by Grace Draven
Unfazed by the killing, Azarion stripped the soldier of his breastplate, helmet, and weaponry and tossed the body into the cell. He caught the keys Gilene tossed him with a nod of thanks.
Torchlight cast his sublime face in sharp relief, transforming it into a skeletal mask made even more macabre by bestial-bright green eyes. Gladiator, Pit fighter, he’d probably shed enough blood to fill a dozen washtubs.
A jagged ache pressed needles into her right thigh, hip, and lower back—the first warning of the agony to come. She flinched and surrendered her illusion of Hanimus with a moan.
“Woman?” Azarion gave her a puzzled look.
She ignored him, intent on escaping the city before the price of her magic brought her to her knees. She assumed the illusion of the old slave again and turned her back on Azarion. “Our agreement is met, gladiator,” she said over her shoulder.
“What is your name?”
Fresh air and the promise of escape gave her tired feet wings. “Forgotten,” she murmured as she hurried away from him.
His gaze burned holes between her shoulder blades as she fled back the way she came. An invisible fire licked at her leg and back, slowing her stride and making her whimper. She cast off all illusion just as she escaped the catacombs. By the time she merged into the flow of foot traffic on the narrow streets, she limped.
Sanctuary, personified by her two brothers and a pony cart, waited at the nearby Fell Gates. Nylan’s face twisted into a fierce frown when he saw her. She was so close. Each year she fell into his arms and sobbed on his shoulder as he and their younger brother, Luvis, settled her into the cart for the trip home. This year would be no different.
Sick with pain and desperate to reach her siblings, she barely heard the thunder of hoofbeats or the panicked shouts of the crowd behind her. Nylan’s horrified expression and Luvis’s shouted “Gilene, look out!” made her pivot.
Time slowed. Road dust hung in the air in a choking miasma. Pedestrians stood flattened along shop walls or leapt into the shallow safety of doorways. A soldier bore down on her at full gallop, his mount’s hooves pounding out a relentless beat as he consumed the distance between them. Gilene glimpsed the rider’s eyes—as green and hard as sea glass. Familiar.
“No,” she whispered and spun away in a futile bid to avoid him.
Too late. He leaned from the saddle, arm outstretched toward her. A terrific force wrenched her upward, almost garroting her with the collar of her own shift as the fabric pulled tight. She landed belly down across a pair of muscled thighs. Air gusted from her lungs in a hard whoosh.
It was nothing compared to the crippling shock of pain that torched her back and thigh. Reduced to emitting only breathless grunts, she arched and twisted in her captor’s imprisoning grip.
The world careened in all directions as the horse balked at her struggles, and Azarion fought to bring it under control. Snarled curses, her brothers’ diminishing shouts, and the mount’s protesting whinnies all blended into a mad cacophony while Gilene thrashed even harder on the gladiator’s lap.
A sudden crack of agony blossomed across the side of her head. Her vision went dark, and she knew no more.
CHAPTER FOUR
The captive agacin twitched across Azarion’s lap like a dying trout. His mount, stolen from one of the cavalry stables, snorted in protest at the strange movements and jerked against his rider’s guidance. With a hand on the fire witch’s back and another holding the reins, Azarion maneuvered the horse across the narrow bend of a feeder stream that traveled down the mountains and merged into the Holstet river. Kraelag lay behind him, hidden by a cloud of wind-stirred dust and the blinding rays of the setting sun. He kept an ear tuned for voices, the bays of hunting hounds, even the thwang of a bowstring as an archer loosed an arrow to bring him down.
This was a temporary reprieve. He’d barreled through the city’s crowded streets and out the main gates without raising a single warning cry from his guards. Some of the soldiers he passed had even laughed and cheered him on his way at the sight of the unconscious woman draped in front of him across the saddle. No one was the wiser that the Gladius Prime, a priceless slave and a favorite toy of the empress, had just escaped his prison. Dressed in the military garb of the Empire, he was only a soldier, hot for a woman and eager to tup her, willing or not, in the nearest straw heap.
He needed to put as much distance as possible between him and the capital before the alarm sounded and a contingent of trackers hit the trails to find him. They wouldn’t kill him—only return him to the Pit and the arms of the empress.
East and north of the stream lay the belt of Krael’s farmland, its fertile plains fed by the silt drained from the river. Two days’ ride on a fast horse and he’d reach the northern edge of the capital’s immediate land holdings—from there, a dangerous trek across the vassal lands of the Nunari and finally to the steppes of the Sky Below. If he was lucky, he’d manage to evade capture while crossing open fields, avoid being shot by Nunari clansmen for trespassing, and keep the witch from escaping or setting him alight when his back was turned.
“Be my protection, Fire Mother,” he prayed to Agna. “Be my strength.”
For once, the vicious games so loved by the Kraelians played to his advantage. No one cared if a Pit guard lay dead in the catacombs, and Azarion’s handlers would assume Herself’s favorite had once more been summoned to her chambers. He had until the small hours, when the celebrations and street parties ended, before the hunt began. He might even have until dawn if Hanimus was too far gone in his cups or the arms of a whore to notice no palace guard returned his best gladiator to his cell.
Capture wasn’t an option. He had learned to cut a throat long before his cousin sold him into slavery, and he had lost count of the number of men who had choked on their own blood from the slide of his knife in the arena. He would drown in his before he let Kraelian hunters drag him back to that cell.
Many years had passed since he’d been on a horse, and he felt clumsy in the saddle. The invisible daggers stabbing his side didn’t help. The agacin’s wrap eased some of the discomfort, but every beat of the galloping horse’s hooves against the earth was a punch to the side. He gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore it. He had three things to accomplish: stay in the saddle, keep hold of the agacin, and find shelter for them in a place far enough from the capital that he could rest for a few hours before taking to the road once more.
The sun had dropped far below the horizon, and night filled the sky with stars when the tired horse finally topped a small rise and slowed to a walk. The witch had regained consciousness, but only enough to give a small moan. She didn’t open her eyes. Azarion frowned as he glanced down at her, laid across his thighs. In his bid to keep her from tumbling them both from the saddle, he’d accidentally clipped the side of her head with his knee, hard enough to knock her out, but not for this long. This torpor of hers stemmed from something else.
“Agacin.” He tapped her lightly on the back. She moaned again but didn’t wake. He was tempted to stop the horse and lift her off his lap for a better look at her. She might well be sick. Her face had been ghostly under the mask of her illusions when she unlocked his cell door. Shadows painted crescent moons under her eyes, and her lips had lost what little color they possessed. His hands tightened on the reins to slow the horse to a stop when a sound reached his ears that turned his blood to ice: the baying of hounds.
Someone had discovered his escape.
He slammed his heels into the horse’s sides, and the animal leapt forward, galloping toward the jagged silhouette of a woodland in the distance.
They rode at a dead run, the echo of the hounds and the horns of hunters pursuing them. The horse labored valiantly up a gentle incline where a line of evergreen trees began their march down the opposite side of the slope.
Azarion slowed their wild ride to a nervous pace once they reached the r
idge, as much to rest the tired horse as to gain his bearings. They couldn’t stay long. The moon’s light slanted away from them to illuminate the trees and cast him and the agacin in shadow. It wouldn’t last, and the hunters closing the distance would see them.
At the bottom of the slope, where the trees parted on either side of an overgrown path, the remains of a city lay in darkness. Not a single flame from an oil lamp or candle could be seen, and the silence pulsing from its heart was a palpable thing, a waiting hush that tainted the breeze. No song of night birds, no drone of insects. Not even the watery call of frogs.
Azarion stared down at the dark city, pondering what to do. He was nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion, one arm numb from keeping the agacin from sliding off the horse. The animal was worn out by the hard, steady pace and the labor of carrying two riders. Its sides swelled and shrank like hard-worked bellows.
He could run the horse into the ground until it dropped from under him. It would put more distance between Azarion and his pursuers, but he’d then be without a horse and forced to leave the agacin behind while he fled on foot. Injured as he was, his chances of hiding from or outrunning a hunting party were nonexistent. Below them, the abandoned city crouched, offering a roof over their heads and a place to hide for a short time while the horse rested.
Still, Azarion hesitated while an uneasy feeling crawled up his spine. Surely even the hunters, driven by duty, a promise of bounty, or fear of the empress, would hesitate to follow them into this place. They would think him mad for hiding there. All made wide berths around the haunted city of Midrigar.
The agacin herself had capitulated to his demands only when he threatened her with the possibility of seeing her village destroyed like Midrigar if the rulers of the Empire found out they had been deceived.
Midrigar sprawled across the landscape in its unnatural silence, repulsing and beckoning him by turns. Hiding behind its walls guaranteed him safety from the Empire’s trackers, but what lay beyond the shattered gates, waiting for the unwitting or foolhardy traveler?
He tapped the horse’s sides, coaxing the animal down the slope before guiding it to a spot not far from the western gate. Not far for an uninjured man unencumbered, but an interminable distance for one with cracked ribs and carrying supplies as well as the dead weight of an unconscious woman. It couldn’t be helped. He needed the horse, and he needed Midrigar, and the two would not meet, no matter how much he might wish otherwise.
Within the shelter of evergreens, he found a place for his mount to graze. It happily ignored his actions in favor of eating and stood docile as Azarion eased himself off its back and paused a moment to lean against the saddle to take shallow breaths. The bloodbath in the arena followed by the brawl in the empress’s chambers and a round of fucking in her bed had drained the life out of him. The pain in his side, while piercing and burdensome, reminded him with every breath that he hadn’t died yet.
With night fully on them, the air had turned chilly, still carrying the last vestiges of old winter. Azarion shivered from the cold as he looped and tied the reins around the branch of a young fir. He pulled the supply satchels free of the saddle rings and dropped them to the ground before lifting the agacin from the horse’s back to lay her gently on the grass. He left the animal saddled in case he had to abandon Midrigar and ride away fast.
The agacin had rolled to her side and curled in on herself. Azarion knelt beside her, staring at her features, pale in the moonlight. A bruise marred her cheekbone, the skin puffy under her eye. He hadn’t meant to strike her in his struggle to keep them both in the saddle. He didn’t blame her for fighting to get free. In her place, he’d have done the same and more.
Were she a Savatar woman, she would look for the first opportunity to sink a knife between his shoulder blades or set him ablaze. Even so, he hadn’t failed to notice her resolve or the abhorrence of him in her gaze. He would do well to stay on his guard when she revived. The deadliest adversary wasn’t always the fiercest, and he suspected that, like him, this woman would do whatever was necessary to obtain her freedom.
He stroked her cheek and found it hot to the touch. Fever. Her eyes snapped open, and she cringed away from him. The movement made her cry out, and she gripped her leg, rolling back and forth on her side.
Caught off guard, Azarion covered her mouth with his palm and held her still. “Shh, Agacin,” he whispered. He didn’t think the hunters would hear them yet, but they grew closer every moment. No need to help them in locating their prey.
Had she been injured during their flight from Kraelag beyond the blow from his knee? He remembered her in the street, moving purposefully through the crowd toward a wagon and a man who beckoned to her. Azarion hadn’t noticed at the time, but when he thought back on it, she had limped.
“Agacin,” he said. “Can you stand?” They couldn’t stay here. Midrigar’s questionable sanctuary was their best hope, and Azarion needed the fire priestess to walk there on her own.
“Wake up, Agacin.” He shook her shoulder but got no response. He recalled another man by the cart, his expression as horrified as the first one as they caught sight of Azarion riding toward the witch. He had shouted a word that had made her turn and face what pursued her. Gilene. “Gilene,” he said and shook her harder.
She peered at him with a confused gaze. As memory and awareness seeped in, her eyes widened. She struggled to sit up. Grass and the remnants of dead leaves rustled as she scooted away from him on her haunches. Whatever injury plagued her was forgotten for a moment.
Azarion stayed where he was, waiting for her to settle. He kept a wary eye on her hands, looking for the warning bloom of flame to ignite in her palms.
“Filthy bastard,” she spat at him. “I should have known better than to believe a Pit fighter might keep his word.” Her hand came up to touch her cheek, and she flinched. “You struck me.”
He rose and followed her movements, noting she still hadn’t risen, and the tightness around her mouth spoke of pain as much as it did fury. “Where else are you hurt?”
Her hand went involuntarily to her thigh before she pulled it back. “My face, where you hit me.”
Azarion sighed, his patience thinning even as his unease rose. “It was an accident. Gilene . . .”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Is it your name?”
“No.”
“What is your name?” he asked for the second time since he met her. Her mutinous silence told him he wouldn’t get that piece of information from her anytime soon. He shrugged. Unless her name held magical powers and could transport them from here to the Sky Below, it didn’t matter what she was called.
“Agacin,” he said. She went still at his warning tone. “Tell me if you can walk. If you can’t, I’ll have to carry you, but we aren’t staying here.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” She rolled to her hands and knees and paused, hands curling into fists in the grass, head hanging low between her shoulders. He empathized with her; his own pain made him dizzy, but what care he might be able to give her would have to wait. He bent and scooped her into his arms.
She thrashed in his grip, back arching away from him. He had all he could do to keep a hold on her as she did her level best to climb up him and out of his arms.
“My back,” she said between gasps. “My back is on fire.”
Had anyone else said the same thing, Azarion would have assumed they spoke figuratively, but this was a fire priestess. He set her down, looking for any flames that might be dancing up and down her spine.
She swayed, and her hands shook as she reached for him to steady herself. “Mercy, please, I beg you. Don’t touch me.”
He stared down at the witch’s pale features. If he didn’t need her to gain back his place in Savatar society, he would abandon her. Her injuries, combined with his, put him in jeopardy, slowed him down. Even now, they should be ins
ide Midrigar instead of here at the tree line struggling to walk. They were a pathetic pair—the half dead defeated in their goal to rest among the long dead.
“Which hurts worse? Your leg or your back?”
She blinked at him through a fall of tears. “My back.”
“So be it.” He crouched, ignoring the splinters shooting through his side and the tearing of scabs on his back. The agacin gasped when he flipped her neatly over his shoulder, growling through the agony of holding her weight, even on his uninjured side.
Her hands clutched at his tunic. “Put me down! I’m going to be sick!”
“Then be sick and have done with it.” He bent once more to retrieve the supply satchel he’d taken from the saddle. It held a water flask and road rations to last half a day between two people. She squirmed in his grip, which made him hold on to her even tighter. “Be still,” he warned in his most threatening tone, and her struggles subsided.
Black spots swarmed his vision, and he feared he might pass out before he took his first step toward the west gate. The moment passed, and he trudged to the dead city.
“Where are you taking me?”
He didn’t answer. It hurt to talk, to walk, to breathe. The last two were unavoidable actions, but the first he set aside. She didn’t harangue him for an answer but fell silent, her hands still buried in his tunic. Azarion thanked the Fire Mother that his captive didn’t retch.
By the time they reached the gate, he thought his chest had cracked open and his lungs had caught fire. Though the night was cold, sweat slicked his skin and dripped into his eyes. The agacin, tall and slight, was an anvil on his shoulder. He halted and tipped her down until she found her feet. “We’re here. You must walk the rest of the way,” he said, holding his side as he breathed hard and tried to stay conscious.
She braced a trembling hand on what remained of the gate. “What is this place?”
She’d figure it out sooner than later, so he didn’t bother lying. “Midrigar.”