Ilapara feels rather than sees Tuk smirk. “Perhaps you should take better care of your men,” he says. “That way you won’t have to blame other people for getting them killed.”
“Is there no arrangement we can come to?” Salo asks.
The lead reaver bares his teeth. “None that involves you leaving this place with your head still attached to your body.”
All right. That’s it. No use in delaying the inevitable. “Then why are we even talking?” Ilapara says.
The lead reaver’s glare slides to her and intensifies. “Boys,” he says to his men, “take your time.”
And then everything happens very quickly after that.
Your body is a cage into which you are born a slave, her uncle would tell her as he taught her his secrets in the privacy of the open wilds, with nothing but the sky above and the savannas below to listen. Heartbeat, coordination, speed, pain, breath, fear; most of the body’s workings are naturally inaccessible to you. They control you, dictate the terms, and you either sink or swim. It is up to you to break out of your cage and take control of it, and the first step is recognizing the power of your mind.
A trio of reavers descends upon her all at once. A blood-spattered machete darts for her head. She sees it in time to sway away, using her momentum to whip her spear around, but these are reavers, high on tonics and the thirst for blood: her spear cuts through nothing but air.
They give her no room to breathe. A machete comes for her belly. Another comes from behind, destined for her left shoulder. She spins away yet again—and straight into the path of a third blade already halfway to her face. The man wielding it is the same reaver who spoke, promising evil things to come. Here he is now about to kill her, because even in her accelerated state, she is only human, and this man is a reaver; she could never be fast enough to evade a blow already so close, only fast enough to see it and to register that this is the blade that will end her.
Except something curious happens, so quickly she almost misses it: a delicate field of red lightning arcs right before her eyes and deflects the reaver’s blow with a resonant peal, as though it has struck a shield of unbreakable glass. They all pause battle in surprise, and the reaver in question inspects his machete like he thinks it might be defective.
A proud enemy is an enemy set in his ways. His victory is assured; the laws of nature are on his side. It is why, when he is suddenly confronted with a creature that fails to conform to these laws, he will sooner question his reality than accept it and adapt. Punish him.
Ilapara doesn’t let the reaver make another mistake. She erupts forward with her spear and sinks it into the soft flesh at the base of his neck. His shocked face will haunt her in her sleep if she survives this, and so will the gurgling noise of blood gushing out of his mortal wound, but the nightmares will come later. Now she twists her spear to bring his life to a swift and permanent end and lets the body crumple to the ground.
Light flashes and a crack thunders as a blow that would have cut into her right flank is deflected away before she has reoriented herself. She moves to evade a little too late, and another peal sounds behind her, another blow that should kill her, but she remains unharmed.
In the face of her seeming invulnerability, the reavers attacking her grow wary, which gives her just enough room to maneuver herself out of their immediate reach for a precious split second and finally take stock of her environment. Out of the corner of her eye she sees that Salo hasn’t moved from his seated position, though he’s cocooned himself in a rather intimidating whirlwind of leaves and loose earth. The reavers are ignoring him for the more immediate threats, thinking perhaps that they’ll save him for last. Good.
Tuk is tangled in a knot of reavers, not even trying to evade them. Bolts of lightning keep arcing around his form as the reavers unleash blow after blow onto his body only to strike a luminescent specter that disappears as soon as it appears. His flashbrand, meanwhile, cuts through the air unhindered, leaving ghosts of red light where he swings it. With his recovering arm and the exhaustion of a day’s travel weighing down on him, he’s far from the clinical swordsman Ilapara saw on the waterbird, but three reavers are already lying dead on the ground by his feet.
The split second of peace ends, and Ilapara sidesteps a hacking strike to her neck. A loud crack behind her tells her she just survived yet another lethal blow. Is this what cheating death sounds like?
She punctures a reaver in the stomach, retracts, swings her spear so forcefully the reaver’s mask gets chopped in half when the blow connects. He falls, his face a bloody ruin. She ducks—a peal as the machete behind her hits anyway, but it doesn’t touch her, so she shifts on her feet, pivots, and thrusts.
One by one the reavers fall to her spear. Men who are feared across the vast savannas of Umadiland, men who have raped and pillaged and killed for their mystic warlord; they prove no match for a girl they can’t hit.
“Kill the sorcerer!” At last one of them figures out that the real threat in this battle has thus far gone unmolested, but Tuk performs a dexterous twisting leap and cuts him down before he can test the winds blowing around Salo.
At this point, most reasonable people would recognize that the tide of battle hasn’t been in their favor for a while now, that perhaps it never was, and they would flee, but the three remaining reavers only grow more rabid, as if they have tapped into some previously sealed reserve of rage. Ilapara’s phantom shield cracks several times under heavy blows before she and Tuksaad whittle down the reavers and she impales the last one in the heart and watches his murderous fervor bleed out of his blackened mouth.
Abruptly the whirlwind gusting around Salo dies out, and he rises to his feet, anxiety showing in the high arch of his eyebrows. “Are you all right? I’m sorry I wasn’t much more help.”
Breathing heavily, Ilapara surveys the bodies strewed around what used to be their camp. The fetid reek of voided bowels is thickening in the air. She feels a stirring of nausea but fights it off. “We killed a dozen reavers without suffering a single scratch,” she says, panting. “I think you helped us plenty.”
“That ward of yours, Salo.” Tuk picks his way over a dead reaver lying facedown in the dirt. By the awe in his blue eyes, one would almost think he doesn’t even see the bodies. “A dynamic, self-activating kinetic barrier. Did you come up with that just now? And how is it so precise?”
Tuk’s enthusiasm fails to steal Salo’s attention away from the blood and bodies around him. For a while he stands motionless, taking in the carnage like he can’t quite believe his eyes. Ilapara sees signs of growing panic in the way his hands start to tremble. “Did we just kill twelve men?”
“Now’s not the time to think about it, Salo,” Ilapara tells him in a firm voice. “We’re not out of the woods yet. Survive first; panic later.”
“Not to mention the fact that they were trying to kill us,” Tuk adds.
“Right.” Salo takes a moment to process this before he nods. “Right,” he says again. Absently, he walks off and starts searching for something in the canopy beyond the clearing. Ilapara follows the line of his gaze but sees nothing there.
“I can’t sense Alinata anymore.” Salo turns around to face the bridle way. “I can’t even sense . . . oh no.”