Chapter 21: Carriage

The scream never left the guard’s throat.

Something spun out of the darkness inside the tower. A blur caught my sight, before it buried itself in the guard’s neck.

The impact made a sound like a boot stamping into wet earth.

His hands flew to his throat, fingers scrabbling at the hilt jutting from beneath his jaw. His mouth opened, but what came out wasn’t a sound. It was a wet, bubbling hiss.

He folded.

My brain was still processing the first blade when the second came for me.

A flash spinning through the air, end over end, aimed at my face. My body didn’t move fast enough to dodge it properly, but some desperate backward lurch pulled my head out of the blade’s line.

I stumbled through the doorway.

My heel caught the threshold stone. My shoulder slammed into the doorframe. The dagger whipped past me and punched into the heavy oak door.

The hilt quivered inches from my eye.

I stared at it.

My lungs wouldn’t work.

I couldn’t see clearly into the room anymore. My angle was wrong. But my brain didn’t need to see anymore.

The dead soldier in the corner. Throat gutted, blood pooled and body cold.

The guard beside me with a blade in his neck.

It all made sense.

The entire perimeter around Grezheim was cleared land. Stripped of any cover. From these walls, you could see for miles in every direction.

How had hundreds of hooded figures poured over the battlements without anyone raising an alarm?

Because the alarm was already dead.

They’d sent someone ahead. Hours ago. Maybe longer.

No crystal communication. No alarm bell. No call for reinforcements.

Grezheim would burn deaf and mute.

A voice came from inside the room.

Clipped syllables. A language I didn’t recognize.

My hand found my sword hilt.

Too late.

The elf came through the door.

One moment the threshold was empty. The next he was there. His hood was up. Two blades gleamed in his hands, one in each, both short, both curved.

Unlike the last elf I’ve faced, he didn’t pause or try to test me.

He came at me to kill.

The first strike was a scissoring motion, both blades sweeping inward from opposite angles. If I’d been a heartbeat slower reaching for my guard, they would have met inside my ribcage.

My sword caught the right-hand blade. The left carved air a finger’s width from my hip as I twisted sideways, wrenching my body out of the cut’s path.

He was already flowing into the next attack.

Both blades reversed. A low diagonal from the left, rising toward my chin, and a high stab from the right aimed at my eye socket. The combination was seamless. No gap between strikes. No pause for breath.

I parried the diagonal. Barely. The impact shuddered up my arm and rattled my teeth.

The stab I dodged by throwing my head back so far my spine protested.

He was good.

He was terrifyingly good.

But I was better than last time.

A Level 2 in Swordsmanship didn’t add speed or strength to myself. What it added was insight. The ability to perceive the fight as it happened instead of processing it three heartbeats too late.

His shoulders moved before his blades. The direction of his leading foot predicted the angle of the next cut. When he shifted weight to his left leg, a right-hand strike followed. When his wrist rotated inward, the blade would sweep horizontal.

I could read him.

Not fast enough to win. Not good enough to counter. But enough to survive for more than two exchanges.

And enough to talk.

“What is an elf doing inside Grezheim’s walls?”

The words came out between parries. I hadn’t planned them. My mind had decided that if I was going to die, I was going to die informed.

The elf didn’t answer.

A slash came for my throat. I ducked it. Thrust for his midsection. He deflected with ease and riposted with a combination that drove me back three steps.

“How did you get past the wall?”

My sword caught his left blade.

He pressed forward. I yielded ground, boots scraping on the stones, maintaining distance by fractions.

“The signal crystal,” I said, gasping now, arms burning. “You killed the operator. How long ago? Before sunrise?”

Nothing.

A brutal overhead cut that I barely caught on the flat of my blade. My knees buckled under the force. I shoved him off and swung a wild horizontal that he avoided by simply leaning back.

“How many of you are already inside?”

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No answer.

I was losing ground. The walkway was narrow, the battlements on one side, a drop to the streets below on the other. Every step backward was a step closer to having nowhere left to go.

But I kept asking.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I noticed what I was doing. I was treating this fight the way I’d treated the wyvern corridor. Each death was a reconnaissance mission. Each loop was an investment. Information purchased with blood.

My life wasn’t a life anymore.

It was currency.

Something I offered in exchange for one more answer. One more pattern. One more detail that might, in some future loop, make the difference between failure and survival.

The realization should have horrified me.

It didn’t.

“You talk too much,” the elf said.

The words came out heavily accented.

I almost laughed.

Talk too much? I barely talked.

I’d spent loops in near-silence, alone with a mule and a stolen sword and the inside of my own skull.

But the elf had spoken. He could speak. That meant there was a crack in the silence I could exploit.

Maybe not now. In a future loop, when I was better. When I had the right leverage.

For now, I needed information of a different kind.

The kind only combat could teach.

His left blade came low. I parried and, for the first time, didn’t retreat.

I counterattacked.

The motion was ugly. A chopping slash that felt more like desperation than technique.

The elf deflected it. Easily.

But I‘d attacked.

The next exchange, I did it again. A thrust this time, aimed at his chest, poorly timed and overextended. He sidestepped and punished me with a cut across my forearm that opened skin and sent blood spattering onto the walkway stones.

Pain screamed up my arm. I ignored it.

I swung again. Another choppy, artless cut.

Again.

Again.

Each counterattack was wrong. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it. The angle was off, the timing was early, the commitment was too deep. My instinct-instructor screamed corrections I was too slow to implement.

Each failed attack taught me what failure looked like. Where the blade was when it missed. Where my weight was. Where his body went when he avoided it.

The elf’s patience frayed.

His eyes burned behind the hood. I couldn’t see their color, but I could feel the heat of his gaze like a brand on my skin.

The next exchange was mine.

He threw a vicious combination. Right blade low, left blade high, designed to split my attention. I caught the low strike, let the high one pass over my head, and drove my sword forward in a straight, brutal thrust aimed at his shoulder.

It connected.

The tip of my ugly, unfinished blade bit into the meat of his upper arm. A glancing wound, barely more than a cut.

But it was enough.

Blood welled from the wound.