Read Online Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles) by Intisar Khanani - Free Book Online

 
    I smile, a wild, feral thing Kenta would have been proud of, and launch myself at the foremost soldier. I have to make this look like a struggle, at least a little, before they kill me. The narrow hall works in my favor: only two can face me at a time. However, the fact that I never learned swordplay, and that I’m still off-balance from my last spell, makes the fight brutally short.  
    The first soldier meets my sword with his own, blocking my swing and throwing my arm back towards the wall. I duck and twist, just avoiding another blade, and bring my sword back around in time to clumsily block the second soldier’s attack—and lose my footing as my sandal skids on the floorboards.  
    I stagger, throwing myself sideways as a blade slides past my ribs. I’m not quite fast enough to outstep the second blade the soldier uses. It knocks my own sword from my hand. I twist away as it skitters across the floor, yanking my knife free from its sheath. A woman screams—Lady Degath?—but there’s no way I can reach her. I throw myself forward, slicing my knife towards the soldier’s chest, and another sharp edge flashes in the corner of my vision.  
    I don’t look at it, expecting it to cut into my neck, kill me. I see the eyes of the soldier facing me flicker, and then the flat of the blade slams into the side of my head.
    I fall to my knees, stunned. A boot plows into my back. My face meets the splintered floorboards, and then a man’s weight slams down on me, pinning me to the floor. He rips the knife from my grasp, and, with the help of another soldier, binds my hands with ruthless efficiency. They search me quickly, checking my pockets, frisking my arms and legs, checking the empty sheath at my calf. I stare across the floor, trying not to think about what I’ll do if they realize I’m a girl, and find myself looking through the Degaths’ doorway into the glazed eyes of Lord Degath. A few drops of blood trickle from his lips to form a perfectly round coin of darkness on the floor. I swallow back bile.
    “Who’d have thought the Ghost couldn’t fight worth shit?” one of the soldiers sneers as they haul me to my feet. They wear the uniform of the sultan’s soldiers rather than Blackflame’s mercenaries, and yet they don’t seem any different.
    I look up, catch the measured gaze of the second soldier—not a soldier, I realize, taking in the embroidered rank marks at his collar. A captain.  
    “He wasn’t trying to kill us,” he says.
    “Then what the hell—”
    “He was trying to get killed.” The captain steps forward, holding my gaze. “Isn’t that right?”
    I force a smile through bruised and bloodied lips. At least they haven’t figured out I’m neither a boy nor the Ghost. “Some people don’t mind blood on their hands. I do.”
    The man holding me spins me around and backhands me across my face. I fall against a wall. My vision jumps, and all I can think of is how the Ghost must have felt when Kenta hit him with that board.
    “ Hold. ” The captain’s voice rings out through the hallway. “We bring him in alive as we were ordered. You will not let him taunt you into killing him.”
    “If only you’d been as stupid as the rest of them.” I turn my head to meet his eyes. He offers me the shadow of a smile, one fighting man to another, I suppose. Then he turns and walks into the massacre he had ordered.  
    I follow him with my gaze, forcing myself to keep looking past Degath’s sprawled form. Behind him lies his wife, her eyes rolled back, showing only white, her face taut with a pain now departed. Blood stains the front of her dress.  
    At the back of the room, the two girls cling to each other. I crane my neck to see the third form crouched beside them: their brother, clutching his arm to his side, blood seeping through his fingers.  
    A part of me is sorry, sorry that the little girl and her brother are still alive, that they will pay the price of their father’s choices and