Evardo frowned as if trying to understand something or maybe picking over their words.
“Just spit it out.” Éli waved Evardo away and grabbed his dagger from the fire, the blade hot in the embers. He really had no time for a healer tonight. Éli pressed the hot blade against his wound, seething under the burning pain.
They follow the Guardian. Protect her. One of them is a strange sort of—
Someone knocked at the door, cutting off Evardo’s words. Éli had heard enough anyway. Just a few more assholes in the way of his prize.
“Come.” Éli set the dagger aside to cool.
Granger stepped into the room, dripping water across the floor.
“You’d better have good news,” Éli muttered.
“The old man was at it again tonight.” A grin spread across Granger’s face. “Scared them tavern folks half to death with his sob stories.”
“I said good news, not the insane ramblings of an old man.” He flexed and unflexed his fingers again, breathing in the Guardian’s softness. “You kill those bowmen yet?”
The smile slid off Granger’s face, his one eye hardening. “City guard arrested them before we could move in.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Éli stood and grabbed the chair, flinging it against the wall. Wood shattered in a dozen directions as Connor ducked and covered his head. “You were supposed to kill those bastards! Not let the city guard have them. Fuck!” He seethed. “Get everyone into woodsman clothing. We’re going after the woman.”
“Yes, Commander.” Granger pressed a fist to his shoulder and exited the room.
Flames crackled in the hearth. Éli opened his hand, black and white flecks drifting away from his palm. The black ones seemed to suck the light from the room, while the softer ones brightened.
“I’ve got you now,” he whispered, groaning at the recollection of her mouth against his. He wanted to drag her to Jon’s cell so that bastard could see what he’d lost, but he’d have to find her first.
Éli pulled on a fresh shirt and grabbed his weapons. Kicking open the door, he barked orders at his men and headed to the stables. Time to find the woman before Jon did and make his brother proud.
CHAPTER 41
The Jungle
Jàden leaned against a tree trunk, Ashe’s head in her lap as the sky turned gray in anticipation of dawn’s first sun. Any moment, Jon and the others would ride through the trees to find them, and yet the past lay heavy on her shoulders.
Two years in a cage waiting for Kale when she should have done more to free herself.
“Maybe we should get you back to the city and a soft bed to help you recover.”
She traced her fingers across Ashe’s forehead, sweat fevering his brow.
Breathing shallow and skin pale, Ashe’s condition hadn’t changed as he fought the effects of the poison. Jàden tucked a blanket around his shoulders to keep him warm. “Hang on a little longer.”
Braygen crouched next to her, his stormy eyes flickering with sympathy in the gray dawn light. His chest was bare and his beard freshly trimmed. He must have been cleaning up down by the river. “You need to rest.”
“Not until he’s out of danger.” Picking up a small cloth, she dipped it into the bowl of water and laid it across Ashe’s forehead. Yet the zankata inked onto Braygen’s chest stayed in her line of sight. Part of her so desperately wanted to learn everything these people knew about Kale, but she’d already spent two seasons trying find him and everything had backfired. “I need to return Ashe to Felaren and find his brother.”
“Oi, them fucking bastards!” Alida stumbled into the clearing covered in mud, two of her Tahiró companions flowing together from birds to human. “Rakir from Felaren found our tracks, but I killed two more of ‘em. Fucking bastards tried to rip my shirt off.”
She clutched a torn bonding cloth in her hand. “My wife is gonna be pissed.”
“When is Sumaha not pissed?” Braygen chuckled as if the situation were amusing, but his features turned serious. “How far back are they?”
“Maybe an hour, but they’re ridin’ like they got a fire up their asses.” She pointed at Jàden. “The skinny one’s lookin’ for her.”
“How many?” he asked, already moving toward his horse as he spoke quietly with Alida.
Éli. It had to be him. Jon and his men would never assault a woman like that. She ignored whatever Braygen and Alida were saying and laid Ashe’s head against the ground. “I’ll get you back to Andrew, but we gotta hide from Éli.”
She wasn’t going to let Éli’s men finish killing Ashe. Jàden gathered the horses.
“We kept the trail fresh for your friends, but no more. Come, we disappear with the wind.” Braygen helped her clear all trace of their passage.
“Can you send someone back to Felaren? I need to get a message to Jon.” She clutched the bloodflower’s chain then thought better of it.
This was Jon’s legacy and the key to the Bloodflower Gate. She couldn’t put it in the hands of a stranger.
She cut off a corner of her shirt, dipped her finger in the mud and drew the bloodflower on one side then wrote sanda ven on the other. “It will be only six horses like these and their male riders. Jon will have a cigarette in his mouth—that’s how you’ll know.”
Braygen nodded and slipped her message to one of his companions. As they worked the rest of the small camp and lifted Ashe onto a makeshift litter between two of the smaller horses, Jàden needed to be sure Jon found them, even if the message never got delivered.
Only one way she could leave a marker for Jon and not Éli, whose power slid through her veins like rotten slime. She’d give anything to untie herself. His energy was so different. Like a cloud of death and terror on a bright spring day, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Jon sensed it too.
Jàden grabbed a handful of mud and drew Kale’s zankata on a rubber tree trunk. The Rakir shouldn’t have any clue what it was, but if Jon or the others were close, they’d know she’d passed through here.
She was almost done when Braygen grabbed her arm and tugged her to the far side of the trunk.
“I’m not finished.”
He pressed a hand over her mouth, his gaze fixed down the path. “An hour my ass.”
Back pressed against the tree, she couldn’t see anything as hooves thundered against the ground. She closed her eyes, listening to the horses and how the jungle silenced with their presence.
Ten…twelve…
This wasn’t the sound of eight riders like she’d grown accustomed to but a distinctly harder rhythm with more tangled beats.
Braygen pulled his hand away from her mouth. When she opened her eyes again, he was watching her.
The fine hairs of his sparse beard glistened in the pre-dawn light, nearly the same shade of dusty blond as Kale.
Jàden’s heart ached as she traced her fingers along the black lines inked on Braygen’s chest as if they would show her Kale’s face.
Looking for him again would put Jon at risk, and she couldn’t bear if anything happened to him. And now, as Braygen lowered his hand to caress her jaw, she couldn’t shake the ease and warmth his presence commanded. Nor the stirring of a buried instinct that he was the key to her past and her future.
Harnesses jingled along the road, and a horse whinnied, shaking her from Braygen’s spell.
The Rakir slowed, many of them circling back into the clearing.
“Prints stop here, Commander,” one called.
She knew that voice. Twisting around, she pressed her chest against the trunk and peeked out.
Granger, the beefy soldier who’d abducted her in Nelórath, crossed back and forth over the muddy ground. His beard was thicker now, and Jàden couldn’t help a faint smile at the patch over his eye.
“They didn’t just disappear. Find them!” The shout came from Éli this time, his anger easy to see with the way his jerked his horse around.
His bonded magic slid through her veins as dawn’s gray light brought out the deeper shadows in the woods, each branch a little more twisted. Lurking behind a tree wouldn’t hide them for long.
She glanced around to see where Alida and Ashe were, but they’d disappeared. Everyone had.
“Spread out into the trees.” Éli was practically looking right at her.
The urge to run was so strong she clenched her fists. One little movement and he’d spot her for sure. Or maybe he’d seen the zankata symbol she’d painted.
Something whispered up the back of her spine, the same presence she’d sensed just before Mather died. It seemed to hang like a ghost between her and Braygen as he laid a hand on her waist.
“Keep perfectly still,” he breathed.
A horse plodded onto the road just in her line of sight, a young boy clutching the reins with a tall, slender figure holding onto him as if for dear life. Their face turned toward her, a thousand years of anguish etched into their features. They couldn’t have been more than twenty and yet wore the fear of heavy abuse in their eyes. A terror she knew all too well.
But it was the young boy sitting in front who held her attention. Hair as black as midnight, this kid couldn’t have been more than eight or nine.
She recalled the scream she’d heard on the Tower barge only moments before she boarded.
“What are Rakir doing with a child?” Braygen whispered softly, a rigidness to his tone.
“I don’t know.” She kept her voice low.
The boy sat tall in the saddle, white-knuckling the reins and giving off a vibe of both confidence and terror.
An arrow whizzed by Éli’s head from across the road and sailed off into the brush.
Braygen leaned close to her ear. “That’s our cue.”
As Éli and his men drew their weapons and stalked toward the far trees, she and Braygen crept backward into the brush. He moved as silently as a soft breeze, while she was about as graceful as a shàden climbing a tree.
“Come, Guardian.” Braygen untied the horses from a dense thicket of tall ferns.
She nodded as the Tahiró ushered her aside and lifted Ashe onto a makeshift litter between two of the smaller horses, heavy blankets stretched over his chest to keep him warm. One man grabbed the reins and guided the horses.
The thick foliage blocked them from the Rakir, but still the presence lingered over her shoulder as if waiting for something. It had to be the dreamwalker from the north, but why did they not tell Éli where their group was?
Who are you? she whispered into their mind, hoping they’d hear.
I can’t hold him off long. You need each other.
As she followed Braygen, the presence lingered for several long minutes then slipped away as if letting her go.
“Need him, my ass,” she muttered under her breath. They hadn’t answered her question and Éli terrified her. She scratched her arms as if she could dig out his power and get rid of him for good.
“What is it?” Braygen asked as she turned back.
“Nothing.” She had no choice but to move forward and keep Ashe alive. As the Tahiró wiped their trail clean, she climbed on Agnar’s back and grabbed Hena’s lead line.
Frank’s ships crossed over the canopy. She glanced again at the black ink crossing Braygen’s chest.
Kale needed her to find him.
To set him free or maybe to erase her guilt that she’d expected him to be her savior.
Maybe it was time to save him and follow the trail of life she now had in front of her.
As she nudged Agnar alongside Braygen, she nodded at his chest. “I need you to tell me everything. Take me back to the beginning.”
CHAPTER 42
The Jungle
Jàden rode close to Braygen. Exhaustion pulled at her eyelids, but she refused to sleep until Ashe was out of danger. She could do nothing but wait for him to wake up, and she needed answers. “How did you know my real name?”
“I wondered when we’d get around to that.” Braygen chuckled.
Guiding his horse around a fallen branch, he waited for her to catch up again and moved close enough that their knees nearly touched. “I was born on Hàlon, a few years before the war. Everyone knew your name.”
“What war? What happened to Hàlon?” When he didn’t answer right away, she nudged Agnar ahead and cut him off, meeting his stormy gaze. That was when his words clicked. “You’re a sleeper.”
“Like you.” His expression grew somber as the others forged ahead, leaving them alone on the empty road. “I was barely a toddler when the war started. My parents were botanists and trying to earn their Guild badges. They wanted to work on the moon’s surface and study all the new flora once terraforming took off.”
Jàden’s stomach twisted into a knot. Her last day on the surface, when she’d tried to say goodbye to Sandaris, the Guild scientists were still scratching their heads because nothing would grow.
His voice broke her reverie. “My father wanted to fight the Enforcers to free you of all charges that your connection to the Flame put everyone’s life in danger. Most of Hàlon called you the moon’s savior, but Enforcers arrested anyone with even a hint of your power. Protests turned to riots, and riots turned to death squads.”
“I don’t understand.”
Even after her and Kale escaped the moon’s core all those years ago, they were still pursued. Barely able to get to the Sandaris surface, they were heading toward the Ironstar Gate when Frank caught up. She knew nothing about a war or any rioting, only that the Guild Council closely guarded the secret truth of Hàlon’s technology. The firemark bacterium hadn’t come from a rim world but directly from the alien starship buried in Sandaris’s core.
The one that tethered her and the Flame’s power.
She needed to escape Sandaris but couldn’t do so without a pilot. And the only one she trusted was Kale.
Braygen grabbed her hand and gently squeezed as if trying to comfort her, despite his words. “Your connection to the Flame, once it came to light, started a war between the Guild Council and Hàlon’s citizens. They wielded Enforcers to suppress the knowledge that Jason Kale brought to light, but the Enforcers took it too far. Thousands of people got spaced out the docking bays, millions more locked in hypersleep.”
“Locked in hypersleep,” she murmured. Forced like her. Millions. Jàden was going to be sick, recalling the high numbers on the hypersleep pods the day she’d awoken. As her heart filled with grief, she clutched Braygen’s hand.
A hidden instinct pushed to the surface of her senses.
A completeness, peace. As if she’d been searching for Braygen her whole life instead of Kale. His pale, freckled skin seemed to glow with some hidden fire deep beneath the surface.
She yanked her hand back, some small part of her aching to grab his hand again as rain drizzled on her cold palm.
He fiddled with his bow as the flicker dimmed.
She must have been hallucinating from fatigue. Braygen traced his thumb across the polished wood where her zankata was etched. Carved below it was another creature, something she’d seen only once in her life.
The terrifying monster with giant wings and a long tail from inside the moon.
Jàden turned her horse away and nudged him after the others. She didn’t want to see that thing ever again and definitely not tied to her mark.
But Braygen’s words took hold of her gut.
If millions of people had been locked in hypersleep, did it mean they were still on Hàlon or scattered across Sandaris like her?
Braygen stayed alongside her for the next few hours while she digested every piece of information from the war after Kale’s death to hypersleep. There were so many unknowns, and she couldn’t quite put the pieces together.
“Why would Enforcers do such a terrible thing?” She’d met many of them over the years, and despite their duties to follow the chain of command, Jàden had found many of
them to be kind, generous souls when they weren’t ordered to aim a weapon.
“That part is still unclear.” He patted his mare on the shoulder as she shied away from Agnar’s nipping. “All I’ve learned for certain is the Enforcers believed they were under attack and kidnapped all the gatekeepers. They opened the gates and forced a mass exodus to the surface by gunpoint to protect Hàlon. Then they sealed the gates and trapped everyone on the surface.”
Her fingers itched toward the bloodflower pendant as tears slid down her cheeks. Never could she have imagined a war because of her and the power she wielded or the hypocrisy of the Guild Commanders.
She couldn’t shake the memory of the emptiness she’d seen in the Enforcer control room. Guild citizens barely made up a tenth of the population, but they were the ship leaders, scientists, medics and military. All other citizens worked the pipeworks, sewage and water and other essential duties to keep the ship running smoothly.
“The Enforcers control Hàlon now?” Even as the question floated off her tongue, it didn’t make sense.
Braygen shrugged. “No one knows anymore. But they have the keys, and we can’t get back.”
Millions of Enforcers plus nearly four thousand years of time would have swelled their numbers to fill the ship with life again. There was a piece of the story missing, but she didn’t want to hear any more. Not until she could process what Braygen had already told her.
“So how are you awake?” she asked. Maybe his story would be brighter than the horrors of what happened during hypersleep.
“I was five years old when the Enforcers found us. My mother tried to protect us while my father shouted opposition. The last thing I heard him say was ‘Free the Flame wielders’ before his head exploded.”
“Shit,” Jàden breathed, trying to settle Agnar so he’d stop being such a nuisance to the mare.
“I was shoved into hypersleep alongside dozens of other children. When my pod failed, I woke up to my parents’ bones scattered across the substation floor.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, the bloodflower key heavy against her chest. If it was held captive on Hàlon, how had it come to be part of Jon’s legacy?
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