Another crossbow twanged, this time the arbalester aiming low at Jaciel’s legs. The quarrel struck the back of a chair, deflected off it at an odd angle, and struck Harven in the middle of his chest. His hands fell, the imploring gesture broken. He fell to the floor, blood pumping from the wound like a flooded gutter overflowing at the eaves.

Clariel felt him die. It was a sensation she knew well from hunting, though she had never realised it was the death sense of the Abhorsens, because she had never been so close to a person in the moment of their death. With animals it was like a fleeting, frozen touch in her mind. Here it was an icy gale that blew through a door that slammed shut again, all in one terrible instant.

A moment later Jaciel’s left-hand dagger flew through the air and the crossbowman who’d fired choked and gargled and plucked at the steel in his throat. Clariel felt his death too, another brief, icy waft deep inside her head.

‘Clariel! Go!’

Jaciel’s command was laced with Charter Magic. Before Clariel could even think to fight against it, she found herself at the small door, wrenching it open, the narrow stair below her dark. She turned sideways as she stepped through, fighting the spell, and saw Jaciel throw her second dagger at Aronzo. He parried it too slowly and too close, so the blade spun across his handsome face, opening his cheek from chin to ear. Aronzo screamed and dropped his sword, his hands clutching his face, the blood running out between his fingers.

Clariel had one last glimpse of Jaciel preparing to launch herself at Kilp and his guards. Her mother was casting a spell, a forge spell drawn with a single master Charter mark, sketched in the air. Flames grew from her fingers as she traced it, long white-hot flames like curving swords.

Jaciel’s daughter saw no more. The spell forced her away, turned her head and sent her stumbling down the stair.

Clariel did not see her mother charge her enemies.

Kilp fled before her, his guards closing ranks behind him. Jaciel killed one, cutting him almost in two. But she was struck herself twice, a terrible wound in her side, and another above her knee. She merely laughed again. Bloody foam dribbled from her mouth as she spun and hacked and drove steadily deeper into the panicked guards, her fiery blades hissing as they cut through armour, flesh and bone.

The guards fought back, chopping and stabbing in blind desperation at this terrible enemy who wielded fire and would not die.

Jaciel was almost through to Kilp when a blow from a halberd took her in the neck, and the head of the greatest Goldsmith and finest artist in the Kingdom flew from her shoulders, to roll bloodily across the floor.

chapter seventeen

seeking refuge