Vengeance of the Hunter (7 page)

“
Ani a bhota
—” The words were a reflex, but even as he spoke them Kestar froze, conscious of the trembling spreading from his fingers to other parts of him, of the quickening of his pulse deep within his chest, where Faanshi’s light had shone. Heat flushed his cheeks, and only with a dogged effort did he make himself finish hoarsely, “
Arach shae.
”

Abbot Grenham echoed the benediction, or at least Kestar thought he did; the abbot’s voice seemed strangely distant in his hearing. But they worshipped the gods of Nirrivy here, not the gods of Adalonia, no matter what trappings were on display in the place—surely Abbot Grenham would have invoked one of those older deities?

Kestar spun away from the bed, unable to look any longer at the shell of the old woman, blood of his blood and yet a stranger. Nor could he look at Abbot Grenham. He could only mumble a shaken request to be excused as he strode past him as fast as he dared, as fast as he could move without seeming to flee outright. This time the abbot made no move to halt him, and for that Kestar was grateful. He didn’t want to speak of what he’d just witnessed, what Darlana Araeldes had told him, or why he hadn’t been able to speak the name of the Voice of the Gods. Shame and panic and a niggling furtive relief all churned within him, blending together until he couldn’t discern one from the other, or say from where any of them might have sprung.

And it frightened him to the core that he couldn’t tell the difference.

Chapter Five

House Nemea
,
Dareli
,
AC 1864

It was all her fault.

She’d wanted only to take care of her family—to give her mother and sisters a chance to avoid starvation and the ignominy of the workhouse. Or worse, for the unforgiving eye of the Church never strayed long from those it deemed heretical. For the sake of her family Dulcinea had been willing to make herself over with a name that wasn’t hers and marry a man she didn’t love, all in the name of keeping a roof over her mother’s and sisters’ heads and food upon their table.

For the sake of her family, she had to betray the man she
had
come to love. To watch as Cleon maimed him, and to turn away from the desperate pleas Julian called out to her in the grip of pain and panic and the drug he’d been slipped—by her own hand.

She hadn’t had to feign her shame, though. Cleon and the rest of the household could think her abashed by the assault they thought she’d undergone; Erasmus could crow over her in his contempt. None of it mattered in the wake of what Julian had suffered because of her.

Where Cleon’s men took him, Dulcinea had no way of knowing. Her husband ordered her bustled off to their chambers, under the care of her maid and the family’s senior housekeeper, to await examination by the first doctor they could summon from town. Keeping from screaming, even as she submitted to those ministrations, took every scrap of resolve she had. The housekeeper’s motherly concern was trial enough to bear, but worse yet was the wariness from her maid, just short of open hostility. Young Moirae had been her ally in trysting with Julian, and Dulcinea suspected the girl of nursing an infatuation with him.

“I know you don’t like what’s happened,” she said, taking the maid’s hands even as Moirae reached up to arrange her hair. “I know you must hate me now.”

Her eyes brimming with unshed tears, Moirae stood clutching the pearl-handled brush she’d picked up, and made no move to break out of her mistress’s grasp. “How could you do it, miss? How could you set Mister Julian up like that, when he loves you so?”

That Moirae knew what she’d done Dulcinea didn’t even think to doubt; the girl had a way of finding things out, which had made her invaluable. And because it was Moirae, Dulcinea swallowed her pride and said, “As the gods are my witnesses, I wish I’d had any other choice. I’ll be praying for forgiveness for the rest of my life. But I need to know he’s going to live, Moirae. Do you know where they’ve taken him?”

Moirae’s expression wasn’t precisely mutinous—she was too well trained and too good-hearted for that—but neither did it show any of the forgiveness Dulcinea’s own heart already sought. “I’ve my suspicions. But I don’t know for sure. Not yet.”

“But you can find out. Your brother will be one of the ones taking him away,” Dulcinea pressed. “I’ll give you both anything if you make sure he gets away. As far away from this benighted House as possible.”

“Milord will have our heads if we do that,” Moirae said, fear flaring in her eyes, a breathless squeak strangling her voice. “He didn’t kill Mister Julian on the spot, h-he said he’d let him live—”

“It’s not my husband I’m worried about. It’s the other one.
He
wants Julian dead.”

Even in her own chambers, Dulcinea was reluctant to speak that above the barest whisper—and even here, she didn’t dare speak Erasmus’s name aloud. But she didn’t need to.

Comprehension drained all the color from Moirae’s face, and she nodded, once slowly, then again with greater force. “You leave it to me, miss,” she said, matching her wary whisper. “I’ll make sure he gets to safety.”

Only then did Dulcinea let go of her. “Anything you need to make it happen, tell me. But Moirae, don’t...don’t tell him I’m arranging it. He may not trust it if he knows it comes from me. And he’d have every right not to.”

Moirae paused and then took the liberty of reaching to clasp her shoulder, a familiar gesture that Dulcinea would have rejected from any other servant, anywhere else in the house. Here and now, though, that small grace note of contact was sorely welcome. “You leave it to me, miss,” she repeated. “Will you be all right if I go now?”

“Go. And report back to me when you’ve done it. I won’t be able to rest until I know.”

The maid bobbed her head and hastened out of the chamber, as silently as she could, looking both ways along the corridor as she left. Not even when the door had closed behind her, not even when she was alone, could Dulcinea allow herself to weep.

She could only call, in her heart of hearts, upon any gods that would listen—Adalon, Nirrivan, she didn’t care—and pray.

* * *

Pain as bright as fire, the worst pain he’d ever experienced, scorched every edge of Julian’s existence. Yet unconsciousness was no refuge, for his dreams were filled with his brother’s thundering voice—and the inexplicable, mindless need that had gripped him at Dulcinea’s nearness. It still haunted him, making his dream-self struggle to reach her. But she was just beyond his reach, turning from him in contempt he’d never seen her express. The hand he threw out to grab her vanished in fire that in turn raced upward to consume his arm. His shoulder. And last of all, his eye.

His scream hurled him from sleep into wakefulness, with no appreciable lessening of his agony. Panic roiled through him along with the pain, for he couldn’t see, and when he unthinkingly tried to clap a hand to his head, his entire right arm shrieked. Panic turned to terror as he realized he had nothing with which to reach his brow; his hand was gone.

“Easy! Easy, Mister Julian, you’re safe. I swear to all the gods you’re safe. Can you hear me?”

He could, though at first he couldn’t recognize the voice. Not until his right eye shivered open did he get back enough unfocused vision to get a face to go with those urgently murmured words. “Who...?”

“It’s Moirae, Mister Julian,” the blurred face above him said. “I know you’re in such pain, sir, and I hate to make you move, but you’re in danger and we’ve got to get you out of here.”

That made all too much sense, even with the furor and fire that seemed ready to devour his every limb. “Danger,” he muttered. “My brother. Didn’t do it, Cleon, I swear I didn’t...”

Small, sturdy hands grasped his shoulders, holding him in place where he lay, with far more strength than he could begin to muster in that moment. “Not just milord Cleon. It’s the other one that did this to you, sir. We need to get you away so he can’t hurt you anymore.”

“We...?”

Another figure leaned in beside the girl Moirae, a young man, like enough to her in face and coloring that Julian could only dimly suppose them to be family—though he could barely remember his own name, much less this boy’s. “Me and a couple of the lads,” the youth said. “We can get you away tonight with no one the wiser.”

Gods, he couldn’t think, Julian couldn’t begin to think with his head and arm both burning, yet it began to sink in nonetheless that he was in terrible trouble. “They’ll come for me,” he said, struggling to speak, to force coherence into a tongue gone thick and dull with pain. “The watch...Cleon was going to give me to the watch.”

“And they’ll toss you right in the Barrows and no mistake,” Moirae said, “assuming you live that long. Neither of your brothers wants you to live that long, Mister Julian. Let us help you stick it to them. Let us get you out of here.”

Doggedly Julian began to sit up, an attempt that only inflamed the fire raging through his muscles, but he set his teeth and almost welcomed it. It cleared his hazed thoughts, at least a little, and let him see that he’d been laid upon a cot in a small building he finally recognized as the groundskeeper’s cottage on his family’s land. The groundskeeper was Moirae’s father and the father of the rangy lad kneeling beside his cot. The boy’s name returned to him—Momus. Why they had elected to help him, he couldn’t begin to fathom. Right then and there, though, he didn’t want to question his luck. It was all too welcome a gift, if both his brothers had finally turned against him in deed as well as spirit.

“I’ve got nowhere to go,” he rasped. “Where can you take me?”

With a grim, stony expression that would have been at home on the face of a man twice his age, Momus said, “If we’re lucky, Mister Julian, we can get you all the way to Shalridan.”

* * *

Near Dolmerrath
,
Kilmerry Province
,
Jomhas 27
,
AC 1876

Their flight westward through the province felt disturbingly familiar, enough that twelve-year-old memories kept threatening to flare behind Julian’s eyes. The speed along ill-used roads, the urgent need to avoid detection, and the howl-inducing amounts of pain were all the same. But he hadn’t had Morrigh then, or Faanshi’s determined hands pouring power into him to keep him moving, or two elves to guard their backs and find them places to hide.

On the other hand, twelve years ago every Hawk in Kilmerry Province hadn’t been out for his blood, either.

Killing that last patrol sat badly with him. Not that they’d had a choice, and he’d do it again in a heartbeat if it meant preserving Faanshi’s life, but he never liked to kill without a contract. Moreover, he’d never slain Hawks before, by contract or in self-defense. And he could see nothing but greater danger for all of them, now that members of the Order had died in the name of a young healer’s freedom.

The second patrol that found them proved him right.

There were six of them this time, with faster horses and better weapons than the group that had come before, and they swept down upon them in the last few hours of their mad dash for the coast and the wooded cliffs where Dolmerrath lay hidden. All that saved them in the first stretch of that chase was that Morrigh, Elisel and Doreel were better horses still—and that Kirinil and Alarrah both were devils with their bows even in the saddle. They took down two of the Hawks with arrows straight through their necks, but that left four, all of whom swiftly demonstrated that they knew exactly how to duck. Alarrah took down a third only by virtue of shooting the horse instead of the rider, making the creature stumble and throw its Hawk from the saddle. The last three, though, kept with them all the way to the Wards.

The best and strongest protection for the hidden stronghold of the elves, the Wards operated with brutal simplicity on anyone of human blood, flooding the victim’s mind with overpowering fear. No thought would be left save that of the fastest possible retreat.

Julian might almost have admired it as a line of defense, if he himself weren’t vulnerable to the magic—and even worse, Faanshi. The girl was only half human, but her raw, barely trained power left her peculiarly sensitive to the Wards’ implacable strength.

Faanshi began to keen even as she pushed Morrigh for even greater speed, and even as old memories rose to frantic screams behind Julian’s eyes. He had to keep himself from clinging too tightly to the girl to remind himself of her living presence right in front of him, for she had to breathe to ride—but as the Wards roared into both their minds, it was all he could to keep from screaming at the vision of their pursuers’ guns shooting her right out of his arms.

Out of nowhere, Kirinil and Alarrah flanked them. Julian caught a glimpse of Kirinil twisting in his saddle, his eyes gone the hue of molten bronze as he flung an arcane gesture over his shoulder. What the motion did needed no explanation, not when the Hawks who still pursued them began to wail somewhere behind them in the trees.

Alarrah pulled just enough ahead of them that she was clearly in both Julian’s and Faanshi’s lines of sight, and shouted at them both, “Keep riding, and follow me!”

She wasn’t the strongest of lodestones to hold their attention, not when the power of the Wards roared through them. But Morrigh knew to follow the elves’ horses now, and moreover, Faanshi had mastered how to handle him. That she managed it even when gasping out great, racking sobs was a far greater goad for Julian’s own resolve. He held onto her, slamming his eyes shut, for Morrigh’s galloping set off answering reverberations in his skull. What he shouted at Faanshi himself he couldn’t begin to tell, and it wasn’t important, as long as he could hear her calling back.

He had to look up again, though, when shouts and the rumble of newly arriving horses sounded somewhere ahead. Julian’s vision blurred in and out, making it almost impossible to tell how many elves on horseback were charging out to meet them; it could have been three, or three dozen. The copper-haired elf in the lead, however, was unmistakable. Tembriel, more fierce-eyed than Julian had ever seen her, rode past them at breakneck speed. Both her hands were lifted, and both were wreathed in coronas of flame. She whirled them together over her head, weaving a larger and larger ball of fire, and Julian flinched from the sight of it as she let it fly. The panic of the Wards was still high in him—and for one single terrifying instant, she looked like the Anreulag Herself.

Then she and her compatriots had passed them, leaving Julian and Faanshi to their own desperate riding. It seemed to last for hours beyond counting, forcing the Rook to shut out everything that wasn’t the need to hang onto the girl and stay in the saddle, no matter what wild visions ripped across his consciousness. More than once he thought he felt bullets strike them both; more than once, he heard the Anreulag crying out with a voice of thunder. But neither bullets nor holy fire halted the stallion, and when Morrigh finally did stop, it took Julian several seconds to realize that they were safe.

Only then did he slide, half-blind, out of the saddle. Without thinking and without surprise that she’d come down with him, he crushed Faanshi close to his chest as they both fought to get their trembling under control.

“Julian, did we make it? Oh great Lady of Time...they almost had us, I was sure they’d shot you.”

“It’s all right, dove.” Had he called her that before? It felt familiar, though in that moment that wasn’t important either. “We’re all right. We’re safe.” He should have opened his eyes and lifted his head; he should have been looking to verify that they had, in fact, reached Dolmerrath. But just then Julian couldn’t bring himself to do anything but hold the girl.