Vengeance of the Hunter (4 page)

He can’t be.
Not after how I left him.
He can’t be
.

“I speak utter truth of what was reported to me.” The Tantiu’s voice flattened. “And the men who served the duke, and who serve the
akresha
duchess now, aren’t in the habit of lying.”

“But if the Anreulag found him...” Rab’s hands refused to stop their shaking. To most of the pious, gods-fearing folk in the realm, most of whom never saw Her unless they attended the holiest of services in the capital, the Anreulag was the Voice of the Four Gods, their living avatar. Rab had never been pious. He’d heard all the stories that gods-fearing folk didn’t dare to tell—the ones in which the Anreulag spoke not as the Voice of the Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, but rather as that of the wrath of the Church. And when She spoke, She did so in words of thunder and blood. And if She’d spoken to Julian...

No. He couldn’t finish the thought.

“The Anreulag’s coming most likely meant the deaths of all in Her path. I saw Her myself, in the war when I was young, and I know what She can do.” Even as he spoke, though, the other man leaned forward. “But I can also tell you this. The men who were present told me that when She appeared, Faanshi’s magic arose and drove Her away. And that as of when they brought the duke back again to our hall, she was last seen holding your Rook in a circle of light.”

Holy Father and Mother, Rab didn’t want to think about the girl. She was the whole reason Julian had abandoned their rightful calling—and
him
—and he still wasn’t ready to forgive the shift in his partner’s loyalties. Yet for all his anger, he couldn’t deny that Faanshi had power. With his own eyes, he’d seen her heal Julian, as well as the Hawk Rab himself had almost killed. He couldn’t imagine the meek little chit driving away an angry dog, much less the Voice of the Gods, and yet she’d called up radiance like the Daughter’s own morning when she’d healed that Hawk.

Could she actually have done what this Tantiu stranger was claiming?

“Then he might still be alive,” Rab said, just barely holding back from uttering Julian’s true name in his reluctant hope. If his partner were dead, it’d no longer matter. But if he lived, it’d never do to let his name slip where dangerous ears could hear it. Which, in Rab’s estimation, was all of them.

“He might. And if he is, he must remain so if the girl is to keep her life along with him. This the
akresha
Ulima saw most clearly. Will you help me to find them?”

“If you’re planning on taking her from the Rook’s hand, good fortune with that. Perhaps Tykhe will look more kindly upon you than a humble hireling such as myself.”

“I don’t know the ways of your Tykhe, but if She’s brought you here as Djashtet has me, perhaps it’s for a purpose.”

Rab wanted to laugh outright at that, though he restrained himself to a bitter snort. “As near as I can tell, good fellow, all that Lady Tykhe has in mind for me is that you’re to keep me from getting blind, stinking drunk.”

“Has it occurred to you that perhaps She intends to see you and your wandering companion reunited?”

“Since you’re clearly not about to offer me a contract on that little dove, I can’t see how Tykhe might manage that.”

His voice dripped with mockery, and he wasn’t about to care, yet the big Tantiu showed no sign of being affronted. If anything, his black gaze grew all the more intent. “My goal is the girl, and Djashtet guides me through the wisdom of Her priestess to where she may eventually be. But the signs of the Lady of Time are unclear, and I know only that to find the one I seek, her protectors must be as one.”

“Your errant dove scuttled that pretty bloody well, stranger. The Rook would much rather be with her than me.”

“And they’ll both be in peril if I don’t find her—if
you
don’t help me find her.”

He was serious, Rab realized. The man’s words neither rose in volume nor hastened in tempo; he was as unhurried and immutable as stone. His steadiness spooked Rab, and that galled almost as much as discussing the healer girl, though he fought down the impulse for further sarcasm. It would win him nothing now. Moreover—and this spooked him most of all—a tiny voice in the back of his mind warned that if there were any chance the Tantiu was right, if there were any chance Julian was in trouble, he couldn’t fail to act.

Almost without his conscious will he slid his left hand to the dagger that rode nearest to it upon his frame. The weapon came out of its sheath without a whisper, and Rab began to twirl it, over and over. It felt good in his grasp, poised and proper and overdue to be back where it belonged.

But he wasn’t prepared to hurl it, not quite yet. If nothing else, he had no target. “They may not be where I left them last. And if those I left them with have faced the Anreulag again, they won’t take kindly to outside contact.”

Undeterred, the other man slipped a hand into a pocket and pulled forth a pouch, dropping it onto the table between them. “Do what you can,
akreshi.
I offer you this for your trouble. Whether you succeed or fail, by the grace of Almighty Djashtet, I’ll do the rest.”

As it hit the scarred wood of the tabletop, the pouch clinked. Rab nudged it open with his free hand and spied the gleam of gold in the leather folds. The Tantiu stranger, it seemed, was serious indeed. With deliberate nonchalance, he stashed the pouch into a pocket, gave his dagger a final twirl and sent it home again to its sheath.

“This’ll be the most expensive message I’ve ever sent, but you’ve got yourself a contract.”

Chapter Three

Somewhere in Kilmerry Province
,
Jomhas 24
,
AC 1876

As if every Hawk in Adalonia were pursuing them or soon would be, four riders on three horses fled westward through Kilmerry Province.

How many hours they spent in the saddle on their first day and night of riding, Faanshi never tried to track. It was enough to know that they’d made their escape—that after she’d healed the Hawk Kestar Vaarsen, he’d granted them safe passage out of Arlitham Abbey. By her sheer existence, and by her elven blood and elven magic, she broke the laws of Adalonia and of the Church of the Four Gods. By her escape from slavery and her refusal to return to a harsh master, she’d broken more.

In her heart she feared that Kestar’s own Church would hunt him now as it was hunting them. Alarrah, her newfound sister, shared her healing gift; Kirinil was the most powerful shielder among the elves still left in Adalonia. Refusing to arrest any of them would doom Kestar, and would have even if he’d had no elven blood at all. But she could spare him barely more than passing worried thoughts when all her wits had to focus on their urgent flight. She was more tired than she’d ever been in her life. But she was also young, with the strength of youth. The man who shared a horse with her wasn’t as young as she—and in that hour, he wasn’t as strong, either.

Not when the Voice of the Gods had almost killed him, and her own power had erupted to save his life.

Julian’s weight and warmth against her back was all her magic needed to fill her senses with him. Not so strongly as Kestar had—whether because of her still-new gift of shielding or simply because the Rook was fully human, Faanshi didn’t know. Echoes of his memories resounded on the very edge of her thoughts, yet they somehow stayed mercifully at bay. Later, she suspected, they’d converge upon her. During that ride of measureless hours, it was all she could do to keep from losing herself in the screaming of bone and muscle she’d reshaped from the inside out. With his arms wrapped around her and his head drooped forward onto her shoulder, she could almost see new nerves sending erratic bolts of sensation through flesh she had no memory of restoring, flashes of sensation like miniature stars on the edge of her sight, flaring and dying away again.

The stallion Morrigh was restless under her command, and though she barely knew the creature, it pierced her heart. He couldn’t understand why his master didn’t sit right upon him, or why her unskilled hands held his reins. More than once she had to flail inwardly, wildly, for how to make the horse obey her.

But as they rode, Julian clung to consciousness as fiercely as he clung to her. Djashtet be praised, he murmured guidance into her ear—when to use her right hand or left upon the reins, when to lean forward in the saddle, when to pull back.

And she was grateful beyond measure that he was still awake when the Hawk patrol found them.

They had very little warning, for though Alarrah and Kirinil scouted as they rode, the night was muffled by unexpected fog—and they’d had to slow down so that Faanshi and Julian could keep pace with them. A tattoo of hooves, the bellowed command to halt in the name of the Anreulag, and the sudden flare of amulet light were their only signals that they’d chosen badly, risking an open road in the name of speed. The Hawks were upon them.

There were three of them, impossible to miss when the glow of their amulets made them seem like ghosts charging out of the fog. Hawk amulets shone with blue-white radiance in the presence of elven blood, and all the more sharply when an elf had magic as well. With three elf-blooded mages to trigger them, these amulets flared now like tiny suns. At the sight of that incandescence, Alarrah screamed something in Elvish, but Faanshi barely heard it, for Julian’s voice in her ear was a far more pressing goad.

“Lean forward, girl. Hard as you can.”

She couldn’t help but do so, for the assassin leaned forward too, kicking Morrigh’s sides and letting out a rough, raw cry that sent the horse exploding into a gallop. “Where do we go?” Faanshi cried.

“Anywhere. Ride for your gods-damned life!”

What Alarrah and Kirinil were doing, Faanshi had no time to tell. One of the Hawks targeted her and Julian, keeping pace with Morrigh well enough that it was all she could do to keep her place in the saddle while the Rook’s horse ran. Their pursuer wasted no time trying to order them to stop. Instead he shot at them with the pistol he brandished in one hand—and only Morrigh’s mad charge through the fog, so far as Faanshi could see, let him miss.

Still, the retort of the gun was far too close. With a ragged oath, Julian shifted behind Faanshi, leaving his right arm curled round her while his left flung a dagger at the Hawk coming up hard beside them. Amulet-light burned through the fog, letting Faanshi see at least something of where Morrigh ran—but she didn’t need to see the Hawk to know that Julian had struck. A burst of pain across her consciousness and the man’s roar of outrage were evidence enough.

One knife-strike, though, wasn’t enough to take him down. He kept coming after them, pushing his horse harder to overtake Morrigh, and when Faanshi risked a swift glance back over her shoulder she saw that he was taking aim with a second gun.

“Julian!”

By now, with the other horse close enough beside them, the Rook had barely any angle at which to aim—but he hurled his second knife nonetheless, flinging it with vicious sideways force into the Hawk’s shoulder and throwing off his aim enough to send his shot wide. Nor did he stop there.

“Keep riding, girl!”

Faanshi couldn’t see what he did; she could only tell that he moved by the shifting of his body behind her, and by the sudden pressure of both his hands against her shoulders. Then, with a great howl of effort, he launched himself off Morrigh and over onto the Hawk’s mount. Both horses screamed their protest. For an instant all of Faanshi’s senses flared with the impact of one body against another—and then of both bodies slamming into the ground.

Surely she must have prayed, though in truth she couldn’t have said what desperate pleas she made to Djashtet, even as Morrigh kept running in alarm. She could think of nothing but the need to get the stallion turned, slowed and stopped. By the time she managed to halt him and scramble out of the saddle, he’d charged several yards ahead of where Julian had taken down the Hawk.

Breathless, her heart pounding, Faanshi ran back through the fog. The Hawk’s amulet blazed more brightly the closer she came, but Julian himself was an even stronger beacon. Her magic hadn’t yet released her from the echo of his pain, and she could feel every blow he took from the fists of the Hawk in russet and black. Nor did her power ignore the hurts Julian had dealt his opponent. It warned her that the man was bleeding from three different places, a steady flow of blood that sapped his strength—but he was still holding his own against the Rook.

And as she came close enough to finally see them, he drove a hammer of a blow into Julian’s jaw, sending him to his knees.

Faanshi didn’t think and didn’t pause, not even to draw the knife at her side. Instead she threw herself at the Hawk, her palms blazing with radiance of their own, as anger she so seldom set free ripped down the mental hearth she’d been taught to build around her magic. Power surged, furious and bright. As her hands pushed into his back, the Hawk screamed, arching backward and nearly toppling over onto her.

Before she could dodge, Julian lurched up from the ground and slashed the Hawk’s throat with his final knife, the black-hilted one, the one he never let Faanshi touch.

The blow was harsh and brutal. It dropped the Hawk into a lifeless heap at her feet.

Once before, when her power had first awakened, she’d witnessed death—when the duke who’d been her master let the old groom Kennach die of his heart attack rather than allow a living witness to her power. This time was worse. Her power roiled, caught between her own fury at the man’s attack and an immediate, instinctive revulsion at the abrupt cutting off of his existence.

The effort to hold herself back, to keep her hands from mending damage when only a moment before they’d delivered agony, nearly made her retch where she stood. The world spun. All at once, the fog around her felt very, very cold.

Then Julian was there, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her away from the body. “Don’t look,” he whispered raggedly. “Come away, girl. You don’t have to look. You don’t have to touch him.”

Faanshi welcomed the distraction, for as soon as he touched her, she felt that what little strength he had left had been ground away to nothing. Pain so fierce she could almost hear it throbbed through his head, and his new right hand shuddered even as he clung to her. That trembling spread through his entire frame, and Faanshi was afraid to let go of him for fear that he might fall. “You shouldn’t have done that. Julian, you can barely stand.”

“I’ll make it. No choice. Just...Morrigh. Find the horse...”

His head drooped onto her shoulder as he trailed off, leaving her no option but to hold him close and let her restless power flood over him. It gentled as it struck, and Julian palpably relaxed—too much so, for she had to struggle to continue to hold him up. “Can you hang onto me? Can you walk? We can’t stay here!”

“No,” he agreed, though his voice was thin and faint now, as though he spoke from a great distance away. “Get you out of here. Keep you safe.”

As she lifted a still-glowing hand to smooth his hair, Faanshi said swiftly, “You are. You killed the man who would have seen me Cleansed. You pushed me away from the fire that would have struck me down.”

“Had to, little dove.”

She wasn’t at all sure she’d heard those muttered words correctly, but they caught somewhere behind her breastbone and stayed there, refusing to be dislodged or denied. Little dove. Nine-fingered Rab had called her that. It was different from Julian; how, she wasn’t prepared to name.

“Brave Rook,” she murmured. That made him lift his head and blink at her in hazy surprise, exactly as she’d hoped he might. “If anyone says you’re not a good man, Almighty Djashtet be my witness, I’ll hit them. Later. We need to move now. Please. I can’t carry you.”

But before he could muster a reply, much to Faanshi’s profound relief, Alarrah and Kirinil emerged out of the fog. None of them dared speak too loudly, lest other ears might hear. With the elves’ help, though, they gathered the horses, retrieved Julian’s knives and got the assassin himself back into the saddle.

Faanshi didn’t ask where the other two Hawks had gone; that was plain, given that her sister and Kirinil lived. Nor was there any question of their burying the ones they’d slain, though she had no idea what the elves—or the Adalons—did to honor the dead. There was no time for any such thing, and no time to ask.

She had just enough time to catch Julian’s eye as he hauled himself onto Morrigh behind her, and to frown at the consternation in his face. For the tiniest instant he hesitated before slipping his arms around her waist; only then did he cling to her again, as tightly as before, as though contact with her was all that kept him conscious. That at least Faanshi knew how to address. She was young, with the strength of youth, and she was prepared to pour her power into Julian all the way back to Dolmerrath if she had to do so.

But she didn’t know how to chase that trace of fear out of his expression. It didn’t suit him.

And it troubled Faanshi deeply that he might be afraid of her.

* * *

Hours later, once they’d fled the place where they’d killed the Hawks, Faanshi prayed.

She burned him.
The knowledge haunted her, frail but clear beneath the moonlight as Morrigh pounded after the other horses, up into the hills.
The Anreulag burned him from within.

What did it mean, that she’d reversed the work of one who was practically a goddess?

For that she had no answer. No wisdom from the Noonmother or the Crone of Night presented itself to her seeking, and her mind flinched from considering even the borders of that question, much less its heart. It was far safer, though no less disconcerting, to focus on the Rook at her back. He had no strength; therefore she’d hold him up. When he stirred and shivered behind her, murmuring broken syllables that never quite formed into proper words, she took a hand off the stallion’s reins long enough to clasp his arm. “Hang onto me, Julian.” The words seemed a mantra for him, and that was enough.

When Alarrah called a halt, with dawn casting a feeble glimmer of light along the eastern horizon, that mantra got them both out of the saddle. Faanshi’s legs nearly pitched her to the rocky earth—but Kirinil appeared on Julian’s other side, bearing him up so that neither of them fell.

“A few steps more,” he urged her. His voice was rougher than it should have been. He too was tired, Faanshi was sure.

“Where are we?”

“A stopping place. Our people have them all throughout these mountains. This one is small, but it’ll serve. Can you feel the Ward on it?”

She nodded, though the magic was little more than a buzz of irritation on the edge of her senses. Julian, however, jerked between them.

Her dismay must have escaped onto her face, for Kirinil went on, “Don’t worry, this Ward is no match for Dolmerrath’s. It must keep us safe for only a few hours. Time enough to rest the horses, and ourselves.”

Rest sounded blissful beyond measure. A few steps more, she urged herself. When Julian could rest, then she would too.

Kirinil led them up a slope studded with boulders that must have fallen from farther up the hillside, and with the scattered trunks of old, dead trees that had collapsed in the company of their living fellows. Tall conifers cast their shadows slantwise down upon them, blurring the hill’s face in Faanshi’s exhausted sight. Yet the elves seemed to know exactly where they were going. Alarrah coaxed her mount and Kirinil’s ahead of them, up over the crest of a dip in the earth—and to the girl’s surprise, the she-elf and the beasts she led abruptly vanished.

But only for an instant. As Kirinil helped her haul the assassin along, the debris of boulders and ancient logs wavered and then coalesced into something entirely different: the mouth of a cave, low and narrow, barely large enough for one horse to enter.