The embassy guards knew their business. They attacked together, then separately, one elf trying to get behind Piaras, the other intensifying his attack to force Piaras to focus all his attention on him. It didn’t work. It was like the kid had eyes in the back of his head. He didn’t, but Sarad Nukpana wasn’t restricted by eyes. I hated that goblin shaman, but right now I was grateful. His skill was keeping Piaras alive.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. That same preternatural skill would condemn him.

This might have started out as a kidnapping, but it’d turned into a setup. The embassy guards were no longer wearing Guardian uniforms. For anyone who saw them now, they were elven embassy guards under attack and defending themselves. One of the bastards was even standing off to the side, bearing witness to the whole thing. Balmorlan knew that Piaras was capable of defending himself. Taltek Balmorlan would call it an act of revenge and murder. Piaras was a subject of the elven crown attacking elven embassy guards. Balmorlan could have him arrested and extradited before the ink was dry on the paperwork.

The first squad of Guardians had arrived; their job was to deal with Piaras’s bukas. I wished them luck.

Mychael and I drew blades. Before mine had cleared its scabbard, Mychael was halfway to the Guardian impostors.

One embassy guard risked a backward glance and Mychael’s armored fist punched him squarely in the face. That was the distraction Piaras/Nukpana was waiting for. With a quick twist of his wrist and flick of his blade, Piaras easily disarmed the remaining elf and pinned him to the wall, the tip of his blade resting in the hollow of his throat. Both young men were breathing heavily, and Piaras’s dark eyes were blazing.

“Piaras, stand down.” Mychael kept his voice low and even.

Piaras didn’t move.

The elf who Piaras had pinned to the wall swallowed, and a thin stream of blood ran down his throat where Piaras’s rapier had pierced the skin. “Sir, I can explain,” the elf whispered to Mychael.

“Jari, nothing explains or justifies this.” Mychael’s voice was tight with restrained fury. “Piaras, stand down. I’ve got him.”

The tip of Piaras’s blade was unwavering.

I slowly moved along the wall, closer to the young elven Guardian. I needed for Piaras to see me, to remember me. To remember himself.

“Piaras,” I said. “Mychael can’t question him if he’s dead. If he dies, Balmorlan will never have to answer for anything he’s done to you. Let him go. Please. Lower your blade; Mychael can take it from here.”

I could see the struggle on Piaras’s face, and I could feel the battle raging in Piaras’s mind. He was fighting back, with everything he had he was fighting back. All Piaras had to do was extend his arm and that young elven Guardian would be dead, and this time it wouldn’t be self-defense. It would be murder, cold and calculated. Sarad Nukpana wanted that murder, so did Taltek Balmorlan. Piaras wanted it to stop. He wanted to lower that blade, but he couldn’t.

“Piaras, you’re stronger than he is.” I said it quietly, simply. I said it like it was the truth, willing Piaras to believe it. I was talking about Nukpana’s strength, but the Guardian held captive at the tip of Piaras’s rapier didn’t know that; the Guardians within hearing didn’t know that—and I didn’t want them to. “Let him go; it’s over.”

Piaras swallowed, his breath hissing in and out between clenched teeth. His knuckles were white on the rapier’s grip. Then he took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering exhale, and with visible effort, lowered the bloodied blade.

Piaras was back with us and in control of himself. For now.

Mychael stepped up next to him, but made no move to disarm him. “Clean your blade and sheath your weapon.”

Piaras did.

For Sarad Nukpana, this was just a demonstration, a taste of what he could make Piaras do—and how he could force me to find the Scythe of Nen and let him out of the Saghred.

“When the lower hells freeze over,” I said in my mind. I was sure Sarad Nukpana heard me. To him, this was but the first move in a game he intended to play until he got what he wanted. Like I said, when hell froze over.

A pair of Guardians stood nearby, awaiting Mychael’s orders.

“Take this traitor into custody.” Mychael never took his eyes off of the disgraced elf.

The two Guardians chained Jari Devent’s hands behind his back.

“My brother ordered me and I had no choice—” The elf’s voice had an edge of panicked desperation.

“You had every choice,” Mychael’s voice slashed through the air. “You made the wrong one.”

Devent’s pale eyes flashed with defiance. Big mistake. “My obligations to my family—”

Mychael took two strides and was in the young elf’s face, his rage a living thing in the air, his voice low and furious. “As a knighted Guardian, you have duty and loyalty to the archmagus, the Conclave, and to me. You betrayed us all.”

The elf’s chin came up. “You’re going to kill me.” He was trying for brave, the tremble in his voice said otherwise.

“No, we’re going back to the citadel, and we are going talk. I will ask questions and you will answer every one of them—truthfully and completely.”

The Guardians took Devent away, and Piaras cleared his throat.

“Thank you, sir.” Piaras’s voice was quiet, but firm. “I don’t know what happened to me.”

“We do,” I told him. “And we’re going to fix it so that it never happens again.”

“Sir!” An out-of-breath Guardian ran up to Mychael. The armor on his sword arm had been ripped away.

A buka’s roar told us exactly what had done the ripping.

I swore. The Guardians and watchers couldn’t kill those bukas, because even though they were solid, they weren’t real. Piaras’s voice had made them; Piaras’s voice was the only thing that could unmake them. As if the kid hadn’t endured enough tonight.

“You have to dispel them,” Mychael told Piaras.

Another roar joined the first as a watcher and a Guardian tried a divide-and-contain tactic. It didn’t work.

“I tried, sir,” Piaras said. “When the second one materialized, I—”

“They’re still here,” Phaelan pointed out in a singsong voice, eyes wide and disbelieving, blades in both hands.

“I know that!” Piaras snapped in desperation.

Mychael was the calm in the middle of furry chaos. “What did you use?”

Piaras told him. I didn’t know what the hell he’d just said, but Mychael did.

“That’s not strong enough,” Mychael said. Then he told him what to use; I didn’t recognize those as words, either. “And be firm with them,” he ordered.

“Got it. I think.”

“Don’t think, do!” Mychael barked like a drill sergeant to a new recruit. “You’re banishing them! They’re not going unless you force them. Do it! Now!”

Piaras did. He didn’t think; he just reacted to that order. Mychael’s voice gave him no choice. It wasn’t Mychael’s spellsinger voice. It wasn’t magic. It was the voice of a commander of men, a leader on the battlefield, a voice you obeyed without question or faced consequences that might be worse than getting squashed by a buka.

Piaras squared his shoulders, braced his feet, and let the bukas have the full force of his voice. It rang like a bright battle horn in the night, the volume magnified by the marble buildings. It was majestic and compelling, commanding the bukas, forcing them to do his will.

I’m glad the kid wasn’t aiming at me.

The bukas were becoming less substantial. One of them had a watcher by the leg and was dragging him closer; he lost his grip, his hand becoming translucent in the lamplight. The bukas were going, but they weren’t going quietly. One roar shattered a row of windows on a pristine government building before becoming a mere echo, a distant cry. Then the monsters simply winked out of existence. Piaras’s ragged breathing said there was nothing simple about it. He was bent over, hands on his knees, looking a little green around the gills. But he was still upright. Unbelievable. And the bukas were gone without a trace, not even a smell remained. Good work. Scary, but good.

And I think Piaras had done that all by himself. Sarad Nukpana had nothing to do with it. That was the scary part.

“Bravo, kid,” Vegard whispered in awe. The big Guardian’s grin was fierce.

There was a smattering of applause from the Guardians and watchers. The applause grew and with it came whistles.

Great. Once word got around, Piaras would be even more of a magical must-have than he already was.

I put an arm around his shoulders as he pulled himself upright. “Raine, I couldn’t stop myself,” he whispered, looking down at the dead elf sprawled in the street. “Once I started, I couldn’t stop.”

“I know,” I told him, resisting the urge to hug him. Later, not here, not now in front of dozens of Guardians and half the watchers in town. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Piaras’s brow creased in confusion. “How?”

“Not now. Let’s get off the streets first.”

“Sir Jari said you needed to talk to me,” Piaras told Mychael. “That’s why I went with them.”

“I know,” Mychael said. “I didn’t need to speak with you then, but I do now—and so does the archmagus.”

Chapter 16

“You are not dragging him in front of that old man for judgment!” I was surprised at how vicious my voice sounded. I also didn’t care. I was too tired and angry and scared and a dozen other emotions to care what I said or how I said it.

We were in Mychael’s office in the citadel; Piaras was in the next room getting some cuts and scrapes taken care of by a Guardian healer.

“I’m not dragging him anywhere,” Mychael told me. “And Justinius is not going to judge him. He’s going to help him.”