The Dragon's Path

huge head. “Lord Maas, listen to my voice. Listen to me. You cannot win.”
    “I will see your guts,” Maas shouted.
    “You won’t. Everything you love is already gone. Everything you hoped for is already lost. You can’t win. The fight is over. You’ve lost everything already. You have no reason to fight.”
    Feldin surged forward, but even Clara could see the change in his stance. His swing was more tentative, his weight on his back foot, as if reluctant to engage the fight he had just been winning. Vincen drew back, limping badly. His leathers were red and wet. Feldin didn’t step forward.
    “You saw her die, Lord Maas,” the priest said. “You saw her fall. She has gone, and you can’t bring her back. Listen to my voice.
Listen
to me. The fight’s lost. Nothing you can do here matters. You can feel that. That thickness in yourthroat. You feel it. You know what it means. You cannot win. You cannot win. You cannot win.”
    One of the guards moved forward, his blade before him, but his gaze kept cutting back to Feldin. Feldin, whose eyes were caught on nothing. Vincen started to close with the man, but Clara rushed forward, put her hand on his arm, pulled him back.
    “You can feel the despair in your belly, can’t you? You feel it,” the priest said. His voice was sorrowful, as if he regretted every word. Each syllable throbbed and echoed within itself. “You feel it in your heart. You’re drowning in it, and it will never end. There is no hope. Not now. Not ever. You cannot win, Lord Maas. You
cannot
win. There is nothing for you. You’ve lost it all, and you know it.”
    “Lord Maas?” his guard said.
    The point of Feldin’s blade lowered to the floor like he was drawing a vertical line in the empty air. In the candlelight, it was hard to see, but she thought there were tears on his mask-empty face. The guards looked at each other, confused and unnerved. Feldin dropped his sword to the ground, turned, and walked away down the corridor. Clara trembled. The huge priest put one hand on her shoulder, one on Vincen Coe’s.
    “We should leave before he changes his opinion,” the priest said.
    They backed down the hallway, leaving a track of blood. The guards took a few uncertain steps toward them, then back toward their retreating lord. They reminded Clara of nothing more than hunting dogs given two conflicting commands. When they reached the double doors, Vincen stumbled. The priest lifted him up, slinging him over a shoulder. It took them minutes to find a door that led out, what seemed half the night to negotiate the darkened gardensand reach the edge of Maas’s estate. A thick hedge marked the border, and the priest knelt by it, rolling Vincen Coe’s body to the ground. There were voices in the night. Shouting and calling. Searching, Clara thought, for them.
    “Under here,” he said. “Watch over him. I’ll bring a cart.”
    Clara knelt, pushing herself in through the twigs and leaves. The hedge had little space beneath it, but there was some. Vincen Coe dragged himself in after her, digging his elbows into the litter of dead leaves and old dirt. His face was ashen, and everything from his belly down was wet and slick. In the darkness, the blood wasn’t red, but black. She pulled him in close to her as best she could without proper leverage. She had the sudden visceral memory of being thirteen, hiding in her father’s gardens while one of her uncles dashed about pretending he didn’t know where she was. She shook her head. The memory was too innocent for the moment.
    Vincen rolled onto his back with a groan.
    “How bad is it?” she whispered.
    “Unpleasant,” Vincen said.
    “If Maas uses his dogs, we’re as good as found.”
    Vincen shook his head, the leaves under him making the softest crackling sound.
    “By now, I’m sure everything on the estate stinks of me,” he said. “Take them till morning to find which blood’s freshest.”
    “Still feeling well enough to joke, I see.”
    “Yes, my lady.”
    Clara struggled to rise, squinting through the leaves. There was more shouting now. And, unless she was mistaken, the crash of swordplay. She felt sure she heard Jorey’s voice raised in command. In the close confines of theirshelter, she felt the huntsman’s fast, shallow breath as much as heard it.
    “Be strong a bit longer,” she said. “Just a bit longer.”
    When he reached his hand to her, she thought it might be the last gesture of a dying man, but his fingers