Circle In The Deep (The Outcast Royal Book 1)

by Aaron D. Schneider

  And if they continued, she would fall and not get back up.

  Whether her guide sensed this or not, Ax-Wed didn’t know, but when she was finally led out of the tunnels she almost cried with relief.

  They stepped into a softly lit chamber that she immediately recognized as different than the others. Its walls seemed suffused with a pale blue light and although something about this all seemed familiar, the significance was lost as she immediately set about stretching her tortured body. Mindful of her side, she extended her limbs and unfurled her spine in a slow expansion that left her dizzy but grateful.

  “You’re not made for tunnels,” said a small, almost dainty voice. “There were times I thought I would have to drag you through.”

  Ax-Wed stared at the girl. Her eyes watered and although it took a minute for them to adjust, she decided that perhaps her guide was not as much of a child as she’d first surmised. The rags hanging on her made it difficult to get a clear view of her silhouette but here and there, hints of a frame on the cusp of womanhood pressed against the tattered layers. Also, the girl’s face, while round and dirty, showed a sternness and strength that no child could possess.

  “I wasn’t sure myself,” she admitted. “I’m merely glad I can stand straight.”

  The corner of the girl’s mouth hitched in half a smile and it was only then that she noticed the thin but distinct tracery of fresh scar tissue. In an uninterrupted line that began at her crown and continued down the side of her face and narrowly skirted the corner of her eye and mouth, the scar vanished over the edge of her chin.

  A suspicion wormed into her heart and with its germination, a deep anger rose inside her, utterly ignorant of her weariness.

  “Where did you get the scar?” she asked bluntly.

  The youth’s sea-green eyes flashed and she made no attempt to misdirect or confuse her.

  “Why does it matter?” she answered. One foot slid behind her as she settled her weight there.

  Front foot light, back foot strong, Ax-Wed noted with a hint of respect. She’s ready to run or fight at a turn.

  She held the girl’s gaze for a long, trembling moment and her respect for the youth grew when the gaze was met unflinchingly.

  While a little brash, this child has some salt in her. Maybe I misjudged her.

  Deciding there was only one way to get answers, she settled a hand on the ax head at her belt.

  “Did one of those creatures hunting us give it to you?”

  The girl’s eyes betrayed nothing as she continued to glare in response. “Maybe, maybe not.” She sniffed pugnaciously. “Why do you care?”

  “Because I know blades,” the Thulian said in her flat, almost bored tone. “And I know scars.”

  The girl threw her another half-smile, but this one was twisted and sneering. “Ha, good for you,” she snapped. “I don’t see how that means a rat’s a—”

  “That scar is too straight and too smooth,” Ax-Wed explained with a frosty squint. “You don’t get that from an accident or fighting. You get it when someone or something has you holding very still and cuts you deep and long and slow.”

  Something like true terror flared behind the girl’s eyes at the words, but the brash hardness that rose to counter it was astonishing in its speed and intensity.

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?” she asked in a voice that seemed too small to contain the venom in her words. “Honestly, are you done showing off or is there another part of this act?”

  The Thulian shrugged and hid a wince when she felt a little more blood seep from her wound.

  “If those creatures gave you that scar, it means they had you,” Ax-Wed said and battled pain, fatigue, and frustration to keep her tone even. “You were helpless and they marked you.”

  At the word “helpless.” the youth’s mocking facade was breached for an instant but the terror was soon replaced by the simmering rage she had seen by torchlight when they first met.

  “You think you’re so clever, huh?” she all but snarled and her lips peeled back in a feral smile. “Is there a point to this or do you simply find the best way to say thank you is to be a real bitch to the person who saved you?”

  If I was clever, I would have thought of this earlier, she admitted silently and clenched her jaw for a second as another stab of pain shafted through her side. She needed to tend to her wound without delay but didn’t dare to let her guard down yet.

  “If they had you like that,” she continued and her voice sounded raw even to her. “Why would they let you go? I saw what they did to the others, so why did they spare you? Unless…”

  “Unless, what?” The girl scoffed and did her best to act incredibly bored with the conversation but she was too angry to be very convincing.

  “Unless you started to work for them,” Ax-Wed said with a pitying look at her. “Willing or not, they could be using you as a kind of lure or trap—someone is dumped here who doesn’t go down easily and you come along and get them to let their guard down. In return, those creatures let you live.”

  The youth’s eyes narrowed and an incredulous snort issued from the back of her throat.

  “Did you even see those gnashers?” she asked. “They’re animals. All belly and balls without half a brain between ʼem.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed with a nod. “But not whatever leads them. That…Voice from under the hood.”

  Ax-Wed hated how scared she sounded as she mentioned it, but she saw that the girl wasn’t jeering at her. She was too busy looking scared herself.

  “Okay,” the youth said, her voice on the point of cracking as she licked her lips. “The Voice, yes, but that’s not what happened. They didn’t give me this.”

  A dirty finger ran along the scar to emphasize the point.

  “If you say so.” Ax-Wed grunted and made it clear that she didn’t believe her. Another ripple of pain raced across her body and she clenched her jaw and hoped the child didn’t see the tremble in her legs.

  How much longer until it simply gushes down your side?

  “Look, you don’t have to believe me,” the girl snapped and turned away enough to hide the marred side of her face. “But I’m telling you the truth. I got this before they caught me and pitched me into this place.”

  Something in the girl’s voice—some newfound fragility—nagged at Ax-Wed to reconsider. The Thulian liked to believe that her time as a traveling sell-sword had given her a nose for deceit which, combined with her paranoid-infused childhood, made her difficult to take advantage of. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility of deceit but if the child was playing her, it was one of the best performances she’d ever witnessed—and she’d grown up among a people for whom lying was like breathing.

  “Convince me,” she said quietly and shifted a hand to surreptitiously cover her wounded side.

  Silence filled the space between them and she struggled to stay focused. Something hard and frighteningly cold inside her urged her to kill the girl and see to the injury, but she dismissed the thought firmly. It was better to bleed out in this pit than murder a child—even an impudent one—on a suspicion.

  Ax-Wed fought to keep her breathing steady although her eyes threatened to lose focus as the girl began to speak.

  “Behnam did it,” she said and snapped her world into focus. “After Shirein…left, he said he’d been too soft on us and we had to serve more clients and in more ways. Me and Vashthy were the oldest and we tried to stand up to him.”

  Despite the haze of injuries, the warrior woman understood the words and her righteous anger rallied her strength to attend to the girl’s story.

  “He killed Vashthy right there—beat her head in against the table,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes but refused to fall as her voice deadened. “Then he told the others he would do the same to anyone who didn’t hold me down.”

  A pained breath became a groan, although whether for the girl’s tale or her wound, Ax-Wed couldn’t have said.

  “I tried to fight bu
t there were too many and I’ve always been small,” she said as though explaining the weather. “Then he took a knife from the table—he’d been using it to peel a plum, I think—and did this.”

  Her finger traced her scar again.

  “‘They only want you because you’re perfect and pure,’ he tells them,” she said and her voice conveyed a heavy, coarse male tone. “‘Now no one wants her and she’s merely another mutt in the street.’”

  She raised her head and seemed determined to keep her face from being downcast as she spoke around a tightening throat.

  “Then he made them strip me and throw me out,” she said, her voice brittle and jagged. “The cut had barely started to close when the snatchers caught me one night when I was sleeping on the street.”

  Ax-Wed nodded and began to rock on unsteady feet.

  Did I get more wine without realizing it? Honestly, it wouldn’t be the first time I got drunk without knowing it.

  The girl looked at her and her eyes narrowed and then widened as she went through several emotions at once.

  “Zam’s dug!” she swore. “You’re hurt!”

  Ax-Wed followed the child’s gaze groggily and looked down to where her side now glistened with a fresh coat of blood.

  That happened fast, she marveled as she sank to one knee.

  The girl was at her side instantly and made a valiant if futile effort to support her.

  “What can I do?” she asked, her eyes huge and frightened but her voice remarkably calm.

  The Thulian’s hands settled on her belt and her fingers worked the buckle with automatic efficiency despite their numbness. “Help me…help me get this off,” she mumbled as she tossed the belt aside and pawed at her cuirass. “Need…need to…see it.”

  The effort took several moments and more than once, only a sharp word or a slap from the girl kept her from losing consciousness and pitching forward. Once the cuirass fell to the floor with a slithering rattle, they tugged the arming vest off and finally, the thin, blood-soaked tunic. Now naked from the waist up, she bent and inspected the injury. Something like a red mouth had grown between the ridged muscles of her abdomen. In defiance of her scrutiny, the wound ejected more of her vital fluid as she probed the edges.

  “The patch must…eh, must have been flushed out.” Ax-Wed panted and her head swung from side to side as she searched for her belt. It was where she’d tossed it, barely out of reach but seeming so very far away.

  “Do you need that?” the girl asked as she followed Ax-Wed’s gaze. “The belt?”

  “The d-dagger and the sssilk ribbon,” she slurred as she slid back toward the floor. The stones felt icy on her bare skin but she was beyond caring. She needed to save enough of her strength to try one thing—one last roll of the dice.

  Despite her determination, she’d started to fade into the gray that crept along the edges of her vision when she felt something pressed into her hand.

  “There’s the dagger,” the girl said above her, the calm in her voice beginning to crumble. “And there’s the silk ribbon.”

  A sleepy smile pushed at the corners of Ax-Wed’s mouth as she began to wind the silk around the dagger.

  “Good girl.” She sighed and her will railed against the lethargy that threatened to drag her down. “Once I…I do this, I need you to do…do two things because I’ll probably p-pass…out.”

  “What?” the girl asked and a trace of a sob slipped out.

  “After the…the incantation, p-pull this out,” Ax-Wed instructed and held the dagger up with its silk-wrapped blade. “G-gently, please.”

  “What?” the child demanded incredulously but when she saw her bleary stare, she nodded quickly. “Very well, and the second thing?”

  “T-turn my head t-to one…one side.” The Thulian dragged a breath in. “You’ll s-see…see why. G-got it?”

  The child nodded.

  “G-good…good girl,” she muttered. “Here goes.”

  The blade began to descend when the girl’s voice rose sharply, shrill and unmistakably young.

  “Don’t leave me,” she pleaded. “Please.”

  “B-be back…before you know…know it,” she assured her as she lowered the dagger so its tip caught on the edge of her wound.

  As groggy as she was, she’d thought she was beyond pain but the cruel point proved otherwise. Her muscles tightened with the sudden surge of agony that radiated from the wound but she embraced the pain. Riding the waves of torment that coursed up her nerves, she found the clarity she needed. The words and mental framework of the incantation came into her mind, unnatural traceries ingrained into her psyche.

  Her vision cleared and she locked gazes with the girl watching her with huge, tear-filled eyes.

  I hope I’m not wrong about you, she thought and drove the dagger in as she let the incantation tear a path from her mouth.

  Pain—physical, mental, and even spiritual—ripped through her and her body arched upward as though lightning coursed through her frame.

  Lightning would have felt better, she had the time to think before the world vanished into a lightless, numbing void.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What exactly are you asking me, Hazarbed?” Prince Tarkhind asked, his voice dangerously cold.

  Guuhal would have laughed at the role reversal from his conversation the day before had the stakes not been so dire. Instead, he gave the servant who came to refresh the prince’s cup a warning look and the experienced retainer responded with the slightest nod of acquiescence. The cup was filled, the carafe left upon the table, and the man vanished.

  Besides the two royal guards at the gate to the palatial gardens, the Hazarbed and his prince were utterly alone with the horticulture and a bevy of drowsy songbirds.

  “It is not my aim to question you or your decisions, my prince,” he said and wondered if what he felt was like walking on brittle ice. “But as I seek to do your will, what I don’t know can hurt my efforts and thus hinder your plans.”

  Tarkhind turned his gaze to a copse of trees that were his favorite and his dark gaze roved across the elegant twists and curves of the trunks. The silence stretched, interrupted only by the mostly intermittent birdsong, and the guard commander wondered if he’d been wordlessly dismissed.

  His father was no treat but this boy is something else altogether, he thought as his fingers tightened on his staff of office. And when did he become so old?

  The guard commander’s eyes narrowed when he saw the patches of white at the handsome royal’s temples and the strands of gray that marred his majestic black mane.

  “Who is getting in our way?” the prince asked at last and took a sip without looking away from his trees.

  “It is not as simple as that, my prince,” Guuhal said quickly and his stomach squirmed at the direction this conversation was taking. “The simple fact is that it is not sustainable. The first round of this new quota and the complications have already started to pile up. We can’t keep doing—”

  “How long have you served Jehadim?” Tarkhind asked and cut him off abruptly.

  The guard commander felt the net underfoot even though he couldn’t yet see the cords but he knew there was nothing for him to do but answer.

  “Twenty-seven years as a royal guard, my prince,” he said. “Twenty-two years under your father and twelve of them as his Hazarbed. Five years under you as your Hazarbed.”

  “And before that, you served in my father’s armies as a Kushadi lancer, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, my prince.” Guuhal nodded warily. “Only for three years but all of them on campaign or outrider patrols.”

  Tarkhind held the cup to his lips but did not drink and his breath caused a slight ripple across the hot mint tea.

  “Thirty years of service,” he said, the cup still perched against his lower lip. “I have difficulty believing you survived this long by not answering a question posed to you by your prince.”

  He stifled a frustrated growl as he bowed his head.<
br />
  “My apologies, my prince.”

  “I want names, Guuhal,” his sovereign said and a scowl touched the corners of his mouth. “Not apologies.”

  The guard commander’s teeth ground together as he kept his gaze lowered and wondered how the entire conversation had slid out of his control so quickly. He’d hoped to be able to leverage the disruptions to get the prince to give him more information about what exactly was going on, but it seemed information was only bound to travel in one direction in the court of Prince Tarkhind.

  “There are several, my prince, some less deliberately disruptive but all potentially dangerous,” he said and decided to attempt a change of tactics. “I didn’t wish to entangle you with matters of dignitaries, merchants, royal guards, and criminals when you clearly have much on your plate.”

  The prince raised an eyebrow as he sipped his tea. Then, with the kind of calm deliberation that made Guuhal increasingly nervous, he placed the cup on the table and turned his gaze upon the Hazarbed.

  “I admit I’m impressed,” the ruler declared in a tone that made it clear he was anything but. “I would never have thought you were the type of man who had the spine to mock his master to his face. Well done, Guuhal, I would never have thought you had it in you.”

  The guard commander couldn’t help recoiling from the accusatory compliment.

  “M-mock you?” he said and the incredulity of the situation robbed him of any decorum he’d held onto. “I don’t understand.”

  Tarkhind adjusted the cup on the table by a quarter turn and responded with a smirk which Guuhal would have found infuriating if he wasn’t suddenly frightened by the dangerous mood the young prince seemed to be in.

  “Oh, don’t spoil it now with denial.” The ruler of Jehadim sighed wearily. “You see me here sipping tea while I send you scurrying off to do my dirty work. Well, that must be frustrating.”

  “I do not mock you, my prince,” he insisted. “I’ve served long enough to understand that the burden of rulership is something not easily understood or appreciated by those being ruled.”