Savage Bounty

by Matt Wallace

  Her touch is rough and calloused, and brings Evie great and immediate comfort.

  “I love you, girl, as one of my own. We may very well die tomorrow trying to storm that city, but that’s no reason to expect it. You hear?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Sleep now. Bam will stay at that door if I have to nail ’im to it.”

  Evie nods obediently, suppressing the laughter tickling her throat.

  Mother Manai finally leaves her, unknowingly taking with her that brief moment of comfort and consolation.

  Alone again in her borrowed quarters, Evie hugs the blanket tighter around her body and stares down at the floor beyond the foot of the bed.

  Her would-be assassin has left a puddle of blood in his wake.

  Evie does not see a small puddle, however. She sees a river of blood, the one that will drown the battlefield in the morning, and she knows that, win or lose, they will all swim in it.

  SCREWING, WITH YOUR HEAD

  “HE’S HERE, LEXI,” THE TWO-FACED killer whispers in her ear with mocking jubilation. “Brio is here. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what all of this was about?”

  They haven’t bound her to the chair, but Lexi finds it just as difficult to move. Whatever was in the tea Daian forced her to sip (the threat of that force contained solely in the coldness of his eyes when he handed her the cup), it has made her limbs feel as heavy as felled tree trunks.

  Lexi’s eyelids have no trouble remaining open, however. In fact, she can’t seem to close them even when she wants to.

  “Say hello to your one true love, my lady,” Daian urges her.

  For once, he isn’t lying. It’s Brio, the man she has loved practically since they were both born, or at least as long as she can recall. Raised together, the children of the kith-kins that came together to form Gen Stalbraid, long-serving pleaders for the Bottoms.

  Brio manages to make his simple pleader’s tunic resplendent. He looks healthy and happy and pleased to see her. His smile is warm and open, and exactly the way Lexi remembers it. He enters the receiving room of her guest quarters/prison cells on Burr’s hidden estate. There is only an ornate, antique table between them.

  She wants to speak to him, to ask him how he’s come back to her, come to be here in this place. Lexi can’t seem to command her voice.

  “Oh, he’s brought a friend,” Daian observes. “You aren’t the only one who has made new acquaintances in your time apart. Isn’t that the girl you hired to find him?”

  A smaller, more slender figure steps in front of Brio. A woman.

  It’s Ashana, who renamed herself Evie in order to infiltrate the Savage Legion, to find and rescue Brio at Lexi’s behest. She was a member of Gen Stalbraid once, an orphan they took in off the street to train as a retainer, like Taru. But unlike Taru, the girl was put out by Brio’s father when it became clear Ashana was in love with his son.

  The last time Lexi saw her, she was wearing the costume of that Evie character, the stinking rags of a poor woman from the Bottoms who had taken to the bottle. Her hair had been greasy and disheveled, her face streaked with muck.

  The Evie who has stepped into her line of sight is beautiful, draped in a shimmering silk shift that seems to barely touch her smooth skin. Her dark hair is crisp and clean and framing her face in perfect ringlets.

  She stands so near to Brio that her back is touching his chest, and noticing that knots Lexi’s stomach. She squirms as much as she’s able to against the chair.

  “They seem to have become quite close, no?” Daian asks her, suggestively.

  As he says those words, Brio slides his hands over Evie’s shoulders. Lexi watches her childhood rival for Brio’s heart shiver visibly under his touch.

  Confusion bubbles in Lexi’s brain. She feels her heart begin to race faster.

  “Yes,” Daian whispers seductively. “Very, very close, from the looks of it.”

  Brio’s fingers curl beneath the straps of Evie’s shift. In one quick, almost violent movement, he jerks them over her shoulders and down her arms, exposing her breasts. As he encircles her with his arms and cups her breasts in his hands, Evie reaches up and digs her fingers into Brio’s perfectly sculpted hair, gripping his head and forcing his face into the crook of her neck, where he sucks and bites hungrily.

  Lexi’s chest painfully constricts. She tries to close her eyes and shake her head in denial, but her muscles are still frozen.

  “Doesn’t seem like a man who needs rescuing to me,” Daian remarks. “If he was ever lost, he seems found now. It just wasn’t you he wanted to find him.”

  Lexi feels acid rise in her throat. It burns her lips as she finally manages to force out some sound.

  “N—no…”

  “I’d never ask you to trust me,” Daian assures her. “Trust your own eyes. Are these the people you’ve been fighting so hard to honor with your actions? With your service to Crache?”

  Lexi has no choice but to watch as Brio tears away the illusory material of the shift still clinging to Evie’s body. As he pulls off his own tunic, Evie grinds her naked hips back against him.

  She sputters and shakes, but she still can’t will her limbs to respond.

  “I know this is hard. Not as hard as Brio, clearly, but I am sorry for how difficult this is. But you need to see this. You need to know who your friends are, and who they are not.”

  The false sympathy in Daian’s voice is an added edge to the dagger in her heart.

  Lexi wants to claw out her own eyes as Brio enters Evie. In the next moment, they are fucking like animals three feet in front of Lexi, both moaning and screaming as if they’re moments from exploding into a thousand pieces.

  “They’re not worth saving, Lexi,” her captor insists. “Nothing about the world in which you were raised is worth saving. It’s all made of lies and betrayal and pain. It’s time to embrace a new world, and new friends, ones who would never hurt you like this.”

  He’s right about the pain of it all. The agony of what she’s witnessing is unbearable.

  This was a deep fear she’d had, one that Lexi never voiced even in her own mind. Now it is happening right in front of her, and nothing about the world makes sense. Nothing can matter if this is truly happening. Nothing she has done means anything.

  You don’t really believe this, do you? another voice asks her, one that doesn’t belong to Daian.

  For the first time, Lexi is able to slightly shift her gaze from the sickening scene in front of her.

  Her mother is somehow there in the room with them, alive and vibrant and not beset by a trace of the deteriorating sickness that took her from Lexi so long ago. She’s standing off to the side, looking at Lexi with features twisted in anger for her daughter. Her mother’s eyes, however, are soft and filled with sympathy.

  She can’t be here, Lexi thinks. It doesn’t make sense. She’s dead. None of this makes sense.

  There is a reason for that, her mother says, as if she can hear Lexi’s thoughts. This isn’t real, daughter. It may look and sound and smell and feel real, but it isn’t. It can’t be, because these people care about you, and they would not betray you. Brio would not betray you. Would he?

  But he has. He is. She’s watching it happen.

  Concentrate! her mother demands. Look at them and focus! You are stronger than this! Be the stem, not the petal.

  We are not flowers. We do not wilt.

  Those words have guided Lexi through most of her life, through all the hardships of the past year. They were her mother’s words, when she was alive. Her mother was always the one she went to, always the voice of reason and truth and resolve and encouragement.

  Lexi forces herself to watch Brio still thrusting lustily into Evie, and Evie gratefully writhing against him. Lexi strains with her mind, her gaze narrowing as if she is trying to look through them.

  The two lovers humping each other like rabbits don’t disappear, but they change before Lexi’s eyes. The man no longer loo
ks like Brio. He’s younger and far fitter, his muscles chiseled and sculpted. Neither is the girl Evie. She is some pale, blond waif.

  A cold relief spreads through Lexi’s body. That same icy wave seems to shake free her voice, as well.

  “I don’t know who these people are,” she says through gritted teeth. “But they are not my people. That is not my husband. I can see them now. I see the truth.”

  She hears Daian sigh.

  “That will do, you two,” he says, speaking to the couple splayed upon the table.

  The pair immediately stops. They are both still breathing hard and labored from their coupling, but all of the passion vanishes from their faces, from the language of their bodies. Their enraptured moans cease as quickly as if they’d been echoes brought by the wind.

  It’s clear the lust was also an act.

  The image of Lexi’s mother has disappeared, however, gone with the rest of the illusions in the room.

  Lexi laughs, bitterly, feeling tacky sweat covering most of her skin.

  “That is very clever,” she commends Daian. “Mixing the real with the imagined. It makes it quite difficult to tell them apart.”

  “That was the idea, anyway,” Daian says, not even attempting to mask his irritation.

  They are trying to change her. That much is clear. They are trying to break her down and turn her against all that she loves. It must be so Burr and the Ignobles can use Lexi to achieve whatever their ultimate goal is. They want her to willingly give herself and her allegiance to them.

  As the two performers climb down from the table and begin to gather up their strewn clothing, Daian paces in front of the chair, gazing down at her with a wry grin.

  “Burr puts so much stock in this meddling of the mind. I told her, giving me an hour of solitude with you and a few of my favorite forged implements would be quicker and far more effective.”

  She stares up at him defiantly. “You can hurt me. You are undeniably good at that. But you cannot change me. That power is beyond you, beyond any tool you possess. And if you cannot change me, you cannot win.”

  Lexi thinks she detects the briefest crack in his maniacal veneer. However, Daian is now smiling wider than before. He leans down, resting his palms against his knees, his face inches from hers.

  “Those are truly beautiful words, and they express a lovely, worthwhile sentiment. But you and I both know they aren’t true. I’ve already changed you. Quite a bit, I imagine.”

  “Only in the way an infection changes you. Infections heal.”

  Daian nods, casually. “Or they kill you. Wouldn’t you say death counts as change? What’s more transformative than that, really?”

  Lexi’s eyes turn deathly cold. “I’m too tired to bite your nose off,” she says. “You should be grateful for that.”

  Daian laughs. He leans away from her, standing to his full height.

  “I like you more and more every day, you know. I’m very glad you’re here. This place can be quite boring.”

  He turns and begins following his performing sex minions from the guest rooms.

  “The immobilizing effects of Burr’s potion will wear off in a bit,” he calls to her without looking back. “This was fun. We’ll do it again soon.”

  After they’re gone and the doors have been closed, Lexi can only wait for the privilege of free movement to return. She tries to shake Daian’s words from her head.

  You’re going to have to kill him first, you know.

  It’s her mother’s voice again.

  Lexi casts her glance to every corner of the room, but the image of the woman has not returned.

  “What do you mean?”

  Whatever their plans for you, however you acquiesce to them, whatever else happens, that man is going to kill you one day. You can see it in his eyes. He dreams about it. The thought gives him pleasure.

  Lexi closes her eyes, feeling the truth of that. The realization churns her guts.

  “What if I can’t?” she asks the ghost in her head. “I’m not… I have never harmed anyone that way… let alone…”

  You have to decide whether you value your life more than not taking the life of another. And you have to know there is nothing you can’t do to survive. If you have not learned that by now, no one can teach it to you.

  Tears are welling up in Lexi’s eyes.

  “I wish you really were here,” she whispers.

  RUNED

  A GRAYING, PEG-LEGGED SKRAIN FILLS Taru’s cup with muddy water. They look up into the soldier’s withered, joyless face. His eyes don’t even see Taru. He moves to the next wretch waiting for refreshment, toiling along like a weary spirit shuffling endlessly through limbo.

  The grizzled, hobbling veteran is one of only a handful of Skrain detailed to “guard” the Savages, though mostly the Skrain seem to ignore them in favor of huddling together, drinking and gambling and commiserating sullenly among themselves. Those of the soldiers who have not aged beyond the battlefield have taken injuries that would prevent them from effectively fighting by Skrain standards, mostly missing arms and legs.

  Apparently, the Savage Legion is also where Crache sends its forgotten soldiers.

  The former retainer newly conscripted into the Savage Legion is seated on a stump in one of the many clearings dominating the great forest immediately east of the Capitol. When they were young and first came into the service of Gen Stalbraid, Brio’s father would bring Taru along with him and his boy to fish the ponds and hunt green pheasants. The forest was vast then, full and lush, the trees tall and ancient. Now the saplings outnumber their more mature fellows, and huge sections of the forest have been clear-cut to the ground.

  Even as they sit there with the other newly coined legionnaires, Taru can hear the crews of three different Gens with lumber concessions working in other parts of the forest. The sounds of chopping axes and sawing blades echo through the clearing in all directions.

  Taru stares at their reflection shrouded in the murky waters of the cup. Bluish-green runes have already formed in both of Taru’s cheeks. It took a half-dozen unenthusiastic Skrain to hold them down while the minter forced a freshly pressed coin down the retainer’s gullet. A portrait of every one of their faces, including the dead-eyed minter, has been added to the walls of the revenge museum inside Taru’s head.

  They take a sip of the water that is more brown than clear, gag, and immediately spit it out onto the ground. Taru angrily tosses away the cup and scratches at the stubbly sides of their scalp. Their blond hair is rioting wild down the back of their neck, and Taru would murder for a razor or even a proper knife without an edge full of chips and rust.

  Erazo scurries past Taru, toting the short, bulbous bludgeon that is somehow wholly appropriate for the stubby man and his blunt and wooden personality. The legionnaires’ chief wrangler ascends another one of the permanent stumps pockmarking the clearing to address his company.

  “You’ve watered your filthy holes!” he shouts at them in his raspy voice. “Now get on your feet! We’re moving!”

  “Where’re we going?” a scrawny, white-bearded dungeon rat of a man asks the wrangler.

  Erazo nods to one of the brutes on his staff, who smartly slaps the man across the ear, eliciting a high-pitched squeal.

  Taru takes a deep breath, hanging their head in order to compose themself. They never could abide bullies, but these are special circumstances.

  The irony is that, in a way, the brutal little man treats Taru more fairly as a slave than they were treated by most in the Capitol as a free person and retainer of a Gen. There doesn’t appear to be any prejudice against the Undeclared here.

  In the Savage Legion, they are all equally inhuman.

  “We’re marching to the northern coast,” Erazo informs them. “Where you’ll be loaded onto boats for the journey east to the front line. There is glory, gold, and freedom waiting for you in the fight against these rebel scum!”

  Taru cannot help themself. They laugh openly and bitterl
y at that statement.

  The retainer doesn’t have to raise their head to know Erazo is staring nine-tailed lashes at them from his perch, but they bring their eyes up to meet his anyway.

  “Did I say something funny, Savage?” he asks them.

  Taru shakes their head. “Not at all. I was just wondering, how many have actually claimed this glory, gold, and freedom? How many marked like us?”

  Erazo hops down from the stool and wades through the withered crop of emaciated new recruits seeming to sprout weakly from the ground.

  “Haven’t you learned yet?” he barks at the retainer. “I don’t answer to you or anyone!”

  Though Taru knows they shouldn’t, they stand to stare down at the wrangler.

  “We all answer to someone,” the retainer says, coolly.

  Erazo, with surprising speed and agility, swings his bludgeon into the back of Taru’s left knee, folding their leg and dropping the former retainer down to all fours.

  Taru groans more from the frustration and anger than the pain, though there is a copious amount of that, too. They push themself up from the ground by their hands only to have Erazo kick one of their wrists out from under them.

  “That knee’ll be hell on the march,” he tells Taru. “But it’ll heal. That’s me pulling my strike. You talk pretty, so I bet I seem a brainless hoss to you. But I know my job. You’re a big bitch. Or bastard. However you like. You’ve had training, it’s clear enough. You are better stock than I usually get. So I’ll see you to your first battle healthy enough. But don’t press me. Around here, even good stock is easily replaced by enough of the bad, and I get plenty of that.”

  Taru has already made the decision to punch the little man in his balls, hopefully with enough force to permanently recede both tiny orbs into Erazo’s body. The retainer leans back and balances themself on one knee, cradling the other as it begins to throb in earnest.

  Even on their knees, the top of Taru’s head rises to the height of the chief wrangler’s chest.