Born Assassin Saga Box Set

by Jacqueline Pawl

  Mercy’s father is standing in the mouth of an alley with a bow in his hands, one of the Cirisians’ poison-tipped arrows pointed at—

  At Firesse’s heart.

  Drake tackles the First as it whizzes past. They land in a sodden heap in the fountain, a tangle of limbs. He pushes to his knees, being careful to stay below the line of the fountain’s walls, and grasps her shoulders tightly. “Stay down! Stay down. Are you hurt?”

  She winces and reaches for her left arm. When her fingers brush her upper arm, they come away wet with blood. She lets out a pained gasp and shudders. Calum can feel his father’s panic, even as his own heart sings with joy as the poison begins to work its way into the First’s system; if she dies, her magic might die with her. Drake will be banished to the Beyond without having claimed his revenge.

  “You’ll be all right,” his father says quickly, already reaching for his dagger. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch—” He starts to rise, but she grabs the hem of his shirt with her uninjured hand and pulls him back down.

  “Wait,” she sighs. She grimaces, then says something in ancient Cirisian.

  He watches incredulously as a cloud of dark green gas seeps out of the wound and hovers in the air an inch from her skin. The poison—she’s leeching it from her flesh.

  She says another spell, and the green cloud shoots past Drake and over the lip of the fountain. He looks up just in time to see the poisonous gas envelop Mercy’s father’s head and slither into his mouth and nose. He claws at his throat, his eyes widening in horror. Somewhere behind Drake, a woman shrieks. Dayna. Drake turns, but Calum hadn’t needed to see her to know it’s her.

  They’d snuck away from Myris’s group to murder Firesse.

  “Adriel!” she screams as Mercy’s father collapses, his eyes rolling up into his head. “Adriel!”

  NO! Calum cries.

  Dayna throws down her bow and runs toward her husband, tears streaming down her face. When one of Firesse’s soldiers steps in front of her, she doesn’t hesitate before she whips out a knife and plunges it into his heart, straight through his leather armor. Then she’s running again. Drake jumps out of the fountain as she falls to her knees beside Adriel. Her shoulders shake with heavy, wracking sobs.

  “Help Firesse,” he orders a passing Cirisian. As the boy leaps into the fountain to aid his First, Drake stalks toward Dayna. She doesn’t hear him approach until it’s too late—until he’s knotting one hand in her hair, yanking her up and away from Adriel. Her hands fly up to protect herself, but she’s unarmed; she had left her dagger in the chest of the elf she’d killed. She lands a few good kicks to Drake’s legs before he throws her to the ground, her knees cracking hard against the stone. When she tries to rise again, he gives her a swift, sharp kick to the ribs.

  NO! STOP IT! STOP! The leash on Calum’s temper snaps; everything within him rails against the bonds keeping him captive in his mind. Damn the consequences. Damn the blackness lurking at the edge of his consciousness, waiting to drag him under. Drake had tormented his mother for years. Calum will not allow him to do it again.

  “Do you know who I am?” his father snarls as she gasps, one hand clutching her side. Caught up in the height of the battle and his own cruel nature, he doesn’t bother to masquerade as Calum—that, or he wants her to know it’s he who has been wearing their son’s face for so long.

  “Drake,” she wheezes. “I could see the evil in your eyes.”

  “I should have killed you the moment I recognized you,” he growls as he flips her onto her back, straddling her hips so she cannot kick out, “for bearing me a bastard without a spine.”

  She pummels his chest with her fists, thrashing and bucking. He catches her hands and pins her wrists to the ground above her head. When he leans down and runs his tongue up her slender neck and along the line of her jaw, she stills, terror pouring off her in waves. “Do you remember the last time we were in this position, my darling?” he whispers into her ear. “Do you remember how I made you scream?”

  She spits in his face.

  When he rears back in disgust and wipes his face with a sleeve, she blurts, “I know you’re in there, Calum. I know you’re watching, that he’s making you do these things. Stop him. Fight back. Fight back, my son.”

  I’M TRYING! If he could shout the words, he would. He feels like sobbing; he feels like closing his fists around Firesse’s throat and watching her lips turn blue, watching her eyes bug out of her skull; he feels like razing all the damn Islands to the ground if only to keep people like her from hurting his countrymen.

  Drake backhands Dayna across the face. He grabs the dagger sheathed at his hip and raises it high, preparing to drive it into her chest.

  “FIGHT HIM, CALUM!” Dayna screams.

  As the blade begins its downward arc, Calum shoves everything within him against the walls of his mental prison, letting his rage and guilt and fury boil over. You will not kill my mother, you heartless piece of shit!

  Something within him cracks.

  Then he’s gasping, panting, stopping himself short right before the blade in his hand—his hand, not Drake’s—would have lodged in Dayna’s heart. He freezes. The ice-water in his veins is gone. He can smell the stench of vomit and the coppery tang of blood hanging in the air, can feel the cold of the sopping wet clothes hanging from his body.

  “I-I-I’m free,” he chokes out. He meets his mother’s wide-eyed gaze and lets out a hysterical sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “He’s gone. You did it.”

  She shakes her head, breathing hard. “You did it.”

  He tosses the dagger aside and helps Dayna up. She rises slowly, still clutching her ribs. “You need to run,” he urges, pushing her toward the nearest alley, where the archers stationed high above won’t be able to shoot her. They haven’t loosed any arrows yet, although he knows they’re watching. They must think he’s still Drake—must have known what his father would do to them if they claimed one of his kills. “Warn Mercy and Tamriel what’s to come.”

  She looks over her shoulder at Adriel, sprawled on the ground, and begins to tremble.

  Within his mind, a presence stirs—one with a vengeance.

  “He’s coming back,” Calum says. He stoops and picks up a sword from a fallen soldier and pushes it into her hands. “Stick to the alleys. Run as fast and as far as you can—don’t stop to eat or sleep until absolutely necessary. Firesse will kill you if she finds you.”

  She seizes his hand. “Come with me. Keep fighting him. We’ll find some way to free you.”

  “I-I can’t.” He can already feel Drake drawing nearer, a predator circling its prey. He can only hold his father back long enough for her to escape. “You need to leave now. Tell Tamriel—” He chokes on the name, on the shame it brings. “Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him it wasn’t me.” The words are flimsy—how can he possibly hope for forgiveness now, after all he has done, after all the destruction he has wrought?—but he needs Tamriel to know. He needs Tamriel to know he would not have traded his country’s secrets and spilled his countrymen’s blood if he could have avoided it. He suspects he’ll never get a chance to tell him face-to-face.

  She nods, fresh tears shining in her eyes, and rises onto her toes to kiss his cheek. “Thank you, my son,” she whispers. “I pray we meet again one day.”

  With that, she turns and runs as fast as her injuries allow. He watches her leave, funneling every bit of his quickly-fading strength into holding his father back.

  Just a little while longer. Just a little while longer. Just a little—

  He gasps and crumples to his knees as a sudden migraine nearly cleaves his head in two. His hands fly to his temples. He can’t stop the scream which rips free of his mouth, the waves of agony which make his stomach roil.

  Oh, I’ll make you pay for that, my insolent, spineless excuse for a son, Drake hisses in a voice laced with violence. Calum almost can’t hear his father over the ringing in his ears. Little bursts of light flare in
his vision, then go dark. Drake’s presence slams fully into his mind, those prison bars sliding shut on him once more, the ice-water filling his veins with such acute agony that Calum’s heart stutters. It’s almost a relief when the darkness, thick and absolute, drags him under once more.

  But—before everything goes silent, before the pain finally abates, his father scoops up the dagger he’d tossed aside and murmurs, “Let the chase begin.”

  32

  Calum

  A gasp of pain startles Calum out of the darkness. He comes back slowly, only to find Drake standing in the middle of a tent, staring down at a bound and gagged Dayna with his lips curled in a sneer. Adriel is slumped beside her. His skin is pale and waxen, but he’s breathing. He’s alive. A sheen of perspiration coats his brow.

  “See what happens when you try to play savior, Calum?” Drake muses.

  Let them go.

  Not a chance. They tried to kill Firesse, and now they’ll face their punishment. Besides, he says as someone slips into the tent behind him, it’s not up to me.

  “I gave you a chance to fight for our people,” Firesse snarls as she moves to Drake’s side. She’s still dressed in the colorful clothes she had worn to the Bounty Fest, but now the quilted top and fitted pants are crusted in dried blood; they’d had to fight their way out of Rockinver. A slender strip of linen is wrapped around her upper arm where Adriel’s arrow had grazed her. Dayna stiffens when Firesse lunges forward and grips her chin roughly, her eyes burning like molten metal. “I gave you a chance,” she hisses again, yanking down Dayna’s gag, “to take your revenge on the people who murdered your daughter and chased you out of your home. And yet you tried to kill me. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I still have family in the capital. My daughter stands at the side of the prince you so desperately hunger to slay,” his mother growls, her body going taut with anger. “You must be a bigger fool than I thought if you assumed I would choose the Cirisians over her—and over my son.” Her eyes slide to Drake’s, slitted with hatred. “I know the truth about who attacked whom at Ialathan. Calum was nothing but your puppet.”

  “I did what was necessary to save my people.”

  “If you cared about your people, you wouldn’t have burned Graystone to the ground with dozens of elves trapped inside. I would never—I will never—follow a leader who ends innocent lives without batting an eye. The Creator looks down on you and weeps, child.”

  Firesse rears back as if struck by an invisible hand. “You would let that villain’s name poison your tongue? Have you forgotten our gods?”

  “How could I continue to worship gods who allow you to walk this earth?” Dayna spits. “The only villain here, Firesse, is you.”

  A shadow passes across the First’s face. She looks toward Adriel, still slumped and half-conscious beside Dayna. “Be careful how you speak to me. My magic is the only thing keeping the poison from reaching your husband’s heart. Without me, he’s dead.” She digs her fingernails into Dayna’s cheeks, her eyes narrowing. “You vastly underestimate how easy it would be for me to destroy everything and everyone you hold dear.”

  “You’re going to kill us shortly, anyway. Why shouldn’t I use what little time I have left to tell you exactly what I think of you?”

  Firesse bares her teeth in a grin so chilling it makes Calum’s stomach drop. She shoves Dayna back and straightens, her flame-red hair falling like a curtain around her deceptively pretty face. “You’re not going to lose your life just yet. You’re so desperate to see your daughter again, and it wouldn’t be fair of me not to let you see her one last time.” She strides out of the tent. Just before she slips through the flap, she tells Drake, “Have Kenna and Farren keep an eye on them while one of Myris’s men scrounges up some shackles.”

  As Drake wanders through the camp, Calum’s thoughts return to those brief minutes of freedom in the town square. It has only been a couple weeks since Firesse allowed his father to possess him, but the disconnect between his mental prison and his body is so absolute that when he’d freed himself, it felt like he had been shoved into bright sunlight after spending his entire life shrouded in shadow. He’d been able to move, to speak, to feel the breeze against his face and the ache in his chest from the arrow wound he had sustained in Xilor. By the Creator, he’d been himself again.

  Then the darkness had swept in and claimed him.

  He’d been lost in that strange, featureless void while the Cirisians had made camp in the bottom of a valley, the wide expanse of the Bluejet cleaving a jagged line through the range of lush green hills and weathered white tents. It’s nearly dawn, but Calum has no idea if it has only been a few hours since the attack in Rockinver or if it’s already the next day. Either way, the gaps in his consciousness are growing longer; his tenuous grasp on the body he’d been forced to yield slipping. The next time he disappears, it might very well be permanent.

  Every animal instinct within him screams to stop fighting, to sit back and watch his father commit countless atrocities in his name in the vain hope that once he has his revenge, he’ll take enough pity on Calum to release him. It’s a slim chance, but it’s not impossible. Mere weeks ago, Calum would have done it. He’d been selfish and foolish enough to do anything to ensure his own survival. Now, though, he would not hesitate to resign himself to oblivion if it meant he could stop this senseless war, if he could end the slaughter of his countrymen, if he could save the people he loves from dying at Firesse’s hands.

  He will never, ever risk their lives again.

  Tamriel—his cousin by blood, his brother by choice; Dayna—the mother he’d never had and always needed; Elise—the girl who had befriended him when all the other courtiers had only brushed him off; even Mercy—cunning, ruthless, infuriating Mercy with her sharp eyes and barbed tongue. They’re his family, not the monster wearing his face.

  He tests the bonds holding his mind prisoner, poking and prodding as gently as he can to keep from drawing Drake’s attention. There—a crack. He’s not sure how he knows it, only that he can feel its existence. He’d broken something when he’d slipped free, punched a hole through the walls of his metaphorical prison. If he can direct enough willpower toward the fault line, perhaps he’ll be able to break out one last time—if only long enough for him to free Dayna and Adriel or to shove a sword through Firesse’s black heart. And when he goes dormant again . . . he doubts he’ll return.

  For Dayna, for Tamriel, for Mercy, for Elise, for Adriel, for every innocent person Drake helped Firesse slaughter, he’ll risk it.

  Soon.

  Dayna and Adriel are being held under heavy watch in a tent across camp, far enough away from Firesse’s that he will have to choose between saving them and killing the First—he won’t have time to do both. He could fight off the guards and release Mercy’s parents, but there’s no doubt in his mind that they’d all be killed by the other soldiers before they could set foot outside camp. He could go after Firesse instead, but he’d noticed when she stepped outside earlier that two armed soldiers had been standing watch just outside. Drake must have told her about Calum’s unexpected interruption while he’d been dormant. Even if Calum could fend off her bodyguards long enough to kill her, Dayna and Adriel would pay the price with their freedom and their lives.

  Quiet laughter draws Calum out of his thoughts. He watches through eyes he cannot control as Drake crests one of the hills surrounding the valley, and Faye and Nerran come into view. They’re sitting side by side in the waist-high grass, staring out at the swirling pinks and pale purples the rising sun has painted across the sky. They’re speaking in low voices—not flirtatiously, as they had that first night at the Keep so many weeks ago, but as if not wishing to break the calm, companionable silence which had settled over the valley during the night.

  Nerran glances up first. “Come to join us? Or to drink your troubles away?” He takes a swig from a half-empty bottle of wine, then offers it to Drake. “I’ve drunk enough to be ab
le to stand your presence for a little while.”

  “How gracious of you to offer. Isn’t it a bit early to be drinking?”

  “It’s not morning yet,” Faye says, pointing to the eastern horizon. “I’m choosing to consider it very, very late last night.”

  Drake settles down on Nerran’s other side, stretching his legs out before him. “It’s not Cirisian wine, is it?”

  Great. Calum remembers with a flush of embarrassment the night he’d gotten drunk off that Creator-damned Cirisian wine. Of course Drake had to have seen that memory.

  “Beltharan through and through. One of Kaius’s men swiped it from the fest, and he gave it to us as a thank-you for aiding them in the war.” Nerran’s eyes remain trained on some point in the distance as he speaks, but Calum can hear the note of disgust slip into his voice. When Drake doesn’t grab the bottle, he takes another sip and hands it to Faye. Then he adds, almost as an afterthought, “We’ll reach Xilor in a few days. I thought you should know—we’re leaving when you reach Sandori.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Hewlin already cleared it with Firesse. She was not happy, to say the least, but he convinced her to see reason. We’re not soldiers, and we’re not trained killing machines,” he says with a nod toward Faye. “Our place is not in a war. We’ll stay with you and provide weapons and repairs until the final battle, but duty calls. We’ve been away from Feyndara for too long.”

  Sadness washes over Calum. Over the year they’d traveled and worked together, Hewlin and the others had become family. They’re loud and argumentative and, frankly, obnoxious at times, but they look out for one another. They’d taught Calum almost all he knows about smithing. They were the first friends he’d ever had who had not known him as Calum Zendais, who had not judged him for the infamy of his father as so many in the court had. Despite his better judgment, despite his own selfish reasons for accompanying them to the Keep, they had become special to him. He suspects that when they part outside Sandori, they’ll be walking out of his life for good.