by Naomi Lucas
Aldora sensed them following.
“Almost there, witch,” the Laslite said.
She knew. She heard the commotion emanating from the tavern long before it came into sight. Shadowy figures meandered in the alleyways leading up to it, shady dealings, whispered arguments, and the grunts of bad sex met them before the rough, carved doors she knew so well.
Aldora had no idea what would happen once they crossed the threshold. She locked her legs and twisted toward her captor. “I’m not a witch,” she begged. “You don’t have to do this. You know there’s no proof. I’ve lived here my whole life and many in this town know me, they know my family, know how hardworking and law-abiding we are. I am!” She raised her head and met the Laslite’s eyes, seeing them clearly for the first time. “I’ll do anything,” she finished on a whisper. She would if it meant all of this would go away.
If she could be back in her family’s fields tomorrow, with no one the wiser but herself about what had happened, she would do anything.
Her resolve turned to stone as she stared at the patroller. Aldora knew she couldn’t get away from him. The bindings on her wrists were too strong, and even if she did manage to escape, fleeing back into the forest and slipping away, she’d still be bound, leaving a trail of blood for the wolves.
Were she to make it safely home and remove the bindings, she wouldn’t be able to stay.
I could do it, I could survive. For how long, though? She was a farmer, not a hunter nor a soldier. She was better at planning than she was at fighting and she knew it.
But I am a hider.
My body is strong. I can endure... Her eyes shifted away from the Laslite.
I can pretend.
“Pretty words but not pretty enough for me, witch. Do you want to know something? A secret perhaps?” The tavern doors knocked open and a laughing couple poured out and walked by without a glance. The lute playing within grew louder. He dragged her inside and leaned toward her ear. “During our final year of training to become a Laslite, witches are set upon us throughout that time to test us, witches enslaved by the king. That shocks you doesn’t it?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond. “They could come upon us at any time, anywhere, whether it was during field training or in the middle of the night, whether it was a whore at the tavern just like this, or a servant taking away your plate. We had to stay vigilant, watchful, but we could not assume. To assume was to be paranoid, and a paranoid Laslite was worthless. But each witch had something in common, something only a Laslite could recognize, and why nothing you say could ever change that. Do you want to know what it is?”
Aldora shuddered and nodded, peering at him nervously through the candlelight. She shouldn’t care what her captor had to say but she wanted to know, wanted to know what damned her so entirely in his eyes.
“You all smell of fruit.”
Aldora narrowed her eyes and her brow furrowed. Apples. He turned on his heel and tugged her toward the door.
“But I work in an orchard,” she argued, wrenching back. “You saw the apples in my bag.”
He humphed and they were suddenly surrounded by sticky mead and honey music. “I heard you talking to something beyond the barrier.” His words were drowned out by the sudden uproar of laughter and cups being slammed and shuffled on tables. Everyone looked up and tracked them with their gazes as they passed. She heard the tavern door opening and closing several times as those who had followed them from town entered the establishment. Some of the noise dulled as she was hauled toward the back of the room, wincing as chairs and table corners banged into her sides.
With sudden violence, and before she could fight him off, her captor picked her up and threw her across the table. She landed on top of the steaming bowls of soup and goblets of liquor, directly in front of the glazed-eyed Master of Thetras, Nithers Emen.
“I’ve found the reason why the mists are seeping,” the Laslite declared.
A sickening hush fell across the room.
Aldora gasped and cried out, flinching away from the metal and scalding liquid that soaked into her clothes. Her arms wiggled under her, crushed and battered by the sudden force of being thrown. She lifted her head and whimpered, feeling a sharp stab of pain where it had slammed into an iron cup.
“What is the meaning of this?” Nithers demanded.
Hands were on her the next moment, dragging her off the table and forcing her to stand, and it took all her strength to stay upright despite being held up by her arm. Hot and cold liquid streamed down her body to pool inside and around her boots.
“This,” she recognized her captor’s voice, “is a witch. One I came across speaking to something beyond the barrier.”
“Aldora? Aldora is a witch?”
At her name, she looked up at Master Nithers. He had a town’s lady cooing on his lap and his hands were fondling her bared breasts. Aldora recognized the girl as the blacksmith’s daughter, Hypathia, and immediately understood. She was an innocent who, like most budding females along the bordertowns, was in the process of losing it.
All the women of Thetras, and she assumed all other bordertowns, understood. To be pure, virginal, was to make a great sacrifice. Aldora had never understood why. Her bitterness had led her to believe that men found women who were untouched by other men worthy of something more—like death. If we cannot be touched then there is nothing stopping us from being killed. Aldora had done the same thing, in this very tavern, several years back. The tavern whores always knew the best men to send a maiden to.
Hypathia was disinterested, her features neutral, her body unresponsive. Her nipples weren't even puckered. But to go to the Master for an introduction? He either paid a whore a large amount of coin, or Hypathia was seeking safety beyond her standing.
“Aldora’s not a witch,” Hypathia offered meekly. A weak defense but enough to give Aldora hope.
Pretend. She lowered her head subserviently to peer through her lashes. She wasn’t a witch but she also wasn’t a simpering innocent. “This is all a mistake, my lord.”
“I found her next to the wall after sundown, speaking to something, some creature, maybe even the mist itself without pretense,” the Laslite said.
“That’s not true!” she pleaded, and a shiver shot through her remembering the dark voice. “It was a misunderstanding. I heard children and wanted to make sure they were safe. You know they play dangerous games.” Aldora hoped it was enough to convince Nithers. She hated lying, but her options left little recourse.
“Quiet! Both of you!” Nithers squinted at her and then the Laslite. “When did this all happen?”
Hushed conversations filled the tavern; without looking, she knew they were all about her.
“Not an hour ago, my lord.”
“Where?”
Both Aldora and the Laslite answered at once.
“—Between Thetras and Ledger—” she blurted.
“—Outside of town, on the world path leading to Nestras—”
The Laslite’s grip tightened on her arm. Pain shot through her and she bent over, praying someone would step in and save her. “He assaulted me,” she whimpered.
“Don’t listen to her lies.” The Laslite hit the table with his fist. “She spoke of tricks and is manipulating you now. I have encountered many witches in my travels and I guarantee, on the king’s honor, that she is one!”
Others in the tavern started to speak up, spewing their own opinions that she could neither argue nor agree with. Tears slid down her cheeks and settled on her lips, her chin, where they eventually fell from her face.
“The mists have gotten worse, it started years ago,” someone said.
“Burlox fell less than a fortnight ago! We’re not safe.” Another voice, louder, and more frantic.
“We’re all in danger! Look at her! If she’d been assaulted, she’d have more than mead and stew marring her.”
Nithers shoved Hypathia off him and stood. She fell to the floor and quickly covered herself before she
scrambled away, her eyes alight with fear and pity. For me. Nithers leaned across the table and scanned Aldora from head to foot.
“You can see, Master of Thetras, that she is a liar,” the Laslite said smugly.
Nithers waved his hand and the room descended back into silence. He opened his mouth and a moist breath that reeked of mead blasted her face. She flinched away.
“A-Aldora,” he slurred. “I do not know you well but answer me this question.”
She stilled, unsure of what he would ask of her.
“Whose children did you hear out there so late in the twilight?”
Aldora paused, confused before realizing he meant her story. Tears slid down her face. She didn’t have an answer because to answer was to incriminate and she couldn’t do that to an innocent. Could never to that. Not even to save herself.
Her silence was damning enough.
“Sacrifice her to the mists!” A yell went out that was quickly picked up by others. It grew until it drowned her, solidifying her fate.
She thought she would—could—do anything to end this nightmare. She’d been wrong.
Chapter Four
***
Vedikus heard the chanting of humans long before he made it into position. He gritted his teeth as he dropped his stealth and headed toward the noise. He’d been waiting in the shadows for the moon to slip directly overhead and into middling night, not long at all, and not even long enough to fully scout the perimeter and see what he was up against.
Thetras’s sacrificial clearing reeked of hungry beasts. It was one of the only places that remained a free-for-all for human sacrifices. Other locations, some far, some near, were ruled by different tribes and monsters. To capture a sacrifice within lich lands was near impossible.
His own hands were coated in blood from stealth attacks he’d performed from the shadows. The cursed mist dined upon them as he sprinted forward. The noise the humans made called others just like him to the location. In the distance he felt the thunderous strike of centaurs approaching, he heard the high-pitched shrieks of hobgoblins, and to his dismay, the sudden beat of an orc drum.
Vedikus unsheathed his axes, readying... His eyes sharpened as he entered the clearing.
A hobgoblin rushed in from across the way but was dead and twitching on the ground with an axe embedded in its head the next second. Vedikus stomped over and pulled his weapon from the body.
Two more came from his right and he sent his axe flying again. The one still standing hesitated long enough for him to pick up the corpse at his hooves and throw it, knocking the fleeing hobgoblin down under its weight. He walked over to the goblin’s struggling form and hacked its head off before picking his other axe back up.
Vedikus swiveled around, ready for the next death.
A group of centaurs came next, the smell of their horseshit contaminating his nostrils when suddenly, he heard a human female scream.
“Please. Please, listen, I didn’t do anything wrong! Please!” Her begging cries filled his ears and his eyesight sharpened further.
“Toss the witch cunt!”
“We will not be the next Burlox!”
A mob of noise built into a crescendo, breaking his focus. I would kill them all if given the chance. Vedikus glanced at the tiny silver orb of the moon and asked allowance to do so knowing it would never be given.
“Please at least let me say goodbye to my family!” the female cried. And for some reason it enraged him.
Vedikus’s lips parted and heat suffused his face. The centaurs watched him as they spread into an arch on either side of him, their spears all loosely poised in their hands.
“Minotaur, we would rather not fight you,” the middle one said. His hoof lifted and stamped the ground, breaking bones from long ago battles beneath it. “Our peoples are not enemies. Do not cause this to change.”
Vedikus gripped his axes. “Not when it comes to this.”
The centaur’s lip twitched, revealing a chipped tooth. His hair was long and braided, broken knots and messy but adorned with wooden beads and shells. A stud by the sea.
“No.” The centaur nodded. “Not when it comes to this, but still, we find you in our way.”
“Then you must go through me for the female.”
The centaurs growled in unison, and three sets of bloodthirsty, amber eyes trained on him.
“You know the sacrifice is female?” the one on the left asked.
“Can’t you hear her screams?” Vedikus fumed, letting his horns dip in warning. “I’ve spoken to her. She is already mine.” Her cries were at his back, and the sound of the pulley on the other side of the barrier sounded with a screech. The thrill and excitement of her people’s jeers bolstered with each piercing turn. With it deepened the approaching drums of the orcs. His eyes stayed on the stallions. He still had time to kill them.
They swiveled toward the sound and readied for the coming attack. Orcs were a nasty business.
Vedikus stepped back toward the wall he now guarded. He prepared to protect what advantage he had. They would not take his spot over his gushing dead husk.
“You’ve spoken to this female? How? Is she magiked?” It was the left centaur again. His gaze darted around as he spoke. “Minos don’t deal in witches.”
“The Bathyr deal with no one,” Vedikus taunted.
The stallion sneered and broke rank.
The middle horse, and what he presumed was the leader, lifted his hand.
“Stop Telner, I did not give the order to attack.” The leader looked to Vedikus. “If it is as you say, will she choose you?”
She does not have a choice. “Yes. Only the vicious best capture the blood breeders. You against me? She would have no option but to choose me. I’m the safest bet. One look at your bulbous, hanging pricks and she’ll choose a pack of nipping hobgoblins over you.”
All three centaurs stomped their hooves and brayed angrily, not taking his mockery lightly. But it was true. Centaurs weren’t rapists, but they were widely known for having a hard time with the humans they collected. They’d been known to resort to taking many measures to convince their human captives to bear their young. He found it weak that the species couldn’t master them.
Telner moved closer and stood up on his back legs before bringing his front hooves down. The strewn-about bones and bone dust cracked and powdered the air. “You want a painful drawn-out death, minotaur, I’ll give you one!”
Vedikus hoisted his axes and positioned his legs, bowing his head slightly forward to jut his horns. The sound of the pulley had stopped and the pleas of the female were now almost directly overhead, high up in the mist and beyond anyone’s sight. There wasn’t much time before she fell. If the centaurs attacked him, he would only have moments to slay them.
“She’s at the top!” the lead centaur yelled, lowering his spear. His men looked up just as the orcs entered the clearing. They hesitated.
Vedikus slammed his axes into the ground and used it to his advantage. “Protect me while I catch her!”
The sacrifice had come all too quickly and that hope he had felt earlier had stabbed him in the back. If there’d been more time, he wouldn’t need any beast’s help. But he had to catch her fall. He could not chance her life.
Vedikus didn’t wait to see what the stallions chose to do, but when their spears didn’t pierce his back and the battle cries of the orcs sounded, he assumed they shielded him.
“You will let her choose, Minotaur! Or face the consequences,” the centaur leader shouted in warning.
Vedikus grunted but his focus was on the mist above him—its thick impenetrable shroud—as he watched for her fall. He bent his knees and lifted his arms, readying for the exact moment to catch her. His jaw tightened at the thought of her landing on his horns or crashing into the bone-strewn dirt.
“We give this sacrifice willingly to the labyrinth... To honor the magic that protects us from those trapped within... May this human feed your hunger and deliver us safety from yo
ur wrath and your expansion...” A haunting, jeering chorus of voices droned out the rites. The female had gone eerily quiet. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hear her amongst the ruckus but that she’d likely given up trying to persuade her people.
Cretins.
Fear—both monstrous and human—mixed with the blood of his enemies behind him threatened to drown his senses. Vedikus crushed his tongue between his teeth, flicking his eyes back and forth. Watchful. Angry.
Waiting.
He had her. He just needed to catch her first.
“This life for ours... For those who bask in the sunlight and live in humanity’s kingdom remain forever guarded against magic and curse.”
The chanting stopped and the humans went silent.
The battle shrieks behind him intensified. More had joined the fray. Vedikus felt the ravenous chaos building around him. He knew all of it wasn’t for the human, but for its fresh blood. Human blood meant everything. Vedikus released the heat from his chest with a growl. This human was his. Blood and all.
A cascade of applause and cheers filled the mist.
Vedikus tensed, anticipating the moment the female appeared.
Where? He searched the darkness above him. The roars of the battle happening behind him grew closer.
Her frightened whimper came first, followed by a fluttering of cloth in the breeze, then a flailing form appeared. A howl went up behind him and Vedikus pivoted to the right, reaching...
He caught her, crouching down to cushion as much of her landing as possible.
Vedikus stared down at the female. Her eyes were clenched shut, her body tensed harder than petrified wood, and she had long dark hair, half-braided but mostly tangled around her face. She’s wet. He gripped her tighter to his chest, careful not to press her against the weapons still buckled to him.
His blood-slickened, sweaty hands pressed into her skin and he felt her pulse race beneath his fingers. Though the mists began to clear around them, her features remained unformed in the dark. There were no glimmers or firebeetles to light her face for his perusal, but he knew when she opened her eyes to look up at him.
