Where Serpents Strike (Children of the Falls Vol. 1) (21 page)

And then Merek and Awlin were left standing
alone in the dark, stuffy arcade. Merek looked at his sister,
finally free after so many years. When she threw herself into him,
he scooped her up into his arms and held her tight.

“Thank you! Thank you!” she cried, kissing
his cheek and squeezing him even tighter.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Merek
said. “I tried, Awlin. For years, I tried. I looked for you—”

But she shushed him. “It wasn’t your fault,
brother. You don’t need to be sorry for what was beyond your
control. It’s over now. And we’re together again.”

Merek realized that perhaps Awlin didn’t
know why she had been kidnapped. Perhaps her captors never
explained to her that she was taken because of him. For years he
had longed to have many conversations with his sister, but
revealing the truth about his crimes, his selfishness, and how they
had led to her imprisonment, wasn’t one of them.

She beamed at him, her eyes crinkling. “We
will go home now?”

He took Awlin by the hand and said, “Right
now I need to get you somewhere safe.”

Merek felt relieved when, at last, they
exited the bleak enclosure of The Pit. Awlin was a pleasure to look
at in the midday sun, the play of light and shadow across her
features, the shine and spring of her hair, the gleam of her bright
green eyes.

He led her to the grumpy old mare, thankful
that Patryk had at least left the horse. He mounted and pulled
Awlin up behind him and then set off toward the white tower that
Patryk had pointed out earlier.

A tremendous rush of urgency surged through
his chest. He hoped he could stop Patryk before his friend did
anything too stupid.

On the corner of the next intersection,
Merek saw a large wooden board building with a sign that read
Wanderer’s Rest
, an inn that sat diagonally to the crossing
streets. Slowing his horse he approached the building’s front and
handed Awlin a purse of coins. He helped her down off the horse and
started to give her instructions to rent a room and wait for him,
but she shook her head.

“No. I don’t want to leave you.”

“I’ll be back soon. You’ll be safe here.
Just stay inside the room.”

“Merek!”

“I’m sorry, Awlin, but I have to do
this.”

In his head, Merek cursed Patryk for putting
him in this position. Leaving Awlin alone was the last thing he
wanted to do, but he couldn’t take her back to the estate of the
very same man who had just sold her. She would have to wait while
he attempted to talk his friend out of doing something incredibly
stupid—if it wasn’t already too late.

He swung his horse around and galloped
north. It took less time to reach the estate than Merek
expected.

Like all other structures in Slavigo, the
buildings of Adairous Dolar’s extravagant and portentous villa
stood only two stories high, with the exception of the tower, which
appeared to be little more than a decorative lookout.

Large and luxurious, the property consisted
of a main mansion built of white brick capped with shallow pitched
roofs, a barn, servants’ lodgings, and a few other outbuildings all
centered around a well-groomed courtyard of palm trees and lush
vegetation. Merek left his horse under the shade of a cluster of
trees, then made his way down the street toward the villa.

With expert eyes he took it all in, noting
with ease the location of several guards. He was pleasantly
surprised to find that there weren’t more. The front gate was
closed and guarded, but the walls were low enough that with a few
quick steps up the rough surface he managed to hoist himself
over.

In Merek’s years of experience he had come
to find that the well-lit palaces and mansions of Efferous, with
their bright stonewalls and open roofs, were much more difficult to
hide in than the cramped, shadowy corridors of Edhen’s castles.
Still, no Efferousian mansion was impossible to sneak into.

Merek stole past a gardener watering flowers
in their tubs. He hopped over a stone barricade and into the main
house.

In the right wing of the mansion, from a
room toward the back, he heard raised voices. He made his way
through a shaded corridor that took him to a second floor balcony
overlooking a white cobbled courtyard. In the center of the
massive, open-roofed room was a deep blue pool surrounded by native
stone and green vegetation. The smell of salt water hung in the
air.

There were four men below, including
Adairous Dolar, a trim man with a square jaw and hair as dark as
night. He wore a long white tunic fringed with gold that dusted the
floor at his feet. In front of him were two armored bodyguards,
their beefy fists clasped onto a bloodied Patryk Brennan.

Merek’s head sagged. He grit his teeth in
frustration and whispered, “Why couldn’t you just wait? Damn
you!”

The sound of a body falling lured Merek’s
gaze back to the scene. Patryk had just slumped to his knees.

“Say another word and I shall have him
strike you again,” Adairous said coolly.

“My lord,” Patryk blubbered, “I have your
money, I just need to—”

Adarious gestured with a nod of his head,
which prompted one of the bodyguards to deliver another punishing
blow to Patryk’s ribs.

“Maybe we should invite a doctor to examine
his hearing?” Adairous asked, looking from one bodyguard to
another. The two men only half smiled as though they had heard the
sarcastic remark before.

Adairous clasped his hands behind his back
and paced over to the pool of saltwater. “I want to introduce you
to a fish,” he said.

“What?” Patryk moaned.

“It is a very small salt water creature
native to Efferous’ shores. I had never heard of it until one
afternoon I was swimming in a bay not far from here when something
bit my ankle. The natives call it
pienne
, which means
‘little teeth.’”

A feeling of dread began to creep over Merek
as he watched from the balcony, hidden from view by a dark wooden
railing and a large indoor fern.

“Why are you telling me this?” Patryk said.
His voice sounded distant and weak.

“Hold him!” Adairous shouted.

The bodyguards clamped onto Patryk as
Adairous sailed across the floor and kneed him in the chin. A spray
of blood and teeth arched through the air. While Patryk coughed and
cursed, Adairous dragged out a pair of large gold leg irons that he
clamped onto Patryk’s ankles.

“What are you doing?” Patryk croaked as he
attempted to get off his knees.

Adairous grabbed him by the hair and snarled
into his face, “Taking what you owe me.”

He pulled out a knife and made an incision
all around Patryk’s neck, starting on the right side and carving
down around his throat, up the left side, and around his spine. The
cut wasn’t deep enough to kill him, but it did draw from Patryk a
fair amount of blood and a slew of pained screams.

Merek looked around for some way to distract
Adairous or call him and his bodyguards out of the room. He wagered
he could best one of them in a fight, maybe two, but certainly not
all three.

And then there was Awlin. He pictured her
waiting for him back at the inn. She needed him now more than ever.
He couldn’t risk getting hurt and never seeing her again.

“Damn you, Patryk,” Merek muttered. “Damn
you. Damn you!”

The bodyguards dragged Patryk forward and
tossed him into the saltwater pool. His shackled feet plunged to
the bottom like stones and for a moment he vanished beneath a blue
and white spray of water. His face remerged, punching through the
surface by only a couple of inches. The saltwater slopped back and
fourth over his eyes and nose, making him cough and spit as he
struggled to stay up for air.

“Adairous, please!” he begged. “Wait!”

“The pienne is attracted to blood,” Adairous
continued in a bored voice. “By itself, it will nip at you, taking
a piece of skin perhaps.” He knelt by the edge of the pool,
watching Patryk flail to keep his nose above the water. “But if you
get ten of them together, or fifty, or, say, in the case of this
place, a hundred, they will tear through a man like butter.”

Patryk flinched as something swam up close
to his neck.

“Bloody hells, what is that?” he yelled.

After it bit him, he screamed and began to
thrash, but that only seemed to further provoke the feeding frenzy
that ensued.

Merek watched, horrified, as the water
around Patryk’s head came alive with the wild flapping tails of a
hundred tiny hungry fish. The water turned a disgusting shade of
red and Patryk’s screams filled the mansion. After several horrific
moments, his head popped free of his body and bobbed in the water
before it was pulled under and eviscerated.

Merek’s blood had turned to ice. He left his
hiding spot and fled the mansion in a hurry. He managed to weave
back through the mansion’s right wing, narrowly avoiding a guard
passing through the garden. After a few moments he was back at the
wall where he climbed up, over, and out onto the street.

Shivering with shame and regret, Merek tried
to convince himself that he didn’t just let his friend die. He had
tried to help him, tried to convince him not to go through with his
plan, but Patryk had insisted. Surely, then, it was his fault he
was captured and murdered. Merek had done all he could.

Besides, he had Awlin to care for now.

Though he tried to shun it, Merek’s shame
lingered. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Patryk’s death was on
him.

Before he reached Wanderer’s Rest his regret
had become so heavy in his gut that he ducked down a narrow
alleyway and spewed the contents of his stomach.

Thunder cracked through the darkness outside,
jolting Lia awake. Her head bobbed and her forehead smacked against
the glazed window where the rain tapped its own rhythm on the other
side of the glass. For a moment, disorientation seized her as the
memories of her nightmare dissolved—barking dogs, screaming
children, violent waves and death and choking for air. She’d
dreamed it a dozen times before.

From her seat in front of the cottage
window, Lia looked over her shoulder to the candlelit room at her
back. Warm colors of brown and orange reflected back at her. The
accommodations were humble, all that simple farming peasants could
afford, but there was a bed, a chair, and a chest of drawers, which
gave a homey feel. A wooden tray on the bureau held a bowl of soup
that had once been hot. Lia remembered the old woman bringing it
into the room, but she had been too lost in her own depressing
thoughts to bother eating any of it.

She picked up her silver dagger from the
windowsill. She inspected the blade in the candlelight, huffed on
an oily finger smear, and wiped it clean with the sleeve of her
tunic. Not a day went by that she didn’t spend some time polishing
the blade or running her fingernail through the etched pattern on
the hilt. The cold steel was a comfort to hold.

On the bed, a man groaned in pain.

Lia Falls wiped the sleepiness from her
tired eyes and went to the side of Khile Alexander. He had been
lying unconscious for almost two weeks. His fever had broke earlier
in the morning, but he had yet to regain consciousness.

Lia had a question to ask him, and her
patience was running thin.

He opened his eyes, big and blue even in the
candlelight. He looked up at her as she brushed the hair from his
brow. “Where am I?” he asked.

“Some cottage,” she said. “The people won’t
give me their names, but the old man says he’s from Edhen. The old
woman doesn’t speak our language.”

Khile put his hands at his sides and pressed
down as if to sit up.

“No, be careful!” The moment the words left
her mouth Khile’s face contorted into a frightening display of
agony. “Your leg,” she said, after he had calmed a bit, “it broke
in the storm, remember? The old man put a new splint on it, but he
said it will be a while before you can walk again.”

Khile sighed in obvious disappointment and
relaxed. “Lovely.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Very.”

She helped prop him up with some pillows
before retrieving the bowl of soup. Khile didn’t care that it was
cold. She fed him a couple spoonfuls, which he seemed all too eager
to swallow. He wiped the back of his hand across his thin lips,
which were now lined by a light brown beard.

“I think I can manage,” he said.

He took the bowl and spoon into his own
hands.

Lia opened her mouth to ask a question, one
of the many that had been sitting on her tongue for the last week,
but she changed her mind. She figured it was best to let Khile get
some of his strength back before she inundated him with all that
was on her mind.

He slurped another mouthful. “So what
happened?”

“What happened to what?”

“How did we get here?”

Lia cocked an amused eyebrow. “Shipwreck,
remember?”

“Vaguely.”

As they spoke a bit more, Lia was surprised
to learn that Khile’s memory stopped before they had washed ashore.
Even though he had awoken many times over the last two weeks,
always appearing cognizant of what was going on, it seemed as
though his fever had ultimately plundered his memory.

She recounted for him their journey to
Efferous, how rocks had sunk their ship. She had used those rocks
to orient herself in between the flashes of lightning. She had
kicked and kicked for so long that her legs felt like worn leather
by the time they finally reached land. She told him of her journey
through the hills of Advala to the farmhouse where she met the
elderly couple. They had been leery of her at first, unwilling to
trust anyone from Edhen. If not for the old man softening to Lia’s
plight it’s likely Khile would never have survived.