Eyes wide, Kalder nodded.
And gulped audibly.
Duel clapped him so hard on the back that he’d stumbled forward. “Good lad.”
As they walked off, Kalder had cleared his throat. “Me lord? Might I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Have you any children?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Kalder shrugged. “Curiosity, mostly.”
Duel arched a dark brow at him that was most chilling. “And again I ask why you’d like to know.”
Kalder hesitated before he explained it further. “Well, I know how me father deals with us. I was but wondering how a…” He wasn’t quite sure what to call Duel, as Kalder still hadn’t determined if he were a man or a monster. So he settled for an accurate word that wouldn’t offend the creature, or get him gutted. “… warlord such as yourself copes with his own offspring.”
Duel snorted. “Simple. I ate mine upon their arrival from their mother’s womb, so as to spare myself any future misery they might bring me.”
Well that settled that, then, and Kalder made a note to take care and not offend him in the future. At least not too much. If Duel had no love of his own spawn, it meant he’d have far less for someone else’s.
Or at least that had been Kalder’s thought until their first battle.
Even now, he remembered well the terror he’d felt when Devyl/Duel’s army had annihilated their enemy to the south with the intel Kalder had brought to them.
Drunk on blood lust, Duel’s men had been like savage animals as they’d torn through the innocent village that had been caught in the cross fire of the two battling forces. New to the ways of humans, and a virgin in warfare, Kalder had been sickened by the sights and smells of it all. By the wanton slaughter.
Worse, he’d been horrified by the part he’d played in telling Duel’s army it was safe to advance on an unprotected population, and had blamed himself for the misery of the victims.
He’d held himself accountable for the countless bodies strewn about and left out on the ground so callously, with no regard for them or how their loved ones would feel once they returned to find them like this.
Until the soldiers had mercilessly cornered him. No longer did they view him as an ally or the one who’d allowed them their victory.
Now he was as hated as the ones they’d slaughtered. Why? Because he had information they wanted, and he wouldn’t give them that one piece they didn’t need to have.
“Where’s the queen, you little rat?”
It’d taken Kalder a moment to understand their language. He was still getting used to their inelegant words and dialect. “I-I-I don’t know.”
Their largest, beefiest soldier had grabbed and backhanded him so hard that it’d dazed his senses. He could have sworn he’d lost half the teeth in his mouth from that one strike alone.
Doubting he would survive another hit of that magnitude, Kalder had tried to get away, but like a pack of hungry dogs, they’d attacked en masse and brought him low. He’d been certain he was as dead as the innocent villagers around him.
Blow after blow had fallen against his flesh, as well as boot heel after furious boot heel. His body had become numb to the pain of it all. When suddenly, he’d heard Duel’s fierce shout in his native Myrcian. He’d looked up to see their commander in his black-ringed armor, astride his huge ebony warhorse.
His armor stained red with blood—along with other unsavory things—Duel had glared at every one of his soldiers. “What is this?”
“He won’t tell us where the queen’s hiding!” The soldier had kicked at Kalder again, causing him to groan out loud in response. “I know he’s hidden her and their treasury!”
“He’s a mutant!”
“Aye, he’s not one of us!”
“Kill him!”
Duel had held his hand up to silence them. “Harm him again, and it’s my sword you’ll be facing.”
That had finally quelled them and sent most of them back to their pillaging. Albeit this time they were less enthusiastic about it.
His expression grim and intense, Duel swung his leg over the back of his massive horse and dismounted. With a feral eye to the bastard who’d started the beating, he dismissed him then knelt beside Kalder on the ground.
Kalder could barely focus on his face through the blood that obscured his vision. He ached so badly that in all honesty, he’d wished himself dead just to stop the pain. And given the amount of fury in his overlord’s expression, he’d expected Duel to finish what the men had started. To gut him as he’d done the others who’d gotten in his way.
Indeed, Duel had been just as ruthless in this battle as Kalder had first suspected when they met. He’d spared no man his sword or his fury.
Until now.
With a shocking tenderness, Duel had reached out and gently wiped the blood from his cheek. “Can you stand, lad? Or do you need me to carry you?”
“I can walk on me own.”
He cocked a doubting brow.
But Kalder quickly proved that he wouldn’t let anyone help him. Especially none of these vile bastards who’d spared no one a second thought or single mercy as they gutted them. Worse, they’d mocked him for the fact that he’d refused to blindly murder or kill.
Duel handed him his skin of wine and waited for him to take a drink. “Did you see where the queen went?”
So that was it, then, was it? He should have known. No real mercy given. Only a ploy to win his favor and use him.
Bloody wanker.
Kalder choked and sealed the skin before he gave it back, wanting no part of it or the man who was using it for no other purpose than to bribe him. “I won’t let you or the others rape her or harm the children she took with her. You’ll have to kill me first. They took nothing with them, save what supplies they could carry to sustain them. She has no treasure. That I swear to you on me own life.”
Duel scowled at him. “You took this beating to protect a woman you know not?”
Kalder looked away as guilt tore through him with fresh talons. “I’ve killed enough for one day. I won’t stand by and see another slain. Not if I can help it.”
“I watched you, young Myrcian. You didn’t take a single soul in battle.”
Kalder swallowed hard against the sour tears that threatened to fall. “I might not have lifted a sword with me arm, me lord, but the information I gave killed more than I could have on me own. I’m just as guilty one way as I would have been the other.”
Duel took his chin in one mighty fist and forced him to meet his gaze. “I want you to listen to me this day, Kalderan Murjani Dupree, and you listen well. What happened here today was a tragedy. You’re right about that. I take no satisfaction in the deaths of the people slain by this army. Or the part I took in it. But remember this. There’s not a man, woman, or child lying upon the ground around you who wouldn’t have cheered at the news of the deaths of my own people, and the destruction of my kingdom. Or yours, for that matter. These corpses you pity and cry for are the very ones who would have reveled in the deaths of my own family and all I love and hold sacred, and would have demanded your own life had you been taken by their soldiers. They would have lined the road for a chance to jeer at you, and would have thrown their own stones to carry you to your god as quickly as possible and laugh while you bled out from the wounds they gave you. So while I would not gleefully seek to take their lives when it’s not necessary, I will not hesitate to end them when I have to in order to protect the safety of what I hold dearest, and neither should you. For the face of every woman and child you see here this day could very well be the face of your own family at home tomorrow. Remember, while ’tis fine to feel for them and mourn for them, do not let it ever blind you from doing what you must to keep those you love safe. Do you understand?”
Kalder ground his teeth. “Are you saying I should have given up the queen to those monsters?”
“Nay, lad. You followed your conscience.
And with that memory, the child would one day come seeking vengeance.
Duel had been right in that prediction.
Kalder bore those scars, as well. Some from later that night, when he’d gone to help the queen escape and she’d cut his throat and had robbed him before they’d left him to bleed out while they used the horses he’d brought for them to run over his body. Had Duel not come searching for him, he’d have paid for his kindness with his own life.
And then, other scars from fourteen years later, when the queen’s eldest son had recognized him and, forgetting Kalder was the sole reason they’d survived their ordeal, had buried his dagger deep in Kalder’s back while he’d been walking outside a dark tavern in some forgotten town.
That night, drink and fury had gotten the better of Kalder as he assumed his own brother had sent the attacker in for the kill, and before he’d recognized the man behind the vicious ambush that had almost paralyzed him, he’d torn his assailant apart and used the boy’s assassin’s dagger to cut his throat. It’d only been as the prince was taking his final gasps that Kalder had realized why he’d been attacked and who his assailant was.
Not one sent by Varice.
One sent by fate and chance.
In that moment, as the moonlight had revealed the young man’s face, even with his own wound throbbing and burning, he’d hated himself again.
War was a vicious cycle of hatred. The past was ever a mounting monster he couldn’t escape.
Like the darkness, it swallowed him and he couldn’t see past it. He was overwhelmed now. Unable to breathe.
To focus.
Every time he thought himself out of it, and away from it all, it found some way to seep back in and drag him under. An ever-tidal swell he couldn’t escape.
Everything has consequence.
Every action taken, and every one not …
And now he was lost to the past and he felt even more lost to the future.
* * *
Cameron’s heart pounded as she struggled to keep their enemies from Kalder’s inert form. He was in some strange trance that she couldn’t break. Nothing seemed to work to make him realize where he was, or what was going on around him.
His skin was ice cold to the touch. Rigid. He was like a living statue.
Damn his brothers, all! They were a worthless lot to do something like this to him, especially while he was under fire. How could they be so cruel?
While she might not always appreciate her own sibling—wanted to choke the very life from him about half the time he was in a room with her—at least she knew Paden always had her best interests at heart.
Overzealous though he was.
Case in point, he fought by her side in this fight to protect Kalder, even though he couldn’t stand him and wanted to send him straight to hell. He fought and he bled for the man, for no other reason than because he knew Kalder was dear to her. His own feelings for Kalder be damned.
That was what family did.
They put the happiness of their loved ones first. Thought of them above themselves. That was what made them family. Not blood or bone.
Their willingness to bleed and die for each other.
To sacrifice.
“We can’t hold them back forever.” Paden sliced at one demon who came too close and forced the creature back. “I can carry him out for you.”
Cameron hesitated as she caught his loophole in those words. And harkened back to some of Paden’s more dire childhood pranks that still resonated deep within her soul and psyche. Ofttimes, it wasn’t so much what her brother said, but rather what the rascal meant, and wordplay was what this particular devil did best. “Aye, but will you, brother?”
He tsked at her serious question. “Tell me the truth, Cammy. Do you love him?”
There was no hesitation in her answer. Just as there was none in her heart. “I do. Scary though it is. And hopeless, even more so. I would never have him harmed.”
“Then I’ll die before I let them have him. I swear that to you on me life, me precious bit. None shall have him. In that you can trust.”
A single tear fell down her cheek as she stared at her big brother in his pale Seraph form. Never had she loved him more. “You better not get hurt, either. I’ve taken enough trips into hell to spank your rotten arse, Paden Jack. Don’t you be making me take another.”
He scoffed at her. “You were ever a bossy one, bit. From the moment you came out and first demanded I give up me bed for you.”
Smirking, Paden swung Kalder up in his arms and flew off to safety so that she could turn her attention to fighting the demons with the other members of her crew.
All around, her friends battled with everything they had, but it wasn’t looking good for the crew. These were some of the fiercest demons they’d ever faced. Never let it be said that the Malachai didn’t choose among the best for his army.
Cameron moved to cover the Dark-Huntress, Janice, as one of the nastier beasts came at her back. “Have you ever seen the like?”
“Nay!” Janice hissed as a twisted blue demon caught her wrist with a tentacle and snatched it hard enough to make it snap with a horrendous sound.
Suddenly, Chthamalus Morro was there with a number of his Barnak soldiers. They shot out dozens of small, bright blue gelatinous blobs toward the demons. Blobs that seemed to have the consistency of snot, and when they landed on their targets, they spread out and began to smoke—something that caused the demons to scream and recoil as if they’d been struck by fire.
Or worse.
Flaming snot.
Shocked, she gaped at Chthamalus.
He grinned. “Don’t ask how we make them or where they come from. Just be glad we’re not shooting them at you.” He aimed a tentacle at another set of advancing enemies and began lobbing more blobs to stop them.
She clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks for the cover.”
“No worries. My lord prince would have me nethers of both genders if I let anything happen to his lady.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. While she wanted to believe that Kalder cared, she found it hard to believe at times. Especially right now, when he wasn’t here to help when she needed him most. But then she was used to being abandoned whenever she needed someone.
It was something she’d grown used to the moment her parents had orphaned her as a child—that sick feeling whenever she looked around at the worst times of her life only to find that the only thing she had at her back was four solid walls.
If she was lucky.
I came into this world alone and sure as I’ve lived, ’tis how I shall leave it.
Seldom had any hour in between been any different. In spite of all his good intentions and protestations otherwise, Paden headed out to sea every time she needed a shoulder to lean on, and left her behind to wait for his return.
I’m making a better future for us, Cammy. Those were always Paden’s excuses. But she’d have rather had him home, to make a better present, as the future was often too hard to see past the misery and drudgery of what she had to get through minute by minute of every single day. She couldn’t stand waiting for that nebulous date that never seemed to arrive, and being forced to stand strong on her own two legs that were getting more and more tired every furlough they carried her.
Truth be told, Cameron again had that desolate hole in her stomach that she’d had most of her life. The first time she’d felt it had been right after the deaths of her parents. When she and Paden had arrived in Williamsburg, among the bustling crowd of noonday people. They’d jostled her about as if she were a piece of driftwood in the ocean with no land in sight, and but for Paden’s ever firm hand on hers, she’d have been lost to their tidal, hostile current as they cursed her for being in their way. Rudely, they had elbowed her if she got too close to any.
Oh how she remembered the bright patterned clothes and cloaks coming at her from every direction in an overwhelming sea of color. The stampeding sound of shoes and boot heels striking the cobblestones and boards while her fear welled up that they’d run her over without care or compassion should she fall.
Though she made no external sound whatsoever, inside she’d been screaming in terror. Screaming out for someone to see them and help them.
No one had noticed.
No one cared. Pain was ever invisible to all, except for those poor bastards it eviscerated.
And that day, she and Paden had been the poor bastards torn apart in its wake.
To this day, that emptiness of being alone, even when surrounded by a crowd of people … nothing had ever filled it. It’d become as much of her being as another appendage. Granted, a useless one, but nevertheless, always there, and always in the way.
Always hurting.
Since the day her parents had died, she’d never really felt as if she were a part of any group or family. Not really. Perhaps it was because Paden had forced her to live a lie. To pretend to be something she wasn’t. To hide herself behind a fake shell of happiness and solitude, in a false guise, that nothing ever really penetrated. Indeed, there was nothing more painful in the world than a false smile pinned over the mask of misery.
Speak as little as possible so as not to betray herself. Make few friends lest someone discover that she wasn’t a boy. Keep to herself as much as possible.
No one could be trusted. Not with their secret that could get them both into so much trouble, and cost Paden his commission and her a place to live.
Her job.
If not their very freedom.
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