The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 47: Volume 2: Chapter 45 – The Breaking

Read chapter 47 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 45 – The Breaking “Eyes on me,” Daryl sang from nowhere, and three wolves obeyed without meaning to. He let them commit, then wasn’t there; they collided with a Defender’s planted edge and learned about consequences. His laugh, thin and pleased, ran along the rear line like a hand steadying a row of glasses. Yara felt the moment lean toward breaking. An Enhanced came back on a stretcher, her Enhanced, the pikeman she'd rebuilt first, the one with his mother's thread braided at his wrist and silver veins running under perfect skin. His throat was open. Not torn, sliced, neat as surgery, because wolves knew where the song lived and how to stop it. The silver veins flared once, pulsed, then faded to gray. The light went out of his eyes in stages: first the brightness, then the color, then the hope that there might be a third thing. Irreplaceable. She'd spent his mother's thread. She'd made him better than he was. She'd sent him back, knowing he'd be worth the cost. And he'd died anyway. Another stretcher slid in: the archer, the one with the rebuilt shoulder, the one who'd run back to the line with his bow singing. A bear had caught him across the chest, claws like plowshares, strength like a collapsing house. His ribs had crumpled. The ones she'd made perfect, silver-traced, better than nature would have managed, had folded like wet parchment. He wasn't breathing. Wouldn't again. Irreplaceable. And she was running out of them faster than she could make more. "WE'RE LOSING ENHANCED!" Marcus shouted, and under the words, Yara heard the shape of his thinking: We're losing investments we can't replace. She looked at the field. Right flank: gone. Fifteen dead, twenty scattered, the rest folding back toward the center like a door torn off its hinge. Beasts: loose. Stampeding through their own lines, trampling supplies, turning handlers into obstacles. Wounded: piling up faster than she could work. Twelve waiting. More coming. Bruno couldn't help. The boy with shaking hands couldn't find the right anchors. Enhanced: dying. Two down already. How many more before the arithmetic went from expensive to unsustainable? And every Consumed that fell turned to powder and went home. Every kill she made fed Severin. Every loss she took bled her dry. The Gem purred under her ribs, low and hungry and patient as a debt collector. Feed me the beasts. Make them weapons. We can still win. "No," Yara said. Her voice sounded far away, like someone else was borrowing her mouth. "Not yet." Then we die here. He's on his ridge, you in the chalk. Your city will fall in a week. Eliza writes it down. The weight breaks her. Do you want that ledger? "Not. Yet." But the words came quieter this time, because she was running out of reasons, and the Gem knew it. A sound rose from the left, not quite a shout, not quite a word. The noise men make when they've looked at the field, done the math, and realized the equation ends in running. "RETREAT!" Someone said it. Yara didn't see who. Didn't matter. The word caught. Men started stepping backward, not fleeing yet, just backing, one step, two, checking over their shoulders for the distance to the rim. Backing was how running started. Running was how massacres started. She'd seen it before, in the days when Aramore burned, and refugees tried to climb over each other to reach the gates. If they ran now, Severin's wolves would take them in the open. Scattered men in chalk dust with no formation, no cover, no way to help each other die more slowly. It would be butchery. She saw it unfold in her head like a map: the column dissolving, the regulars scattering, the wolves running them down one by one while Severin watched and counted. Then the march south. Aramore's gates, unmanned. Eliza and Marcus and Varrek and Sam and Harry and the fourteen bodies breathing in the West Hall and the two black birds that remembered being girls. All of it was gone because she'd tried to win a fair fight against a man who'd sp