Felrina retrieved the parcel from her pocket and uncovered the greasy cake with its flecks of meat. The sight and the smell of it . . . She pictured herself with her father in the cottage by the river where they had lived, his smile from across the table while he broke apart their morning bread. Choking back a sob, Felrina dropped the food.
Hard fingers seized her wrist. Felrina looked up, expecting Avalar’s wrathful glare, but found Terrek beside her instead. He bent to grasp the cake, brushing the snow from it with his gloved fingers. “You will eat this,” he said.
Felrina stared at the crumbs he held. Nervously, averting her gaze from his angry face, she gathered them into her palm. Cringing, she turned from her captors, thrusting one large section into her mouth and swallowing hard.
“No, don’t wolf your—” He drew a sharp breath. “Take smaller bites. Chew first, so it doesn’t make you sick.”
Felrina blinked, fighting back tears at the unfamiliarity of his scathing tone. She squinted at the sun’s bright rays, forcing herself to eat.
Terrek motioned to the giant. “Gaelin will need you to carry him again, so this one can ride. Put her on his calico. Vyergin can show you how to tie her. He was an Enforcer; he would know.”
Felrina listened while she fed herself, measuring each mouthful. As she swallowed the last little piece, the giant unshouldered her weighty pack.
“Ponu has left?” Avalar asked. She caught Felrina by her robe and then snagged her hands. Felrina stood where she was put, her legs braced to keep her balance while the giant positioned her arms behind her, wrapping a cloth around and between her crossed wrists.
Terrek stopped at Gaelin’s side. “Yes, the elf’s gone,” he answered. “He told me he ‘trusts that I will decide rightly,’ whatever that means. She’s only alive now because I still feel rage.”
“Mayhap you always will,” Avalar said. Terrek nodded somberly.
Felrina shrank from the giant’s stare. The shan were being mounted; the warrior in his peculiar hat was already on the move. Felrina submitted without a struggle as Avalar scooped her up and placed her behind the neck of one of the creatures—a colorful beast splotched orange, brown, and black. It tipped its shaggy head, eyeing her as if to check if she was worthy.
Kneeling, the giant grasped Felrina’s ankles under the animal’s round belly, drawing a rope through the stirrups to bind them together. Then she straightened and, gripping the little beast’s lead rope firmly, turned to retrieve Gaelin from Vyergin.
Terrek was riding in front of his companions into the dense forest, but Captain Vyergin held back. Coaxing his ruddy-tan creature alongside the giant, he stretched to pass Gaelin a small flask.
“How long will it be before he k-kills me?” Felrina blurted. Her voice cut through the calm beneath the trees, startling the finches in the boughs overhead. Both the captain and the scowling giant glanced back.
With a grunt, Vyergin nudged his beast into a shambling lope over the frosty, uneven ground. Felrina shivered at the giant’s glower. “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’ll be quiet.”
Avalar nodded and began to turn back.
“You say you d-despise suffering,” Felrina said, “but isn’t this a kind of torture? Making me sit here and w-wonder just when he might c-come back here and—”
“Did you not take prisoners?” Avalar interjected. “Did you not put them to death, Felrina Vlyn?”
Felrina swallowed at the sudden sour taste in her mouth. She recalled her dungeon strolls, how she had kept her eyes forward, never letting herself acknowledge the sad, beseeching looks from the men and women caged and awaiting slaughter. They were the ones deemed unfit for Mens’s army, the crippled or the young or very old, but all with lives they cherished as much as she valued her own, lives she had ripped horribly away to placate a monster.
“Could your prisoners hear the executions?” Avalar went on, her words grinding ruthlessly in Felrina’s ears. “Were they perchance forced to sit and to wonder when they might be next?”
“Yes,” Felrina mumbled. “And y-yes.”
For a long tense moment, Avalar stood silent. Felrina waited for the giant’s judgment, for more harsh words to flay her alive. But mercifully, Avalar turned away. Clicking softly to the shan, the giant hurried after Vyergin.
✽ ✽ ✽
GAELIN, SEATED ON his cloak beside the fire, hugged his knees, pressing them to his chest as he peered through the young and hungry flames. He gripped the little flask Wren had given him, shaking it to hear the liquid within, water from the snow he had stuffed in its throat. Uncorking the vessel, he drained it with a gulp, setting it by his leg as a reminder to refill it.
Again he swallowed. He could see his friends clearly now, the men squeezing the tents in among the trees. Roth crouched nearby, grunting with effort as he pried cones from the ice with his boot knife, tossing them into a pile to feed the shan.
The trees were dense, allowing no snow to reach the ground—and no shan to fit between the trunks to shake their branches.
Avalar, standing by his calico, untied their prisoner, the black-robe tumbling from the beast’s back. Gaelin followed the woman’s progress from the corner of his vision, her legs quivering as she walked small and frightened next to a warrior more than twice her height. Felrina’s wrists were bound, and her eyelids, when at last she lifted her head, were swollen and raw.
Gaelin shifted quickly when Avalar stopped by the fire, spreading his cloak to give the prisoner a place to rest. “Sometimes we bring over rocks or wood to sit on, but here there’s just that,” he said, nodding toward a lone stump. “You’d need a ladder to get up there.” He grinned at her, hoping to brighten her mood.
“We’re c-close,” Felrina said, staring into the flames while Avalar, having released her hands, secured them in front of her body instead. “I feel him.”
As she finished with her work, Avalar grimaced. “I sense other things,” she said darkly, “but not as often as I did. The river flows pure where we are now. No giants died here.”
Gaelin shivered. He had forgotten how every step brought Avalar nearer to the atrocities inflicted upon her people. The giant, squatting behind him, clasped his shoulders and squeezed, her strong fingers kneading gently. He forced himself to relax and lean forward, sighing as the tension eased from his muscles.
Felrina tugged at a snarl in her hair. “Why do you get sick when you use your staff?” she asked. “I had a staff, too. It never depleted me the way yours does.”
“Holram’s power burns me inside,” he confessed. “I try not to use it so I can recover.”
Gaelin glanced up, catching Terrek’s disapproving frown, his quick head-shake as he approached. “Why are you confiding in her?” Terrek demanded. “As far as we know, she could still be his! Perhaps that god of hers hears our every word.”
Her back hunched, Felrina closed her eyes. Gaelin, taking the full brunt of the commander’s smoldering glare, spied glints of reluctant pity lurking there as well.
“You killed my brother,” Terrek snapped. “Little Camron. How do you live with that, Felrina? Yet here you are! Alive and well and chatting with Gaelin as if you’re one of us. When you haven’t been for nearly two years! You’ve been far too busy, haven’t you? Betraying your own kind!
“It’s not just Camron.” Terrek stepped closer, glowering down. “You’ve committed heinous crimes. You remember the term for that? You went to Braymore, the same university I did. My father’s marker helped you get there. And what did they call mass murder back on Earth? Crimes against humanity! And here you are, not denying it. So you tell me, Felrina Vlyn! Do you deserve death?”
“Yes,” she moaned.
“I agree,” said Terrek. “And so does Lord Argus, as he’s been harping at me all day. And Lieutenant Roth over there—he wants to do the deed himself! Should I let him? Or is that too lenient? Perhaps we should do to you whatever it was you did to my brother?”
Terrek drew a shuddering breath. He
seized her hair and yanked up her head, forcing her to look at him. She hung with her chin tipped up and her throat exposed, the contours of her neck glowing pale in the firelight as her eyes rolled back in fear.
“No, look at me!” Terrek insisted.
Trembling, she raised her bound hands, desperate to hide his rage from her sight. “I . . . I c-can’t,” she sobbed. “Oh, Terrek!”
Releasing her hair, Terrek caught Felrina under her arms and dragged her bodily around the little blaze—to set her firmly on the stump’s high seat. “Do as I say, Felrina Vlyn. Or I swear I will kill you right now on the spot and be done! Look at me!”
She complied, shuddering, choking back sobs.
“You talk to me now.” Terrek leaned in, his voice deathly calm. “Not to Gaelin. Not these other people—to me! You’re going to talk to me now, and you’re going to describe to me exactly what you did to my brother!”
“I—” Felrina rocked where she sat, her hands gripping the edges of the stump. “I was called to the sacrificial chamber.” She paused, groaning softly. “I didn’t know who it was to be. I saw his face and I . . .”
Gaelin closed his eyes and let his mind wander as Felrina struggled to force out the words, recounting a story she clearly loathed. He listened to the soft sounds of his breathing, the low, comforting crackle of the fire. Over his head, the wind whispered through the low-hanging branches, making the boughs creak in a slow and gentle rhythm.
Behind him, Avalar began to cry, and even that sound belonged in this moment somehow. It meant Camron Florne had known love in his brief chance to exist. He had touched lives and had made a difference.
“You bitch!” Roth screamed. “If you don’t kill her now, Terrek, I will! You heard what she did! They did that to my family, too!”
“Will that give them back their lives?” Terrek asked. “Would it bring Camron back?”
“I’m sorry!” Felrina slipped to the ground below the stump. “I do deserve to die, Terrek! I want to die. Please! Everything you’ve said is true, and there’s n-nothing for me here. My father . . . and you . . . everything I loved is gone!”
“Free her wrists, Vyergin, so she can eat,” Terrek said, and Gaelin sighed, for this was the friend he knew. “Avalar, tie her again when she’s through. Be gentle with her for now. I need a moment to think.”
Chapter 45
GAELIN SIGHED AS their prisoner picked at her food. When Vyergin came to squat in front of her, Gaelin shifted back to give him room, watching while the captain straightened her forgotten dish on her lap. “You’ll get through this, my dear, but you must eat something or you will—” He broke off as she flinched from his hand. “That’s all right,” Vyergin reassured her.
As he withdrew to give Felrina her space, Gaelin clambered to his feet and retreated with him to the other side of the fire. “I hate this!” he whispered. “Every time I look at her I feel such . . .”
“I know what you mean,” said Vyergin.
“She’s still hurting. I thought Holram healed her.” Seeing the captain wince, Gaelin asked, “You know something, don’t you?”
Vyergin shrugged. “Perhaps Terrek’s right and she deserves all this. Maybe she does need to die, and perhaps she will. But I cannot abide rape, Staff-Wielder.”
“Rape?” Gaelin met the captain’s angry eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve never . . . Holram doesn’t know that word.”
“Roth’s twin, Gindle, was attacked first,” Vyergin told him. “A few days later the same man went after my sister, Elahne. He came past our border and found her by the river checking her snares. He took her at knifepoint—I suppose he believed he had the right. He didn’t know the lay of the land, and I did, so he wasn’t hard to catch.” Vyergin grunted. “He broke his damn ankle trying to cross the river, and that’s when I took him down. Right there on the rocks.
“I trussed him up and eviscerated him first,” the captain drawled. “Just a nick in the hollow below the belly. Enough to snag his gut and loop it around Hawk’s saddle. Hawk wanted to get at the greenberry bushes nearby, so I freed the bit from his mouth and let him wander into the brambles while I enjoyed my lunch. A short while later, seeing that the villain was still alive, I pinched his nose like this.” Vyergin demonstrated. “And then I fed him his balls in little pieces. I wouldn’t let him breathe until he swallowed.
“That’s when I heard the dog pack closing in,” he said. “They were attracted to the blood, you see. So I opened the man a bit more for them and left. I just cleaned off my saddle, climbed onto Hawk and rode away.” He drew a long shaky breath. “The last thing I heard was the screaming.”
Gaelin gaped at him. “I can’t believe you’d kill like that.”
“I was no longer fit to be Captain of the Enforcers, so I quit. What that cult did, though . . . It wasn’t just how they murdered our men. It was when they tossed the pieces into the water—as if they were nothing but dead branches cleared from a field.
“I was an Enforcer. I’ve witnessed some very brutal things in my life, but that was the worst.” Vyergin turned his head to look him up and down. “You slew someone, too, or so I’ve been told, and you’re not so terrible. Even ironwood snaps in a gale, Staff-Wielder, if the wind hits it long enough. The same is true for people. I hear you’re handy with an ax.”
Gaelin swayed on his feet. “Chopping wood is all I used to do. I . . .”
“Stop!” Vyergin scolded him. “I know all about it, Lavahl. Terrek confided in me. He visited your old haunt the day after you met him. You wanted to know where he had gone to, remember? He took his horse, left camp, and went straight up that mountain to see for himself. I do believe he buried what he found there—your mother’s bones that were on the woodpile, too.”
“I was the ironwood in the wind,” said Gaelin.
“Yes, you were,” Vyergin concurred. “So you’re human; good for you. I hope it was nice and messy. If you’re going to feel guilty about something for the rest of your life, you may as well be thorough about it.”
Gaelin nodded as he surveyed Felrina through the smoke. The woman was ignoring the giant’s attempts to get her to eat. “I do feel guilty,” he muttered. “I know what it’s like to be hurt.”
“Well, I do not! And if I could catch the miserable bastard who mutilated her”—Vyergin motioned toward their prisoner—“I would do it all again!”
Sighing, Gaelin joined the captain at the base of a crooked tree, leaning his tired shoulders against its trunk.
“Now that I’m older and wiser,” Vyergin said, “I generally prefer to express my ghoulish inclinations in less violent ways. I just gut innocent animals and make them into stew. Speaking of which,” he added with a glance past Gaelin, “here comes Roth with another diradil.”
Gaelin sank back as the captain trudged across the little camp to assist the lieutenant with the meat. His gaze settled on Felrina as once more she jerked her head away from the plate Avalar held. The woman blanched, covering her mouth. Following her stare, Gaelin peered at Vyergin, who had hung the diradil by its antlers from the crook of a branch and begun to skin it.
“Felrina?” Avalar called out in alarm. Gaelin scrambled to his feet, his heart pounding as he retrieved his staff, then hastened toward the prisoner passed out cold beside the fire.
✽ ✽ ✽
FELRINA WATCHED THE flicker of firelight through the canvas. Nighttime shadows kept her company in the tent, crouching low and ominously dark in the corners. Catching the scent of roasting meat, she curled beneath her furry covers, sucking in breaths at the churning in her stomach.
Sounds reached her from beyond the taut fabric. A shadow stretched tall outside by the doorway, its owner, who could only be the giant, rising from where she had been squatting as a steady crunch of footsteps approached.
“She has roused,” said Avalar, and Felrina grimaced at what the giant represented to her now—the freedom she no longer had. But I haven’t been free, she reminded herself. Not since I left home.
The tent’s door-flap folded back. Felrina squeezed her eyes shut as someone entered, burying her face in her dampened pillow.
“Vyergin described your injuries to me,” Terrek’s quiet voice said. “Ponu was right. You became Erebos’s victim, didn’t you, Felrina? You were being deceived; I knew it right from the beginning. You’ve paid quite a terrible price for it, haven’t you?”
Felrina drew a quivering breath, grateful for the gloom that spared her the sight of his loathing.
“I’m no executioner,” he continued. He bent over her, his hands brushing her shoulders, and she felt a soft weight—more furs being laid across her back. “My heart aches for my brother. Camron loved you. You were like his big sister, Felrina, and right now I can’t imagine killing anything he loved.
“But I must consider Roth. He’s the boy who wants you dead. He tried to reach us after your cult butchered his family. He came home to find his mother and his sister, Gindleyn, hanging dead from one of the branches his old treehouse rested on. The men were gone—his father and his brothers. No doubt taken to be dachs. Since then, he’s been staying with us at Vale Horse. Now he is begging me to let him kill you, and I understand how he feels.”
Felrina rolled her head, listening hard. His breath was catching in his throat. Is he crying? she wondered. More than anything, she yearned to sit up and beg his forgiveness.
“I could let him,” Terrek rasped. “But he is just a boy. It would be the same as if I did it myself. No, if I made this choice, it would have to be me, my sword!”
Holding her breath, Felrina extended her arm along her body to find his leg by her hip. “Give me your knife, Terrek,” she quavered. “I’ll do it myself. You shouldn’t have to. P-please. I d-don’t deserve to live.”
“No, you don’t,” Terrek agreed. “But now, thanks to that thing you call a god, we’re close to extinction, aren’t we? If humanity is going to survive, we can’t keep killing each other. Therefore, you will henceforth dedicate yourself to our cause. You have the knowledge we lack of Erebos’s domain so you will help Argus guide us to the place where the Destroyer keeps his power.”
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