Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (21 page)

Her lips parted, and that haunted look returned to her eyes. “Say it for me in your language,” she said softly, as if they were alone and she were asking for words of love.

He replied with equal softness in Islander. Tears rose in her eyes, but she didn’t look away.

The skinny Fey holding Nicholas spoke in a language he didn’t understand. She waved her hand at him with a downward, dismissing motion, and then replied in the same language. She never took her gaze off Nicholas.

“Who are you?” she finally asked in Nye.

“Does it matter?” he said. The disagreement between the two Fey added a level of panic he had not felt before. “You are going to kill me anyway.”

She shook her head once, then wiped the blood off his throat with her thumb. Her skin was warm and calloused. “No,” she said. “I will not.”

The sudden tenderness confused him. He glanced at the skinny Fey holding him and saw anger in the boy’s eyes. Nicholas’s own people were watching, standing very still. The crowd had grown huge. All movement in the kitchen had stopped except near the door. The battle cries were now coming from the courtyard.

The baker was sliding through the crowd. He was weaving his way toward the pantry door. Nicholas understood the plan. The baker was going to get help if he could.

She, too, glanced at the crowd around them, then back to him. “I could torture any one of them until they told me your name.”

“No,” Nicholas said, mimicking her tone. “You will not.”

“Such courage for a man in such a desperate position. If I were to kill you”—and as she spoke the words, she whipped the knife out of her belt and returned it to his throat, the movement so quick that he would not have been able to stop it even if his hands had been untied—“they would lose something precious.”

The servants, blood-covered and already battle weary, had looks of utter horror on their faces.

She was standing so close to him, he could feel her breasts pressing on his chest. “If I threaten you, I control them.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You give me such power that I think I’ll keep you.”

She turned to the Fey behind her. “Modify something in here for a makeshift prison, and disarm those poor people.” They moved to do as she asked. Then she faced Nicholas. “Tell your people that if they continue to fight, I will kill you.”

He said nothing.

She grabbed his bloodstained shirt and pulled him even closer. “Tell them.”

The collar dug into his neck. He nodded. She stepped back so that he had a clear view of everyone in the kitchen. The servants, from the young boys who cleaned out the hearth to the women who directed the work in the dining hall, watched him with wide eyes.

“My friends,” he said in Islander. “It doesn’t matter what they do to me. What matters is Blue Isle. Kill these creatures. Kill them all.”

For a moment the Islanders just stood; then they surged forward, almost as one body, catching the other Fey unaware. Knives went into Fey backs, grunts of pain echoed as Fey were bashed on the head, screams sounded from the far side of the room as an elderly woman pushed a Fey soldier into the hearth fire.

The Fey woman grabbed Nicholas, her knife again at his throat. “What did you tell them?”

“I think that is obvious,” he said.

NINETEEN

 
Rugar ran a stained hand through his caked hair and took a deep breath. He hurried down the dry patches of the muddy street toward the main street. Caseo, Rusty, and Strongfist followed. Even before Rugar arrived at the road, he saw things that made his internal chill grow.

Fey running, their long forms without grace. They weren’t waving their weapons or moving in an order. They were fleeing. Rugar had seen that action often enough in battle to recognize it. Behind them waddled overweight Islanders in black robes, shaking small vials of clear liquid. Some Fey clutched their arms. Others fell screaming to the cobblestone, writhing in an agony Rugar didn’t want to comprehend. A stink rose—burning flesh and something even more acrid, something he didn’t quite recognize.

The beating of his heart increased at the sound of terrified footsteps. He stopped in the shadow of a deserted storefront and watched as his mighty warriors collapsed in the face of armorless creatures brandishing what appeared to be water. His throat was dry, and he finally understood—from a victim’s point of view—how terror spread from person to person like fire in a wind.

Caseo came up behind him, his breath ragged, not from exertion but from fear. “They’re killing us,” he said.

“We’re letting them,” Rugar replied. His words were stronger than his confidence. He, too, wanted to turn and run.

But he couldn’t. He was their strength.

The mud had dried on his face, making talking difficult. He brushed the flakes away and shook them out of his hair. He needed to rally his people.

“Caseo,” he said, “send word to the troops near the palace. We need to inform them of this threat. If they know, they won’t be as frightened. When that task is done, I want you to gather the Spell Warders and see if you can counteract this poison. Try to find out what kind of powers these religious Islanders have.”

Caseo nodded. Having an assignment seemed to calm him. He hurried down one of the back alleys, his reedy form moving with a purpose he had seemed to lack only a moment before.

“Rusty,” Rugar said to his guards, knowing they were there without having to look for them. “Get word to the remaining troops inside and outside the city. They, too, need to know about this turn of events.”

“What about you?” Rusty’s gravel voice came from the area in the back and to the left of Rugar.

“Strongfist and I are going to see if the danger is as bad as Caseo says.” The shard of fear dug deeper into Rugar’s heart. His father had warned him. But none of them had realized that the conquerors’ terror seemed more powerful than any victims’ terror Rugar had seen. Perhaps because he shared it.

Before him the Fey were still running like frightened deer, oblivious to anything but escape. A young infantry boy tripped and fell on the cobblestone. The black-robed Islander, hurrying past, dumped the remains of his vial onto the boy’s back. The boy screamed, his features locked in a look of pain and surprise. His back steamed, and he was rolling, rolling, rolling as if to put out flames. Then, suddenly, he stopped moving. Even from Rugar’s distance he could see that the boy was dead.

Rugar turned away. His people were dying, and he had to find a solution. Quickly, before the terror spread and ruined the morale. All they needed was a way to kill the Black Robes. The Warders needed to know where to focus their spell designs. Since he had sent Caseo to the palace, he would have to go to the warehouse himself. Rugar slipped between two buildings and followed the narrow alley, heading in the direction of the wharf.

The smell grew stronger as he walked, but the screams had faded, replaced by low murmurs and the cries of beings in pain. At one intersection Strongfist moved as if to go to someone, but Rugar caught his arm. He didn’t dare lose his guard now. And, besides, until they knew what caused this odd wounding, they were better off not touching their comrades.

By the time they reached the edge of the wharf, the smell was a ghost in his nostrils. The eye-stinging smoke had lifted, leaving only the white buildings of a thriving seafaring people, the sunlight reflecting off the wide waters of the Cardidas, and bodies strewn across the muddy ground like abandoned children’s toys.

He let out a small cry and went to stand in the carnage. He had stood among the dead before on countless battlefields, but they had never been his dead. Oh, he had lost a few here and there, but never so many and so hideously. A Spell Warder, recognizable only by his robe, lay at the base of a ramp coming out of the warehouse. Three Foot Soldiers, side by side, their faces gone, their hands fused to their chests, still twitched near his feet. They were suffocating—he knew that—only he had never realized that it was such a long, horrible way to die. They had no nostrils and no mouths and no indication of where those features had been. He was not a Healer; he had no idea how to save them.

No Black Robes lurked among the carnage, only a golden cat mincing around the bodies, stopping on occasion to paw at the remains. The reflection of light off the water was nearly blinding, and the rare moan breaking the silence was more horrifying than the screams.

Strongfist had left his side and was walking among the dying. He stood beside a shaking woman, his hands hovering over the remains of her face as if he were afraid to touch her. Finally she stopped, and he hunkered down beside her, his shoulders rounded in defeat.

“These Islanders have a great magick.” His voice shook with disbelief. They had never encountered any other beings with the same or stronger abilities.

“Perhaps they’re Fey.”

Rugar whirled toward the new speaker. Solanda stood where the cat had been, the skin around her eyes loosening in the last throes of change. She was naked. Her hands and feet were stained with mud.

“What did you see?” he asked, grasping for anything. If they were Fey, there might be an ancient magick, a way of revenge.

“I saw them kill with their magick liquid,” she said, her voice as smooth as a purr. “But we kill with many devices, from our hands to our minds to our knives. Perhaps they have the same powers as well.”

“The Nye said nothing of this.”

“You believe the conquered?” Her words hung in the air. She placed her hand on one slender hip, and her eyes were as unfathomable as a cat’s. “They had many reasons to lie to us.”

He hadn’t relied entirely on the Nye. His people had looked up the histories, listened to the legends. No one had thought that the Islanders would have magickal powers.

Only those with the evil Visions had even suspected Rugar had made a mistake.

The moans around him made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “What did you see?” he repeated.

“At first I saw only a few of those smelly little men,” she said. “Then I changed and hid. And from my hiding place I saw even more. This poison kills.” She looked down at the Infantry soldier beside her. Two slender, perfectly formed hands grasped weakly at smooth skin where the face had been. “They have no Shape-Shifters, though, for I terrified one of their number when I changed before him. They also appear to have no women.”

Those facts seemed irrelevant to Rugar. Finding an immediate solution to this nightmare was the only thing that would satisfy him.

“I do have something that might interest you, though,” she said. “If you will follow me.”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the dying boy. Rugar stumbled over bodies, over twisting Fey reaching for him. The stench was overpowering: burned flesh and fear and the beginnings of fetid decay, all overlain with the muddy scent of the river and the sharp odor of fish. Hands brushed his ankles. And the cries of the dying sounded discordant, like a choir out of sync and out of tune, yet filled with devastating emotion.

Solanda’s hand felt curiously cold in his, as if she, too, were part of the dead. She held him tightly, squeezing his fingers together, her nails digging into his flesh. She was as frightened, as bewildered, as he was.

He glanced toward Strongfist, who was still hunched over the dead woman. For a moment a fear touched Rugar: a fear that this horrible death was catching, like an illness that sweeps from person to person with no discrimination. But Strongfist’s features had not changed. He still leaned forward, shaking back and forth, as if the carnage were too much for him.

Rugar looked away from Strongfist, back in the direction they had come. No black-clad Islanders lurked. They must have felt they had done their piece there and were moving to other venues. How terrifying for his Fey: to be attacked by creatures they knew nothing of and then to die in ways they never had before.