“Looks like he’s got somethin’ on his mind.” Boots leered. Firelight pooled in his dull eyes and cast contorting shadows across his wrinkled face, making his ugliness even more hideous.
I continued growling and mumbling, hoping they’d remove the rag and let me speak.
“Shut ’im up before he draws the wargs back to camp.” Ratsnest held out the dagger. “Use this. See if it’s as sharp as it looks.”
Boots took the dagger and grinned. “The wargs’ll sleep with full bellies tomorrow, traveler.”
Wait! I twisted, somehow getting my legs under me, and shoved backward despite the new wave of heat spilling shivers beneath my skin.
Boots stomped closer and fisted a hand in my shirt. He hauled me clean off my feet, holding me close. When he spoke, spittle dashed my throbbing cheek. “Shame they won’t be huntin’ you. They prefer fresh meat. Maybe we could make you run, huh?”
“Just end it,” Ratsnest snapped from behind him.
I breathed hard through my nose and glared back at the ugly bastard. I hadn’t begged in the workhouse or on the streets, and I wasn’t about to start now. I had lost everything but my pride, and this worthless sack of horseshit wasn’t taking that from me.
He drew the dagger back and smiled, but its twin flashed in from behind him, hooked around his throat, and sliced neatly through his flesh. The skin of his throat peeled apart, and blood bubbled from between the folds. He coughed. Blood splattered my face. And then we both crumpled to the ground. I landed on my knees and watched the whirl of darkness sweep onto her next victim. The dagger sank home in Ratsnest’s chest. His bloodshot eyes widened in alarm, but he didn’t so much as get a chance to cry out. Shaianna tore the blade free of his chest and cut his throat. From her arrival to their execution, it was all over in seconds.
She turned on me and strode forward. The tear-shaped emerald I thought I’d imagined glistened on her cheek. Her eyes were cold, her expression flat. Her actions left no doubt. She’d kill me if I ever crossed her. But not today.
She plucked the rag from my mouth. “Come, the wargs are close.” She cut the ropes from my wrists and tugged me onto my feet. “Can you run?”
Run? I was having a hard time standing. “I don’t—”
A warg burst from the bushes. Its rippling snarl spurred me on. I ran, but soon stumbled and pitched forward. Shaianna snagged my coat, hauled me around, and shoved me aside. I hit a tree, clung on, and watched her square off against a warg. The beast had to be three times heavier than her. It hunched, head bowed, preparing to leap. Shaianna stood straight, head up and dagger gripped near her heart, ready to plunge forward. She couldn’t win this. The beast would gut her.
“Run …” I hadn’t meant to speak.
The warg snapped its head to me and flattened its ears with a growl. Icy terror spilled through my veins and rooted me to the spot. I couldn’t run, not even if I’d had the strength. Terror gripped me. I was looking my death in the eye and couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
Shaianna drew in a small breath and whispered something in a language I had never heard before. I would have missed it had the breeze not changed and carried her word to me. It sounded like a promise, like something that should have been spoken alone in private. The warg heard it and forgot me. It cocked its head at her. She said the same word again and lifted her chin, then whispered a string of sounds that may have once been a language, but sounded smooth and fluid like a flowing stream.
The warg’s growling breaths slowed. Its yellow eyes widened, drinking in the sorceress and her spoken-magic. It huffed something like a sigh and settled on its belly, planting its head between its massive paws.
She tucked her dagger away and then held out its twin to me, the one I’d stolen and lost. “Take it.”
I wasn’t sure I could step away from the support of the tree and made no attempt to move. “How did you…? How is it…?”
She closed the distance between us, took my hand, and placed the dagger in my palm, hilt first. “We must go now—”
A horn sounded, followed by a heavy silence. The forest seemed to hold its breath. And then a blood-chilling howl rang out. Our docile warg swung its head around, ears pricked.
Shaianna’s cool hand slipped into mine. She pressed a finger to her lips and drew me away from the warg. We walked with her arm scooped around my waist—one step at a time, quietly and painfully slow—until the second horn sounded and the answering howl was joined by another.
Shaianna stilled.
A growl rumbled so close the sound touched the back of my neck.
“Run!”
We did. My hand was locked in hers—but it wouldn’t last. Branches snagged on my clothes and clawed at my face, and with each step a wretched weakness hunted me down just as the wargs did. The horns faded until all I could hear was the throbbing of my taxed heart and my ragged breaths filling my burning lungs..
Shaianna pushed ahead, a blur weaving left and right. She tossed a glance over her shoulder—to shout a warning as the ground gave way and we fell over a precipice. My hand slipped from hers. Fear widened her eyes. She might have said my name. Her lips moved, and her hand reached out. But I was tumbling and already lost. The wind rushed all around and then, suddenly, the cold had hold of me. Inside its icy embrace, I found I didn’t care that this may be the end. There was nothing left to care about.
I wondered, lost in the dark and cold, if when I met my sister again, she would forgive me.
Chapter Seven
I came to with a roaring sound filling my head, sunlight stabbing at my eyes, and the smell of wet stone assaulting my nose. After a few haze-filled moments spent trying to figure out why I couldn’t hear Brean city noises, I realized the roaring was coming from a nearby waterfall and I was sprawled on a riverbank, which went some way in explaining why my clothes were damp, but explained absolutely nothing else.
I sat up, and my sore muscles creaked a warning. That wasn’t right, was it? The last thing I recalled was bleeding and running from the wargs. Another look around the riverside confirmed there was no sign of wargs by the tree line or in the river where the water meandered around boulders.
I ran a hand through my wet hair, surprised at the stiffness in my arm and that I could move it at all. I shifted my shoulder back and forth, expecting pain to fire up, but nothing happened. I’d woken feeling worse from sleeping on straw beds. My jacket sleeve had been reduced to bloody shreds, so I hadn’t imagined the wargs. I shrugged off the jacket and unlaced my bloodstained shirt, freeing my arm. It should have been a ragged, torn mess, but there was nothing to indicate a warg had attacked me. I flexed my hand open and closed, watching veins and tendons move. No pain, no wounds. How long had I been out?
I staggered down to the water’s edge and got a look at my reflection in the rippling surface. Patches of blood and dirt clung to my face and my eyes had a haunted look about them, but I was still in one piece. I cupped my hands in the water and splashed myself clean. A memory of smashing my face into the ground hit me with startling clarity. I prodded my cheek and circled my jaw. No evidence of the encounter with the wargs remained on my skin or beneath it. But it had happened.
Resting my hands on my knees, I sat on the bank and watched the river flow.
Magic.
Wounds like mine did not heal overnight.
I remembered running, falling, and … nothing.
I trailed my gaze down the waterfall thundering a few hundred meters up the river. Rolling mist billowed from the plunge pool. In the cool morning air, steam drifted above the warmer water. At first, I didn’t see Shaianna in the water, and then she was all I could see. Her slick hair ran down her pale back, failing to obscure the multicolored gems snaking from her left shoulder to her right hip. They may have continued lower, below the waterline. My thoughts certainly did.
I wet my lips, leaned a hand on the bank, and spectacularly failed at not looking. Morning sunlight breached the gorge above and spilled over the water
fall into the plunge pool. The gems—scattered in trailing patterns across her milky skin—lit up like constellations in the night sky. Maybe I had died, because a sight such as her, draped in sunlight and glitter, couldn’t be real.
She lifted her hands to the spray, and when she turned her head, she laughed. I couldn’t hear the sound over the roaring water, but I didn’t need to. Joy lit up her face and made her beauty suddenly breathtaking.
I tore my gaze away and closed my eyes. What was I doing here with this impossible woman, chasing after an impossible jewel, believing in impossible magic? This wasn’t me. People hired me to steal whatever their rotten hearts desired. I bunked with whores and stole from strangers. I walked the rooftops at night, spied on private meetings, and traded in trinkets. Magic was real for her, but it wasn’t for the likes of me or the people of Brea. If the Inner Circle knew of Shaianna … No, this crazy, beautiful killer was not part of my world. The old man in the plaza had been right. Shaianna was not meant for the likes of me.
When I dared look where she bathed, she had vanished, and I pretended the pain of losing sight of her was from the fall, or the guilt, or the many other wretched memories and thoughts chasing one another through my head, and not from the fact that the sight of her had had a very real effect on needs that were more than physical.
The air had warmed and the sun had crept farther into the gorge by the time she approached me from behind.
“Who is Jayne?” she asked.
I looked over my shoulder. She had wrapped herself in her layers of dark leather and pulled her cloak around her once more. The laughing woman I had watched bathing was a memory, and I knew from her tone that the cold, hard sorceress was back. I wondered if the laughing woman was real, or if she was someone my wishful imagination had concocted.
“Jayne…?” I lifted a knee and draped an arm over it. The river burbled by. “Why?”
“You spoke her name while I healed you.” She approached the water’s edge, not caring whether the water lapped at her boots.
“How exactly did you heal me?” I asked. Only the rush of the waterfall filled the next few moments, and I smiled. She hadn’t given me a straight answer yet, so why should that change now? “Let’s try an answer for an answer. How does that sound?”
“Very well.”
I scooped up a flat, wet stone and rubbed my thumb across its surface. “Jayne was my sister. We were orphaned when I was fifteen and she was ten.”
That was the quick and clean version. The truth was much dirtier, and not something I’d spoken about in many years. I swallowed, buying time to clear the unexpected scratch in my throat.
Shaianna had listened, though I wouldn’t know it from the way she stared at the river.
“Your turn,” I told her.
“Some of my power is returning. Not a significant amount, but enough to heal you and subdue that wild thing. Without my touch, you would have died, and I along with you.”
Considering how dangerous she was, I had to wonder if the world was better off without us both. “So you don’t just kill?”
“Do you just steal? Is that all you are?”
“That’s two questions, princess.” I smiled and tossed the pebble across the water. It skipped once, twice, and then disappeared below the surface.
“What happened to your sister?” she asked.
“She died.” I picked up a second pebble and tossed it hard enough to almost clear the river, but the water stole it greedily enough. “She took a knife from the workhouse kitchens and buried the blade in her chest. There was nothing I could do. They keep siblings apart in the workhouse, but I knew … I ran through the halls and found her barely alive. A few seconds later, long enough for her to say her final words, she died in my arms.”
I looked up and held her stare. She died wishing me dead. Those were words I couldn’t say, because Shaianna would next ask, “Why,” and that I couldn’t speak of.
“What happened to your queen?” I asked, eager to steer the attention away from me before my expression cracked and revealed the pain of those memories.
“I failed her.” A note of sadness softened her voice and crept through her brave facade. “She too died.”
She stared across the river, her eyes bright and that teardrop gem suddenly significant. Maybe she wasn’t just the coldhearted assassin I believed her to be. Maybe, somewhere deep inside, she was warm and real, just like the laughing woman I’d seen, but I doubted I’d see the real her again. And perhaps that was for the best.
“We should return to Brea and resupply.” I got to my feet. “I’ll have to steal something to hock for rubies. The highwaymen took everything—”
“No.”
“No?”
“No going back.”
“Arach is a few days’ ride on horseback. On foot, it could take a week. We don’t have any food or any means of carrying water. You’ve already seen what awaits us out here—”
She strode down the riverbank and called back, “Come, thief. I’ve wasted enough time saving your wretched life.”
I arched a brow at her back. Never mind saving my life. I might end hers if I spent much longer in her company.
I waited until I felt the pull of the bond and then begrudgingly trudged after her.
I found traveling with Shaianna as easy as walking a tightrope, and I’d tried that once too. Just when I thought I’d figured her out enough to relax, she’d snap and lash one of her scathing glances across me, as though I’d deliberately stung her with my words. Once I realized whatever I said riled her one way or another, I started firing verbal jabs her way, just to get a rise out of her. It wasn’t as though she could leave me behind, and her heavy silences had begun gnawing at my patience. Add to that the image seared into my thoughts of her beneath the waterfall, and I needed a distraction to keep from saying or doing something I’d regret. Stay focused. Find the Dragon’s Eye. Break the bond. Sell the Eye.
After we’d hiked up the moorland slopes of Merrivale—and there was nothing merry about the steep rocky climb—Shaianna finally stopped to admire the land. A canvas of purple gorse spread between large, scattered stones. Very little above knee height grew this high up, exposed to the elements.
“This is crazy, you realize?” I panted, hands on my knees, ready to pitch over. “If we’re not set upon by wolves before we reach the Draynes, the inhabitants of the valley will likely skin us alive and serve us up to their restless gods.”
She chose not to hear me and stood in the wind, her face lifted to the breeze. Her cloak rippled and her lips were set in a firm, determined line. “There are no gods here, thief.”
“We need to rest. Find shelter. Water. Something to eat.” She didn’t seem to require any of those things and didn’t even appear tired. Being a thief, I was built for stealth, not stamina. Endless hiking over rocky terrain and unforgiving bogs was not part of my skill set. I’d happily mingle in a crowd and relieve a lady of her heavy purse or a gentleman of his lord’s ring, but out here, standing alone on what felt like the top of the world, cold and caked up to the knees in dirt, Brea’s taverns didn’t seem all that bad.
“There, you see there…?” Straightening, I pointed toward a sheltered grove of trees. “Shelter for the night.”
“Shh …”
“Why?” Across the entire expanse of moorland in every direction, I couldn’t see another soul or any sign of habitation. The emptiness yawned for miles, over rolling hills, toward where the Thorns cut into the horizon like the teeth of a saw. “Lest we disturb the foxes and mice?”
She tilted her head and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “There is much to be heard should you care to listen.”
“All I hear is my stomach growling.”
“I hear whispers.”
Whispers. Of course she did. “We won’t reach the Draynes before dark, and I’m not travelling through there at night. We’re setting up camp in that copse, and I’m not discussing this. If you want to continue, you
’ll have to carry my ass across the moor.”
I stomped ahead and scrambled over ancient boulders as daylight faded. Her Princessness trailed behind at a leisurely pace. A few glances back revealed her picking flowers. Could she be any more of a contradiction? By the time we reached the grove, fog had rolled in and the temperature had dropped enough to set my teeth chattering.
“You’re cold.”
I ignored her and settled my rump on a lichen-covered rock. She headed deeper into the trees, only to reemerge a few moments later with a sharp fragment of black rock in one hand. She kicked a few rocks aside, digging out a shallow depression, and tore up several clumps of grass. By now I’d figured out that she was starting a fire and wondered how an assassin-sorceress-princess who’d grown up among the highborn knew how to make a fire with only rocks and grass.
“What kind of rock is that?” I asked, hoping the question sounded idle.
“Flint.” She crouched, stabbed the shard of flint into the mound of grass, and plucked her dagger free. “And steel.”
“When struck, sparks will fly.”
She lifted her gaze. “From your tone, are you comparing these materials to us?”
“Certainly not,” I denied with false conviction. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
She narrowed her eyes. I scratched my cheek and averted my gaze, wrestling to keep my smile hidden. She wasn’t particularly astute when it came to reading my expressions. Or maybe she could and just didn’t care, because she went back to focusing on her fire.
“Which am I?” she asked, striking the two together. Sparks did indeed fly, but none caught.
“Well, clearly, I’m steel. I’d have to be to put up with you. Anything less would have buckled by now.”
“Which would make me flint.” A smile touched her lips. “You realize, thief, that flint is harder than steel? The sparks are burning fragments of steel.” She struck the two together, and this time the grass smoldered and caught. “The metal is the first to give against the rock. This will always be the way of things. Steel is made by man. Rock is a part of the land, a part of the earth, and infinitely more powerful than anything man has constructed.”
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 49