by K. F. Breene
“That’s rude, you know,” Sanders growled. “Why don’t you talk in a language we all know?”
“Why don’t you learn more languages?” Tobias shot back.
“Are you trying to be a bard? Because if so, you need to find a sense of humor first.” Sanders took another bite of his apple.
“Just spreading the good cheer of a narrow victory by running away.” Tobias winced as he shifted his weight.
Sanders snorted. “We did at that. I didn’t like the look of that Hunter. Didn’t seem human.”
“His fear is growing.” Rohnan ignored the chatter around him, focusing on Cayan through his link through Shanti. “As your power merges with his and blossoms, he can feel the power at his disposal through you. The two of you have a large well of power, but his is deeper. His deepest reserves… bottomless, it seems. But locked up. Covered, somehow. We need to break through that barrier to allow a surge—a deep undertow—of power. He is stronger than you, Chosen. Much stronger. I’ve never seen the equal.”
“You’d never seen my equal, Rohnan.”
“And I hope I don’t see his. I wonder if he can feel what lays deep within him—if he has always felt it, and is afraid of the free-fall into it, worried the power will overcome him. Or maybe he is afraid of what else resides down there. He lost his parents young, did he not?”
Shanti closed her eyes and focused on Cayan’s touch. She felt the hum between their skin, and the electricity that originated at her hand then spread out. She pushed harder into his mind, trying to get deeper. Rohnan could see things without trying that most people couldn’t find, even with a deep connection. Still, she had to try.
Her mind whirled and spiraled, sinking deeper into his. He enveloped her presence, welcoming her in, holding her within himself. The spiciness saturated her body, humming. Erotic stirrings tickled private places, mirroring his deeper desires. Fire erupted in her core and her skin broke out in a sweat, making her breath come out in fast pants. She leaned in as he stroked a thumb across her skin, relishing that pulsing heat she’d never felt before.
“That is an effect of your succinct mating, and will probably be very pleasing one day, but it is not why we are here,” Rohnan warned. “Focus.”
Shanti fought the tightening in her body. She fought her yearning and his lust. Above all, she fought the begging need for completion by his touch. Instead, she weaved within those emotions until she found what Rohnan had recognized while she had been siphoning off some of his energy and replenishing her Gift. Some sort of blockage nestled within deeply scarred emotions. Jagged and cutting, she sensed pain. Loneliness. Uncertainty. And beneath that the world almost seemed to drop away. She felt a void so deep it sucked her toward it.
Rohnan was right. Power. A vast store of world-shattering power. She wasn’t the most powerful in the land by far. He was. He just didn’t know how to access it.
“This would overcome him. If he doesn’t know how to use his current power, he shouldn’t break into an even bigger store of it,” she surmised. Rohnan grunted his assent.
Out of curiosity, and maybe because he had been scraping away her defenses and pain to get at the roots of her since she’d known him, she honed in on that scarred place, on that loneliness, just to get a glimpse of what he was hiding.
As if she’d triggered a trap, his defenses reacted. He crushed her within his mind. Jagged edges stabbed at her consciousness. Claws pierced.
Heart hammering, she pulled back and yanked herself free. She ripped her hand out of his and felt Rohnan pulling her body away. Her eyes blinked open, shocked and shaken. Cayan stared at her, confusion filtered through a haunted, desperate sorrow. His eyebrows drew low over his pleading eyes.
“So, that’s a do-not-enter area, then?” she asked lightly, straightening. She gave him a smile, trying to ease the situation. Rohnan took his hands away and turned toward the fire, giving them a little privacy, such as it was.
Cayan reached toward her again. “I still don’t have any control, but… yes. That’s…” He glanced at those around the fire, most staring at them. When he looked back at her, strength and power overshadowed the soft vulnerability she’d seen moments before. “Did you get what you needed?”
Yes, she had, but the commanding air he was using to replace a deeply rooted humanity—the tough, almost coarse treatment of his vulnerability—sparked her stubbornness. No way was he going to spend months dragging out the harsh realities of her past, and then try to shrug off his own problems. His people might find men crying a weakness, but she wasn’t of his people, and she would make this big, tough bastard blubber like a baby.
Rohnan started laughing, reading her. “This is what I meant, Chosen. You crave to dominate, or be dominated. There is no middle ground. There is no soft approach in your mating dance. There is war and release, only.”
“I didn’t ask. Mind your own business.” Shanti focused on Cayan. “No, I didn’t.” She took his hand again and resumed their connection. “Kick me out again and I’ll be forced to teach you a lesson.”
A glimmer sparked in Cayan’s eyes, the usual blue turned an eerie purple in the firelight. The man always rose to the challenge.
Rohnan chuckled again, a sound that grated under the circumstances.
When they entwined their Gifts this time, Shanti didn’t touch that jagged place, but she went deep until she felt that hint of bottomlessness peeking through his tight defenses. “Now, do you feel my mind within yours?”
“Yes,” he said in his hard voice.
“You should do this away from his men. That was shortsighted of you,” Rohnan said in an offhanded way.
She ignored him, mostly because he was right. To Cayan, she said, “Can you feel me sucking a little? Drawing on your power?”
“Can I try this next?” Tobias said. “I wouldn’t mind a little suction.”
“She’s the wrong sort to get mixed up with,” Sanders commented. “Too much of a headache.”
“I can feel it,” Cayan said. He was tightened up, though. He didn’t like having to learn something in his men’s presence.
The air of gloating she felt coming from Rohnan was annoying. He loved it when he was right.
“I had enough strength to connect with your mind and draw what I needed,” Shanti explained to Cayan as she backed out slowly. “If you—not I, you—had very little strength, I would initiate a connection like this, and then I would feed you power. Feed you energy. With an enemy, if you are strong enough, and deft enough, to create this type of connection despite their attacks and defenses, you can suck their energy away. A few of the Inkna attempt that trick—I learned it from that disgusting little mouse you captured a long time ago.”
She withdrew totally and took her hand away.
Cayan took a moment to stare at her, his uncertainty of his Gift making his emotions turbulent, but he recovered quickly. “We’ll go over our journey tomorrow morning,” he said. “You should get some sleep. We’ll need you at full capacity.”
“It’s as if you think this is my first time traveling,” Shanti said, thankful for the excuse to slip away and into her sleeping furs.
“First time traveling with a group.” Cayan rose.
“Well, not the first time, right, Captain?” Tobias spoke up. “But hopefully it’s the first time she stays with a group…”
Sanders smirked. “Remains to be seen. We’ll need a sentry for the camp, and another to watch her.”
Rohnan matched their laughter as Shanti stood. Shaking her head, she left the warmth of the fire in search of her saddlebag and bedding. The journey had begun, and today might prove to be the easiest day they’d have. The Hunter would be dogging their steps despite his injury, and organizing men to cut them off whenever possible. She’d thought getting through the Graygual to get across the sea would be the hardest part. Now she wondered if they’d even get that far.
Chapter Thirteen
Shanti moaned as she climbed into her saddle. Her back ached,
her hips and groin were stiff, and her quads couldn’t be tighter. They’d been riding through wood for the last two days, often taking tiny trails and constantly ducking branches. Her body wasn’t used to sitting in a saddle for extended periods of time, and it showed.
Rohnan had offered to tie her on. She had offered to break his nose.
It was just her luck that her horse hated everyone but her. And because it tried to bite everyone that touched it, she had to stow its saddle, brush it, and give it food and water. As a fellow leader of this journey, those chores should’ve been delegated to one of the boys. She should’ve been relaxing by the fire as someone else looked after her ride. But no. Her horse was a bastard. A really fast, well-bred bastard, flunked out of pedigree for its personality.
She did not appreciate every one of the fighters pointing out the similarity between her and her horse.
“Okay, Shanti…” Daniels stepped close to her horse with a studious expression.
Her horse sounded its strange, equine growl.
Daniels’ gaze jerked up, focusing on the horse’s head with round eyes as he quickly scooted away. He was one of the few not to have been bitten, and he seemed to want to keep it that way.
Clearing his throat, he stretched to hand Shanti up a map from as far from the horse as he could. “We have about another half-day through the trails, then we have an open stretch of land before our next sheltered area.”
Shanti glanced at the well-drawn map featuring a great many small trails marked in red. A couple of larger trails were colored blue. They all led into a treeless area with a black line running through it. She put her finger on that line. “This is a main road?”
Daniels nodded as Cayan joined them. The horse made his complaint known once again. This time, Cayan stared at the animal for a moment. He didn’t move away.
The horse didn’t press the matter. It probably knew Cayan would resort to violence, much like Shanti did.
“Oh yes, piss off my horse. Thanks.” Shanti studied the map.
The horse blew out a breath and shifted right, forcing the others to move with it.
Shanti rolled her eyes and followed the black line with her finger to a large thoroughfare. “He’ll have people waiting for us on this road,” she tapped the black line, “and an army on the larger trading route. This won’t work. I thought we went over this last night?”
“We aren’t following the road. We’re crossing it.” The sparkle of humor from the horse situation left Cayan’s eyes as he stared up at her.
Frowning, Shanti visualized crossing the road into what looked like another thick wood. “When was this decided?”
“Burson,” Rohnan said as he moved his mount up beside hers. “He spoke with Daniels this morning.”
Shanti glanced back toward the fire pit where Burson sat on his horse. Gracas and Rachie rehearsed new moves they’d learned the night before. Shanti hadn’t lied about keeping their training going, and they’d responded to her methods as they had before—immediately and with vigor.
“When he makes recommendations, they sound so logical. It sounds like this is the only way we can go and live.” Daniels glanced back at Burson. He shook his head. “It’s suicide, this way he’s identified, but I’ve gone over how this Hunter works. Traveling any large road is death. No question. We have a small force, and nearly half are no more than children. We have two mental workers, and one we cannot use until the most dire of circumstances so we don’t give away his talents too soon. We have a nulling effect mental-worker, which is useful, but he does not fight. All the Hunter needs is space and he will have us.”
“Then what is this?” Shanti pointed at the edge of the wood in which they traveled. She let her finger travel the large open space between covered areas. “He will have these maps. Maybe not so detailed, but he only needs the easily traversed routes. He’ll see that there are three places we can enter the cleared land. Only three. And they are not so far away from each other. You can bet he’s setting up a force to intercept us. We need to go a way he doesn’t expect.”
“There is no other way. Not if we want to keep heading east,” Cayan said in an even tone. “Any other route would put days on our journey, maybe weeks, which would just give him more time to heal, and to arrange a force to the East.”
Shanti let her eyes travel the other wooded area on the map. “If the trails in this other area are like the trails in this, it’s going to put days or weeks on our journey, anyway.”
“That’s the Dreaded Lands, Chosen,” Rohnan said quietly.
Cold dribbled through Shanti’s middle with the name. She pictured the map of the land in her mind, placed Cayan’s city, put in the wood they were in, fit the map over it, and then dropped her head. “Stupid. Without a larger map I didn’t even—” She handed the map back to Daniels. “Absolutely not. No way. It’s suicide.”
“It is the only way,” Cayan said in a low growl.
She stared into those crystal blue eyes as she said, “Have you not heard the stories and myths surrounding the Dreaded Lands, Cayan?”
“Do you believe in myths and ghost stories?”
“Yes, when there is nothing else, or when traders will add weeks onto their journey to keep from going through. Even the Graygual won’t enter those lands, Cayan. That should tell you something.”
“Shanti—” Cayan stepped closer and lowered his voice. “In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have left my city with Graygual at my door. I’d planned to send you first, and follow when I knew it was safe to leave. I will admit Burson has a candied tongue, as Daniels said. But he was right. Everything he said was right. I’ve heard he made changes to your journey that seemed foolish, and because of that, Sanders is alive. Burson… has more than just a nulling effect on our power. There is something else to him. Just by the fact that he’s never been wrong. I feel in my gut that we should trust him. There is no other way that makes sense.”
“It mostly swamp,” Rohnan spoke up. “We need a map to guide us through. Without it, we die, anyway.”
Daniels reached into his satchel and took out another map. “Compliments of the man himself.” He nodded at Burson, who watched Xavier trying to emulate Leilius’ tactics of blending in. His big, stiff body looked even larger amid the thin twigs and branches he’d chosen to hide amongst.
Shanti felt Rohnan’s unease. “Something’s not right about this. Do you remember anything in the scriptures about a man like Burson?”
Rohnan’s troubled eyes fell to the ground. “No—but none of this was mentioned. This current journey—it’s like it all skipped. We should be in Shadow Lands now, from what I study. Where we are seems another journey. The Captain and his men are needed addition. His army, and his allies—essential. Burson’s Gift has to be on our side. I feel that. But we are lost right now, Chosen. We are wandering. And he has become our guide. It all as he says.”
“Fuck.” Shanti didn’t know what else to say. She was traveling completely blind without a clue of what came next. She wasn’t in control of her journey, her fate—nothing.
So she said it again. “Fuck!”
“I don’t like this, either,” Cayan said. His mind tickled hers like a feather’s touch. Warmth and comfort infused her thoughts and spread through her body in waves from his Gift.
She’d continued to train him for the last few days too. Now he had down the mental stimulation that could emulate safety and comfort.
It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t fool her. Their journey was about to take a perilous turn.
Shanti pushed his mind away and kicked her horse. The animal swished its tail at the two humans by its side, neighed, and started walking. “Let’s go,” she yelled. “If we’re running to our death, I’d like to get there before supper.”
* * *
Their pace was quick through the widening trails. It was almost as if the wood wanted to spill them out into danger so it could watch what happened. Everyone had heard where they were headed, and knew what Sh
anti and Rohnan called it. The Dreaded Lands. The place where travelers ventured in, but did not make it out.
Every part of the vast land had a place where myths and stories talked of raiders and thieves and murderers. What made this particular place different was that no one returned to spread rumors. No one. There were no tall tales of what lay inside.
“If anyone can come out of this place, Toolan, it’s you,” Leilius said as the sun passed its zenith and began its slow fall.
“I’ve heard of Sarshers entering and not coming out. Warriors. Experienced men. All went in, not believing the myths, but none came out.” Shanti let her unfocused gaze sweep to the side as anxiety ate at her guts. Then something occurred to her.
“What did you call me?” She turned in her saddle so she could see Leilius. He rode like a sack of potatoes not properly tied on. She really hoped she didn’t look like that.
“Too-lan. Tute-lan?” He struggled with the sound of whatever word he was trying to spit out.
“Chulan, dummy,” Marc called up. “Shoo-lan.”
“Shoooo-lane,” Leilius tried.
Rohnan turned in his saddle in front of her. “I’ve been teaching Marc our language. He is extremely intelligent—just needs a soft hand for encouragement.”
“I’ve used… the opposite hand for encouragement.”
Rohnan laughed and turned back around. “That is because you don’t have a soft hand. Anyway, he picked up that I call you Chosen.”
“You call me Chosen in his language, too, so everyone knows what I am supposed to be, even though we now know it’s false. Why is Leilius using our speech for the title?”
“They have adopted Chosen as a name. That name comes from your home language, and so they are trying to celebrate your origin. They have faith in you.”
Shanti scoffed. “You put them up to this because you hate me, is that it?”
“Love, Chosen. I love you. I just don’t always show it when there is a joke to be had.”