Paladin

by Sally Slater

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Braeden said, “away from the shelter for a while.”

  “But Tristan . . .”

  “Will be fine. And we won’t go very far.”

  Sam nodded. “Okay.”

  She followed Braeden out through the gap in the rock. Tristan wasn’t immediately outside, but she made no note of it. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To the sea,” Braeden said. He hadn’t bothered to put his hair up in its usual top-knot or braid, and it fell in straight shocks of silver to his mid-back. A light wind ruffled his forelocks and the strands caressed his face. “It’s peaceful there.”

  In companionable silence, they walked along the beach, clambering over slippery rock till the sea was almost at their feet. The waters were indigo in the night, shot through the middle with white where the moon shone. The tide was stronger now, and waves rippled and foamed before spilling onto the shore.

  Braeden found a large boulder that was high enough to be dry and sat down on it cross-legged. Sam climbed up beside him and sat so close to him their shoulders touched. For an instant, a mix of surprise and confusion flashed across his face, and then it disappeared. He smiled at her, a full, honest-to-Gods smile with teeth and dimples. Her heart stopped.

  “What?” Braeden asked.

  Sam was grateful that he couldn’t see her blush. “You’re smiling. You never smile.”

  His smile faded. “Don’t I?”

  “No! Don’t stop smiling on my account.” She ducked, hiding her face. “I wish you smiled more, that’s all.”

  Braeden gazed at her pensively, and she could almost see his thoughts whirling. Carefully, he grasped the back of her head and placed it on his shoulder. She froze, unsure of how to react.

  He stroked her hair with gentle fingertips, and eventually, she began to relax into him. “Who are you, Sam of Haywood?” he whispered into her ear.

  She chuckled softly. “I’m not sure I know anymore. Sam of Haywood? Lady Samantha, daughter of the Duke of Haywood?” Braeden drew up sharply, jostling her head. She sighed. “If anyone can tell me who I am, it’s you.”

  Braeden resumed stroking her hair. “Sam, do you want me?”

  She jerked up, the top of her head catching his chin painfully. “What?” she squeaked.

  “Do you want me? Do you want to kiss me?” Before she could respond, he said, “I think you do.”

  And then he kissed her.

  Braeden’s lips were hard and unforgiving. He tugged her closer, pulling her onto his lap, and his mouth forced hers open. His tongue slid in, quick and darting like a snake’s, and she recoiled.

  Sam shoved at his chest, pushing him away. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What was that?”

  Braeden leaned in again, his lips descending towards her. Sam scooted backwards toward the edge of the rock and out of kissing range. She narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice cold. “You’re not Braeden.”

  “No?” Braeden asked, or the man who wore Braeden’s face. His lips tilted up. “No, perhaps not.”

  Sam jumped to her feet, and the man who was not Braeden did the same. She reached for her sword, but her hand brushed nothing but hip. She was without a weapon.

  His laughter rang out like the chime of bells. “You would fight poor Braeden? And here I thought you were friends.” He clicked his tongue reproachfully. “He wants more than your friendship, you know. And we can’t have that.”

  He smiled again, a small, secretive smile that had never belonged to Braeden. As his grin widened, the angles of his face softened and rounded, and his skin dimmed from burnished gold to the color of weathered parchment. Threads of dark brown hair sprouted between the silver, and half the length fell out in chunks. His elongated pupils spun into circular points as the crimson drained from his irises.

  When he spoke next, it was in the musical voice of the High Commander. “I’ve been wondering what it was about you. And now I finally know.”

  Sam took a step back, her feet at the edge of the boulder. “H-High Commander?”

  He laughed again, and this time the sound was dark and ugly. “Who would have thought it? Sam of Haywood a girl.” He shook his head in mock sadness, and said, almost to himself, “Too much of his mother in him. But I suppose even a masterpiece must have its flaws.” He sighed. “No matter. I’ll rid him of this disease and then he’ll be fully mine again.”

  “This is a dream,” Sam said, shaking. It had to be. “You can’t hurt me in my dreams.”

  “Clever girl, you figured it out,” the High Commander said. He pulled her to him as though he were going to embrace her. “But I can hurt you when you’re awake.”

  Sam snapped awake to the darkness of the shelter. The flame burned low in the fire pit. She almost expected to see Braeden tending to the fire, as he had in her dream, but the shelter was empty of both Braeden and Tristan. It really was just a nightmare.

  She rolled her blankets around her and attempted to fall back asleep. She willed her heart to slow down and concentrated on deep, even breaths, but sleep wouldn’t come.

  Echoes of the High Commander’s tinkling laughter sounded in her ear. Ignore it, she told herself firmly. It was a trick of the mind, the result of an overactive imagination. Tristan had said the High Commander was at least a day away . . .

  Cold hands closed around her throat, and pain—real pain—engulfed her. She gasped for air and found none. Her body bucked against the heavy weight that pinned her, but as the seconds passed, she felt her strength ebb. Blackness crowded the edges of her vision.

  No! I’m not ready to die! Sam summoned the last of her strength and slammed her forehead into her assailant’s nose.

  The hands dropped away from her neck and she sucked in a burning lungful of air. She then pulled her legs up and planted her feet firmly on the ground. She drove the right side of her pelvis up, rolling on top of her attacker. She stared down into the face of the High Commander.

  He laughed up at her. “How fitting, Lady Samantha, that you have a man between your legs.” She punched him in the mouth. His bottom lip split, but his laughing only increased.

  She punched him again. “Where are Braeden and Tristan?”

  “Oh, I’ve kept them busy for a while,” he said. “It’s only you and me.” His tongue traced over his bloody lower lip. “Perhaps you’d like to steal another kiss?” His grin was wide and bloody. “No? Such a shame.” He sighed dramatically and then threw her off him as though she weighed no more than a rag doll. The back of her head hit the rock wall and Sam saw stars.

  Shaking off her dizziness, Sam scrambled towards the weapons in the corner of the shelter and retrieved her sword. She held the blade out in front of her, trying to keep her arm from shaking. Her knuckles were broken, her throat was raw, and her lungs burned. The sword felt unwieldy in her swollen grip.

  “Ah, yes, Sam the swordsman. Swordswoman. I remember,” the High Commander said. “I can play with sticks, too.” Twin daggers with distinctly wavy blades slipped into his hands. “I’ll let you attack first. Consider it a lesson to my most precocious trainee.”

  Sam aimed a powerful swing at his head, but the High Commander parried it easily. “Sloppy,” he said. “Your footwork betrayed your direction.”

  Sam glared at him. “Are you trying to kill me or teach me?”

  “It’s never too late to learn.” He caught her with a feint to the right, and then sliced deep into the flesh of her left shoulder. White-hot agony lanced down her arm.

  The High Commander attacked again, scoring a shallow cut across her stomach. She hissed and struck out, but her blade slid harmlessly off parry. Faith in blood. She was severely outmatched.

  Sam counterattacked with a low thrust, but she held no illusions that she could land the lightest scratch on him. He was just playing with her. Regardless, she tried, attacking again and again, but no matter how hard or fast she struck, she couldn’t land even a glancing blow. Gods, her arm ached.r />
  “Enough,” he said, and Sam could hear the boredom in his voice. His daggers flashed silver in the dark and then they were everywhere—against her cheek, jutting into her thigh, scraping the skin off her neck. She could feel the blood running down her arms and chest and legs.

  It was all physically too much; her sword fell from numb fingers. “Pick it up,” the High Commander said, nodding at the fallen blade. She grasped the hilt and tried to lift it, but she was too weak.

  The High Commander frowned. “Disappointing,” he said. “I expected better from a trainee of Tristan Lyons. Though you are a woman, so perhaps allowances should be made.”

  He stalked towards her, backing her up against a wall. “Shall I confirm your status as the fairer sex?” He traced the point of his dagger down the center of her chest, tearing through her tunic and binding. “My, what pretty breasts you have. No wonder Braeden is so bewitched.”

  A blind rage overtook her, and she slapped him hard across the face. The High Commander laughed. “Well there’s some fight left in you yet,” he said. “And me with my dagger at your heart.” He pushed his blade into the space between her ribs—just the tip—to prove his point.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because,” the High Commander said, “I made a toy and you broke it.” He drove the dagger in deep, and then pain was all she knew.

  As she drifted off into the blackness, she heard a familiar voice call out. “Master, what have you done?”

  CHAPTER 39

  Braeden shoved his master out of the way and caught Sam’s limp body in his arms. She was frighteningly pale, her skin marred by splotches and streams of crimson. Blood fountained from the wound in her chest, pooling in the valley between the slopes of her breasts. Her body seized. Oh Gods, Braeden thought. Sam.

  “She’s dying,” his master said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  Ignoring him, Braeden ripped the left sleeve off his robes and applied pressure to the wound. Her blood, hot and thick, soaked through the cloth and coated his hands. “You will not die,” he told her. Glaring at his master, he said, “She won’t die. I won’t allow it.”

  “She can’t survive a wound to the heart,” his master said. “She’s not you, Braeden.”

  His master was wrong. Braeden’s heart, too, was dying. “I will never forgive you for this,” he said, a hot pressure building behind his eyes.

  “You’ve grown arrogant,” his master said. He bent over and touched Braeden’s jaw. The tip of his finger glistened with a single, pearly drop. “And weak. You’ll come to learn that I’ve done you a favor.”

  Braeden stared long and hard at the man who had raised him. “Never,” he said. “I will never think that. Sam was—is—all that is good and right with this world. You tried to destroy that. And for what?” He felt a rush of wetness on his cheeks, and he knew the tear his master had stolen from him had been replaced by twenty more. “You and I are done.”

  “Done?” his master said. “I own you.” He made a dismissive wave of his hand. “Now leave her.”

  Braeden waited for the familiar tug of compulsion to take over, but it never came. “No,” he said. The word tasted strange in his mouth. In the many years he’d lived under his master’s roof, saying no had never been more than a fleeting thought.

  His master’s face was a dark cloud. He tore off Braeden’s other sleeve. “What did you do?” His gaze was fixated on the broken lines of Braeden’s tattoo.

  Braeden glanced at the still-healing scar that bisected his shoulder. “It met with a demon’s tooth and a surgeon’s scalpel.” Dark suspicion formed and his eyebrows drew together. “You told me its purpose was to seal off my demonic nature.”

  “I warded you with my blood,” his master snarled. “To bind your demon, I had to bind you to me. How is it that you haven’t slaughtered half the kingdom?”

  Braeden lifted his chin. “I don’t need it anymore. Just like I don’t need you.”

  They both turned at the sound of clanging and heavy breathing. Tristan pushed his way into the room, blood-spattered and disheveled. “So many demons,” he said between lungfuls of air. “I’ve never seen the like.” His eyes went wide, his jaw slack. “High Commander,” he said grimly.

  Braeden’s mouth went dry, and slowly, he turned back toward his master. The man he knew as his master was gone, and in his place stood the High Commander. But Braeden knew better; it was only an illusion. The High Commander’s fingers dripped with freshly spilt blood—Sam’s blood. His master and the High Commander were one and the same.

  No wonder his master hadn’t balked when Braeden had asked to leave to join the Paladins; he’d never left him. Braeden had thought that by becoming a Paladin trainee, he would finally be free to live his own life, but instead he had been caught in the web of his master’s machinations. Had his master always been the High Commander? Or had he merely stolen his face? His master collected faces like people collected rare coins. Even Braeden didn’t know his original form.

  “Who is that woman?” Tristan asked, cutting into Braeden’s ruminations.

  His master—the High Commander—guffawed, slapping his knee. “Too funny,” he gasped, wiping away tears. “You always had more brawn than brains, Lyons. It’s why I liked you.” He shook his head. “It would have been better for all of us if you had never started thinking.”

  Braeden looked down at Sam’s too-pale face. I’m sorry, he thought at her. It should have been you who told him. “This is Sam, Tristan.”

  Tristan’s sword clattered to the floor. “No.” He crossed the shelter in two strides and knelt beside Braeden. Tristan cupped Sam’s face with both hands. “Oh Gods, it’s really him. Her.” He turned to Braeden. “You knew?”

  “Aye.”

  “How long?” Tristan asked, his question edged with a thread of anger.

  Braeden dropped his gaze. “For a while now.”

  Tristan’s voice shook. “How could you not tell me? How could she not tell me?”

  “We all have our secrets,” Braeden said. His master smirked at that. “Sam wanted to tell you, but she was afraid.”

  “Afraid? Of me? She thought I would betray her?” His hurt was evident in his tone.

  “She was afraid you would hate her.”

  Tristan fell silent.

  “You don’t, do you?” Braeden asked. “Hate her?”

  “No,” Tristan said hoarsely. “Oh Gods, is she dying?”

  “No,” Braeden said just as the High Commander said, “Yes.”

  “He did this to her,” Braeden said, glaring at his master.

  Tristan stood up quickly. “You go too far. Your grievance is with me, and that’s where it should have stayed.” He reached for his sword.

  “No,” Braeden said. “He did this to her because of me. This is my fight.”

  The High Commander’s musical laugh filled the room. “The prodigal son returns to challenge the father. I will show you no mercy, Braeden.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  “We’ll fight him together,” Tristan said. “You haven’t seen him fight.”

  “I have,” Braeden said quietly. “He taught me everything I know.” Before that admission could settle in, he said, “Stay with Sam, Tristan. This is my fight, and she is your bride.”

  Before he could witness Tristan’s reaction, Braeden walked out of the shelter, knowing his master would follow. Outside, he and Tristan had left behind a graveyard of demons, littering the beach with their corpses. It was the sudden onslaught of demons that had taken Braeden away from the shelter, and foolishly, he had thought to let Sam sleep. Now, in retrospect, he realized the demons had been a distraction.

  Demons trailed behind the High Commander like obedient puppies. Their obedience was a gift unique to his master, a gift Braeden had once craved. For the price of obedience his master had offered him control, and Braeden, a child who couldn’t understand the monster inside him or why it did such u
nspeakable things, had leaped at the bargain. The berserk rages had stopped, and for a while Braeden had been content. He had allowed his master to shape him into a weapon, and if his master had sometimes been cruel, Braeden had told himself that far fewer would suffer than if he were left to roam the earth unleashed.

  His master would disappear for stretches at a time—for a week or a few months, and once, an entire year. During those disappearances, Braeden was free to spread his wings, only to have them clipped. People were cruel, he discovered, if less overtly than his master.

  It was after his master’s year-long disappearance that Braeden had decided to join the Paladins. Naively, he had clung to the hope that the Paladins were truly the bastion of goodness they presented. It was to be his chance at redemption.

  Staring into the grinning face of the High Commander, Braeden now knew he’d been a fool to believe the Gods would give him such a chance, and Sam was the cost of his folly.

  The High Commander’s daggers still dripped with Sam’s blood, and a white ball of fury formed in the place where Braeden’s heart had been. Swiftly, Braeden drew his two katar from his robes. The short blades were wide and triangular, and the H-shaped hand grips sat right above his knuckles.

  “You said it yourself,” his master said. “I taught you everything you know. Why fight a losing battle?”

  Braeden rubbed his katar together, relishing the rasp of steel against steel. “You reap what you sow,” he said. “I’m no longer holding back.” He sprinted at the High Commander and thrust with both blades.

  The High Commander shifted to the side and clamped his daggers around Braeden’s left katar. He wrenched the blade from Braeden’s grasp, and then the two of them broke apart. “Give up,” his master said. “You’re already down to one weapon.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Braeden said. A new katar dropped into his empty hand. He jumped forward and slashed, raking the High Commander’s chest. “If you hope to disarm me, we’ll be here all night.”

  His master sliced diagonally. Braeden ducked and rolled, throwing a katar as he somersaulted. The blade lodged itself in the High Commander’s kneecap.