by Grace Draven
Her actions made more sense now. He admired her commitment as well as her bravery. What she subjected herself to was a horror few would want to suffer once much less several times. “Does your family know how you feel? Beroe itself?”
Her sardonic smile lacked any humor. “Of course they know, and it doesn’t matter. I’m not the first fire witch born in Beroe, and I won’t be the last. The village fathers protect Beroe.” Her pinched features drew even tighter. “By whatever means they must.”
A terrible legacy, an ominous hint. “The witch who came before you, she taught you how to summon fire and create illusion?”
Gilene rubbed a hand across her eyes. “Yes, just as I’ll teach the girl who will come after me.” Her eyes focused more sharply on him once more. “Do you understand why I have to go home? If I’m not in Beroe by next spring, the slavers will take another woman to burn in the Rites, and she will die. The village elders will punish my family if I don’t return and give the Empire my sister or one of my nieces.”
His captive was a prisoner of her birthplace, bound by the chains of familial devotion and threat. He almost regretted taking her. Almost. “I will return you to Beroe before that happens.”
She slapped her thighs and growled her frustration. “My gods, are you not hearing what I’m telling you? I can’t go with you to the Stara Dragana!”
“Keep your voice down.” She glared but stayed quiet. “I heard you, and I understand why you need to go back, but it doesn’t change the fact you have to come with me.” He ignored her angry snort. “My father is a clan chief,” he said. “An ataman. As the ataman’s only son, his leadership would pass to me when he died. When he became ill, my cousin had some of his friends attack me, beat me until I passed out, and sell me to Kraelian slavers. All so he wouldn’t have to challenge me for the chieftainship if my father didn’t survive. I intend to reclaim my birthright, and to do so I will need an agacin by my side. The Savatar recognize succession through blood tanistry—worthiness of a successor based on combat. If my cousin weren’t the coward he is, he would have challenged me to combat for the right to rule the clan. With me gone, he needed only the approval of the clan atamans and the agacins to become an ataman himself. However, if I return with an agacin who supports my claim to take back the chieftainship, they will be forced to allow me to challenge my cousin, because it comes with Agna’s blessing. I can demand the right of combat to retake the chieftainship.”
She hunched away from him and turned her head so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “I want no part of this struggle between you and your relative.”
He coaxed her back to him with a finger on her chin. “Help me regain my place as ataman, and I swear on the spirits of all my ancestors I will return you to Beroe before the slavers arrive next spring.”
Disbelief was stamped on every part of her body and face. “And why would you keep your word once you’ve gained your prize?”
“Because, despite what you might think, I have honor.”
Acerbic laughter greeted that statement. It died as quickly as it erupted. “Do I truly have a choice?”
“If you want to see Beroe again? No.”
She shook her head. “Honesty for once. There’s hope for you yet.”
He swallowed back a cheer at the thread of agreement in her voice. “Will you help me?”
“As I really have no choice, then yes.”
“Do I have your word you won’t try to escape again?”
“Absolutely not.”
He hadn’t expected a promise, so her reply didn’t surprise him. “Then we know where we stand with each other.” He settled back against the wall, feeling the hard thumping of his heart calm a little. “You’re a brave woman,” he said. “A bitter one, but brave.”
She didn’t acknowledge his backhanded compliment. “What will you do to your cousin when you see him again?”
Ten years of smothered rage threatened to boil up inside Azarion. He pushed it down, back to the cold, dead place that had kept him alive for so long. “Kill him and mount his head on a pike outside my tent.”
He cocked an eyebrow when she tilted her head and gave a shrug of her own. “That seems only fair.”
This time, Azarion didn’t bother hiding his grin. “You may not look like a Savatar woman, Agacin, but sometimes you think like one.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stealing horses was easier than Gilene imagined. Either Azarion was as good a horse thief as he was a gladiator, or the drunken sentries and grooms paid to watch the stable yard and take care of the animals had imbibed enough wine and ale to drown an army. It might have been both, as she soon rode away from Wellspring Holt on a stolen chestnut mare, heading toward an unknown future.
Azarion rode beside her on a bay mare with white fetlocks. While Gilene had to use all her concentration to stay on her horse’s back and not fall off, he rode with ease. The Savatar were known throughout the world as excellent horsemen, and obviously ten years fighting in the Pit weren’t enough to make him forget how to ride.
A pouch containing the foods he’d stolen earlier at the market as well as rations and leftovers uneaten by the drunken stable hands was tied across the back of his saddle, and he was armed with a crossbow, a quiver of arrows, and two knives—courtesy of one of the sentries, who didn’t see Azarion creeping stealthily up on him until it was too late.
Gilene didn’t ask whether the sentry was dead or merely knocked unconscious, and Azarion didn’t offer an assurance either way.
They rode east and north through the night and by dawn had passed out of the heavily forested territories belonging to Krael and into more open terrain where the trees grew in solitary majesty or clumped together in small clusters. Fields of waist-high grasses brushed the horses’ bellies as they galloped toward the distant silhouettes of the Gamir Mountains.
Azarion pointed to a set of hillocks that marched east under a rising sun. “We’ll stop there and take shelter in one of the barrows to rest the horses and sleep through the day.”
“Another grave?” she grumbled. “What is this desire of yours to sleep among the dead?” She covered her mouth to stifle a yawn. She was saddlesore and irritable, and unprepared to spend hours in a tomb, no matter how much she might want to get warm and fall asleep.
“One of those barrows will be big enough to house even the horses. We’ll be warm, out of the wind, and with a roof over our heads.” He nodded toward the sun. “That’s a blood dawn rising. We’ll be in for storms later and can wait them out until nightfall.”
His reasoning was sound enough. Still, she remembered a similar argument before they stepped through the shattered gate and into Midrigar. What had lurked there made standing in the middle of a savage gale seem safe.
Her expression must have revealed some of her thoughts, because Azarion guided his horse closer to hers. “These are old barrows, scoured clean of spirits and anything of worldly wealth. And they were built to honor the dead, not imprison them. Midrigar is an abomination. Barrows are simply resting places—mostly for the dead, sometimes for the living.”
“Barrows sometimes house wights,” she argued.
“True. Those ahead don’t. Just the occasional mouse or a colony of bats if grave robbers cut their entry hole into the roof.”
Her hands felt frozen to the reins, and the two shawls Halani had given her before they parted ways did little to ward off the cold. She was tired and far from home, with a stranger who kept her for purposes of which she wanted no part. They had escaped a demon thing in a cursed city and found solace with free traders who dealt in questionable goods. The idea of sleeping the day away in a barrow next to the bones of the departed didn’t seem all that strange at the moment. She just hoped her fear of a lurking wight didn’t come to fruition.
Azarion took her silence for agreement and tugged on her mount’s bridle to get her moving again.
They reached a gradual rise just as the sun’s lower edge cleared the horizon to spill morning light across a flat landscape that purled and swayed in a tide of tall, pale-plumed grass. She gasped at the sight. “Have we reached the Stara Dragana?”
Azarion spared her a glance, his attention mostly on the barrows before them. “Within its western borders. This part of it belongs to the Nunari, vassals of the Empire. The city of Uzatsii sits about a league from here.”
The grasses parted on either side of a shepherd’s road that led to three hills clad in a flowering carpet of sweet vernal. Made by the hands of men instead of the whimsy of nature, the middle hill was the largest barrow. A rectangular doorway built of stone was framed into one side. A stele, twice as tall as a man, stood sentry to its right, and as Gilene rode closer, she spotted pictograms carved into the stone. Arcane and enigmatic, they decorated the stele from top to base. She could only guess their meaning and prayed they weren’t curses to warn away any who might wish to enter the grave mound.
Azarion halted his horse at the stele and motioned for Gilene to do the same. He dismounted for a closer look. Gilene waited, silent, until her curiosity got the best of her. “What does it say?”
He traced the carvings’ outlines in the air with one finger. “It tells a story. This is the youngest of the three barrows, built for a Nunari chieftain named Gisrin and his family. According to these carvings, he was a great warrior who slew a thousand men and sired twenty-seven sons with five wives.” His mouth curved in a smile at Gilene’s snort. “Keeper of the fastest herds, blessed by Agna, the Great Mare.”
Gilene shifted in the saddle. “That’s all very impressive, but is he cursing anyone who enters his barrow?” She wanted out of the cold but didn’t want to fight off a wight defending a grave just to find a little warmth.
Azarion nodded. “Aye. According to the stone, if we enter, we’ll suffer baldness and sores, and our cocks will fall off.” Amusement glittered in his eyes. “Not that the last should concern you.”
A bubble of laughter rolled into her throat and threatened to escape. She disguised it with a cough, refusing to let her captor see how his commentary delighted her. They were adversaries working under an uneasy truce. Friends shared laughter. She and Azarion were not friends.
“Come,” he said and gestured for her to dismount. “Lead your horse in behind mine. This grave mound is tall. The ceiling will be high enough for the horses to enter.” He patted his mare’s neck and gave Gilene a wry look. “Horses are herd animals with a strong sense of themselves as possible prey. If there’s danger in the barrow, they’ll know it long before we will.”
In the end, her need for warmth overrode her fear of angry spirits. She nearly fell out of the saddle, stiff from hours of riding. She pushed away the helping hand Azarion offered. “Lead on,” she said and took up her horse’s reins.
The animals didn’t balk as they passed through the barrow’s tall entrance. Wide enough that she and her mare might have walked side by side across the threshold, the barrow doorway was edged with stacked stone and cut birch timbers mortared into solid earth. A shallow depression in the soil outside the entrance marked the place where a stone had once been wedged to seal off the entrance. Its remains spilled in a pile of broken rock stacked against the mound’s base.
Gilene expected darkness thick enough to weave inside the grave and was stunned to discover a high-ceilinged chamber illuminated in gradually brightening shades of gray. The source of anemic light came from a hole near the top of the roof’s vault, just big enough to allow a man in. Grave robbers had visited this tomb many times, breaking in from the top and from the door.
The clop of the horses’ hooves echoed softly in the barrow as they walked toward the chamber’s center. Gilene paused, and the mare paused with her as she peered into the shadows that clung to the curved walls and edged the packed earth steps that laddered toward the roof, stopping not far from its narrowest point and supported at regular intervals by a framework of more birch logs.
The lower step levels were a ruinous mess of broken clay pots, rotted blankets, and bits of riding tack. Among the detritus she saw bones of humans and animals. Some of the skeletons remained intact, half buried in yellow and red ocher. Beside them, a horse skull kept watch from large, empty eye sockets. Nearby, more skeletons were not so fortunate. In their search for valuables, looters had destroyed whatever careful placement relatives had arranged for their dead. Human skulls lay among the rib cages of sheep and the jawbones of dogs.
Gilene shivered and leaned against her mare. She wondered what the long-dead Gisrin might think of such desecration to his family’s gravesite. She hoped wherever his spirit resided now, it had given up such worldly cares long ago. The barrow was a macabre place to shelter, but it lacked the suffocating malevolence that shrouded Midrigar. Here, the shadows were just shadows.
Azarion led his horse to one side of the barrow, kicking aside bones and pottery shards. “Bring your mare to stand with mine. They’ll stay put, and they can graze outside tonight before we leave.”
As they had few supplies, it didn’t take long to settle in. Gilene carefully cleared away debris from the spot they’d chosen to sleep, whispering words of apology to any lingering ghost as she placed bones back on the lower step.
Azarion used the horse’s thick blankets as pallets and set them side by side. He sighed at Gilene’s dismayed expression. “I’ve had plenty of opportunity to lift your skirts, Agacin. You even raised them for me back in my cell.” Her face heated at that reminder. “If I wanted to tup you, I would have done it by now. All I desire right now is rest and warmth. I know you do too. Sleeping together is the best way to do it.”
The memory of Azarion’s body heat curved along her back certainly swayed her. Despite her best effort not to fall asleep and to keep some distance between them as they shared a pallet in the traders’ camp, she awakened in the mornings huddled under borrowed blankets and tucked against Azarion’s chest and midriff, his arm heavy on her waist. He was a light sleeper and sensed the moment she woke, rolling away to slide out from under the covers and make his way to the communal fire one of the traders had started. She had been slower to follow, content for a short time to soak up the pleasant warmth and pretend she was indeed a wife and not a captive.
Their circumstances now were far more reduced, with only the horse blankets for bedding and her shawls to ward off the chill. The barrow’s earthen walls kept out some of the cold and all of the wind, but a draft still sneaked into the entrance or whistled down from the hole in the roof. Azarion’s assurances of his disinterest in her were both a comfort and, in an odd way, an insult.
Gilene chose not to think too long on the last and crawled across the makeshift pallet to lie on her side with her back to him. Her stomach growled. She was hungry but also tired, and willed away the gnawing at her belly.
Azarion curled around her, tucking her into the cove of his body. Gilene stifled the soft groan that danced across her lips at the feel of all that lovely heat, and kept her body stiff. Already her eyelids felt as if they were weighted with stones. The whuffles and snorts from the horses nearby soothed her like a lullaby, and her limbs loosened, sinking farther into the thick horse blanket.
Azarion’s low voice revived her a little. “The sun will heat the barrow soon enough. I don’t dare light a fire. Anyone will be able to see the smoke rise from the top for leagues.”
She wrapped the edges of her shawls around her hands and tucked them under her chin. “Do you think the Empire would track you this far?”
He shrugged against her. “It depends on whether or not they think I’m worth the amount of bounty they’ve put on my head. The Empire might not send its soldiers after me this far into the steppe, but the Nunari won’t hesitate to capture outlanders and sell them as slaves. It was to them my cousin sold me, and Uzatsii is where I was put on the auction block.”
&nbs
p; Her drowsiness evaporated. She rolled to face him. “If they catch us, they’ll sell us both.” The realization made her shudder. Her lot in life was a grim one, her fate determined the moment her magic manifested, but she had never suffered the degradation of slavery or the humiliation of the auction block.
His long lashes shadowed his eyes. “Or they’ll keep you if one of their warriors takes a liking to you.”
That made her shake even more, and Azarion’s arm pressed a little harder on her waist as if to soothe her. She pictured the Stara Dragana outside the barrow, with its swaths of flat land carpeted in plumed grasses, and sparse clumps of stunted trees dotting the landscape as it purled out to the distant mountains in the east. “So much open space.” She all but breathed the words. “And no place to hide.”
“There are barrow towns like this one along the way, laid out in a line like a road. For the most part, people avoid the places of the dead, considering them sacred. We’ll keep doing as we are now. Travel at night and shelter in a barrow during the day until we reach Savatar territory.”
Her gaze went beyond the curve of his shoulder to the laddered walls with their many skeletons and grave goods. Bones upon bones, like chaff on a threshing floor. “Never did I imagine I’d rely so much on the dead for my safety.” She rolled back to her original position, wondering at the vagaries of fate that had put her here in a grave next to a man both brutal and gentle, desperate yet unbroken.
His lack of reply to her comment meant he’d no rebuttal to offer or had fallen asleep. Gilene didn’t turn to check, choosing instead to cover her head with her scarves and warm her ears. Azarion loomed large behind her, hot as a hearth fire. The thought of a merry flame made her miss her magic. It would return in time. It always did, this thing she called a curse and Azarion named a blessing.
