“Look—” Valyn said, raising a hand.

Before he could finish the sentence, something whistled past his ear, a soft, almost timid flutter, and the Flea jerked back. One of Pyrre’s knives sprouted from his shoulder. Not a bad wound, but had the man not moved it would have taken him straight through the neck. Without pausing, the Flea shifted stance, putting his good arm forward, letting the hurt one drop into a low guard. If the pain bothered him, he didn’t show it, but the distraction had put a space between them, and Valyn used it to glance over his shoulder.

The Lord of all Chaos had unleashed his full fury upon the room.

The advantage, so skewed toward the Flea at the start, had changed dramatically with Pyrre’s appearance and the death of Blackfeather Finn. There was still no sign of Chi Hoai, which meant that Valyn had the numbers, six to three, and Newt had gone after the Skullsworn, ineffectually, it seemed, which made five to two inside the room itself.

Unfortunately, the advantage didn’t seem to be doing them much good. Sigrid’s attack had snapped Annick’s bowstring, and Gwenna’s demolitions would be suicidal in the tiny space. That left the four members of Valyn’s Wing facing Sigrid. It should have been good odds, but the blond leach had managed to hold her ground, twin blades naked, one of the two dripping blood. As Valyn watched, Gwenna went down cursing, clutching at her knee, and Laith reeled backward, battered by another invisible attack.

Valyn turned back to the Flea barely in time to knock aside the flat of the other man’s blade. The flat. Valyn stared. Even now, even bleeding from the shoulder, the Flea wasn’t trying to kill him. That the two Wings were fighting at all looked more and more like a horrible mistake.

Valyn parried two more attacks, stepping back to buy space, time. If he and the Flea were alone in a room, they could talk things out, but they were not alone. Behind Valyn, steel rang viciously against steel, Laith and Gwenna were cursing, and Sigrid’s unnatural fire continued to rake the chamber. The Flea might be pulling his punches, but the rest of his Wing was not, not anymore. Valyn couldn’t blame them. Somewhere back there crumpled on the crumbling stone floor lay Blackfeather Finn, the man who had taught them all to shoot. He was fucking dead.

Valyn stared at the Flea, trying to think of something to say, some way to stop the madness. There were no words. Some things you just couldn’t take back. The only goal now was to get clear, get free, before more people started dying.

He beat away the Flea’s weapons with a vicious fury of blows, then spun. “The doorway,” he bellowed to his Wing, slashing a sword behind him to cover his retreat. “Get the doorway.”