The pieces moved endlessly inside Kherron’s mind, and his stomach sank with the possibility and the likelihood of what her words meant. “Which one?”
“Which one?” The woman barked out a laugh, then winced at whatever pain the movement brought her. “They’re all the same, aren’t they? They’re all against us.”
He had to grit his teeth and clench his fists to keep from leaping across the ground and falling upon her. “Which amarach did you kill?”
“The black-haired one. The same that came for your precious Dehlyn every night.” A grimace of morose pleasure split her lips. “The amarach that did more for her than you ever managed.”
Either she attempted to goad him, or whatever ailment had brought her here and immobilized her had driven her mad; this much was clear. And it surprised Kherron to find himself less enraged by such a brazen confession than he would have been weeks earlier. Somehow, knowing how weak the tattooed woman was and how desperately she tried not to seem so made her all the more harmless. But he knew she spoke the truth, and his heart ached for Wohl—the black-winged amarach slain in his duty as Dehlyn’s guardian.
He could not say why he mourned the immortal being who had brought him nothing but frustration and infuriating riddles. He’d envied Wohl’s closeness to Dehlyn at one point and resented the amarach for all the things Wohl tried to make him see while incapable of truly showing him. But mourn he did, and new knowledge did very little to soften his hostility toward the tattooed woman, no matter her current impairment.
“Did Torrahs do this to you?” he asked, choosing not to engage the Ouroke in her obvious baiting.
Lorraii closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’d been on my own for some time before... this.” She rubbed a hand across her brow. “Something else happened. A darkening of the world, a... breaking. I do not know what ails me.” The last she spit out with flared nostrils and through gritted teeth, as if such a confession physically strained her.
Turning briefly to glance at Kayu, Kherron found in the bird-man’s raised brow the same measure of surprise he himself felt. Her description matched very much what had happened during the clanning, and it did not surprise him that the tilting of the world that day would have also affected the tattooed woman, wherever she’d been. But neither he nor Kayu had an answer for the Ouroke, and if none of them knew the cause of her unexpected albeit rather satisfactory malady, they could not know what to do for her—or more importantly, with her.
“Tell me about the dagger.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at him and smirked. “You know what it is.”
“I have one of the same,” Kherron replied. “But mine does not burn hot when I touch it.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” she grunted, then blinked slowly and lowered her head back into her hands. “I made the dagger mine, and it answers only to me. But it does not ward off enemies.” With another small groan, she rolled her head to the side, stretching her neck, and gave a small gasp of pain. “My runes, on the other hand, have betrayed me completely.”
“Your runes.” Kherron glanced at Kayu again, who gestured toward his own face, indicating the Ouroke’s tattooed skin.
“Some more than others.”
“Show me.” He knew very little of what he was about to inspect; he had not known the copper designs upon Lorraii’s flesh marked her as one of a separate people, perhaps even an entire race, until Kayu had named her thus. But caution and the sharp memory of ignorant failure fueled both his curiosity and his need to glean as much information from the woman as he could.
The last Ouroke studied him with a heated, vehement hatred, and Kherron held her gaze. He would not back down, and as the woman seemed to realize this, the fury blazing behind her eyes dulled to a dim, wary acceptance. Then Kherron fully recognized how truly unwell she was; Lorraii was willing to concede to his demands for the mere possibility of relief.
Slowly and pausing every few seconds to steady herself against the ground, Lorraii turned on the frozen earth until she faced away from Kherron’s party and the flames. He thought at first she meant to hide something from him—perhaps a small, unseen weapon or some unknown power wielded by an Ouroke—until he recognized the soft hush of leather brushing against itself as she undid the laces of her vest.
Kherron felt Kayu and Paden shifting in surprise and curiosity around the fire, but his focus remained on the tattooed woman; even still, he did not trust her to be entirely compliant. She grunted again when she pulled the vest’s shoulders down her arms, letting the garment fall to the ground behind her and exposing her entire torso to the cold and the wary stares of three men not her explicit allies.
It was true; the copper tattoos wrapped impressively around every curve of her neck and shoulders, her back and hips. Kherron easily imagined what a sight her bare breast and stomach must have made, undoubtedly marked with the same intimidating coverage of whorled designs. The image gave him no pleasure, nor did the truly terrible sight of what was undoubtedly the cause of her suffering.
Along the rounded curve of her spine, from the base of her neck to the waistband of her leather breeches and surely farther down, a line of runes had illuminated from beneath her skin to stand out starkly amidst all the others. They burned as if lit by glowing coals beneath, the skin at the edges of each shape grey and charred-looking like hot ash. Kherron had the distinct impression that, should he reach out to touch these awful wounds upon her back, they would burn him just as swiftly as had the Ouroke’s stolen Sky Metal blade.
And yet, reaching out to touch them was the only thing he could think to do—the only thing he wanted to do. Blinking steadily against the unearthly glow rising from Lorraii’s flesh, Kherron turned to Kayu and nodded for the man to step away from the fire with him. With a raised brow, the bird-man stood and complied, passing a highly curious yet wary Paden, who studied the Ouroke’s bare back as if it were some sort of sacred text.
“How much do you know of the Ouroke?” Kherron asked when they’d gone a few yards into the surrounding trees. He didn’t want Lorraii hearing their conversation, despite the fact that she was quite obviously incapacitated. Her weakness did not affect whatsoever how much he did not trust her.
Kayu frowned and glanced briefly at the woman hunched over her own lap on the other side of the fire. “Enough to recognize her as the last. When the Ouroke thrived, they were a warring, nomadic people. Those runes are the source of their strength and... other abilities. I do not know them all.”
A prickle of awareness and understanding had begun to bloom in the back of Kherron’s mind, but he did not wish to test his theory without gleaning as much knowledge as he could from his highly eclectic set of traveling companions. Still, something told him Kayu had roamed this world long enough to have gained some insight that might be useful. “Do you know how they got those runes? The type of dye?”
Kayu’s eyes narrowed. “Some of the Nateru used to watch the Ouroke. Before all but this one disappeared.” He nodded weakly at Lorraii. “I’ve heard them say these people found the wellsprings. The sacred pools. That the coloring of the Ouroke runes came from the very clay beneath the waters.”
Kherron’s eyes widened despite the fact that this did not truly surprise him. “And they were given this freely?”
When the bird-man tilted his head, it almost looked like an apology. “I cannot say. The duty of protecting the sacred pools has always fallen to the Blood of the Veil. Before you, Kherron, very few of the Blood walked this world while the Ouroke thrived. I don’t think there was anyone to stop them.”
With a nod, Kherron turned from Kayu and walked back toward the fire, the flames of which seemed muted and weak when viewed alongside the searing flesh left by the incited runes along Lorraii’s spine. Twilight had almost faded completely into night, and yet plenty of light remained to illuminate the plumes of labored breath streaming from the woman’s mouth as she hunched over own lap. He stopped behind her, and she seemed to deflate even furth
er into her own defeat.
“How does an Ouroke get such markings beneath their skin?” he asked her. While he put no extra effort into speaking gently, he sounded more hospitable than he felt.
“With a ceremony,” Lorraii grunted. “A hammer and flame-sharpened needles. Blood and clay from the heart of the earth.”
For a moment, Kherron could only stand there and stare at the open wounds left by the burning runes on her back. He had not expected her to be so forthcoming with her answers; she must have been in unbearable agony to offer them up so quickly. “But no longer.”
She let out a sharp snort. “I may be the last of my people, but that does not keep me from continuing the rites.”
“You do this to yourself?” he asked.
Slowly, achingly, Lorraii turned her head ever so slightly to glare over her shoulder at him from the corner of her eye. “That is none of your concern.”
Kherron knew she would respond this way, that she would wish to maintain some semblance of autonomy while he questioned her and made her wait. He didn’t know if she expected him to help her or if she’d simply lost any ability to care, but he’d intended only to distract her enough to take her by surprise with his next move. And he did.
Without warning or preamble, he reached out and pressed his palm against the searing flesh along her spine. Lorraii cried out in pain and no little shock, but his contact had rendered her otherwise immobile. Knowing the coloring of her runes had come from the sacred pools and the consecrated caverns known to the Nateru—and apparently the Ouroke—had given Kherron some impression of what to expect. But he could not have prepared himself for the tremor of revelation overwhelming him when the flesh of his palm communed with the clay-dyed runes beneath so many layers of this woman’s flesh.
He saw it all—hundreds of Ouroke warriors and mystics, moving across the world in their nomadic cycles. They ransacked villages and towns, slayed the undefended peoples living unseen in the mountains, unheard on the southern coasts, unnoticed in the parched deserts of the far west. They slayed each other, fought for honor and pride, trained and marked themselves and pushed each other to the brink of physical destruction to earn the power in their next rune. He saw them fall, stricken from existence by immortal blades fulfilling one end of a bargain made by the last remaining Ouroke. He saw Lorraii follow her warlord father, bound to him by blood and magic. He saw her follow the old man who had betrayed Kherron—Torrahs the Wanderer—bound to him by greed and her own undoing. He saw everything that had led her to this moment. The ageless clay punctured into her flesh could not hide a thing from him, offering this knowledge more willingly than this woman would have ever dreamed. And he made one final request of it, which her runes obeyed as if this were their only purpose.
Finally, he pulled his hand away. With a low groan, Lorraii slumped even farther forward, the breath rushing out of her all at once. The reddened glow of the burning runes on her spine faded almost instantly, and where they’d once been raw and seared, they had now healed over into raised black scars, as if he had covered them with soot from the fire. The cracked, rippled flesh there very much resembled the bark of a charred log.
Well aware of Kayu and Paden watching him in wary silence, Kherron walked around the woman’s hunched figure until he knelt directly in front of her, close enough to feel the heat radiating from her body in the cold night air. “I see you, Lorraii, Ruxii’s scion.” She took a deep, shaking breath at these words but did not move. “I see your entire existence as if you laid it bare before me on the ground.” He pressed a finger into the partially frozen earth beside his foot. “I see everything you have done and everything you are.” Lorraii’s breathing came slow and steady now, but still, she remained motionless before him. “You have turned against your people,” Kherron continued, knowing she heard every word. “Against yourself and every pact you have ever sealed. You have made yourself a living weapon, but a weapon has no purpose without a hand to wield it. Do you understand?”
Slowly, the last Ouroke raised her head to meet his gaze. Her eyes blazed with both furious hatred and undeniable relief, and what he saw there convinced Kherron that she did, in fact, understand. And her only options now were to accept her newly crafted fate or return to the agony from which he’d released her, which they both knew would only bring her to a swift and unseemly end.
Kherron retrieved her leather vest from where it had fallen to the ground and offered it to her, never breaking her gaze. Lorraii took it from him, though she did not move to don it once more until he stood and made his way back to the fire.
His companions stared at him, Kayu with dawning comprehension and Paden with a mixture of awe and horrified curiosity. “What did you do?” the healer whispered, still staring at the woman who now laced up her vest, her back still turned toward them and the fire.
“I ended the worst of her torment,” Kherron said, sitting between his companions to stare into the flames. “Not all of it.”
“Her back...” Paden clearly referred to Lorraii’s newly blackened scars, his mouth hanging slightly open.
“What now?” Kayu asked.
Kherron felt the bird-man’s calculating gaze upon him, but he didn’t want to return the gesture. “She comes with us.”
“You said she tried to kill you,” Paden added, finally ripping his gaze away from the Ouroke, who now lay on her side with her back to the fire, the glow of the flames reflecting dully on her leather vest and breeches.
“Many things have changed since then,” Kherron replied. “She does not pose a threat to us.” He couldn’t bring himself to also say that, most likely, she would be unquestionably useful for the remainder of their journey to the Amneas coast. The thought of it left a bitter taste in his mouth, which he did not bother to wash away with a drink from his waterskin.
He had been brusque and honest with her, peeling away the mystery in which she’d enshrouded herself to tell her all he knew of her—that he had given her one final purpose. Kayu had captured the essence of Lorraii’s affliction far better than any of them had realized when they’d studied her within the cage of roots and vines Kherron had constructed around her. Ready to be used for her only purpose and lacking something needed to fulfill it. Kherron had not needed to understand the language of the Ouroke runes or the purpose of each individual marking to know what they were for; whether or not Lorraii herself had the knowledge of their deeper meaning had no bearing on how they had bound her to her use.
After what he’d seen when he communed with the clay beneath her flesh, he suspected Lorraii’s father had laid those runes upon her himself. They were meant as a harness, a binding power that dictated every decision she made and ensured she obeyed the Ouroke warlord explicitly. When Lorraii had sealed her people’s fate and brought the amarach to wipe the Ouroke from this world in their final battle, she had broken her father’s quite physical dominion over her. Kherron didn’t know how long she’d roamed on her own, displaced and tribeless, but the runes had somehow bound her to Torrahs next, making her his new weapon as she’d traveled by his side. She’d done the old man’s bidding, too, whether or not she was aware of her lack of choice in the matter. The memory of her knife splitting into the flesh below his ribs entered his mind, but he pushed it away; he was no longer that same Kherron, so easily fooled and betrayed.
Lorraii had told him her runes had turned against her with the darkening of the world, which most likely had been the same thing that disrupted the Nateru clanning and sent so many things spinning into chaos. Kherron imagined that same darkening, whatever it was, had ripped apart the ties binding Lorraii to Torrahs, and she had weakened rapidly without a master. That was what this boiled down to, in essence; Lorraii could no more exist under her own autonomy than an arrow could pierce its target without first being strung through a bow. And Kherron had made himself the hand that would wield her.
He swallowed thickly, his understated distaste for this woman battling with his appreciation of what she cou
ld do. The odds had been stacked against him from the very beginning; traveling to the Amneas coast to find Dehlyn and release her—though he did it now for Aelis and the Nateru and not for Dehlyn at all—might be simple enough. But Paden was a healer and clearly not trained for battle, and Kayu seemed far more the intellectual type than hale enough to defend against attack or pursue one. Kherron himself had made surprising progress with his abilities as a Blood of the Veil, but he could not predict how these would hold up to droves of amarach, or Torrahs, or the other men he knew guarded Dehlyn on the barren coast. Lorraii had been there herself, had seen what they would encounter when they reached that end, knew every detail of where they were going and whom they would face. He had not been able to let the woman wither away beneath her own undoing when he knew she had much more to offer than he’d ever thought possible. She would not turn on him—the runes that had entwined themselves with her very person would not permit it—and he had to use every advantage at his disposal if he meant to succeed.
Kherron did not expect her to thank him or to apologize for her past transgressions. Nor did he anticipate her warming toward him as they traveled together. Of all the things that lay before him, known and unknown, this was the least of his concerns.
Chapter 22
“Is there anything that might be gained from the use of a large fighting force?” Paden asked.
Kherron turned from the miraculous view to glance at the healer standing beside him. “Like an army?”
“Like an army.”
Their party had stopped days later at the crest of a lower peak, which they’d spent the day traversing because it was a straighter line east and far less treacherous than moving around the mountain at its base. That base just so happened to be an icy, raging river with little room for walking along its banks, where steep, scattering mounds of shale and loose chips of stone had fallen over time from the mountainous cliffs above. Now, they stood overlooking this river—a broad, white, winding snake moving easily through these passes because it had always known the way down and out.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 22