The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [86]
Assassin, she thought, suddenly feeling numb and very slow.
Then the person’s eyes appeared, and Anne knew she had been seen.
“Help!” she shouted quite deliberately. “Help, murder!”
Without a sound, the figure flung toward her. Anne’s paralysis ended instantly; she rolled off the bed and onto her feet, lurching toward the door.
Something cold and hard hit her in her upper arm, and she couldn’t move that limb anymore. It seemed frozen in the act of lifting; she could neither lower nor raise it. She looked and saw that something dark and thin had stabbed through the flesh below the bone. It went straight through and out the other side, where it was stuck in Lew.
Anne raised her eyes and found a violet gaze fixed on her from only a handspan away. She looked back down and understood that the thin thing in her arm was the blade of a sword, held by the man. Somehow she knew it was a man, however slight in build.
Sefry, she realized.
He yanked at the sword, which was stuck solidly in the bedpost. Seeming to think better of that, he let his other hand drop to his waist. The pain of the sword in her arm suddenly hit her, but the fear proved stronger, because she knew he had to be reaching for a knife.
She put her head in the moon, buried her feet in the dark tangled roots of the earth, grabbed his hair with her free hand, and kissed him.
His lips were warm, hot even, and as she touched them, lightning seemed to strike down her spine and the taste of serpent musk and charring juniper burned in her throat. Inside, he was wet and damp, like all men, but terribly wrong, cold where he ought to be hot, hot where he ought to be cold, and nothing familiar. He seemed broken and reformed, each curve in his bone like a healed shattering, every tissue a scar.
He screamed, and she felt a sudden hard yank at her arm as he pushed away. The sword pulled clean, and she slid to the floor, landing on her behind with her legs spraddled in front of her.
The Sefry stepped back and shook his head like a dog with water in its ear.
She tried to scream again but found she had no breath. She gripped her arm, and everything was sticky-wet with blood, which she understood was her own.
The door chose that moment to burst open, however, and two of Elyoner’s guards charged in, carrying torches that seemed to burn so brightly that Anne was nearly blinded.
Her attacker, reduced to a dark stick figure by the brilliance, appeared to recover. His long sword darted out and hit one of the guards in the throat. The poor young man fell to his knees, dropping his torch and grasping at the wound, trying to hold his life in with his hands. Anne sympathized as blood squirted between her fingers.
The other fellow, bellowing for help, was a little warier. He wore half-plate armor and carried a heavy sword, which he thrust at the assassin rather than pulling back for a cut. The Sefry made a few experimental attacks, which the guard beat away.
“Run, Princess,” the guard said.
Anne noticed that there was a gap between him and the door; she could run if she could make her legs work. She tried to get to her knees but slipped in the blood, wondering how close she was to bleeding to death.
The Sefry attacked and stumbled. With a roar, the guard cut hard; Anne couldn’t follow what happened then, but steel rang on steel, and Elyoner’s man went staggering past the Sefry and slammed into the wall. He collapsed there, unmoving.
The assassin was turning back toward her when another figure exploded through the open door.
It was Cazio. He looked odd, very odd, and for a moment Anne couldn’t place why. Then she appreciated that he was as naked as the day he was born.
But he had Caspator in one hand. With only the slight hesitation it took for him to take in the situation, he flung himself at her attacker.
Cazio plunged Caspator toward the dark figure, but the blade was met with the quick, familiar parry of perto, followed by a strong bind in uhtave.
Without having to think, Cazio took the attack into a receding parry and replied