by Sadie Moss
But part of me wonders if he’s taking the long way round to wherever we’re headed so that he can see more of Caelfall. If he’s trying to grasp the devastation that has gripped the city.
I can’t decide if I’m nauseous or heartbroken by what I’ve seen, and I settle for both.
“Kaius is a liar,” I say furiously. “He doesn’t hate Zelus because of how he rules his realm. They might hate each other, but it’s not because one is better than the other. It’s only because they’re so similar. Kaius rules by neglect and fear, just like Zelus. They’re both destroying human lives and they don’t even care.”
None of the three messengers have spoken since we first saw the family begging near the entrance gates. They’ve all gone stoic, faces closed-off and jaws set, though through our connection, I can feel an emotion close to shock emanating from them.
“You didn’t know?” I ask, the question directed at all three of them.
Echo answers, his tone subdued. “No. We didn’t know.”
“We haven’t been in this realm for some time,” Paris says. He’s worrying at the hilt of his sword with one thumb, his gaze moving over our surroundings. “Without visiting Caelfall, we wouldn’t have known.”
“We wouldn’t have cared.” Callum’s voice is hard, and his gaze flicks to me before he begins to lead us down a new street.
“That’s not true. You’re an ass, but you aren’t evil,” I argue, hurrying to catch up.
“No. Not evil.” Paris shakes his head, looking disgusted. “Call it ignorance. Or ambivalence, even. I certainly never considered the plight of humans until I met you.”
“Nor did I,” Echo adds. “Your story has opened my eyes and made me look at things differently.”
Paris slows his steps a little, falling into stride beside me as he lowers his head and murmurs quietly, “Callum would never admit it, but it’s true for him, as well.”
My gaze moves to the broad-shouldered man ahead of us, and I realize with a start that this time, the hardness in his voice comes not from anger, but from self-recrimination. He’s angry at himself for not seeing this. For not knowing.
I wrap my arms around my stomach and hold tight, as if trying to keep all of my emotions contained or find some semblance of comfort. “We’re just as helpless to do anything for these people as we are for my own village,” I murmur. “Aren’t we?”
Before anyone can reply, a low rumbling starts beneath my feet. I throw out my arms as if to catch myself, though I don’t immediately lose my balance.
I glance around, confusion and panic beating wildly at my chest. “What the farse is it? An earthquake?”
“Worse,” Callum snarls. He pivots on his heel, wrapping his thick fingers around my arm and yanking me into the darkness of a nearby alley.
He shoves me roughly against the wall, placing himself between me and the alley opening as Paris and Echo post up behind me. The rumbling sound grows louder, and a moment later, I peek around Callum to watch as a line of men march past the alley, each of them clad in chain mail and carrying weapons of all shapes and sizes.
Dozens of men pass us. Their steps are perfectly in unison, and I can feel the vibrations of their feet beneath my own leather boots. They’re silent, unsmiling, and clearly ready for combat.
The four of us remain frozen in the shadows of the alleyway until the entire regiment has passed. I let out a breath, trying to will my heartbeat to calm as Callum finally steps away from his protective post in front of me.
“Soldiers?” I ask, brushing off the back of my dress from where I was pressed against the grimy wall.
A muscle in the big warrior’s jaw ticks. “Yes. To fight in the upcoming war.”
“Are the people organizing themselves?”
Callum runs a hand through his shoulder-length hair, his face hard. “No. The three men leading that regiment are messengers.”
“Which means Kaius has already sent men to prepare the humans for battle,” Echo mutters. “They’re going to be put at risk of death, fighting a war that has nothing to do with them.”
“We’re going to have to be careful,” Callum says. “If other messengers are already here, we need to avoid them. Whether they’re the ones hunting us or not, they won’t hesitate to capture or kill us if they discover we’re here. We should get what we need and get out.”
We resume our journey through the city, though with more speed and much more focus on our surroundings, though it isn’t as if I can easily tell messengers from men by sight. I keep a firm connection to the weave as I walk, surreptitiously scanning anyone who appears along the road to see if they appear to be wielding magic.
“Where are we going?” I ask when I feel as if we’ve been walking the city streets forever.
“Caelfall Inn and Tavern,” Echo says as we follow Callum down a smaller side street. “They have everything we could need for our journey.”
“Is it actually in Caelfall?” I quip. “Or are we just passing through?”
Echo laughs. “We’re almost there.”
And he’s correct. One last right turn spills us out onto a large thoroughfare dominated by the tavern. Caelfall Inn and Tavern is much bigger than I expected. It rises in three towering stories and covers an entire city block, nestled between a smith’s forge and an open square of bare brown grass that was likely once used for an open air market or common area for the city’s residents. The inn appears to be well taken care of, with a clean wooden facade, blue shutters, and an unblemished front door.
We ascend the three long, narrow steps to the front porch. Several rocking chairs line the windows near the entrance, well-worn but still much cleaner than anything else I’ve seen in Caelfall so far. As a matter of fact, the entire place has a completely different look than the rest of the city. Clean, painted, and hospitable.
Callum shoves open the front door, but then immediately lets the door fall shut without entering the tavern, backing away as if the wood has burned him. He grabs my arm and motions for Echo and Paris to follow, then he strides quickly toward the end of the porch, dragging me along with him.
We don’t exactly have anywhere to go. The porch ends at an old scratched wooden railing, not a second staircase. That clearly doesn’t make any difference to Callum, who lifts me bodily over the railing and drops me to the dirt like a bag of laundry.
I have no time to prepare for the fall since I don’t have any warning it’s coming, so even though I hit the ground on my feet, I’m unable to catch my balance. The momentum of his toss throws me forward, and I land on my hands and knees, coughing as dust rises in a cloud around me.
My messengers vault the railing and crouch beneath the porch. Paris wraps an arm around my shoulders, steadying and supporting me as all three of the men turn to face the front door.
A half-heartbeat later, three men exit the tavern.
I don’t need the weave to tell me these men are messengers. Like my three companions, these men are tall, broad, and handsome, oozing a certain kind of supernatural charm that leaves no room for misinterpretation. They’re magic, plain and simple.
Which means they’re messengers for Kaius.
The three strangers chat amicably, all smiles and smooth tones, but I can see the way they scan the street—always aware. Luckily, their notice slips past the four of us hiding behind the edge of the porch, and after a few more moments, the three men move off down the street.
“Nice reflexes,” Echo murmurs to Callum, shaking his head ruefully.
“I thought they saw me for a minute there,” Callum replies, his voice gruff.
I stand, keeping a cautious eye on the street around us, and brush away the dirt on my skirt. “If they weren’t as self-absorbed as the rest of Kaius’s men, we’d have been in trouble.”
Echo and Paris both chuckle quietly, and Callum glowers at my joke. I gift him with a sweet smile, then step around all three of them to stroll back around the porch and up the steps to the front door.
No o
ne is waiting on the other side of the door this time as the four of us enter the tavern. A wooden desk takes up the front room, manned by a tiny, stooped woman with wild gray hair and deeply wrinkled skin.
I sense the weave being manipulated, and I jolt, looking around the room in sudden terror that the other messengers have returned. But then Echo flips his hand over and unfurls his fingers, revealing several shiny gold coins.
“We need a room,” he says in a smooth voice, the coins clinking to the counter in front of the old woman.
Her rheumy gaze shifts to me and then back to Echo. Then to the two other men behind us. “One room?”
Paris scoffs. “Old woman, is this an inn or a finishing school?”
I pinch his arm. I can’t imagine the woman isn’t used to seeing illicit affairs being conducted in her place of business, so I highly doubt she’s coming at us from a moral standpoint. My dress is in near-tatters after using it to clean and bandage Callum, and I’m sure I look filthier than a child who’s been mucking about in the dirt all day. The poor tavern mistress is likely more concerned that I’m being held against my will than that I’ll be sharing a bed with three men.
“One room,” I affirm in my sweetest, most confident voice. Echo gives her a dazzling smile.
The rest of the transaction passes easily, with her final instruction being that one meal is included in our stay, and we can find that in the tavern. After we receive our room key, we stop in to the small general store attached to the foyer to pick up some supplies before they close up for the night. Echo is a veritable dispensary of gold coins, so while I don’t go wild purchasing all my heart could fancy, I do get a few things I absolutely need. As far as I know, we’ll never be returning to our house in Ironholde, so I need basic necessities and some replacement clothes.
Dressed in fresh garments and armed with new satchels and traveling supplies, we head to the tavern where we order food and drinks, then seek out an empty table to enjoy our drinks while we wait on our meals.
Callum clunks the round of mead on the table and begins distributing the tall glasses among us. “Sierian’s realm isn’t far. Now that we’re out of the Unclaimed Expanse, it will be easy to reach it. Once we set out, we’ll get there quickly using the weave.”
“Won’t other messengers be able to sense us using magic?” I take a sip of my mead, pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Not as good as the mead my father made before his death, but still tasty.
Echo shrugs. “Maybe. We just have to be faster than their senses.”
“What happens if we’re caught by messengers?” I ask.
Paris sighs. “If we can’t defeat them, they’ll defeat us and take us back to Kaius for punishment.”
“And he will end us,” Callum adds, his voice hard. “All of us.”
Our food arrives, and for a while, we’re silent. I can’t remember the last real meal I ate, and while the blight that’s affected the whole city has clearly taken its toll on the tavern too, the food is palatable if simple.
All three messengers are finished long before me, and they launch into a discussion of whether we should leave for Sierian’s realm now or rest up before the last leg of the journey. I’m only half listening—the first half of my plate has brought on a wave of exhaustion, and it’s taking all my concentration just to ensure my fork reaches my lips.
In a lull in the conversation, Paris leans back in his chair and cradles his mug of mead against his chest as he eyes the room behind me. There’s an expression on his face I don’t quite recognize, a hardness that would look more at home on Callum’s features. “Sage has developed quite the group of admirers.”
Brow furrowing, I turn in my seat to find a group of burly, rowdy men leering at me from the bar. They’re all clearly in their cups and feeling the extra burst of bravery that comes with imbibing alcohol. I roll my eyes and turn back around in my seat, scraping up the last of my potatoes.
“They’re a bunch of drunks with nowhere to go and nothing better to do,” I say with a shrug. “I’m one of three women in the bar, so it’s hardly a surprise that they’re gawking.”
None of the messengers seated around me seem satisfied by my answer. Echo’s face has taken on an expression similar to Paris’s, his roguish features hardening like stone.
Suddenly, Callum stiffens, his fingers tightening on his mug until his fingernails turn white.
I blink at him, my heart lurching in my chest. Have more messengers arrived?
“What’s wrong? Callum, what is it?”
A hand clasps my shoulder, and I stiffen. Considering I’m only sitting beside Echo with the other two men across from me, and Echo is on the opposite side of my body, the hand doesn’t belong to anybody who has a right to touch me.
“Hello, love,” a voice slurs. “Aren’t you a pretty thing?”
My jaw clenches. It’s not a messenger. It’s a very human, very drunk man.
Any pity I felt for the group of men in the corner drinking themselves into numbness as their city crumbles around them vanishes in a blaze of anger. My village was small enough that everyone knew everyone, but from time to time, strangers would pass through. And some of them had to be taught to keep their hands to themselves.
Farse it all.
I try to shove the man’s dirty hand off my shoulder, but his clasp tightens. Growing angrier, I twist in my seat, about to renew my grip and force the man’s hand away.
But before I can, a growl sounds behind me, like the warning rumble of a wolf about to attack.
Then Callum slams his mug to the table, and the next thing I know, he’s launched his entire bulk across the table at my drunken suitor.
13
The drunk is surprisingly nimble and dances away from Callum’s attack with an almost girlish yelp. He’s hardly older than me and has rich dark hair and a pleasant enough face, though drunkenness has given his features a mean, pinched cast. And besides, “pleasant” doesn’t hold a candle to the three men who each carry a piece of my soul.
Callum clears the table on his feet, but not without sending the remnants of our meal and all the dishes to the floor in a spectacular crash that pitches the bar into total silence. He looms over the drunkard, his fists clenched tightly at his sides and his blazing green eyes narrowed. “You ought not to touch things that don’t belong to you.”
The drunk giggles softly, clearly too far gone to realize how much danger he’s in. Mead sloshes over the edge of his metal flagon as he opens his arms wide in mock surrender. “Sorry! Sorry. Is she yours?”
Oh, for nish’s sake.
“I belong to nobody,” I snarl, standing up and slamming my napkin onto the tabletop. The effect is a little like slamming a cloud to the ground, but it’s all I have at my disposal considering Callum threw the rest of my meal and all our silverware to the hardwood.
The drunk grins at me, no more intimidated by me than he is by the furious messenger standing before him, then turns smug as his gaze shifts back to Callum. “Well then, it seems to me the lady can decide herself who she’d like to spend her time with.”
My pulse spikes, both in anger at the man’s presumptuous comment and in fear at what he’s about to unleash in the massive warrior who towers over him.
Snarling, Callum reaches out and shoves the man with lightning quickness. The drunk—already unbalanced due to the liquor—keels over backward to the floor. Mead splashes from his mug in an arc, wetting my shoes, and as he lies there groaning, a puddle spreads around him to join the remnants of our dinner on the dark wood.
Then Callum whirls on me. I’m still infuriated by his loss of control and the implication that I belong to him, but I’m stunned into silence by the rage in his eyes.
Before I can say anything, before I can even decide what to say, he grabs me by the waist and throws me over his shoulder. My breath escapes in a huff when my abdomen hits his muscled shoulder, and I’m left momentarily breathless as we exit the tavern to a chorus of catcalls and jeers.
“Put me down!” I yell, pounding at his back with both my hands. All the blood rushes to my head, but I continue to punch his hard muscles, aiming as best as I can for his kidneys where I could possibly get one good shot in and free myself. “Release me right now, you farsing ogre!”
Callum’s arm is clamped over my thighs, pinning me against him so that I can’t move my legs even an inch. Kicking my feet like a child throwing a temper tantrum gets me nowhere.
I recognize this version of him, of course. This is the same domineering ass who made the first week of my life in Ironholde so difficult. He’s a mountain, obtuse and immovable in his belief that he’s right and deaf to my shrieking.
Echo and Paris’s footsteps follow us up the creaky steps to the second floor, neither of them speaking or acknowledging the fact I’m screaming bloody murder. In fact, no one in the hotel has emerged from their rooms to check on the yelling woman. Nor has the old woman shuffled up to us with her suspicious gaze to stand up for me.
Traitors. All of them.
In the upstairs hallway, we pause for a second on the worn blue carpet, and I hear the click of a lock tumbling. Callum moves across a wooden threshold into a dim room lit only by what’s left of the daylight outside an open window. The door latches behind us as the massive warrior leans over and puts me back on my feet.
I’m too furious at him to be grateful he didn’t throw me onto the bed like he usually does.
Instead, I rush forward and shove him with both hands, putting the entire world of my rage into the assault. “You arrogant bastard!”
Shoving him, of course, proves as useless as shoving a tree. Or a wall. Or a farsing mountain. I bounce off him and stumble back two steps before I manage to right myself.
I’m not stupid enough to try the same thing twice, but fury still boils through my veins, and it needs an outlet or I’ll explode.
“How dare you do that?” I snarl, stepping closer and pointing an accusing finger at his face, my entire hand shaking with rage. “Any of it! You put us all at risk by attacking that man like that, and for what? I’m not your property to be claimed!”