The last thing he'd expected was Aeotha slinging her stafff into his fucking face. That cap struck like twenty fists at once. His head was spinning, and he lurched off-balance, tumbling over one of the cots indelicately. The wounded fellow who occupied the cot had already been sitting up - and how could you not, with all this fucking excitement? - and now that injured fellow tumbled out of the cot with a yelp of pain. Skandra ate a faceful of stone. If he didn't have a massive welt and a bruise in the span of a few short minutes, it was going to be his luckiest day yet.
Didn't she hear what he said? Oh, that's right.
He'd made her angry before all this. Focus on the problems at hand, and then think about Aeotha.
He'd prepared more than one potion for fighting Drow. There were a few things you could count on. Number one, Drow hated light. His grip on his sword was tenuous. Aeotha was shouting something at him. Still his left hand found the first pouch on his belt. As the soldiers began to swarm in, he slapped a glass vial against the stone. What flashed when he took his hand away was not the blinding light that might have been expected. Instead it was a soft, white-blue light. The light of the moon. It seemed to spread across the stone, as though the rock itself had been infused with the light. More than one soldier hesitated, not knowing what they were seeing. Yet he wasn't looking for the ones who simply hesitated. There were four of the bastards who flinched visibly, recoiling from the light.
He'd thought it would just be a nice diversion.
He hadn't expected it to help him identify the ones who didn't fit in.
When Skandra lurched to his feet, he heard the first snap of a bow. One lunging, half-running step carried him out of the way. The sound of an arrowhead striking rock was unmistakable. So was the feeling it put in your fucking chest. That close to getting nailed to the ground. And all because of Aeotha. There were more priestesses and soldiers milling about than anybody's fucking business. Not all of the archers were shooting. So that was the game, was it? A second arrow missed behind Skandra. One of the priestesses took it in the shoulder. She went down with a vicious scream, the sort of pain he knew all too well. And if the archers really were Drow, they were going to put poison on the fucking things.