Free Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure by Ari Marmell Page B

incontinent plague to you?”
    Jourdain actually sputtered to a halt, gesticulating wildly with the flintlock. Cyrille bit his lip to keep from guffawing openly. His whole body, even the blade of his rapier, quivered with his suppressed mirth.
    Then the elder guardsman ordered “Take her!” and Cyrille wasn't amused anymore.
    “Now hold on a minute. Surely that's not—”
    Nobody was listening. Jourdain's weapon was shifting back to cover the woman once more. The other two armsmen were approaching from either side, hands raised, blades loose in their scabbards. The breeze kicked up over the field, sending shivers across every patch of exposed skin, as winter itself seemed to tense up.
    And though he knew he must be mistaken, Cyrille could have sworn that he heard the stranger mutter something very much like, “Oh, figs.”
    He could make even less sense of what happened next.
    The hammer on Jourdain's weapon fell with a loud clunk when it was mere inches off target, discharging its ball harmlessly into the diseased bog. The guard jumped, wide-eyed, nearly fumbling the gun. The other two turned their heads to gawp his way, perhaps unaware it had been a misfire, wondering what he was shooting at.
    In that tiny span of distraction, shorter than the twitch of a dreaming dog's paw, the stranger moved.
    She crossed the distance between them at a pace Cyrille wasn't sure the horses could have hoped to match. Her hands closed on Jourdain's shoulders before he seemed fully aware she was coming. A short jump, braced with that grip, brought both her knees up, hard and fast. The first sank into Jourdain's gut, the second uncomfortably lower. The leather padding of his uniform absorbed the worst of it—but what remained was clearly bad enough. He tumbled to all fours, gasping and dry heaving.
    The woman pushed off him as he fell, coming to rest facing Cyrille. She held in her right fist a rapier with a brass bell guard; stood planted in a stance that would've gotten Cyrille reprimanded by his instructors—and which, he had no doubt, would get him dead if she wanted it to. His own rapier hung limp at his side, and the young Delacroix scion offered the insightful and most pertinent observation he could manage.
    “Did you know the jewel's missing from your pommel?”
    And then he could only laugh, albeit somewhat hysterically, at the utterly bemused expression flitting across her face. Then she was running again, the other two guards in pursuit, and Cyrille was left staring, largely unawares, at the whimpering Jourdain.
    Briefly. Sucking in his breath, struggling to bring his laughter and his shock under control, he turned to follow.
    Only once did he stumble in the dim light of the moon, foot catching on Cevora knew what, but he was up and running again with only dirty breeches and a slightly skinned palm to show for it.
    It took him no time at all to catch up; pursuers and pursued had gotten only as far as where Cyrille and the guards had left the horses. In those mere moments, however, the woman had already dropped one of the two guards. He lay on the hard earth, moaning and clutching at an arm that gleamed wetly in the ambient luminescence.
    As far as the other…
    Again Cyrille could only stare in unabashed awe. The womantumbled backward out of the path of the armsman's swinging blade, leaping so that she rolled on her back across the saddle of a skittish, nervously prancing horse. He saw the beast's eyes go wide, but it was too well trained to bolt. She cleared the saddle completely, vanishing briefly behind the animal's flank.
    And reappeared from beneath it, daring its hooves as only a lunatic might, snagging the guard by the knees before he'd taken two steps. A swift jerk and he was on his back with a grunt, lying supine beneath the stirrup.
    Once more she vanished into the shadows, once more reappearing, this time leaping clear over the horse, not so much as touching it, flipping in midair. A single slash with her rapier as