Tallis shook her by the hair. “What is this, part of your big announcement? Bring in muscle to make sure everyone complies?”
“This is my brother having found me after decades of searching. This is . . . this is the brink of chaos. Worse than you even thought of threatening with two barbarian swords.”
She jerked free of his hold and stared him down. At least now she knew who he was. His true identity.
Tallis of Pendray. The Heretic.
She still wasn’t able to read his mind, but his seax held residual memories so strong that she’d caught flashes of his true self. His identity. His life on the run.
A man of myth. But still a man.
“You don’t need telepathy to sense the panic.” She tipped her chin toward where Pashkah owned the altar—the altar she’d hoped would be host to an evening of peaceful triumph. “Those are lambs being herded toward a butcher’s knife. This man is fear and danger. Nothing I’ve done, no matter your delusions, will match the crimes he’s capable of committing.”
“He’s your brother. I wouldn’t expect anything less than deceit and mind-warping delusions.”
Kavya’s heart was expanding with each beat, until it shoved against her trachea. Everything she’d worked for was at Pashkah’s mercy. “Do you hate me so much that you deny the obvious? Look at the men at his back. Every one of them is twice-cursed.”
“You can tell? You’re reading their minds?”
“I don’t need to. They’re Pashkah’s Black Guard. Whole communities have been rolled over by their arrival.”
“He kills Dragon Kings? The Council and the other clans would’ve heard about that.”
Kavya shook her head, her eyes filling. “Not killing. Trying to breed. The Black Guard was responsible for the Juvine forty years ago, when women were stolen from the South and held captive here in the mountains. Retaliation after retaliation followed, reviving the same deeds and the same hatreds that split our clan three thousand years ago. By trapping me, you’ve given him unchecked permission. The Black Guard will continue its spree.”
Tallis had fascinating skin—smooth except for those places where emotions pushed to the surface. So animated for a Dragon King, he frowned with his whole face until it took on the gravity of a pending typhoon. Finally he seemed to be taking her fear seriously.
“Unbind me,” she said, pressing her advantage.
“So you can flee? What do you think I am?”
“An idiotic, brainless thing. All I want is to face my brother without ropes around my wrists.” She forced strength into her voice just as she’d forced calm into her body. “You wanted me discredited, not martyred, remember?”
“That I can agree with.”
“First obeying me, now agreeing with me. You’ll be undone by dawn.”
“Suddenly you expect to live that long,” he said with an edge of a smile.
“You have no idea the consequences if I don’t. Forget martyrdom. I’ll be the dead soul that gives Pashkah what he’s always wanted: the powers of a thrice-cursed Indranan.”
He shook his head. “Legend.”
“No, fact. Just like how the Heretic seems to have graced me with his presence.”
That caught him off guard, but only for a moment. “So you admit it. You’ve known who I am.”
“For the last few moments, yes. Your weapon tells tales to a telepath, even if I can’t read your mind. But none of it means your accusations hold merit.”
He silenced her by dragging a seax nearer to her flesh. Although she shuddered, she appreciated the knife more than his kiss. She could endure pain. Life had taught her those lessons and the means of coping with what no one should have to endure. The surprise of pleasure, however, was still frothing through her veins. Every hair stood on end. Her skin pulled toward his touch and his Dragon-damned kisses.
The conflicting emotions were too much to process.
The tip of the seax was as fine as the point of a needle. Engraved scrollwork along the blade caught the last of the dying sunshine. She recognized the etchings as the ancient language of the Pendray but had no idea of their meaning. Tallis slid the tip between her wrists and sliced the ropes with one swift cut. No wasted motion. Perfect mastery of his weapon.
“Members of the Sun Cult,” came the voice that sent hot dread up her spine and ghostly chills back down. “Your leader is no longer here. Because I am her brother, Pashkah, you can imagine the consequences if I take her life—or if I already have. Perhaps she’s merely fled, leaving you to my mercies.”
The Black Guard marched to the edge of the altar.
Pashkah didn’t smile, but contentment shimmered around him in a swirl of charcoal fog. “I have no mercy.”
Additional members of the Guard dragged a pair of men into sight and thrust them to their knees, flanking Pashkah.
Kavya gasped. “No, no, no . . .”
A hand wrapped around her mouth. She struggled until Tallis’s words found their way into her short-circuiting brain.
“Quiet,” he hissed softly. His arms were strong around her, which was welcome rather than abhorrent. She was ready to shudder apart, disintegrated by fear and utter outrage.
Tallis ducked her back into the tent. They could see through a small sliver that parted the folds of canvas. He kept his mouth near her ear, as if any stray syllable could be a death sentence. Still a Pendray, relying on words. For the Indranan, thoughts were louder.
“Who are they?”
“Representatives to the factions’ Leaderships,” she replied. “My allies. Oh, Dragon save them.”
Pashkah was a man of his sick, malevolent word. He stood over the representatives and spread his hands with a flourish. “These are the presents the Sun was going to offer at dusk. Omanand of the North. Raghupati of the South. She would’ve stood behind them and smiled that tranquil, happy smile and watched as they shook hands. Ended the civil war. Healed the breach. Wouldn’t that have been lovely?”
“Is that true?” Tallis asked against Kavya’s cheek.
“Yes,” she whispered. “A foundation for lasting peace. But it doesn’t matter now. Nothing will matter now.”
One of the Guardsmen handed Pashkah a sword that gleamed with a golden sheen.
Tallis drew in a sharp breath. “That’s Dragon-forged.”
Her lucidity was slipping away, along with her hopes. She was physically ill, so painfully, violently ill. “Yes.”
Pashkah lifted the blade. With one blow, he beheaded Omanand. With another, he separated Raghupati’s head from a body that flopped onto the altar. Terror echoed through the valley like the shrieks of demons.
Kavya saw only blood.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Tallis had witnessed the beheadings of Dragon Kings. He’d dispatched more than a few. Visceral memory would not let his hands forget how the metal hilt would crush the bones of his palm as he struck a Dragon-forged sword through a neck. Neither could he forget the warm spray of the blood. When he’d committed his first murder at the behest of the Sun, that of a long-dead Pendray priest, he’d left behind the ring that bore his family’s crest, claiming the kill and marking himself as the target of his clan’s hatred. Better that way.
Yet he’d thought about Lady Macbeth. Although he’d wiped clean his armor and his weapons, he would never be able to wash away the stains. The exact temperature of a dying man’s blood became an indelible detail.
Subsequent kills had meant less to him. The repetition of it. The rhythm of following orders and detaching his morality. The deaths he’d brought about had created peace in places where Dragon Kings squabbled, where rifts threatened to break fragile alliances. His dirty work had been successful—until it had ruined Nynn’s life.
He was unnaturally good at his work.
Pashkah of the Northern Indranan was better.
Had the man felt any emotion about beheading two fellow clansmen, it would be satisfaction. He stood like a triumphant god who, dissatisfied with
sacrifices made in his honor, had taken the task upon himself. Two lifeless bodies slumped at his feet. Two heads had rolled away—distended tongues, bulging eyes, matted hair. The pair of Guardsmen stepped back from what remained of the prostrate men they’d forever immobilized. Their expressions were even more vacant. They radiated none of Pashkah’s silent triumph.
If Tallis could ever read minds, this was the moment. He sensed more than satisfaction radiating from the murderer. He sensed glee.
The camp was a riot.
The Black Guard descended from the altar and strode through the tents. They grabbed women. Young women. Dark robes and saris were subsumed by men in black brigandine armor. Little blackbirds chased by avaricious ravens. In the melee, only flashes of mirrored armor plates distinguished predator from prey.
The Indranan men fought back. Their punishment was that from which a Dragon King could not recover: crippling injuries. Their kind had remarkable healing powers, but they couldn’t regenerate limbs. Extreme wounds left scars. Suffering those ramifications could last the length of their two-century life span.
“We have to go,” Tallis said plainly. His mission hadn’t changed, no matter the hysteria that tainted the air as surely as his nostrils scented blood. “Wouldn’t they love to get their hands on you.”
“They wouldn’t keep me for long. They’d hand me over to Pashkah and my severed head would lie on that altar within minutes.” The Sun had revealed herself as just an Indranan woman, not a goddess, but she shot sparks from her eyes. “You brought this on us.”
She stood and scampered free of the tent so quickly that Tallis was thrown off-balance. He caught his momentum with a backward twist of his hand. Without wasted motion, he grabbed his pack and tucked one seax into the scabbard crossing his back.
He launched into the crowd, gripping the other blade. The unmistakable swirl of a golden sari was his only means of tracking Kavya through a circus of flailing, screaming, and maiming. She headed toward the outskirts of camp, not toward the round valley’s sole exit—a narrow ravine. Likely she’d chosen this place for symbolic reasons. Circles and unions and the security of being held within the majesty of timeless mountains. She’d also chosen the worst place for a group of defenseless parishioners to escape trained killers.
He glanced up. Along the craggy ridges, more Guardsmen stood in anticipation of an ambitious refugee.
Tallis chased the Sun. No lazy pursuit, as if he were the moon tracking across the sky in a never-ending dance. He chased her with the speed of a Dragon King about to lose his sanity.
An Indranan man caught Tallis by the forearm. “Help us, friend. Help us.”
“Use what your family gave you. Every pod has a Dragon-forged sword. I’ve lived among you long enough to know that.”
“So few of us remain!” His leathery skin shone with sweat. The tightness of his creased eyes couldn’t hide his distress.
“Then make sure you’re one of them. Unless you want to see the Juvine repeated, with your daughters stolen for breed stock.” Tallis shrugged free. “The Sun has made you complacent. Peace. Unity. This . . .” He nodded toward the chaos. Two members of the Black Guard held a young man’s arms while another gouged his eye with a dagger. Shrieking, clutching the empty socket, the victim was helpless while the guards dragged away a sobbing girl with long honey-brown hair. “This is the world we really live in.”
Tallis turned toward where he’d last seen Kavya.
When he couldn’t find her distinctive sari, he resisted the urgency of his gift. These people, this riot—followed by the sinking doubt that perhaps he’d been partly to blame. For whatever reason, Kavya couldn’t read his mind, but what if Pashkah could? Tallis’s focus on her whereabouts might have led the madman here. Those self-recriminations conspired to conceal Tallis’s rationality in the steam of a swirling, claustrophobic rage. He needed to find her. No one needed his spinning berserker rage in that quicksand of gore.
Whatever trick blocked his mind from her telepathy didn’t protect him from the rest of the Indranan. Their previous, almost polite tap-tap curiosity about a Pendray in their midst had become splatters of toxic confusion. Every mind writhed with the same thought: escape.
The shove and crush of bodies overwhelmed his path. He was tempted to use his seax for more than intimidation. However, the chances that some terrified Indranan carried an inherited Dragon-forged sword put him at a disadvantage. His aggression would appear little different than a Guardsman on the hunt for young female flesh, and he wanted to keep his head. Literally. The body count was currently two—at least.
Tallis of Pendray would not fall victim, too.
There.
Golden silk.
His heart jumped with a kick of adrenaline. The dam holding back his gift was weakening.
Kavya was not alone. A large Indranan woman stood at her side. She wore what appeared to be ceremonial brigandine armor, similar to that worn by the Black Guard. Called “the coat of a thousand nails,” its wool and leather padding was backed with rivets. Penetrating that dense overlapping iron with a blade was almost impossible. Pristine and unscathed, the armor was decorated with pale Northern turquoise. Only the woman’s posture suggested her clothing and the curved talwar saber she held were more than for show.
A burst of pain shot down Tallis’s backbone, from his temple to the base of his spine.
What the hell?
He dropped to one knee and looked up. The female stranger glared down. More pain sizzled his every nerve. Another man might’ve been crippled by that stinging, blinding blow, but Tallis had nearly lost the Sun. His prize. He wasn’t going to lose her again.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, working past the agony that centered at the base of his skull. He caught the Sun’s gaze. “No matter what you and that butcher of a brother have done.”
“You blame me for this?” Wide, almost innocent eyes narrowed with concentrated anger. At least the chaos had stripped the last of her ability to draw false impressions from the crowd.
“You’ve led your people to slaughter,” he said. “We won’t be victims, too.”
Lunging forward, seax at the ready, he attempted to grab her waist with his free arm.
The Sun shot backward. “Chandrani!”
The bigger woman met Tallis’s attack with a quick parry and flick of her saber. The curving blade meant his arrow-straight seax was deflected by a swooping arc. It was like trying to stab the center of a blender’s blades. Only his speed, which was gathering as his fury increased, dented the skilled woman’s defenses. She moved with surprising grace, considering she was nearly his height, made of muscle, and covered in riveted leather armor. A bodyguard. That would explain the pain she continued to shoot through his skull. Some Indranan were better suited to thought manipulation, others to combat. This woman Chandrani was obviously one of the latter.
Tallis spun behind her. He kicked the back of her knee with his heavy combat boots. She stumbled—the opening he needed. The power he harnessed was unpredictable, but he’d been wielding it since its manifestation in his early teens. He let a portion of the rage fuel his movements. Stronger. Faster. His mind slipped behind a haze of red. He managed to restrain his violence only after slamming the hilt of his seax against the woman’s temple. She staggered, clutching where blood oozed from between her fingers.
“What have you done?” The Sun rushed forward and held the woman’s head against her chest. “She was the only hope I had of getting out of here.”
“No, you have me.” Tallis hitched the strap of his pack. “I don’t believe you backed yourself into a valley without a way out. Show me how you planned to escape and I won’t continue to fight this woman.”
“Chandrani comes with us.”
He smiled grimly. “If she can walk.”
—
She hated him. Kavya had thought herself immune to hatred beyond her loathing for Pashkah. That loathing came from the knowledge that her life was not her own so lon
g as he lived. She couldn’t behead him and risk taking two minds into her own. Anyone she hired to kill him could accept double the payment to lead Pashkah right back to her. And she wouldn’t risk Chandrani, her only reliable calm in a world of chaos. The woman had offered to kill him several times, as repayment for a bleak night in Mumbai ten years ago when Kavya had beheaded Chandrani’s murderous twin sister. Afterward they’d held each other and cried in both relief and grief.
That was an Indranan’s deepest burden, to genuinely love and hate one’s mortal foe. Kavya lived with the constant dread that the brother she’d adored as a child—together with Baile, the three of them inseparable—was eager to steal her from this world, when she still had so much to do.
But Tallis of Pendray . . .
The Dragon-damned Heretic. She hated him without reservation.
She helped Chandrani stand, although the woman outweighed her by a good forty pounds of muscle. “I’m sorry,” the woman said, her voice rife with pain. “I heard your shout, but your mind flickered in and out. I couldn’t focus to find you. Then . . . then there was chaos.”
“The fault was mine. I was dazed. Couldn’t concentrate after I called for you.”
Chandrani offered a watery smile. She only smiled for Kavya, which represented their unshakable bond. “I wouldn’t be able to concentrate in the company of that lonayíp bastard either.”
“I still need you,” Kavya whispered, her face flushed. “Please. For me. We need to escape.”
Chandrani steadied herself with gratifying efficiency. No one in Asia was a better, more sacrificing warrior. Her honor and dedication had kept Kavya alive far longer than she’d expected as a scared, homeless twelve-year-old girl.
Kavya glared once more at Tallis before turning toward the altar.
Tallis followed. She’d expected his presence, but he seemed unusually willing to follow. Not grab and demand. He was connected to her in ways that he resented. What was it about his past that had produced such a strange combination of bitterness and . . . protectiveness? Even affection? An untenable sense of his innate aura was the closest she could get to reading his mind.
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