Chapter 22 — Taming the Wolf King

The gap Bach Linh tore open lasted perhaps ten seconds before Hac Xa's remaining guards closed ranks to fill it, but ten seconds, it turned out, was exactly enough for a woman who had spent months training to read exactly where an opening would appear before it did. Somewhere behind me I heard her still fighting, snarling curses at guards twice her size, refusing to fall even as the gap she'd bought us widened into something the rest of us could actually use.

I drove forward through the chaos with Thuong Diem at my shoulder, the two of us moving in the same terrible, practiced rhythm we'd built across dozens of smaller fights — his strength clearing whatever stood directly in our path, my speed and the reforged club's reach handling whatever tried to come at us from the sides he couldn't cover fast enough. A snake-shifter lunged for my legs and I met it with a strike Vu Vinh had drilled into me a hundred times on the training ground, low and fast, using the creature's own momentum to put it down rather than trying to overpower it outright. Another came from behind and Thuong Diem simply removed the problem before I'd fully registered it existed, blood-soaked and terrible and entirely, wonderfully mine.

Tuyet Phong's warriors carved a second path from the west, driving deep enough into the chamber that Hac Xa's forces found themselves stretched between three separate directions of attack at once, exactly the kind of chaos I'd learned, across a year of council meetings and quiet strategy sessions, that a rigid, hierarchical command structure handled badly. Hac Xa herself remained coiled at the dais, unmoving, watching the battle with the particular stillness of something that had survived far worse than this and intended to survive it again.

Off to my left, I caught a glimpse of Vu Vinh directing a knot of our own warriors into a tighter formation against a pair of larger snake-shifters, calling out corrections in the same patient, precise voice he'd used teaching me to read tracks in the mud months ago. Cot Nhan, of all people, had found his way into the thick of it too, wielding a heavy iron tool clearly not designed for combat with the enthusiastic, if inelegant, force of a craftsman who had spent decades building things and apparently decided breaking things could not be so very different. Somewhere further back, I heard Tuyet Phong's voice rise above the din, sharp and commanding, rallying a knot of her warriors who'd been momentarily scattered by a coordinated push from Hac Xa's flank.

We reached the base of the dais with perhaps a dozen of Hac Xa's personal guard still standing between us and the boys, and it was there, finally, that the great serpent herself uncoiled from her place atop the bone platform and descended to meet us directly.

"Enough," she said, and her voice alone seemed to still the chaos around us, guards and warriors both instinctively giving ground before something ancient and furious. "You've cost me a fox who was finally proving useful, and half a night's careful preparation, human. I find I've lost my patience for subtlety."

She struck faster than anything her size had any right to move, a blur of black scale that Thuong Diem barely managed to intercept, throwing his whole considerable weight into knocking her strike wide of where I stood. The impact sent him skidding back across the stone floor, and for one heart-stopping instant I thought he wasn't going to get up before her next strike landed.

He got up. Of course he got up. He was, underneath every domesticated, chore-doing, chicken-eating version of himself I'd fallen in love with, still the Wolf King who had once made an entire tribe's chins drop to the ground, and he came back at Hac Xa with a snarl that sounded, for just a moment, exactly like the terrifying stranger who'd faced me down at a cave entrance a lifetime ago.

"You will not touch her," he said, voice dropping into a register I'd only ever heard once before, the night the saber-toothed tiger had nearly taken his life protecting mine. "You will not touch my sons. Whatever you think you understand about strength, serpent, you have not yet met the version of it that comes from having something worth dying for."

Hac Xa laughed, low and rasping, entirely unbothered. "Every creature who has ever opposed me believed exactly that, right up until the moment it stopped mattering." She struck again, low and fast, aiming past Thuong Diem's guard for the vulnerable stretch of my side, and I barely twisted clear in time, the reforged club catching only the edge of the blow instead of turning it aside cleanly. Pain bloomed hot along my ribs, sharp enough to steal my breath for a moment, but I forced myself upright anyway, because stopping now was not a choice available to me.

"You wanted my son's power," Hac Xa said, circling us both now, unhurried despite the chaos still raging around the chamber's edges. "You'll understand, then, exactly how much I intend to enjoy taking everything you love in return."

I didn't answer her with words. I answered with the club, aiming not for her body — far too large and too fast for a strike like that to matter — but for the specific, narrow ridge of raised scale just behind her jaw that I'd noticed, in the brief seconds of watching her move, flexed independently of the rest of her armor whenever she opened her mouth to strike. Cot Nhan's careful, patient binding held true, tiger fang meeting old scale with a crack that rang through the whole chamber, and Hac Xa recoiled with the first genuine sound of pain I'd heard from her all night.

"You've been planning this a long time," I said, breathing hard, putting myself deliberately between her and the dais where my sons still lay bound. "So have I. The difference is, I've spent the last several months learning to fight for the people I love instead of just planning to take something that was never mine to begin with."

Her black eyes narrowed, something calculating replacing the fury for just a moment. "You think a lucky strike changes anything. I have lived longer than your entire species has walked upright, human. I do not lose to luck."

"Good," I said. "Because I didn't get lucky. I found that seam because I've spent a year learning to watch how things actually move instead of how they're supposed to look. Ask Thuong Diem how that worked out for him, the first night I met him."

Something in her expression flickered — not quite doubt, but the beginning of it, the particular unease of a creature who has just realized her opponent is more dangerous for reasons that have nothing to do with size or strength at all.

She struck again anyway, faster this time, testing the same seam I'd found behind her jaw with a defensive twist of her own body that told me she'd already begun adjusting for the weakness I'd exposed. I'd expected that. Vu Vinh had drilled the lesson into me across dozens of practice sessions: no opponent worth fearing makes the same mistake twice, so the trick was never finding one seam and relying on it forever, but finding the next one before your enemy finished closing the last. I dropped low under her strike, feeling the wind of it pass close enough to stir my hair, and drove the club upward instead, into the softer scale along the underside of her jaw where a fresh, less-armored patch of hide had never needed to defend against anything smaller and quicker than a boar before.

She reared back with a hiss of genuine pain, coils thrashing wide enough to send two of her own guards stumbling clear, and for one precious moment the path to the dais stood entirely open.

"Thuong Diem," I gasped, already moving, ribs screaming with every breath, "hold her. However long you can. I need seconds, not minutes."

"Go," he said, already turning to meet her renewed fury with his whole considerable weight, buying me exactly the seconds I'd asked for with nothing but his own body between me and a creature large enough to swallow him whole.

Behind her, the bone bowl between Dai Bao and Nhi Bao had filled nearly to its brim, the swirling black-and-red mass inside it beginning to pulse with a slow, hungry rhythm that made the very air in the chamber feel thick and wrong. Whatever was happening to my sons, it was accelerating, and every second I spent trading blows with their captor was a second I couldn't afford to lose.

The priest's voice cut through the chaos then, sharp and urgent, carrying from somewhere near the chamber's edge where he'd been working, I realized, this entire time, on something I hadn't had time to notice.

"Lam Thien! The ritual — it isn't complete yet, it can't be, not while they're still fighting to come back to you even now! Reach them! Whatever you do to her matters less than whether you reach them before that bowl fills entirely!"

His words landed with the force of a struck bell, cutting cleanly through every other sound in the chamber, and I understood, in that instant, exactly what he was telling me: that this fight had never truly been about defeating Hac Xa at all, not really, not tonight. It had only ever been about reaching my sons before whatever she'd built could finish taking them somewhere I couldn't follow.

I looked at Hac Xa, coiled and furious and blocking the only path to the dais, and understood, with sudden, cold clarity, exactly what I needed to do next — not win the fight in front of me, but end it fast enough to matter, whatever the cost.

Thuong Diem was already doing his part, absorbing strike after punishing strike, giving ground only when he had to and never an inch more, buying every second of distraction his body could physically manage. I circled wide instead of forward, using the chaos of the wider battle as cover, watching for the one gap in Hac Xa's attention that her fury with my husband might finally open. It came when she reared back for a strike meant to end him outright, coils gathering, attention narrowed entirely onto the one target directly in front of her.

I didn't think. Thinking, in that particular sliver of a second, would have cost more than it could possibly have bought. I ran, low and fast, every drop of training Vu Vinh had poured into me across a year of bruised knuckles and patient repetition carrying my body forward before my mind had even finished catching up to the decision.