Amara grimaced. There was no help for it. She'd simply have to press on and hope for the best.
Veiled behind layers of windcrafting, blending with the weirdly lit night in her furycrafted cloak, Amara stalked silently forward.
Murdering a powerful furycrafter like Kalarus Brencis-and surviving the experience-was a dubious proposition at best. His innate gifts at watercrafting meant that only a sudden and massively traumatic injury had a real chance of killing him; a slash that opened anything less than a major artery would be rapidly repaired. She had to be swift. His skills at windcrafting would grant him deadly swift reaction speed to any attack, and the raw strength granted by his earthcrafting meant that if there was any sort of struggle, he would literally tear Amara limb from limb. Worse, if she struck, missed, and, sensibly, tried to flee, he would probably kill her before she had covered more than a few yards. His firecrafting would make that simple.
Most dangerous of all, his metalcrafting would warn him of any steel weapon as it approached him. It would not give him anything but an instant's warning, true, but that would be more than sufficient. In order to kill Kalarus Brencis Minoris and survive the exchange herself, Amara would have to open up his throat wide with the stone-bladed dagger she held in her hand. Or else sink it to the hilt in one of his eyes or ears. There was absolutely no room for error.
Brencis, on the other hand, could snap her neck with a thrust of his arm, burn her to bones with a flick of his fingers, or sweep her head clean of her neck with a single motion of his excellent-quality sword.
It seemed a trifle unfair.
But then, she'd never really expected a series of equitable situations when she'd joined the Cursors.
Crows take you, Gaius. Even when I walked away from your service, you managed to draw me back into it.
Moving silent and unseen had become second nature to her over the past days. She drifted past the guards standing about the courtyard, walking slowly, calmly, and carefully. She paused several times, to let one of the collared Alerans pass nearby, before she continued. Stealth had a great deal more to do with patience and the ability to remain calm when there was very little reason to do so than with any amount of personal agility.
It took her perhaps ten minutes to move from the shelter of the alley to the side of the platform opposite Brencis's table. It took another five to slide around the platform and stop beside the stairs leading from the floor of the courtyard up to the auction stage. When Brencis finished eating, he would go back up the stairs to collar the next victim, and Amara would drive her dagger into his brain. He would fall. She would take to the skies immediately, and be gone from the meager light of the furylamps before anyone could react. It couldn't be simpler.
In matters such as that, simplicity was a deadly weapon in its own right.
It took Brencis several more moments to finish dinner, before he pushed his plate away and rose.
Amara settled her grip on the handle of the stone knife and relaxed her muscles, preparing for the single, blindingly swift strike that was her only chance at success.
Brencis glanced at Rook, then down and said, "I hate this."
"Just remember," Rook told him. "You have what they want. You can't be replaced. They don't have the power. You do."
Amara felt herself freezing into place.
Brencis touched the collar at his own throat. "Maybe," he said.
"Don't show weakness," Rook cautioned. "You know what will happen."
Amara took a moment to admire Rook's delivery, as her words went home in as deadly a fashion as any sword thrust, planting discord and division among the enemy while remaining concealed as simple self-interest. Amara could think of any number of women and men who had urged their mates in a similar fashion, attaining position and prestige by proxy. Crows, but the woman had guts. Amara could not say if she would act with as much courage in the same circumstances.
Suddenly, half a dozen vordknights simultaneously leapt into the air from rooftops around the courtyard, their wings making a heavy, thrumming burr of the evening's silence.
"She's here," Brencis murmured in a numb tone.
The oppressive buzz of Vord wings faded-and then grew louder again, and louder, multiplying in volume, until it filled the stone-enclosed courtyard with thunder. An instant later, a veritable legion of vordknights descended from the night sky. They came down like locusts, all at once, landing upon buildings, cages, and cobblestones alike, covering everything in sight in a living carpet of gleaming black chitin. It was sheer luck, Amara knew, that one of them landed a bare couple of inches beyond where the tip of her outstretched fingers would reach, rather than upon her head, and it was only the practice and discipline of the endless days of stillness and silence that prevented her from flinching into a spasm of motion that would have concluded with her fleeing for safety and finding only disaster.
Instead, she held her place and waited.
From somewhere near the center of the courtyard, a Vord screamed, a high-pitched, chittering shriek that ripped at Amara's ears.
A second after it had faded, the cry was repeated from above them.
This time, the courtyard filled with the thunder of windstreams, as Knights Aeris in gleaming silver collars descended from above, in an armored-guard formation around a pair of figures Amara recognized at once:
The Vord queen.
And Lady Aquitaine.
Of course, the Knights Aeris can't fly among the vordknights, Amara thought, with clinical detachment. Their windstreams would make it too difficult for the Vord to use their wings.
It was the training she'd had as a Cursor. One never allowed emotions to control one's reactions. Whether those emotions were abject terror or bitter hatred so vile that it made her mouth twist at the taste, they couldn't be allowed to take the upper hand. When you felt it happening, you focused on details, the practical, connecting one fact to another, until the surge of fear and hate washed by and receded somewhat.
Only after she had done that did Amara look back at the would-be authors of Alera's destruction.
The Vord queen was shorter than Amara had expected her to be-not even as tall as Amara herself. She didn't know why she had thought it would be otherwise. Thinking back on it, the queen she'd fought and helped to kill in Calderon had not been particularly tall or imposing, physically. It had been a human-shaped creature, but there had been nothing human about it.
This queen was different.
Her cloak was finer, for one thing. The other queen had been dressed in cloth that could have come from a not-too-recent grave. This one wore a great cloak of black velvet so deep that it rippled with illusory colors in its folds. She stood in the courtyard with something else in her posture and bearing, too-something alert, almost electric. The other queen had never projected anything but cold and alien patience.