Blessed Blades (The Elven-Trinity Book 5)

by Mark Albany

  She turned to look at me, as if feeling that I was the weakest link in the conversation, and narrowed her focus.

  “Oh, come, come, Grant, did you really think that you’d kept this affair with all three of the famed ‘Sisters Three’ a secret?” Faye asked, looking around at the five of us. “Unless you’ve already added a member of the elven royal families to your little connection?”

  “What?” Lyth asked, turning around as she heard the direction that the conversation had turned. “Of course not! I wouldn’t think that there is anything that would suggest that.”

  “Well, Grant clearly has something magical about him,” Faye said and shrugged. “How am I to know that he hasn’t worked his charms on you as well?”

  Braire laughed as she reined her horse around to join the conversation. “If you think that what draws us to Grant is magical, you clearly misunderstand the nature of our relationship.”

  “Well, there’s a bit of magic involved,” Norel reminded them as she looked around at the rest of the team. “You know that thing he does with his hand, the one with the runes seared into the skin?”

  “I have a question,” I interjected before Aliana could add anything. “Why are we discussing the nature of our sex life and the details thereof with the Princess and the Official? Just curious.”

  “In fairness, I was never actually a princess,” Lyth added, raising her hand.

  “Well, you were a member of the royal family,” I said and looked at the other three elves. “Unless your royal families don’t use the same kind of terminology as the rest of us.”

  “Yes, because when talking about sex, what we really want to talk about are the details of the elven royal families,” Faye grumbled. “Come on, roll in the hay?”

  “I’m actually curious,” I replied and nudged Faye in the side.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Lyth said and shook her head before she nudged her horse forward to take the lead again, leaving us all behind for a moment.

  “Damn,” I growled and shook my head. I didn’t want to be pushy about it, but on the whole, I want to learn more about the newest member of our team. I knew about as much as the three were willing to share about their past lives, with tidbits being added here and there.

  “I wouldn’t mind talking about our sex life some more,” Aliana said as she grinned and winked at me. Faye seemed to visibly perk up in her saddle. “And more about how he uses those runes.”

  “I don’t think we should,” I replied.

  “Oh, well, I definitely want to hear about what you do with those runes on your hands,” Faye said and leaned forward in her saddle. Again, the fact that she could do that without using her hands to keep her balance was annoyingly competent.

  “Hand,” Norel pointed out, while guiding her horse closer.

  “Hand, of course.” Faye grinned. “Because the best most other men are capable of with one hand isn’t that impressive, I have to say.”

  “Well, he can do that too,” Braire nodded. “The best is when he puts both skills together, bringing it all into a nice, full circle.”

  I shook my head. It felt odd, but I longed for the time when all we were talking about was a roll in the hay. At least that way certain things were left to the imagination.

  I guided Horse forward since Braire and Norel seemed more than eager to delve into the intricacies of what we did while we were in private together. It was probably an elven thing, but I never thought that anything would be dissected that way, allowing for too little to be left up to interpretation. As such, I felt more comfortable leaving the conversation behind, coming up to where Aliana was guiding Faye’s horse from the front.

  “Are we making you uncomfortable?” Aliana asked, looking over to me.

  “What gave me away?” I queried sarcastically.

  “Well, there’s the bond, of course, but there’s also the fact that you’re about as red as a cherry.” Aliana looked over at me with a small grin.

  “Ah,” I grunted. Her mention of it didn’t help calm the flush on my face, amazingly enough.

  “It’s all in good fun, I hope you know that,” Aliana said softly as she tilted her head while looking at me. “To be honest, we’ve been trying to find a way to break through to Faye all this time, and the closest that she’s ever come to being someone who isn’t under Abarat’s control is when she talks to you. And her flirting with you is certainly something that I can go along with, if nothing else.”

  “She was flirting with me?” I asked and narrowed my eyes.

  “I’m afraid so,” Aliana whispered with a grin. She leaned closer to me as she said it, but pulled away as her focus suddenly shifted. “We’re close enough. We can stop here.”

  Lyth pulled her horse back around to join us. The other two sisters quieted as we came to a halt, and everyone quickly dismounted. Faye needed a bit of help with the process.

  “Close enough for what?” I asked Aliana.

  “Close enough that I can open a portal to the burial ground,” she replied and quickly pulled everything we needed out of the saddlebags. I did the same and made sure to tuck Faye’s spear, shortened as it was, into my belt. Braire took a moment to commune with the horses.

  Once she was finished with that, they quickly veered away and trotted back the way we’d come.

  “I’ve sent them back to the town,” Braire explained to answer the unasked question. “No reason to leave them out here in the cold waiting for us to come back, right?”

  “Right,” Lyth said with a nod. “What do you need from all of us?”

  “I’ll need you all to connect to me as familiars,” Aliana explained, taking my hand and Braire’s. “Except maybe you, Lyth. You keep an eye on Faye, make sure she doesn’t try anything while the rest of us are distracted.”

  “I happen to be rather good at letting someone else siphon off my power,” Faye said, and looked around at all of us. “I don’t suppose you’ll need my help here?”

  “I think you should sit and be quiet so that Aliana can focus,” I said as Aliana pulled on my power. The fun we’d had the day before certainly showed, leaving a lot of power for her to tap into, but she was drawing on it quite heavily. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to sustain it for much longer until the very familiar smell and sensation of a nearby portal formed around me.

  I wasn’t fully drained of all my power, of course, but it was damn close as Aliana pulled herself away. She seemed to be the only one mentally present since Norel, Braire, and I were a little dazed from the process.

  Aliana grabbed Faye and pulledher into the circle along with us as Lyth, Braire, and Norel stepped closer, allowing all of us to use the portal together. If past experiences had taught me anything, this would be a rough ride—perhaps one of the roughest yet. And I wasn’t looking forward to that. I ground my teeth as we stepped inside and felt my body twist, as if being forced through a hole that was large enough to fit me, but only barely.

  5

  I wasn’t wrong. Normally, I would have taken a moment to feel proud of myself. The magical world was something of a novelty for me, certainly compared to the rest of our team, and being right wasn’t something that happened often enough. I’d learned to savor the small moments that allowed me to appreciate how I’d grown in this world of ours.

  That said, this wasn’t one of those moments. As the portal closed behind us, it was difficult for me to breathe. My unsettled stomach wasn’t even the worst of it. All of my ribs felt like they were collapsing on each other, with every bone in my body shattering and then knitting back together. The pain was phantom, but that didn’t change the fact that it was pain.

  Agonizing amounts of it.

  I realized that I was rolling around on the ground and softly groaning. I turned onto my back and looked up at the sky. There were clouds, and it was blue, and the sun hadn’t moved too far. I knew that time passed while we were in the portal but I wasn’t sure how much.

  “Fuck,” I growled and ro
lled my shoulders. “I really regret not taking the agonizingly slow ride across the danger-infested Empire whose ruler currently wants us dead.”

  “Yes,” Lyth groaned and then sucked in a deep breath before moving next to me. “Yes, I think that would have been the right choice as well.”

  I pulled myself up from my supine position, ignoring the aches that radiated through my body as I moved over to where Aliana lay. Her eyes were open and she was breathing, looking up at the sky the same way that I had. I carefully eased down next to her, and she turned her head to look at me.

  I scowled as I noted that there was a small trickle of blood coming from her nose, and pulled a cloth from my pocket to gently dab it for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice a little softer than before. “I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off.”

  “Well, I’m not sure where we are,” I said, looking around us as I lay down next to her. “But the fact is that we aren’t where we were. There are no mountains in sight, so I’d say that even if you didn’t pull it off, you came pretty damn close.”

  She chuckled and nodded. “I think I need to stay here for a few moments. I need to recover. You understand, of course?”

  “Of course, I do,” I whispered and leaned in to kiss her neck and then her lips, pulling her closer. “If there is anything you need me to do to help you recover, just let me know.”

  She smiled and moved closer to me. “I don’t think we can do that out in the open like this.”

  “Wait, in the common room in the mayor’s house is perfect, but out in the woods, all alone, just us, is too out in the open?” I asked, looking at her. She chuckled in response. I gently tucked an errant strand of hair back behind her ear and kissed the tip of her nose before I pushed to my feet and moved over to the others.

  It seemed like I was recovering the best and the quickest. Aliana, of course, having opened the portal, needed a bit more time to pull herself back together. Lyth looked like she needed a few more minutes. Faye was still groaning and writhing on the ground.

  I squatted next to her and she stopped, looking up at me. “What happened in the common room of the mayor’s house?” she asked through clenched teeth, looking like she was still in pain.

  “That’s none of your business,” I reminded her and quickly checked to ensure that she had no broken bones or permanent injuries from our trip through the portal. She wasn’t injured, although it seemed like a few muscles were cramping rather badly.

  “Come on, you can tell me,” she whispered, then shook her head. “I don’t think I’ll survive this trip anyway, and I could use a good story to distract me while I recover.”

  “What makes you think that you won’t survive?”

  “Well, there’s no telling if I’ll survive you lot trying to break this hold on me,” she said with a shrug, looking like this conversation was enough of a distraction to take her mind off of her recovery. “And that’s if it even works. If it doesn’t, I expect you’ll kill me so Aliana doesn’t have to bring me all the way back, or take me wherever you need to go next. On the run, I assume. Having the Emperor and Abarat hunting you down can’t be something to look forward to.”

  “You haven’t been around us for long, so I won’t criticize you for mirroring what you would do to us,” I said with a small smirk. “But we need you around. Not only do we not kill people who don’t need it, but we do need to make sure that the process works on you before we test it on the Emperor.”

  “What if the process doesn’t work?” she asked. “You have to know that’s a possibility.”

  “Then we’ll find another way,” I stated, feeling rather confident. “And another way after that, if we need to. We aren’t easy to bring down. You should know this, considering that you failed in your attempt.”

  She smirked and shook her head. “Well, I do hope something works. These ropes are rather uncomfortable.”

  I nodded. “I do know that much, since you bound us in similar ropes.”

  “Ugh,” she groaned and rolled her eyes as she turned onto her side to face away from me. I assumed that meant our conversation was over. I pushed myself to my feet as the rest of the team reached the final stages of recovery as well, and assessed our surroundings.

  It was… interesting. Yes, Aliana had brought us a long way from where we started. I couldn’t see the western mountains anymore. Of course, the thick forest surrounding us made it difficult to see where we were. The place looked lush and full of life. The sounds of birds and animals filled the air.

  The place felt familiar, somehow. Even though I couldn’t see it, I heard the rush of a river nearby. It reminded me of the glade where I had found Lyth the first time, in the astral projection and in person. I looked around at the rest of the team, wondering how they were doing.

  Braire was next to Aliana, helping the djinn up from where she lay on the ground. She looked like she had somewhat recovered from the trip and seemed able to continue our journey.

  “Where are we?” I asked as I looked around.

  Lyth came up next to me, an odd expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if it was nostalgia, but it certainly looked the part. She was smiling like she hadn’t seen this place in a long time, and it was still just the way she’d pictured it in her mind.

  “We’re in the right place,” she said, her voice low and almost reverent as she moved through the trees, running her fingers over the bark of the nearest growths to her. Maybe she had been here before. I wondered if the place was growing like this due to the presence of someone of her particular bloodline. It sounded ridiculous, frankly, but I had learned long ago not to make any assumptions about what was possible when magic was involved.

  Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe it worked the other way around—people of her bloodline were drawn to places like this, and there was another reason why they were this way in the first place. It was like winter couldn’t happen, here.

  Lyth guided us deeper into the glade. We were all moving a lot slower than normal, with Braire helping Aliana stay on her feet. Lyth had strung her bow and had an arrow nocked and ready to fire, just in case, and my hand drifted to the hilt of my blade. I didn’t know why, but something was making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  The trees peeled away from a gorgeous little hillock in the middle of a clearing, showing off an entrance into what looked like a barrow underneath. As we drew closer, I was amazed by just how old the stonework really was, and how long it must have taken these people to carve it.

  That said, it still looked to be in absolutely perfect shape, like it could last against the elements for another couple thousand years.

  “Members of the royal families always preferred to be buried in places where they could commune with nature,” Lyth explained, answering the questions that none of us really wanted to ask or have answered. “A place where their spirits could rest close to what they loved most in the world. Of course, any weapons magically forged for or by them would have been buried with them, so if I had to guess, any weapon that we came here to look for would be down in the tunnels, in the burial grounds.”

  I nodded and looked around, but needed a few more seconds to realize why I was suddenly so on edge when I hadn’t been before.

  “Abarat has to know that there is a weapon that can break his control on people, right?” I asked, looking at the group. The fact that Faye suddenly smiled told me that I’d asked one of the right questions. “Someone like him would have planned for an eventuality like this and put something up against it. Hell, he might have taken the weapon himself by now, wouldn’t he?”

  The five women in front of me exchanged a glance.

  “Abarat is no fool,” Braire said and shook her head. “Even if he couldn’t take the weapon for himself, he would make sure that nobody else could find it. The fact that it was so easy for us to come here tells me that there might be no weapon for us to find.”

  “You call what I did today, easy?” Aliana asked, scowli
ng at her.

  “You know what I mean,” Braire snapped back.

  I turned around when I heard movement just outside the clearing we were in. I saw something, but in the shadows cast by the trees, it took me longer than I liked to realize what was moving toward us.

  “On the other hand,” I said and gripped the sword on my hip, “he might have summoned the monsters we’ve been fighting, to defend this precious and dangerous artifact.”

  “What makes you say that?” Lyth asked while shifting to face me. As her eyes were drawn to where mine were focused, she drew the arrow back on the bow. I sucked in a deep breath and looked at the women as I pulled my sword from its sheath. The clean sound of steel gliding over leather sharpened my senses as the horde of monsters that had been hiding just out of sight moved closer. The undead were here in numbers, it seemed. I couldn’t really tell if these were the same creatures that Cyron had summoned from the depths, or if these were new horrors to be faced.

  There were hundreds of them, though. At least hundreds. Two or three dozen stepped out into the light, but there were countless more still hiding in the tree line.

  “No golems,” Braire pointed out, and I nodded. I hadn’t noticed that at first, but the fact that these creatures didn’t seem to be following a visibly higher power meant that another, invisible power was guiding their intent. I wasn’t sure I liked that. Golems were tough creatures to beat, but I had a feeling that this many of the undead were going to be just as hard.

  They seemed tentative, though, like they still weren’t sure what to do. They’d apparently been sent to guard this place, but no orders about what they were supposed to do to intruders came from their authority figure. Sure, death was probably coming, but they seemed to need confirmation first.

  Even Faye looked like she wasn’t pleased with the development and took a few steps back, closer to the barrow.

  “What are you afraid of?” Norel asked and narrowed her eyes at the woman. “It’s not like you lot aren’t on the same side.”

  “Between you and me, Abarat probably thinks I failed him by allowing the five of you to come this far,” Faye said, still backing away. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think he’s the kind of elf who is overly forgiving toward those that failed him. Wouldn’t you say?”