"There," Tau said, pointing at a flickering light in the distance. "Do you see
it?" The light was bright against the evening's darkness, but he was never
sure how far Jabari could see.
"I see it," Jabari said. "They're burning Daba."
He picked up the pace, and Tau, lungs raw from running, struggled to
keep up with his friend's longer strides.
He couldn't believe he'd gone along with Jabari's plan and tried not to
think about what they'd find when they got to the hamlet. "What if this
doesn't work?" Tau asked. "What if they don't come?"
"They'll come."
Before leaving the keep, Jabari had gone to its barracks and told
everyone he was going to Daba to defend the hamlet. The highest-ranking
guard in the room tried to reason with him, but he wouldn't be swayed.
It was clever. Jabari couldn't countermand Lekan's orders, but the
guards were bound, on pain of death, to protect every member of the Onai
family. By letting them know he was putting himself in harm's way, Jabari
was forcing them to organize and send an honor guard to protect him. Tau
hoped the extra men would be enough.
"Swords out!" Jabari said as they came over a hill. Tau pulled his
weapon free, looked down on the hamlet, and froze.
Daba sat on a plateau with natural borders. The most obvious border was
four hundred strides directly ahead. There, the plateau became mountainous
again and the rock continued its climb to the clouds. To Tau's right, and
roughly eight hundred strides away, was the hamlet's central circle. Beyond
it, the plateau ended in a series of steep but scalable cliffs that dropped
toward the valley floor. On Tau's left were the raiders.
The hedeni had come from the paths leading to Daba's growing fields,
and they had burned half the hamlet already. The flaxen roofs of the larger
houses were on fire, and in the night's dark, the flames silhouetted the
fleeing women, men, and children of Daba.
The Ihagu, Aren's men, were fighting a series of skirmishes between the
hamlet's tightly packed homes and storage barns. They were outnumbered
and losing ground but could only go so far. The hedeni were herding
everyone to the cliffs.
Tau didn't know what he'd expected, but this wasn't it. Scarred and
disfigured, marked by the Goddess's curse, the hedeni held either bone
spears or bone-and-bronze hatchets and chopped at the Chosen like
woodcutters. They used no recognizable fighting stances and their attacks
followed no rhythm or sequence. Worst of all, the Ihagu had been reduced
to fighting just as savagely. Both sides hacked at each other, and every so
often someone fell back, dead, wounded, or maimed.
"What is this?" Tau asked, his voice too low for Jabari to hear.
"There," Jabari shouted, running down, not waiting to see if Tau
followed.
Tau tracked his path and saw three of the raiders harrying a woman and
child. Jabari yelled, charged in, and Tau chased after him.
By the time he reached the flats, Jabari had already engaged two hedeni.
They were circling to his sides, trying to get between him and the woman
and child.
Tau went for the third savage, arcing his sword in a blow meant to
decapitate, but the wretch brought up a hatchet and blocked the strike. The
raider, a mass of dirty hair and mud-caked skin, blundered forward,
swinging the weapon low, aiming for Tau's thigh.
Tau leapt back, fear lending him speed, and the hatchet's blade hissed
past his kneecap, a hairsbreadth from taking his leg off at the calf. Blood
pumping and desperate to shift the fight's momentum in his favor, Tau
attacked. He stabbed out with his blade, aiming for the heart, and, as he'd
been taught, kept his eye on the target, ready to react when the hedena
dodged.
The collision, then, was a surprise. Tau's blade plunged from tip to hilt,
into and through his opponent's chest. The savage had made no move to
avoid the sword's point at all.
Tau didn't understand. The lunge had been obvious. It wasn't a serious
killing blow. Anyone with decent training would have avoided it.
He looked into the face of the person he'd stabbed. The woman's eyes
were big and wide, staring off at something in the distance. Her mouth, fulllipped, formed a gentle O, and the raider's hair, dreaded by lack of care,
hung down her scarred face.
Tau pulled back in revulsion, but his blade wouldn't come free. The
woman—or girl; he couldn't tell—cried out as the bronze ripped her
insides.
She reached for Tau, perhaps to hold him close, hoping to halt the
blade's bitter exit, and her fingers, bloody already, touched his face. She
tried to speak, lips flecked with spittle, but her life ran its course, and she
sighed before the weight of her lifeless body pulled Tau to the ground.
"Tau!" Jabari's voice sounded far away. "Are you hurt?"
"No… I—I hurt her, I think," Tau heard himself say.
"Get up. More are coming. We have to make it to the rest of our men,"
Jabari said. "Is that your blood?"
"Blood?"
"Your face."
Jabari and the woman and child were staring at him. The two hedeni
men who had faced Jabari were dead.
"It's not me," Tau told them. "Not my blood."
"We have to go," said Jabari.
Tau nodded, struggled to jerk his blade free from the hedena woman's
body, took a step, doubled over, and retched. Nothing came up. He retched
again, his stomach still heaving when he forced himself upright. The child
was staring at him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his blood-streaked
hand. "Fine," he said. "I'm fine."
Jabari looked Tau over and began moving. "We have to go."
Tau followed, looking back once. The woman he'd fought lay in the
mud like a broken doll. He'd never killed someone. He was shaking. He'd
never—
"This way," said Jabari as the four of them weaved between huts and
buildings, doing their best to avoid the fighting all around them.
Jabari was heading toward the barricade that the Ihagu had set up at the
edge of the hamlet's central circle. They'd used overturned wagons, tables even broken-down doors to block the paths that led to it.