Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3)

by Kathrin Hutson

  Kherron nodded and gestured for her to proceed, then couldn’t help a stifled chuckle. This discovery, at the very least, explained how they’d so quickly managed to escape Paden’s tent before they’d abducted him. Although, the healer had been and continued to be a remarkably willing captive; he slept rather soundly upon the bed of lichen against the wall of the hollow, nothing but peaceful dreaming presented in the slackened contours of his face. It made him wonder if the man hadn’t been running away from something when he’d so willingly accepted his capture.

  “Do you know anything about that army?” he asked Aelis, nodding toward the sleeping healer.

  She stopped her work to briefly look up at him. “No.” The sharp sound of ripping flesh filled the hollow as she jerked the hare’s fur to strip it off the carcass. “Geyr always—” Stopping short, Aelis shook her head briskly, her jaw working as she gritted her teeth and closed her eyes for a deep breath. “He told me I should listen more to the words on the wind. Join more clannings. Seize the opportunities to learn whenever I could. But I’ve never been interested in others’ politics.” With a mighty pull, she wrenched the rest of the pelt from the creature in her hands, tearing it from halfway over the shoulders clear down to the feet. Kherron’s eyes widened; though her strength did not surprise him, he would have expected the hare to rip in two at such force. It did not.

  Aelis did not look up at him again while she worked, and Kherron had no desire to prompt her further. Her mention of this Geyr person had not been lost on him, and combined with a growing distaste for this specter of her past, Kherron felt himself bristling to think what the man might have held over her—or still did. But he let it go, responding only by offering her a thin, sturdy stick with a sharpened tip at one broken end. This she stuck through the gutted hare, then immediately handed over to him with what could only be a frown of distaste. It gave Kherron no little amusement to realize that she and Siobhas seemed to harbor the same affinity for raw meals.

  So he sat there with the spitted hare, roasting his first unusually successful kill for food over his first irregularly conjured fire. An unexpected, foreign contentment filled the silence of the hollow.

  WHILE AELIS CLEANED and gutted the second hare, Kherron chewed on surprisingly delicious meat, chasing it with what had, in fact, been packed snow now melted in his waterskin. It did not surprise him when Paden roused from sleep; Kherron did not think anyone could have slept through such an enticing scent over the fire. The man blinked, sat up slowly, and took in the sight of Aelis just finishing the second hare. Wiping his mouth with the back of a hand, Kherron extended the other half of a cooked meal to the healer, who accepted it with a little surprise and a nod.

  “Thank you,” he said. After a few minutes of silent eating and a widening of his eyes in approval, the man glanced at Aelis working deftly to fix the second hare on the simple spit. “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

  Aelis shrugged but didn’t look up. She seemed to feel Paden’s unrelenting stare and finally raised her head to meet his gaze. “You provided exactly what I needed. My thanks.” The words carried more than a little cynicism—Kherron thought it had been a long time since the woman had needed another’s aid—but the healer seemed unaffected by her tone.

  “Can I see?”

  Irritation flared behind what had now become Aelis’ glare of irritation, and she curled her tongue behind her teeth. Kherron thought she expected the healer to rescind his request, but Paden remained surprisingly stalwart for being met with such menacing disapproval. With a jerk of her arm, she threw the bearskin cloak off her shoulder and dramatically yanked down the torn sleeve of her tunic. Her exposed shoulder looked little like it ought; the skin was red and shimmering with newly healed flesh, yes, but that was it. There was a scar already—a raised pebble in the center of her shoulder, no doubt reflected in its twin on her back where the arrow had pierced right through. But the stitches had disappeared entirely, and as Paden had noted in the night, Aelis had apparently healed in less than a day a wound that took most men a number of weeks, if not months.

  With wide eyes, the healer took in the sight, apparently not daring to spurn Aelis further by approaching her for closer inspection. With a curt nod, he dismissed her cynical stare, then briefly glanced at Kherron. All Kherron could do was tip his head in acknowledgement. He understood the surprise of unnaturally short recovery; he’d experienced it himself when the fae had healed the knife wound left by that vicious tattooed woman Lorraii. He’d suffered multiple head injuries that most likely should have left him with far less of his wits than he maintained. And, of course, he’d died four dozen times; he had his own scars to prove it. But whether Aelis possessed such capabilities as one of the Wild, from their visit to the sacred pool underground, or some other unknown force, he didn’t know.

  He found it suddenly very amusing that he’d taken to using the names given him already, even in his own thoughts. It seemed he’d reached some undefined threshold for disbelief and no longer had room for doubt or denial. Or he’d seen enough proof by now to truly believe, with all that made Kherron himself, everything others had shown him and everything he’d discovered. A chuckle escaped him, and he felt the surprised gazes piercing him—one with curiosity, the other with vehemence. The latter belonged to Aelis, of course, and seemed far more crucial to placate. He raised an open hand in submission and shook his head, dismissing his own thoughts. Paden returned his attention to gnawing at the hare, and Aelis launched the spit with the second carcass into Kherron’s lap.

  Chapter 10

  The tattooed woman moved as she had when she was young—as if her people still remained to her and she were not the last Ouroke. On swift, silent feet, she’d covered leagues already in the last day, fueled more by the ecstasy of freedom than anything else. No, Lorraii had not been locked away behind the damp walls of Deeprock Spire for very long at all, but it had felt like eons. And she experienced a different sort of freedom now, removed from the Wanderer’s presence, completely alone after so many years. She had not known how much she’d longed to rid herself of him until she’d done so.

  It had seemed, in the beginning, that the old man did in fact possess the means to give her what she wanted—to relieve her crushing guilt and offer her vengeance against those who had stolen the life she’d known from between her very fingers. And after all the things she and Torrahs had seen together over the years, that likelihood had only increased over time. That had lasted only until they’d stood on the brink of the change—the final era—and the old man had fallen as impotent as the rest of them on the Amneas coast.

  Lorraii knew full well how much knowledge the Wanderer had amassed over the years. His understanding both of the Ouroke and her own plight once her people were extinguished might have been the only thing that kept her from taking his life on the day they’d met alone. Then he’d offered her a chance to avenge her slaughtered kin, solidifying that offer—as if it had truly been his to make—the more she came to know him and the more she saw of what he himself could do. And while Torrahs wielded surprising power with the forces behind ancient incantations and the lost secrets of so many centuries, far more power than most had seen in just as long, he had benefitted greatly from traveling with the last Ouroke by his side. And while he remained the only other mortal being who knew what had befallen her people, he did not know the true cause of it. She had served Torrahs as well as she could for who she was, convinced all the while that he would indeed let her loose upon the amarach when the time came.

  But he did not; he had forbidden her to act upon her raging vengeance, had stayed her hand because he wished to wait for the proper time. Only when she’d joined the feeble old men for their first attempt to break the amarach vessel in the tower, only when she’d seen how utterly futile all that knowledge was when faced with such an ancient obstacle, had she finally seen the man for the fraud he had become. The Wanderer had powerful—if unstable—allies, but his greed and ambition had blinded him.
When it counted, the fool was no match for the foe he so bull-headedly battled.

  She chose not to dwell on the similarities between herself and the fierce old man; she preferred to focus instead on how much her eyes had been opened in the last few weeks. Great opportunities could be seized when one realized their own shortcomings and what could never be successfully accomplished. This was where Lorraii had succeeded—in knowing her limitations and changing the course of her intentions when the means no longer led to the desired end. She had survived this long, on her own in a world that would never understand her, by submitting to the wildly shifting winds of fate. And that ability had led her here, to reinstating the freedom she had been too blind to miss, too trusting to recognize its absence. She would not return to the Wanderer for his sake or the realization of his incomprehensibly impossible goal. But if her own desires led her back to that place, where she knew the amarach would swarm en masse should Torrahs prevail in any way, she would not consider it a failure.

  When she’d slipped through the unlocked doors of Deeprock Spire, she’d only wished to escape the man’s infuriating ineptitude and his baffling sense of entitlement when it came to ordering her about. Now, having finally crossed the cold, barren landscape stretching miles inland from the Amneas coast, she found herself relieved by the sight of the thin, scattered trees around her. A frustratingly long distance lay between the biting cold of the dead salt spray surrounding Deeprock Spire and the first signs of self-sustaining life here. Lorraii remembered the final hidden, narrow road having ended somewhere within a few leagues of here, which had dropped her and the old man in the middle of flimsy, thirsty-looking trees like these on their way east. But she no longer traveled with a man who could live without civilization but preferred not to; she would not, this time, follow any road. She would roam as she’d been born to do so, as her people had for centuries.

  Initially, she had not considered where she wished to go now that her decisions had once again become her own. The Ouroke did not always wander with a purpose, but this re-releasing of herself into the world felt very much the same—albeit in some ways altogether different—than the day she’d fully recognized the extermination of her people in these lands. Ripples of autonomy, victory, and self-indulgent praise ran through her now as they had on that day so long ago, though between now and then, her understanding of the world and the ever-present machinations beyond her control had widened and deepened for her time spent with the Wanderer. Lorraii’s recent recognition of her miniscule significance in the grand scheme had relieved her of a burden she had not known she carried until it was released. She could do as she wished, with no figure at all to dictate her duty or her betrayal, and she would disappear.

  Though the landscape had changed enough to reflect her westward progress and the distance she’d placed between herself and that damnable ocean, the sky remained a dull, monotonous grey. The sun hung muted and nearly invisible in the mid-morning sky, and the small growth of trees and struggling underbrush did little to avert the sting of bitterness still riding the cold air. And while Lorraii still felt the caked-on grit of salt on her flesh, faded traces of it staining crusted white lines across her leathers, she no longer tasted the sea with every breath, as if her own tears had filled her mouth for weeks and only now had she realized she had no reason to cry.

  She debated whether or not this would be an appropriate time to hunt for a small meal to break her fast, though it seemed unlikely she would find anything remotely sustaining until she entered what actually did pass for a forest farther west. She’d slept beneath the cold blanket of a starless sky the night before, waking early to travel again and suppressing the call of mortal needs a bit longer. But any thought of food, however fleeting, vanished when she realized she was not alone.

  Traveling all morning with the rising sun—almost entirely dampened by the endless cloud cover—at her back, she had been wholly alone; not even her own shadow had appeared to join her. Now, she noted the brief flicker of her own silhouette cast upon the ground at her feet, and when it disappeared again almost instantly, she knew. With a small, secretive smile, Lorraii turned slowly to greet the amarach pursuing her.

  He seemed almost to disappear against the backdrop of grey skies behind him, his long, plaited hair and smoke-colored wings capturing the full dullness of the day. Standing at least a full head taller than her, he glowered down at the Ouroke as one might confront an unsavory peddler whose wares were rare and necessary and priced entirely too high because of it. Only his burning orange eyes left no doubt as to his presence, making it impossible to imagine him a trick of the light against the dreary morning.

  They stared at each other for an inordinately long stretch of time, and even if it did not reveal everything, that fact alone told Lorraii what she needed to know. She let the smile spread across her lips as she stared up at this new immortal stranger who had found her. “I assume you’re here for a reason,” she said.

  The amarach studied her beneath his silver brows—an odd contrast upon a face so etched with the likeness of youth—yet his other features maintained the stoic stillness of forced apathy. She almost missed it when one of his wings gave a short, shuddering twitch, but it did not escape her notice. “The Wanderer offered you to me to do with as I saw fit,” he growled.

  Lorraii raised her brows. “Well, I’ve been bartered and traded before. Apparently, people keep failing to deliver.” She gave a curt, amused nod. The sight of the immortal’s darkening frown and tightening grimace filled her with an acute satisfaction.

  “Your actions will not go unpunished.” There was no doubt as to the truth behind the amarach’s words and the ferocity of his own belief in them. But he made no move to attack Lorraii, or detain her, or even to summon a weapon of his own he so clearly did not intend to use.

  “Perhaps, in the end,” she replied, taking no pains to hide the movement of her hand going to the hilt of the Sky Metal dagger she’d slid into a side-loop on her vest. It pleased her to see the amarach’s gaze did not stray from her face to her weapon; he knew she had it. “But at this moment, it seems you can do no more than threaten me with the unforeseeable future.” The fact that the creature did not react to such goading only solidified her suspicions; whatever exchange Torrahs had made with this immortal being had run its course, and the pact would remain unfulfilled.

  Though the creature’s patience had obviously been quite thin to begin with, he only allowed himself a long, drawn-out exhale, delivered somewhere between a sigh and a growl. “You slayed one of the amarach,” he said. Lorraii scoffed. “Without cause or provocation—”

  “Without provocation?” The Ouroke could not contain her dry, cruel chuckle of disbelief. “Don’t play the ignorant fool with me. You may not have been there, but the memory of your people is longer even than the memory of mine.”

  “Not anymore,” the immortal quipped with nothing more than a raised brow to give him away.

  “The amarach murdered my people,” Lorraii barked; she was finished playing games and tempting her anger with coyness and hidden meaning.

  The grey-haired immortal threw his head back and belted out a laugh so loud, Lorraii took a step back. “Your memory is indeed short-lived,” he replied. “Have you been wandering all this time as a victim of our inexplicable cruelty?”

  Lorraii blinked, unnerved by the trajectory of a conversation she never expected to have. “I did not ask for the Ouroke to be wiped entirely from existence,” she growled, gripping the Sky Metal dagger with such force, the simply designed lip of the pommel dug painfully into her palm.

  The amarach dipped his head to fix her firmly with his orange-brown gaze. “Not in word, no. We made a pact on the terms your heart had set long before you came to us with such an offer.”

  With a sharp grunt, Lorraii felt the heat of rage and betrayal flash through her with overwhelming intensity. Creatures wielding such power as the amarach should never have also possessed the ability to entreat with an advers
ary’s inner workings. She had not revealed nearly as much of herself on that day so very long ago when she’d summoned a celestial emissary and delivered her proposition. “I asked to be free of Ruxii’s dominion.” The statement ground out of her as if sifted through broken bones.

  “You know as well as any that that dominion extended to the edge of life,” the immortal replied. He folded his arms against the unnerving material of indeterminate origin comprising his vest. The pattern of it shifted and wavered with the movement. “There was no other way to be free of it but to end him and the ascendancies of his demesne.” He paused, his gaze leaving her quickly heating face to roam across her flesh, taking in the sight of so many runes no Ouroke would have been permitted to claim. “You walked from our accord alone, yes, but far from empty-handed. We gave you precisely what you desired at the time.”

  Lorraii drew her weapon, quivering internally with the force of her need. The fact remained that she had been cheated, taken not at her word but instead violated within the very privacy of her own mind. She’d spent her entire existence as Ruxii’s scion being manipulated, bargained, ordered about as if she were a slave and not his heir. The amarach, too, had taken her for a fool, and it would cost them what it had cost her. “Were you there?” she spat, repositioning her fingers around the Sky Metal hilt and bringing it to the ready across her chest.

  The amarach blinked slowly when he finally deigned to acknowledge the weapon in her hand. “I was not,” he replied. “But that has no bearing on what I know. I also know, Last of the Ouroke, that you will never be satisfied. Not with the runes you seized from the blood of your people, not with my end or the demise of the amarach. Your never-ending thirst for battle and bloodshed deludes you, and you have turned an unfounded vengeance upon us because you cannot bear the stillness. I know that, with Ruxii gone and no one to orchestrate the violence that fuels you, you have been flailing in the fruitless pursuit of your own purpose.”