A Promise of Fire (Kingmaker Chronicles, #1)(85)

I feel no fear. I have powerful, deadly magic simmering in my veins. I breathe; they die. In a moment, I’ll show them. I’ll give them a chance to change their minds.

The adrenaline of imminent combat surges through my body. I reach for my knives and don’t feel anything—not even myself.

Horror fills me.

“Griffin!” He doesn’t hear my shout. He doesn’t hear me yelling at him to run, to get behind the walls. He doesn’t hear me because I’m not there!

He stands firm, buying the fleeing people time. They all do. Kato, Flynn, Carver. Griffin.

They watch the Tarvans come, their legs braced for attack, bellows on their lips, and my heart plummets. They don’t stand a chance.

My eyes snap open, and my whole world implodes.

“Wake up!” I sit up. Kaia is next to me, Jocasta on her right. “Get Piers. Now!”

Jocasta jumps off the bed, hastily throws a wrap around her shoulders, and then runs from the room. In less than a minute, I’m dressed. Then Piers is in front of me. Nerissa and Anatole, too.

“A Tarvan tribe is going to attack the building site. Sixty men. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will by sometime this afternoon. We have to get to Ios, or they’re all dead.”

They stay rooted to the spot, pale, with too-wide eyes. Only Anatole holds himself together. “To Ios!” he barks. “Now!”

His voice is like a whip. Everyone flies into action. I’m the first one out, sword strapped on, four daggers in my belt. I raise the alarm at the barracks. Soldiers tumble out of their rooms and into the dawn-cool courtyard, the white marble pearlescent in first light.

Piers jogs over. The hilt of a full-sized sword pokes up over his shoulder, and there’s a shorter blade attached to his belt. He’s wearing leather armor. “We have forty horses in the stable,” he says, stopping next to me.

Forty is a decent number. Armies travel mostly on foot. “Have fifteen horses carry women, and they double up. The twenty-five others carry your best men. Sixty more follow on foot. And they run. I’ve run for a day. So can they.”

I finish adjusting Panotii’s saddle and then reach for the stirrup. He’s prancing, reacting to the stress in the air.

Piers lays a hand on my arm. “You’re not supposed to leave.”

I shake him off. “This is a dire emergency.”

“Griffin won’t want you in danger.”

“I don’t give an Olympian damn what Griffin wants!”

“You’ve made that abundantly clear,” Piers snaps, grabbing Panotii’s reins. “But I do.”

“Let go,” I snarl.

“Why? From what I’ve seen, you’d abandon him in a heartbeat if you could.”

It’s all I can do not to kick Piers in the face. I hold up my hands instead, backing off. “You’re right. Go get killed.”

Piers throws me a contemptuous look before turning to the gathering soldiers and calling out orders as they form ranks.

With a running leap, I land on Panotii’s back, grab his mane for balance, and throw my right leg over his other side. Before I’m even upright, we’re thundering across the courtyard, under the raised portcullis, and out into the sleeping streets of Sinta City.

Urgency explodes inside me. Panotii feels it and stretches his legs. Waiting for the army doesn’t occur to me. I have no food and no water. I don’t even have a bloody sense of direction, and I have to slow down at the east gate, shouting to the guards for the road to Ios.

As the sun climbs the sky in front of me, I’m forced to stop in two villages so Panotii can drink and rest. It’ll kill him to run flat out in the heat. I drink, too, and then ask him to carry me again. When he’s lathered with sweat and breathing impossibly hard, I get off and jog beside him, telling him how brave and strong he is while I scream inside with the need to gallop.

Hours pass. I’m so hot I get a decent idea of what it must feel like in Hades’s dungeon and so thirsty that my mouth feels like the dried-out basin of an evaporated puddle. Steam rises from Panotii’s drenched hide. I slow him to a walk so he can breathe and then reach down to stroke his burning neck. His sides heaving, he shudders beneath me.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but we can’t let them die.” I dismount again, and we run together until my whole body aches.

Finally—finally—Ios looms in the distance, but Apollo has already driven his chariot of fire more than halfway across the sky, and I’m still on the wrong side of the city.

I glance over my shoulder, squinting against the sun. Where’s Piers? I don’t see any sign of the army, and the terrain behind me is flat and clear.

I haul myself back into the saddle and push Panotii into a canter, dreading hearing the sounds of battle. Will there even be any battle noise? How long can it take sixty men to slaughter four?

My heart knows the answer to that. Just long enough to get Egeria to safety, along with a bunch of healers who despise them and everything they stand for.

Anxiety cramps my stomach as we skirt the city’s east side, following the shade of the wall so that Panotii can pick up speed again. At last, the building site comes into view, and I go limp with relief. People are working and standing around. The healers’ tent is still overflowing with gawkers and casting a long shadow across the parched ground.