Vetch had to rely on every trick and tactic his instructors in the garrison had ever taught him. He had never fought anyone else as dangerous as this before. And it wasn’t only Murzagis he battled, but their surroundings. As they fought, they had to step around the bodies of the dead sellswords, and avoid the translucent golden Barriers still hanging in the air all around the chamber—bold slashes of golden ribbons, windows, and cages, eerie remnants of the magic battle that presaged this test of steel.

  Every move required Vetch’s utmost concentration, no matter how his pain and exhaustion worked like demons to break it. He knew the moment he gave in and lost his focus would be the moment he lost the fight, the moment Murzagis would cut him down, robbing him and his town of their due justice.

  Through the back-and-forth battle, he realized how little he had understood about true combat, in all of its hideous immediacy, until this moment. Not only had it been foolish to fight with an excess of emotion, as he had been, but neither would he succeed by personifying cold-blooded detachment. Once, he had assumed this was how the raiders who attacked Moonfane Forge had fought so effectively, that coldness was what gave them their edge. He had thought that learning to become similarly cold was the only way to match them and be a worthy protector for Lily.

  But he had been mistaken, not only about the raiders, but about their commander. It wasn’t disinterest this man had displayed, but the kind of concentration Vetch himself now needed to embody. He needed to fight in the middle ground, between fiery emotion and cold dispassion. The more he understood this, the easier he found it to anticipate Murzagis’s moves, until he felt almost on equal ground again.

  The tide began to turn. Vetch saw through his adversary’s feints and tricks, and wouldn’t allow himself to be goaded into mistakes. He was bolstered when Murzagis elected at last to grip his sword two-handed in order to fend off Vetch’s push. When Vetch managed to beat the raider’s blade aside and score a biting wound to his shoulder, he witnessed the first inkling of doubt appear on the man’s face. Seeing it, Vetch laughed the mad laughter of a warrior who recognizes victory at hand. Not complete victory—not a victory that would see him walk away from the battlefield the sole survivor, able to return home and recover—but the victory of ensuring his enemy’s death, before succumbing to it himself.

  He pushed for that vision, began to believe for the first time that he had what it took to defeat this man.

  Almost.

  For when Vetch earned himself another opening and went to attack, his arms suddenly refused to follow through. The best he could manage was a weak thrust that Murzagis turned aside without effort. Confusion mingled with dismay. Vetch looked at his foe through a fevered haze and saw a man who, despite some injuries, was still fresh and at ease. Vetch, however, was slowing. More than slowing, his limbs were betraying him. His ensuing, sluggish attacks served only to expose his encroaching weakness.

  Had he forgotten how infection-ruined his body was, how close to death’s door? A few trifling scores with his blade and he had thought he could overcome everything? No matter how skillfully he fought, his body could take no more. He had forced it to give him its last and now even that paltry remainder of strength was spent. Each new attack he attempted was slower and more pitiful than the last. His head drooped, and his arms and legs shook with fatigue.

  And he knew Murzagis could see it. If he could not find a way to end this soon, Murzagis would kill him. He would kill him and go on living, to hunt down Marigold and Lily and kill them, too, as his mistress had commanded.

  Murzagis recognized Vetch faltering and seized on it. He reclaimed his command of the battle, pummeling Vetch with heavy attacks that crashed against his defenses. For Vetch, it became a struggle simply to survive, his hope for revenge receding before his eyes. It struck him as almost laughable that his spirit would still cry out for survival when survival had never been a possibility, not since he had chosen to enter the black-stoned castle.

  Battered and harried, his fingers turning numb from all the heavy blows smashing against his blade and carving down his defenses, he thought back to the fight on the forest path. Had he observed anything about this man in that first battle that could help him? Murzagis was skilled and strong, certainly, but was there a weakness Vetch could exploit before he simply could fight no longer?

  No answer came to him. Murzagis’s face was a picture of grim confidence behind his sword thrusts as he advanced on Vetch with the same promise of death he had invited upon Moonfane Forge. With a powerful sweep of his sword, he cast Vetch’s blade out of the way and viciously stabbed his thigh. The sword point bit deep. Vetch cried out and hobbled backward. His opponent allowed him no window for recovery, advancing with the quickness of a ferret. Vetch gritted his teeth against the additional pain and willed himself to raise his sword, aiming for a defiant return strike. Bluff or not, perhaps he could catch Murzagis by surprise.

  But he could put no force behind the downswing. Rather than bring his blade down upon his enemy with purpose, Vetch’s arms fell forward of their own accord. Too late, he realized he’d given Murzagis the clear opening he had been waiting for. Murzagis evaded the attempt, and Vetch’s blade struck only the floor. The raider stepped in and around it, committing wholly to driving his sword point upward toward Vetch’s throat.

  Vetch had seen this gambit before, in their first duel in the forest. It had been a feint, inviting Vetch to jump forward with an attack that left him defenseless. It had been his downfall then. This time, instinctively, he stepped backward out of the way, refusing to fall for the same ploy. But the commander of the raiders surprised him yet again. Rather than bait Vetch in with a feint as before, this time Murzagis carried through with his momentum. Vetch’s dodge was enough to cause the blade to narrowly miss his throat, but he was unprepared for when Murzagis crashed into him, punching him solidly across the jaw with his sword’s pommel. Stars burst before Vetch’s eyes as he was knocked down to the glass-littered floor.

  Self-preservation made him push himself painfully back to his feet. He lashed out with a wild swing of his sword, which Murzagis stepped back from. Vetch stood sucking in ragged breaths. He clawed his lank hair out of his eyes. Against his screaming muscles, he lifted his blade once more. Murzagis tsked.

  “Enough,” he said. “Accept this like a man.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Vetch panted. “For my garrison. For me.”

  Murzagis scoffed and shook his head. “Defeated soldiers are disgraceful. You should have given up the blade the day your garrison lost. Then, you would not be here this day.”

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  He advanced on Vetch, sword held low, casually. Vetch backed away, keeping his distance. A glance behind him told him that he was nearing the far wall of the dining hall, where he’d be at the raider’s mercy. That was what he was counting on. As he shuffled backwards, he held one hand up defensively, while the point of his sword dragged and scraped along the stone floor. Murzagis followed, his manner that of a man who went to put down an injured animal.

  Vetch had survived so much deeper into the fight than even he had expected to, despite his wounds ensuring it had never been a fair one. But he had been a soldier long enough to know that ‘fair’ had no place in a battle to the death. After all, how many of Lady Iris’s soldiers had been set upon he and Lily? It was only through fighting together they had survived that. And it would only be through fighting together that Vetch had a chance to survive this.

  As he backed up, he racked his brain over the details of that battle, going over everything he had seen from the time he had entered the hall and joined the fray. He remembered where he had seen Lily cast some of her earliest Barriers during the fight. Many of the remaining Barriers in the hall were even now fading from visibility. They were still there, but their golden hue had worn away, leaving them invisible to the eye. Vetch made for the place where he recalled a Barrier Lily had cast early on. There was nothing to be seen, and he had no magic with which to sense whether the Barrier was still there or not, but he had to trust that it was.

  He reached the spot and stopped. Wearily, he watched Murzagis come. If Vetch’s memory was correct, that one of Lily’s invisible Barriers persisted there and, like the bridge, its magic would not apply to him, then he would now be standing behind it. Murzagis had no way to know. The worst part for Vetch was that neither would he know whether it was there or not until it would be too late to defend himself.

  Not that he had to feign being too exhausted to fight on. Still, it took all of his willpower to leave his sword arm hanging limp, rather than ready it against the killing blow to come. He had to allow it to happen. As Murzagis came within a couple paces, again Vetch held his free hand before him for mercy. Panting, he waited, willing himself not to flinch, not to give it away.

  Murzagis said not a word, and showed no emotion on his weathered face as he drew his arm back and then plunged it straight forward. The blade would pass through. Vetch knew that. But the hand wielding it would not. He clenched his jaw tight. But nothing stilled Murzagis’s hand. The steel sword point punched through Vetch’s shirt and stabbed him directly in his infected wound. He screamed. Fiery pain radiated from the wound as Murzagis yanked his sword back, and fresh pus and blood burst hot from it.

  Gasping in agony, Vetch staggered, his sword slipping from his fingers. He could only look on in disbelief as the sellsword commander flicked blood off his blade. Had Vetch remembered wrong? Had he misjudged where the Barrier had been? Or had it been there, only for its magic to have completely faded before it could save him?

  Not a party to these thoughts of dismay, Murzagis raised his sword once more. Vetch saw his end coming. Frantically searching his memory, he reassessed where he was in relation to where he thought the Barrier should be. With no way to tell if he stepped into salvation or catastrophe, he forced his tortured body to obey him just one more time, shifting a pace to the side. Murzagis threw all his strength behind an arcing, horizontal slash, one that would cleave Vetch’s head clean off his neck. Vetch stood still and defenseless, allowing the coup de grace to come. If the Barrier was not there—if it had already faded—then so, too, would he be gone in a second’s time. He turned his thoughts to Lily, his love.

  The hum of steel slicing the air marked the passage of Murzagis’s blade toward Vetch’s neck. Inches from hitting its mark, Murzagis’s fist smashed into seemingly nothing, crumpling into Lily’s Barrier. It was as if the man had punched a solid stone wall with all his might. Vetch could hear the finger bones break. The raider dropped his sword with a cry of shock and pain.

  Seizing his moment, Vetch jumped forward, catching up the falling sword by its grip before it could hit the floor. With the last of his strength, he thrust his arm freely through the invisible Barrier and drove the blade’s point deep into Murzagis’s throat. It penetrated straight through the raider’s neck and out the other side. Just as quickly, Vetch wrenched the blade back out. A grim gout of dark blood poured from Murzagis’s throat like a fountain.

  Vetch stood away as the man desperately clutched at his neck in a vain attempt to hold his life essence in. Surprise warred with panic on his face at the realization that he had been bested and killed, his lips trying to mouth words from a voiceless throat as he went down on one knee. In seconds, his hands fell away and he slumped forward face first into the expanding pool of his own blood, dead.

  An odd calm settled over the large dining chamber then, the calm that follows in the wake of a terrible battle. Vetch stood over his fallen foe a moment, regaining his breath.

  “For Moonfane Forge,” he said, at last.

  He was too weary to reflect on his victory, let alone revel in it. Besides, he still had one more task before him. Leaving his defeated adversary where he lay, Vetch stumbled unsteadily across the hall to where Lady Iris still Slumbered behind the curtain-like Barrier she had cast to shield herself. The golden hue of the magic was fading in patches, like puddles evaporating in the sun. The Barriers that Lily had cast over her arms also remained, though they had faded to complete translucence, causing the woman to appear like a marionette hung from a doorknob.

  Vetch leaned his hand on the protective Barrier and stared in at The Lady of Black Crux. He hadn’t the faculty to comprehend how this single mage had brought so much death and destruction down on his town for what he could only surmise was some old grudge against her former teacher.

  Bringing the raider’s sword to bear, he tested its blade through the Barrier as he’d done before, hoping that Iris was close enough to reach this time. Sadly, its point fell short. Vetch withdrew the blade and adjusted his grip, holding the sword by its pommel to give it just a little more reach. Again, he thrust the blade through the Barrier until his fingers were stopped by it, aiming for Lady Iris’s unprotected throat. If he could get even the tip of the blade close enough to inflict a precise cut to a vein, it would be enough to exact the remaining vengeance that Moonfane Forge was surely owed.

  He gave no consideration as to whether this was honorable or not. This wasn’t for him. It was for everyone who had died—Neschi and Iannitz, Captain Tarese, Trimm, Wenzl, Lily’s parents and brother, shopkeepers and herdsmen and tavern patrons, mothers, fathers, children.

  The blade’s razor tip hung precariously close to the woman’s throat. Vetch’s hand trembled with the effort it took to support the entire sword by only its pommel. It was so close. He pushed his fingers against the Barrier until they hurt, straining to inch the blade forward in his grip just a little bit more. But the sweat and blood on his hand caused the pommel to slip from his grasp. The sword fell clattering to the floor behind the Barrier, while Vetch fell to his knees before it, puffing with exertion. He looked at the lost blade.

  “Well ... no getting that back.”

  Turning, he sat with his back to the Barrier and looked out at the great chamber. He could collect any of the other swords littering the hall and try again, but now that he was sitting, he found he didn’t have the strength to rise again.

  So, this is it, he thought.

  He coughed and was racked with agony, as his wound oozed more hot foulness through his blood-soaked shirt. It hurt. But it wouldn’t hurt for much longer. Soon, he would black out and that would be that. No more pain. No more awareness of his failures and missteps. No more living with the stain of not being good enough to be by Lily’s side.

  As his head drooped forward and the edges of his vision closed in, he tried to make his last thoughts focus on memories of his days with Lily. Too few, they had been. He recalled watching her riding Fae across Moonfane Forge’s pastures, her hair streaming free in the wind. He thought of the impulsive passion they had shared beneath the trees on the hill, their final night together. And he thought of the wedding they had attended by accident in Pasanhal town, the happiness in her eyes as they had held hands during the vows, and he smiled.