the barriers we’ve set up and join his dragoons in the slaughter.” Tamas turned to his bodyguard. “Tell me we’re going to win, Olem.”
“‘We’re going to win, Olem,’” Olem said, putting his last cigarette in his mouth.
Tamas stepped onto a rocky outcropping to give himself a better view of the battlefield.
“Men,” he shouted, “take the line!”
Nila was pushed into a doorway by one of the soldiers.
She squeezed her eyes closed, fighting tears she knew so desperately wanted to come. To have escaped soldiers so many times and then fall into Lord Vetas’s clutches, and now this? Who were these people? What did they want?
A man grabbed her by the arm and shoved her up a narrow flight of stairs. They went up two floors, shouting and cursing the whole way. Nila fought them out of instinct more than anything else. She clawed at a soldier’s face, only for her arm to be bent around behind her and her face shoved up against the wall.
“Pit, this girl is a hellion,” the man said. She tried to twist in his grip. He put pressure on her arm and she gasped from the sudden pain. It felt as if it would snap at any moment.
She was thrown into the corner of a small, windowless room. The plaster was yellow and bare, the only furniture a squat table with a stub of candle.
They hadn’t gone far before finding this building, not more than a couple of blocks. Nila had no idea if this was planned, but there seemed some confusion among the soldiers.
Lord Vetas was pushed to the ground beside her. She stared at him — the only familiar face in this chaos. He was calm, collected. Completely unperturbed. Nila hated that she looked to him for some kind of reassurance. She knew none would come.
“Watch him,” the woman said. She was young, and could not have been more than ten years older than Nila, but her eyes were as cold as Vetas’s. Nila had heard someone call her Fell. The soldiers seemed hesitant to follow her orders, but after Fell gave them a long stare, they turned to watch Vetas.
Fell had drawn a pair of wrist irons from beneath her coat. They weren’t typical irons, even Nila could see that. Instead of a horseshoe-looking metal with a crosspiece, they were thick bands with only a single loop of chain between them. The two soldiers turned Vetas roughly onto his stomach, and the irons were snapped around his wrists. He rolled over, examining Fell.
“Drovian irons,” he said. “Very professional.”
“Turn around,” Fell said to Nila.
“No,” Nila said.
Fell grasped her by the arm and jerked her forward onto her knees. Fell stepped behind her, and Nila felt the cold metal of the wrist irons close on her skin.
There was a shout from downstairs. Fell turned to one of the soldiers. “Do not take your eyes off of him,” she said, and disappeared down the stairs.
Despite Fell’s instructions, the two soldiers retreated to the hallway, where they stood near the door, leaning on their rifles.
“What is happening?” Nila asked Vetas.
Vetas’s face was impassive, unmoving as always. He didn’t so much as glance at her.
He watched the two soldiers for a moment before rocking back on his hips and deftly sliding his shackled wrists beneath his legs and out in front of him, like a contortionist performing a trick. Nila felt her eyes widen a bit. The wrist irons hurt like all pit, and even if they hadn’t been so tight, she couldn’t have done that — and Vetas was a man well over forty.
Nila glanced nervously between Vetas and the soldiers. How could they not see him? Did they just not care?
Vetas pulled something off the bottom of his shoe: a wooden knob. It looked like the handle of an ice pick Nila had seen men use to move blocks of ice in the winter, but it had no pick attached to it.
Another handle came off the bottom of his other shoe, and Vetas searched through his slicked hair with his fingers, drawing out a long wire after only a moment of searching. He wrapped the wire around one handle and then the other.
Nila had been with Lord Vetas long enough to know what it was: a garrote.
Vetas got to his feet in one smooth motion, like a snake rising from the grass. He crossed the room in a few silent steps.
