Chapter - 18 Responsibility Of The Champion

Flare's boot slammed into the nearest dark figure's gut, throwing him across the street, and into the side of a house, brick breaking around his form making a hole in the wall where he'd thrashed. She was already on the next one before he'd landed; a curved blade slashing at her throat, catching the wrist behind it, twisting, elbow driving into the attacker's jaw, snapping it sideways and sending him crumpling where he stood.

She didn't kill them, told herself as she moved, a tiny, tight discipline she forced herself to remember even as her blood roared in her veins. A little less calculated, a fist here and a kick there, punches precise enough to end a fight rather than a life, regardless of how much it might hurt some animal part of her afterwards, what she'd just walked through.

She was three people-deep into the press when a fourth blow landed half-way.

A woman stepped into her path—tall, broad through the shoulders that spoke of raw strength than any leaner fighter's build—and caught Flare's next swing with a closed fist. Steel met flesh and steel lost, Flare's blade shattering at the point of impact in a spray of bright fragments, the shock of it running up through her arm hard enough to stagger her half a step.

That stopped her cold.

“Champion.” The woman's voice carried an accent Flare didn't recognize, clipped and hard-edged, amused in a way that made Flare's skin crawl. “Why are you pulling your strikes? Hitting us won't kill us, you know.”

Flare said nothing, glaring, blood roaring louder now than ever.

“Don't tell me.” The woman's mouth curved, delighted. “You're hoping to take us alive. Put us in front of some little court of law.” She turned her head and said something to the others in a language Flare didn't know, and the whole scattered group broke into laughter at once. Unbothered, entirely unafraid of the Champion standing among their own fallen.

Past the sound of it, Flare heard the storm shift direction. A deep roar sliding east along the line of soldiers she'd left behind.

“Tomas!”

The distraction cost her. The woman lunged the instant Flare's attention wavered, and somewhere behind her—from a blind angle she never saw coming—an arrow hissed toward her leg. She twisted to avoid the worst of it, but the movement threw her balance straight into the woman's waiting grip, and Flare hit the ground on her back with an arm locked hard across her throat.

“Aren't you a good little citizen.” The woman's voice came close to her ear now. “Here I thought the Solmere Champion was supposed to be a savage. You smashed our wind-funnel prototype clean apart in those mountains. Had us a little wary of you, honestly.” A short laugh. “Guess I was wrong. Luthain's finished, Miss Champion. You should start worrying about yourself instead of everyone else.”

Flare's vision was tightening to a single point of gray light when the pressure was all gone at once.

She drew in a ragged breath, coughed, and through the swirling vision saw every black-clad body in the street drop where they stood—the woman included, falling at her side, a small dart of black sticking from the side of her throat.

“Flare,”

Master Orin's voice was close. She turned her head, fighting past the constriction in her lungs and saw him coming up through the gap in the partly collapsed house wall, a slim blowgun still in one hand, his granddaughter pressed tight against his side. He crossed to where she knelt, fast for a man in such condition, and offered his arms to pull her up off the ground.

The sky was speaking for them both before Flare got her feet properly under herself.

A dozen thunderclaps split the heavens at once, rolling down over every district visible from where she stood, each one falling with the same heavy weight as the first. The northern watchtower's siren screamed a long note right after, it's sound a single continuous tone Flare had only ever heard described in drills and never in actuality in her whole life.

“Invasion. Borders have been breached.”

Flare looked down at the woman lying dead at her own feet, throat opened cleanly by Orin's dart, blood already pooling dark beneath her. Whatever pain the strike had promised, it hadn't delivered—her expression, even in death, held nothing but the same unbothered amusement she'd worn moments before.

Orin's granddaughter pressed her face into his side, silent tears streaking down cheeks gone pale with shock. Orin himself looked down at what he'd done without any visible satisfaction in it; only the tired resolve of someone who had killed before and had hoped never to need to again.

Flare knelt beside the body and drew the black cloth covering the upper half of the woman's face.

Her skin was a pasty white; gorgeous against the blood still trailing from her mouth, but what caught Flare's attention were her eyes. Even when she was lying there unconscious, her eyelids had the shape of thin crescents curved like sliver moons, smudged with some kind of dark eye paint that gave them a striking contrast. Flare had seen that style before, in the illustrated articles in the war college's library, the ones that documented foreign customs.

“She is from Kaldreth…”

She looked up at Orin, expecting an explanation. He only looked back at her, just as confused as she felt.

“That can't be right,” Flare said, more to herself than to him. “Kaldreth doesn't send women on invasion missions. Their doctrine's built around it. Women stay behind the lines, raise the next generation, nothing more. They'd never risk them this far into hostile ground.” She stared down at the crescent eyes. “So what is she doing here?”

“Flare.” Orin's voice, firm. “Stand. We don't have time for this.”

She stood, forcing herself upright, and bit down hard on her own lip to focus her scattered thoughts. Blood welling faintly at the cut, grounding her like it had at Hercules's funeral.

Orin was studying the storm-funnels that were still visible above the rooftops, calculating something in his tired eyes. “'The funnels are a distraction,”' he said slowly. '”They pulled every soldier and mage to the storm front. They emptied out these streets on purpose. I think that whatever those thunder strikes are, they're being used to move soldiers directly into the gaps that left.”

“I think so too,” Flare said, a sick feeling of understanding in her bones.

The nearest funnel groaned closer, close enough now that Flare could feel the pressure of it coming up in her ears and there was no more time to stand still and reason things out.

“This way,” Orin said, already turning, his granddaughter's hand back in his. “Away from it. Now”

What lay in their path stole whatever breath Flare had managed to recover.

The street beyond was littered with more bodies than that one before it. Men, women, the very old and very young. All littered across the cobbles glossy with more blood than Flare would ever wish to see in a single street. Some had clearly died quickly, she could tell even without wanting to look. Others, it was obvious they hadn't. Women with their clothes torn in ways that made Flare's stomach churn, children and elders with wounds far too cruel to be delivered with anything but a lack of mercy. Black clad soldiers littered the street alongside their victims, also cut down, gutted by those who had been forced to flee in the chaos, the few that had been able to put up a fight spilling their insides across the cobbles.

Flare stopped walking entirely for a moment, unable to make her legs carry her any further into it.

I sent them to their deaths.

The thought came whole and unsparing, refused to be tempered for her sake. She had gone door to door herself, hours ago—do you think she'd known, did she know—leading every family in that neighborhood to the northern gate with complete assurance, certain she was leading them to safety. She had sent them with her own voice into precisely the place the enemy had been waiting.

“This is my fault,” she said, voice quiet, then louder, faster, the words tearing free before she could stop them. “I sent them here. I told them this was safe. I stood in that street and I promised them—“

“Flare…”

“I'm so stupid. I didn't check. I didn't think. I just assumed the northern gate would be safe because it's always been the evacuation route, and now look—” She gestured helplessly at the carnage stretching out ahead of them, her voice cracking. “Look what I did. Look what my orders did”

Orin caught her by the shoulder before she could spiral any further, his grip firmer than his frail frame seemed to be capable of.

“You didn't do this,” he said, forcing her eyes up to meet his. “The enemy did this. You did not.”

Flare desired to believe him. Standing in the middle of everything her own certainty had led these people into, she could not manage it, not yet, not with the evidence of it laid out in front of her in numbers too large to look away from.

She said nothing else. She only nodded once, her jaw tight, and forced her legs to continue moving through the wreckage of a street she would carry with her for a very long time.