Chapter 76: Volume 1- [ - 77]
The cloaked Mirra stumbled forward, her voice cracking. “What are you doing to her? Stop — please—”
The men turned. The one with his cock out — the one pressing against the bartender’s pussy — looked at Mirra with the slow, predatory contempt of a man who had been interrupted mid-act and was annoyed about it.
“Piss off, girl. This is not your—”
I moved. The Boots of the Wind launched me — five meters in a single stride, the Knight’s Bane dagger in my hand, the blade catching the moonlight. The man with the sword — the one standing guard — turned. I slashed.
The dagger caught his neck. The Knight’s Bane coating — the muscle-weakening compound — seeped into the wound as the blade opened his throat. He screamed — a wet, gurgling sound — and fell.
“Kill the bastard!” the second man yelled, lunging for the dropped sword.
I was faster. The Boots of the Wind carried me sideways — the sword swinging through empty air — and my dagger found his ribs. Two jabs, fast, precise, the blade sliding between the bones. He dropped.
The third man — the one with his cock against the bartender — turned. His face was white. His hands came up — the universal gesture of surrender, the instinct of a man who had just watched two of his friends die in three seconds.
I looked at his cock. At the dark, dirty thing that had been pressing against the bartender’s pussy. At the violation that had been seconds from completion.
‘That is my woman,’ I thought, and the thought was not rational, not moral, not anything that a good person would think. It was the thought of a man who had claimed ownership and was enforcing it. ‘Only my cock deserves to be inside her.’
I cut. The Knight’s Bane sliced through the base of his cock — the blade sharp, the flesh yielding, the severance clean. He screamed — a sound that was not human, the shriek of a man whose manhood had just been removed. Blood sprayed. The cock fell to the cobblestones with a wet slap.
I swung again. The dagger found his throat. The scream stopped. He fell.
Silence. The alley was quiet. Three bodies. Three pools of blood. The bartender — her back against the wall, her skirt up, her panties down — stared at me with eyes that were wide and wet and full of something that was not gratitude and not fear and not relief but all three at once.
Blood was on my face. On my hands. On my chest. The Knight’s Bane dripped red, the coating mixing with the real thing, the blade a wet, gleaming thing in the moonlight.
I smiled. The smile was — I had to admit — probably not reassuring. A man covered in blood, holding a dripping dagger, smiling in a dark alley where three corpses lay. The smile of a devil in a woodcut illustration.
“You do not need to thank me, my lady,” I said, and my voice was calm, refined, the voice of a lord addressing a commoner. I wiped my face with the back of my hand — the blood smearing rather than clearing, the gesture making it worse.
Her eyes rolled. She fainted. Her body went limp, her knees buckling, her skirt falling as she crumpled.
I caught her. The princess carry — one arm under her knees, the other behind her back — lifted her from the ground. She was light. Lighter than Seraphine, lighter than the sisters. The body of a woman who stood behind a bar and did not fight and did not carry and did not train.
“Are you all right?” I asked Mirra.
The healer trembled. Her brown eyes were fixed on the bodies — on the blood, on the severed cock, on the faces of dead men. “You — you killed them.”
I looked at her. At the horror in her eyes. At the judgment that was forming — the quiet, moral judgment of a woman who had been raised to believe that killing was wrong, that violence was wrong, that even in defense of the innocent, the taking of life was a sin.
“They would have hurt her,” I said.
“What? No — but it is still wrong — they were — you could have—”
“Mirra.” I said her name — her name, his mother’s name — and the word landed with the weight it always did. “If I had not killed them, they would have raped her. Then they would have killed her — because dead women do not report crimes. Then they would have found you — because you were a witness. Then they would have raped you. Then they would have killed you. Then they would have moved on to the next town, and the next, and the next, and every woman they found would have—”
“That is — you do not know that—”
“I know men like that. I have read about them. I have seen them. They do not stop. They do not reform. They do not get caught — not in a country town where the guard is thin and the Guild is weak and the women are commoners who no one listens to. The only thing that stops them is death.”
Mirra’s internal voice was a war — the moral training of a healer fighting the logical structure of my argument, the instinct to condemn violence struggling against the recognition that the violence had saved a life.
‘He — he is right. I do not want him to be right. But he is. The men — they were — she was crying. She was begging. And they — if he had not come—’
“Fine,” she whispered. “It was — it was right. But—”
“Come on. Heal her.”
Mirra’s hands came up. The healing magic — green, warm, the signature of her goddess’s blessing — flowed from her palms into the bartender’s body. The bruises faded. The scrapes healed. The woman’s breathing steadied, her face relaxing in unconsciousness as the magic repaired what the men had damaged.
“She is just exhausted,” Mirra said, her voice small. “She panicked. The healing will help her sleep.”
I grabbed Mirra’s wrist. “Come.”
I pulled her — both of them, the unconscious bartender in my arms and the stumbling healer on my feet — and ran. The Boots of the Wind carried us at half speed — fast enough to outpace any pursuit, slow enough to avoid jarring the woman in my arms.
The bar appeared — the same bar the bartender worked in, the one I had seen from the street. The sign read THE FEATHERED CUP. The door was open. Light spilled from inside, and the sound of voices — drunk, loud, the sound of men who had been drinking since sunset.
I entered. The room went quiet. Faces turned — farmers, laborers, the handful of men who drank at country bars on weeknights. They looked at me — at the blood, at the woman in my arms, at the healer stumbling behind me.
The bartender behind the counter — a woman who looked exactly like the one in my arms, the same brown hair, the same mole, the same feather tattoo — gasped. “Renna? What happened to Renna?”
I pulled out the Serpent’s Fang. Raised it. Fired.
CRACK.
The shot hit the ceiling. Plaster rained down. The sound — the thunder-crack that these people did not know, did not understand, but feared instinctively — filled the room.
“Leave if you do not want to die,” I said, and my voice was the voice of a man who had just killed three people and was not bluffing.
They ran. Chairs overturned. Mugs shattered. The men poured through the door like water through a broken dam, their screams a chorus of “DAMN IT — WHAT WAS THAT — GO — GO—”
The bar was empty in ten seconds.
I set Renna on a chair. Looked at Mirra. “Check her.”