Wrath of Lions (76 page)

He gawked at the handle, at all the blood, and then back up at Bren.

“Why?” he was able to croak out. His throat felt as if something were lodged into it.

Bren cast his eyes aside and turned away from him. By the rise and fall of his shoulders, it looked like he was crying. That was when Catherine approached, kneeling down before him and placing a velvety hand on his cheek. Her skin was hot to the touch, almost burning. The expression on her face was an odd mixture of resolve and sorrow.

“My poor Matthew,” Catherine whispered. “Does it hurt?”

He groaned.

“The pain will end soon, darling. Worry not.”

His head grew faint, and he felt his body begin to tip over. Catherine guided him to the floor, resting his head atop the hard wood. He coughed, and a spray of red left his mouth, forming tiny dots on Catherine’s elegant dress. His chest hitched, and he began to sob despite the pain.

His voice was nothing more than a sigh when he asked, “Why?” once more.

Catherine shook her head. “I do love you, you know. I always have, ever since I was a girl. But love fades, love
changes
, and when that happens, the only thing you can do is change along with it.”

Matthew’s head lolled. Catherine grabbed him by the hair, making sure their eyes met.

“I know you love me in your own way, Matthew,” she continued. “And I never lied to you. I have long since forgiven your trysts and your long absences from our home. That is not why I must do this.”

The pain became too much to bear, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, but then a heavy hand struck him across the cheek, returning him to wakefulness.

“Stay with me, Matthew. I have not made this decision out of spite, but out of
survival
. You are a powerful man, and yet you are weak, so weak. Your fortune, though vast, pales in comparison to what it
should
have been. When this war began, you freely gave of your own ships, of your own purse, of your own
people
, when Karak came calling. It was not until Romeo and Cleo invited you to their secret meeting that you showed any backbone. Though even that should not have happened. You should have perished on your way to that meeting.”

Matthew’s eyes widened. “You…” he moaned.

“Yes, me. One of your guards told me of your summit with the brothers, so I brought hired men into the city through your
own secret whore tunnel. Unfortunately, the men I hired were simple brigands, not skilled enough to deal with Moira and the lug. I learned my lesson.”

Matthew’s eyes flicked to Bren as his vision began to waver.

Catherine glanced at the bodyguard, who still had his back to them.

“Ah, yes, your protector. A week after the failed attempt on your life, I offered him half the coin I had stowed away, along with the deed to the lands we hold north of the river. He almost leapt at the offer.” She
tsk’d
at him. “You have always been a silly man, Matthew. You cannot get much sillier than blindly trusting a man whose love of gold outweighs his love of you.”

“Sorry, boss,” Bren’s cracking voice said.

Catherine frowned. “Don’t you see, my love? I do this for our children. For our girls, for little Ryan. You would have ruined us by giving Karak all we had and then letting the Conningtons swoop in to take what remained. There needed to be someone smarter in charge of the family fortune, someone with the stomach to make tough decisions. That someone is
me
, dear husband. It always has been, though you were too proud to see it. Perhaps now you do.”

She let go of his hair, and his cheek slammed against the floor. His thoughts were awash with his wife’s betrayal, of the life that was rapidly leaving him. Images of his children flashed in front of his eyes as tears poured down his face. He would never see Mary get married, never watch Christina ride a horse for the first time, never teach Ryan how to sail along the rough ocean waters.

“I’m…sorry…,” he whispered to their memory.

“You are indeed,” said Catherine in reply.

Matthew closed his eyes, and his body lost all feeling. He was brought back to better times, when he and Catherine had been but two teenagers in love, happily frolicking through the reeds, drinking wine while sitting on a blanket in front of the ocean, making love beneath the full moon. Somewhere in the back of his mind,
he knew that he was being dragged along the floor, and he heard Catherine shrieking in horror. Then the heat of the sun was on his face for the final time, and the world seemed to stop spinning as the dying sounds of battle filled the air.

The last thing he heard was Catherine’s voice, shouting above the din.

“My husband! They murdered my husband!”

They sure did,
he thought, and then everything went black.

C
HAPTER

41

A
haesarus didn’t like this. Not one bit.

He and Turock Escheton stood in a secluded room in the rear of Blood Tower, staring at the man tied to the pole opposite him. The man was dressed in one of Abigail’s nightshirts, which was torn and spotted with blood. There was still more blood on his chin, coating his brow, dripping from his missing left ear.

Oddly, the prisoner was grinning.

Turock grunted, twirling a switch in his hand. “You have something to say?” he asked the bound man. He pointed to the map hanging on the wall, the same one they had taken from the man’s tent in the Tinderlands. “What do those red marks mean? Are there other factions?”

The man spit a bloody wad of phlegm onto the floor and said nothing.

“This is unnecessary,” Ahaesarus said. “This is
wrong
.”

“Spare me your sermons, Warden,” said Turock.

“I will not. You requested my help, and my council comes with it.”

“Bollocks. I asked for your muscle, and your ability to see truth, not your brain.”

Turock stepped up to the prisoner, reared his hand back, and lashed out with the switch. It whistled as it flew through the air, striking the bound man across the cheek. A new gash opened up, another scar to join the others that marred the left side of his face. Still he remained silent. Turock wiped the bloody switch on his robe, which had been lime green before they’d started but was now crisscrossed with red lines.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice a low growl. “Is the camp where my men captured you the only one? If not, where they are on the map?”

Ahaesarus bristled from the knowledge that he was being included as one of Turock’s
men
. He might be one of humanity’s Wardens, beholden only to Ashhur, yet he had gone into the Tinderlands at the cranky spellcaster’s bidding, and then he’d hastily summoned him as soon as they returned with their quarry. He had stood silently by with his brethren as the humans mocked and ridiculed the captive after draping the womanly garb over his head.
You say you aren’t a soldier,
he thought.
Yet this is how you act?

“How large is your force?” continued Turock. “What are Karak’s plans? When does the real attack begin? Where?”

All of these questions went unanswered, the grin still pasted on the captive’s bleeding face. The spellcaster huffed in frustration, lashed him with the switch again, and then stormed away.

Ahaesarus was like Turock’s shadow as he paced.

“This is a hard man, wholly devoted to his god,” he said. “Look at him, actually
look
at him. He has endured trials in his life that far outdo any torment you might bring him. There must be—”

“Is that so?” Turock snapped, wheeling on him, a mad gleam in his eye. “You think I couldn’t give him worse? Let us see, shall we?”

“Turock, no.”

The spellcaster brushed aside Ahaesarus’s hand and stomped toward the prisoner. He began murmuring, the tips of his fingers
developing a glow. The bound man stared at him, his grin faltering for the first time in four hours. Ahaesarus, his own anger steadily rising, reached out to stop him, but he retreated when Turock shot him a look. Turock was volatile, and there was no telling what he might do if Ahaesarus tried to be forceful. His words would have to do the job for him.

“You are a good man, Turock,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice steady. “Ashhur has often sung your praises, as have others in Mordeina. Your people trust you. Do not ruin that praise, that trust, by torturing this man. You are better than that. Do not become a monster.”

“A monster?” asked Turock without turning around. He raised his hand, the glow of his fingertips intensifying to bright flames. “Murderers of children, assassins in the night, a man who lets those he loves suffer and die…
those
are monsters, Warden. This bastard you see before you…he fits two of those categories. I refuse to become the third.”

He tore open the nightshirt’s frilly bodice and pressed his fingers into the man’s chest. Fire crackled across the prisoner’s flesh, not on the surface but
beneath
, spreading outward in a pattern like cracks in a sheet of ice. One of the glowing veins split the skin, and a thin spiral of black smoke rose into the air. Sweat beaded on the man’s brow, his neck pulled taut, and his smirk abandoned him, but he remained admirably silent nonetheless.

That silence only drove Turock to try harder.

He pressed his other glowing hand to the prisoner’s temple.

“You say I’m a good man,” he said. “That might have been true at one point.” The gray hair on the bound man’s right temple burst into flame. “But we have lived in turmoil for a year, Warden. A
year
!”

He snuffed out the flames, took a step back, and then offered a few more words of magic. From the cracks in the stone floor rose tiny vines, which danced before the prisoner’s feet, then plunged
their pointed tips beneath his toenails. The man squirmed, grinding his teeth in obvious pain as they drove deeper and deeper into the quick, drawing blood.

“Men, women, and children perish while helping to forge the weapons we need to defend ourselves. I have been kept awake at night in expectation of the next assault. Nature was once full of wonder, but now every bird’s caw, every bat’s tweet, every insect’s chirp might be a signal to rain fiery death down on all I created.”

The vines withdrew, retreating into the cracks that had sprouted them. The prisoner huffed for breath.

“I understand how you feel,” Ahaesarus said. “You forget where my kind came from.”

“Yes, you brave Wardens who hid like children in your cages while winged demons slaughtered your loved ones. Forgive me if I don’t have that kind of restraint.”

“That is unfair. We were not given a choice.”

“You’re right,” said Turock. “But we have been.”

With a snap of his fingers, needlelike shards of ice formed in the air around the prisoner. Turock waggled his hands, and at once the shards drove into the bound man’s flesh. He struggled in his restraints, a human cactus prickled from head to toe with crystalline barbs. He uttered the first sound Ahaesarus had heard from his mouth since his capture: he moaned.

“I am a father,” Turock said as he slowly went about grinding his palm against the ice shards, one by one. “I have not seen my three youngest sons for so long, I have forgotten their faces. They were only supposed to be in Mordeina for a month, to tutor under Howard Baedan and spend time with their grandmother. Byron is a man now, eighteen and full of vigor, with Jarak not far behind. And Pendet…our baby…do you know what a year means to a seven-year-old? It is everything. I fear I may never see them again, and even if I do, Pendet might look at me as a stranger.”

“Yet you still have your children here, children who love and need you just as much as they.”

Turock cackled. “Ha! Lauria is married, Cethlynn soon to be, and Dorek is as much my apprentice now as he is my son. I need
them
, and their partners, more than they need me.”

“Does that not count for something?”

Turock finally turned around, and spittle flew from his lips when he spoke. “Something?
Something?
I want
everything
, Warden. I want my children, my wife, my
people
to be safe!”

“Make it so, then,” Ahaesarus said, a hard edge entering his tone. “If you think your soul is an acceptable price, then so be it. But I will not be an accomplice to this torment. You have turned your back on Ashhur’s mercy.”

“What, you wish me to bake him a cake? Or perhaps draw him a bath and dangle grapes over his mouth?” Turock pointed an accusing finger at the prisoner. “This man would kill us in a heartbeat should we give him the chance, and you wish for me to give him
mercy
?”

Ahaesarus folded his arms over his chest. “Should he or any of Karak’s children attempt to take the life of myself or any of my Wards, I would strike him down without a second thought. But I would
strike him down
, Turock, not prolong his suffering.
That
is the mercy I speak of.”

Turock shook his head. “We need to know.…We have been trapped here for so long.…”

“If you are trapped, it is of your own doing,” laughed the prisoner.

Ahaesarus and Turock both wheeled around. The man was upright in his binds, head cocked, staring at them. The ice shards had melted, leaving him soaked and covered with tiny, leaking red wounds. He winced, flexed his jaw, and then seemed to shake off the pain.

“Your isolation ended when Uther Crestwell died,” the prisoner continued, and he chuckled even as a bit of blood ran down his lips.

Ahaesarus was too shocked to answer. The same could not be said for Turock.

“So those are your first words to us? We’ll see how much you laugh when your balls are gone.”

The spellcaster stepped back and cupped his hand. The blue glow around it intensified, and the prisoner doubled over, finally screaming. Ahaesarus forcibly grabbed Turock by the arm, spinning him around, and the spell died in a cascade of slaps and curses.

“Out!” Turock screamed at him. “Leave my tower now! Leave my fucking lands as well!”

“I will not, Escheton,” the Warden shouted. “The man is telling the truth!”