“Tamriel! Calum!” she cries.
Master Oliver sees her first and pushes past the prince. “What in the Creator’s holy hell are you shouting about, girl? Where are my guards?”
“Th-There— The Rennox!” is all Mercy manages before Master Oliver snags her arm and drags her behind him through the clearing and into the cave. Tamriel and Calum shoot each other bewildered looks and draw their swords. “No! Stay there!” she cries, but they ignore her.
When they return to the cavern with the lake, Mercy points to the tunnel and Master Oliver charges inside. She stumbles behind his large strides, the arm caught in his vice grip beginning to bruise.
“Watch out!” she yells as they round the turn, and Master Oliver stops just in time to avoid sending Akiva flying into the chasm.
“What is the meaning of—” Master Oliver bites back the rest of the question, his eyes roaming from the sinkhole to Parson’s body to the three Rennox who stand across the chasm. He pushes Akiva behind him, blocking the opening of the tunnel with his body. “What do you want?” he calls to the Rennox, his voice trembling with rage.
They chitter among themselves in their low, grating voices. Then they lift the long, crude eudorite spears in their hands and aim the sharp metal tips at Master Oliver’s chest.
His breath hitches. He shoves Mercy and Akiva back, pointing to the cavern from which they had come. “Go! Protect the prince!”
Mercy and Akiva bolt for the cavern, where Clyde and Silas immediately grab Tamriel and push him out of the cave before them. When Mercy passes the lake, she snags her pack and her folded clothes and clutches them to her chest, wishing Master Oliver hadn’t confiscated her daggers and left her in such a vulnerable position.
Akiva pushes her forward, unrelenting even when she trips and goes sprawling, scraping her knees on a jagged patch of rock. Hardly slowing, he lifts her by the underarms and drags her to her feet. It’s all she can do to hold her cloak closed around herself as she runs. Behind them, Master Oliver backs out of the tunnel, wiping sweat from his brow as he levels his sword at something Mercy can’t see. The low, guttural voices of the Rennox echo through the tunnel. Although Mercy has no idea how they crossed the gaping chasm, it’s obvious they’re getting closer with each passing second.
Tamriel, Calum, and the rest of the guards have already retreated, but Akiva hesitates at the opening of the cave. His strong arms close around Mercy to stop her. “Master Oliver, come on! Hurry!”
He waves them away urgently. “Go! Don’t worry about me! Protect the—”
A spear flies out of the dark tunnel and pierces Master Oliver’s shoulder, crunching through armor and bone. An ear-splitting scream rips from his mouth as he falls to his knees.
“Master Oliver!” Akiva cries. He starts toward the Master of the Guard until Mercy yanks him back.
“There’s nothing you can do. If you don’t want to end up like him, we have to go now.”
“But—”
“Run!” Oliver shouts, his voice thick with pain. He pushes to his feet, the spearhead sticking five inches out of his back, and lifts his sword with his uninjured arm. He sways for a moment, then blinks and catches his balance, his face pale. Blood paints his armor crimson. “Go on—I’ll take as many of these bastards down with me as I can.”
Akiva chokes on a sob and doesn’t fight when Mercy pulls him out of the cave and into the clearing.
Calum and the others are running far ahead, shouting something Mercy can’t make out over the jumble of voices. Then a spear flies down from the sky and impales itself in Conrad’s back, a spray of blood flying from his mouth when he falls. When Mercy looks up, her breath catches in her throat.
Countless Rennox stand in the mouths of the caves above them, their obsidian eyes glittering in the sunlight.
One turns toward her and throws his spear. Mercy and Akiva dive out of the way as it sails through the air and thuds into the grass a foot from where they had been standing. Far ahead, Tamriel flinches and turns toward her before Calum grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls him back. “Don’t be an idiot!” he shouts at his cousin. “She can take care of herself!”
They half-stumble, half-sprint through the clearing, ducking and diving out of the way as spears fall from the sky like raindrops. Mercy and Akiva squeeze through an opening in the rocks and bolt for their horses. Behind them, loud booms sound from the clearing. Mercy doesn’t need to look back to know what’s happening: the Rennox are jumping down from their perches, giving chase.
Tamriel and the others climb onto their horses and thunder away, shouting over each other in the chaos. Akiva grabs Mercy and hoists her onto her horse’s saddle.
“Hurry!” she cries when Akiva starts after the four half-saddled horses Parson and the others had left behind. “Forget the damn horses!”
He runs and scrambles onto his saddle.
She digs her heels into her mare’s side and it bursts into a gallop beside Akiva’s, nickering nervously. Tamriel, Calum, and the guards are several yards ahead, their horses kicking up chunks of dirt as they flee.
“Come on!” Calum shouts, pulling his crossbow off his back. He twists in his saddle and levels it at the Rennox which stream after them. “Akiva, let’s go!” He lets a bolt fly, and Mercy watches as it pierces clean through a Rennox’s torso. The creature hardly slows as a web of fissures spreads across its middle. Calum swears and begins reloading his bow.
“Go!” Mercy shouts as he fumbles for another bolt, his hands shaking. “Calum—”
Her horse lets out a bloodcurdling scream and crumples to the ground, throwing Mercy from her saddle. She sails through the air and hits the ground hard, tumbling over the grass. Akiva’s horse narrowly avoids trampling her under its massive hooves.
Someone shouts, but Mercy can’t make out the words through the ringing in her ears. She groans, blinking back tears.
Her cloak is tangled around her bare legs and matted with blood. When she lifts her head, blinking the stars out of her vision, pain jolts through her ribs. They’re bruised, possibly broken. A few feet away, Mercy’s horse lies on her side, blood spurting from the hole in her neck where the spear had shot straight through. Behind her, the Rennox thunder onward, only pausing their chase to retrieve their thrown spears.
“Mercy! Give me your hand!”
Still dazed, she reaches up and a hand closes around hers, the air whooshing out of her lungs when he pulls her onto the saddle behind him.
“Don’t let go!”
Tamriel, Mercy realizes, awash with relief. Tamriel came back for me.
She clutches her cloak with one hand and wraps her other arm around Tamriel’s waist. He spurs his horse, and Mercy nearly slips off when the tall stallion bursts into a gallop. The prince’s guards wait a dozen yards away, shouting his name and waving their arms urgently. Calum fires another bolt at a Rennox, this time taking it down with a shot straight through one of its obsidian eyes. A second later, it jumps to its feet.
Mercy hugs Tamriel tightly as they ride, the distance between them and the Rennox growing each second. No more spears go sailing past. As the ringing in her ears fades, Mercy can hear them growling and chittering in their strange language, but that too is quickly left behind as the guards fall into a protective formation around them. When Mercy closes her eyes and leans her forehead against Tamriel’s back, she realizes that he is trembling just as hard as she is.
8
Mercy
Calum leads them to a small patch of woods south of the Howling Mountains, the Rennox lost somewhere far behind. Tamriel stops his horse and slides off the saddle, then helps Mercy down as she holds her cloak closed around herself. She had dropped her clothes when she had fallen off her horse, but thankfully her pack is still safely strapped to her back.
“YOU IDIOT!” Calum shouts, descending on Tamriel with fury in his eyes. “What the hell were you thinking, going after her? Have you lost your mind? What if you had died?”
“Lowe
r your voice, Calum.” The prince’s grief is plain on his face as he looks around, meeting each of the guards’ eyes before turning back to his cousin. He blinks a few times, still recovering from the shock of the attack. “How many did we lose?”
“Parson, Conrad, and Florian,” Maceo says. “Those damned Rennox—”
“And Master Oliver?”
No one speaks until, finally, Akiva clears his throat.
“He stayed behind so Mercy and I could get out of that cave. The three creatures we saw by the sinkhole, the ones who lured Parson . . . they struck him down.”
“Did you see him die?”
“. . . No, Your Highness.”
“Then he may still be alive. He may have made it out.”
“Tamriel—” Mercy begins.
“He’s a warrior. We left his horse behind. He may come after us.” The prince’s voice is pinched with terror and dangerous, dangerous hope. “He can’t be dead.”
“The spear was eudorite,” Mercy says, grimacing. She’s lucky if she hadn’t broken every single rib when she’d fallen from her horse. Speaking is agony, but Tamriel needs to hear the truth. “When it struck him, it tore through his armor like it was tissue. He’s gone.”
Tamriel’s face crumples. “I can’t believe it,” he whispers. “The Rennox are supposed to be extinct. No one has seen one in decades. And now . . . four of my men are dead because of me.” He looks at Calum helplessly. “Why did they attack?”
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. Could’ve been nothing more than the fact that we were trespassing on their territory.”
“No, Parson didn’t die because of some misunderstanding. He couldn’t have,” Akiva insists. “Those three Rennox we saw lured him to the sinkhole. He was jumpy the whole way to the lake, but I didn’t think it was anything more than superstition. I think he saw them watching us.”
At that, they fall silent.
The soldiers spread out and nurse their wounds in silent grief. None of them voice what Mercy knows they are all thinking: if Tamriel hadn’t allowed her to sleep for those few extra hours, they’d have been long gone before the Rennox had a chance to attack. Because of her, four men are dead, including the king’s most trusted soldier.
She can tell by Tamriel’s expression that he’s thinking it, too.
He doesn’t even try to hide it.
She turns away, shame a weight in the pit of her stomach. No one tries to stop her as she shuffles farther into the woods, following the sound of running water. After ten minutes of walking, she finds a small stream and tosses her cloak and pack aside, then wades in up to her knees. Dark bruises snake around her ribcage, but the skin is unbroken, meaning the blood caked on her cloak is her horse’s. The stream’s cool water soothes her scraped and bloody feet. After waiting a few minutes for the swelling to go down, Mercy sits on the riverbank and brushes away the pebbles which had embedded themselves into her knees when she had fallen in the cave. She tears up one of the tunics in her pack and wraps the makeshift bandages around her feet before dressing.
As she wanders back toward the others, she stares at the canopy of leaves over her head. Before she’d left the Forest of Flames, she had never seen a tree with green leaves. So much in her life has changed since then. For a moment, she wishes she could go back in time. She wishes she could erase the suspicion on the soldiers’ faces when they look at her, forget her guilt for betraying the Guild, ignore the desire which ignites inside her when she catches Tamriel staring at her . . .
She wouldn’t be alive if Tamriel hadn’t gone back for her.
She sighs.
Everything would be so much easier if I had killed him.
When she is close enough to hear the murmur of the guards’ voices, Mercy pauses and scans the woods around her. There isn’t much cover, but it would be easy to cross the stream and leave them all behind.
She wonders how long it would take them to realize she’s missing.
Long enough, whispers the selfish voice in her head.
Master Oliver is dead, her precious daggers lost along with his body. Nothing is left to tie her here except Tamriel, and even he does not want her. She has no clue where she is, but she could easily find her way to a town by following the river. She could . . . if not for her injuries. Right now, she can barely manage to hobble her way back to the others.
Once I heal enough to run, she thinks, I could flee to Feyndara. I could sail to Gyr’malr. I could figure out how to live.
But I’d be living without him.
Mercy pushes forward and soon spots Tamriel and the guards through the trees. The prince is pacing, running his hands through his hair. “One hour,” he’s saying to Calum when she approaches. “We’ll wait for one hour—just long enough for the men to bandage their wounds and rest.” And for Master Oliver to return, he doesn’t say.
“Tam—”
“I’ve told you not to call me that.”
Calum holds up his hands in surrender, then perches on a large boulder and fixes his cousin with a stern look. “You saw how many Rennox were out there. The odds of one man making it out alive, wounded, are—”
“I don’t care.”
When Tamriel turns his back, Calum rolls his eyes at Mercy. “His Highness can’t handle not being given whatever he wants. He’s not used to sacrificing one man for the good of the whole,” he says, gesturing to himself and the guards.
She raises a brow. “And you are?”
“I’ve helped Master Oliver command the guard since I was twelve. Just because I haven’t fought in any battles doesn’t mean I don’t understand what it’s like to lose soldiers. We grieve for our dead, but we keep moving. Master Oliver was like a father to Tam and me, always there when the king was . . . otherwise occupied,” he says tactfully. “I would kill every damned Rennox in the Howling Mountains if it would bring him back, but it won’t.”
“What are they? The Rennox, I mean. They look like living stone, but that’s not possible—”
Calum lets out a sharp, harsh laugh. “Beats the hell out of me, princess. Did you see what my bolts did to them? Didn’t even slow them down!”
“If they come after us and we can’t kill them . . .”
“We’re dead.” He nods. “There must have been some other reason for them to attack us, though. I mean, they kill four men because we invaded their territory? They didn’t even try to scare us off, they just attacked.”
“I don’t know,” Maceo calls from where he sits, stitching the gash in his arm where the tip of a spear had nicked him, “they scared the shit out of me.”
“How long do you think they were watching us?” Akiva asks. “Probably from the moment we set foot in those cursed mountains. They’ve probably gone mad after listening to the wind howl and scream for hours on end.”
“Shut up!” Clyde shouts, startling them. Tamriel stops pacing and turns to the guard, who eyes shine with unshed tears. “Just . . . stop talking about it! We’re alive because they’re not—Parson and the others. I don’t want to hear that they died because of some territory misunderstanding, as if their deaths mean nothing—as if their deaths will mean nothing to their widows. Parson’s wife just had a little girl. Did you know that?”
“Clyde—” Tamriel begins.
“Now she’ll grow up without knowing her father—”
“Believe me,” the prince interrupts, his face darkening, “I know how it feels to grow up without a parent. When we return to the capital, I’ll see their families paid for their service. It doesn’t make up for their deaths—not by a long shot—but I’ll do everything in my power to make sure their families are taken care of.”
Clyde frowns, then nods and sniffles. He mumbles something under his breath about taking his horse to the stream. He grabs his stallion’s reins and leads it out of the clearing, while the rest of them watch him leave.
After a moment, Tamriel settles onto the boulder beside Calum, rubbing his temples. “You were right,” he says.
“We should have left the Mountains hours ago.”
He doesn’t look at her, but Mercy can hear the frustration and self-loathing in his voice, can see the torture he’s putting himself through. She looks away, only to find Maceo glaring at her. Akiva is standing beside him, his fists clenched at his sides. He may have protected Mercy when they had fled the cave, but she knows the next time he must choose between the lives of his fellow soldiers and hers, he will choose his men in a heartbeat.
Tamriel stands. “Calum, find Clyde and bring him back here. We’re leaving now. I’m not making the same mistake twice—not if there’s a chance those things are still following us.”
Calum nods and darts into the woods while the soldiers begin packing their bandages and supplies. Tamriel grabs his horse’s reins and leads his stallion to Mercy.
“We’ll find a new horse for you when we can. Until then, you may ride with Calum or me—although I have a feeling I know who you’re going to pick.”
Mercy shifts the pack slung over her shoulder, wishing she could do something to ease his troubles. “I have a feeling you’re right.”
“What is it between you two, exactly? You scowl anytime he comes near and snap every time he speaks to you. Back at the castle, you asked me if I trust him and I told you I do. Has he given you any reason not to do the same?”
You have no idea. She frowns and looks down at her feet. Calum will do anything to keep the rest of Beltharos from finding out about his forged contract. If Tamriel learns the truth, he won’t return to Sandori alive, no matter how many soldiers guard him.
Instead of answering, she whispers, “Thank you for saving me.”
Tamriel nods stiffly. “You’re welcome.”
When Calum and Clyde return, Tamriel helps Mercy onto his horse and settles onto the saddle behind her. She tries to focus on something other than the prince’s arms wrapped around her as he holds the reins, his breaths tickling the back of her neck, and the fact that she’s practically sitting in his lap. She can tell by the tension in his body that he’s trying not to dwell on it, as well.
Born Assassin Saga Box Set Page 50
