“I’m done being betrayed.”
23
Blood and Bones
The stink of death cloyed the air. Nadine held on to the back of Crann’s hide jacket, letting the creature guide her through the total blackness of the cave. The Nozverak were cautious, determined to remain undetected as they slipped around the catacomb-like tunnels, seeking her mutinous countrymen.
Magnus’s boots scraped the ground nearby as Azolirum guided him. The distance she’d driven between herself and Magnus had only seemed to push him closer to the monstrous creature.
“You should’ve mounted her,” the horde king had said, once they’d gathered outside the vents. “Now she’ll despise you. Mark me.” His companions had chuckled low in agreement while Magnus had turned away with a grimace.
Nadine cringed at the memory. Why shouldn’t he be disgusted? Everything about this situation was lanced. She’d insulted him, harmed him, done whatever it took to push him away. But then, she’d only spoken the truth, same as he’d done to her. And by Yudvir, he’d shown her no more mercy.
Even now Magnus’s words ate at her soul. He’d called her a child. A cringing child licking her wounds in a darkened corner. He’d called her scars festering wounds she’d been too weak to burn closed. But how could she? Who had ever been there to guide her? Nadine had always been alone. Always.
Until now.
Because even after everything, the barbarian was still here. And where were her men? The enlightened Ebronians who’d called her captain and sworn upon the name of her uncle, the Mushar, to follow her unto death?
Her guide stopped, and Nadine kept her hand clenched around his shirt. If she lost track of him now, she might as well be a babe crawling through an open desert.
“We’re here,” Crann whispered in that gravelly voice.
“Take hold of your female, nozturel,” Azolirum rasped through the darkness. “We’ll see there is no threat.”
Nadine’s neck burned at the dismissive form of address. Any shred of respect they’d afforded her before was clearly gone. Suddenly, Nadine realized that whatever they’d shown before was likely for Magnus’s sake. Not hers.
When she felt the barbarian’s hand upon her arm, she stiffened and resisted the urge to pull away. How long would he put up with her deliberate snubs? How long before he decided she’d been right after all and staying at her side wasn’t worth the constant rejection?
I can’t take it back.
She repeated this over and over in her mind. She didn’t want to hurt him, but after Samar’s betrayal, her spirit was a whiff of vapor. There was only one thing left for her now, and that was the chance to achieve some glory for the Pajel name, to be worthy of her lineage and her ancestor, Riyah. She couldn’t do that if she trusted this barbarian to carry her. She wouldn’t let him.
“We’ll wait,” Magnus answered, his voice a whisper.
The air shifted as the Nozverak left them. They scurried over what must’ve been a pile of rocks for all the clattering it made before the darkness around them went eerily silent. Nadine might as well have been floating in a sky without stars for all the nothing around her. The barbarian’s hand was all that anchored her to reality. That, and his slow, steady breath beside her.
“Magnus?” she whispered.
What was she doing? She’d not spoken to him since they’d left the vents. She’d barely looked at him. Yet she couldn’t stop herself. Her heart longed for him. Here in this nothingness, the sound of his voice was all she wanted.
“I’m here, kandiri,” was all he said.
And it was all she needed.
They waited a bit longer, then she stiffened when rocks shifted ahead. Were the Nozverak returning? Nadine’s hand inched toward an oil flare.
“Light your torches, nozturel,” the horde king rumbled. “Come see what betrayal earns you in my lands.”
They lit the torches and climbed over the rubble. The sight on the other side took Nadine’s breath away. Wet blood covered the floors like a dam had broken. Her countrymen, or what was left of them, lay strewn in pieces. Nadine held up the torch as though the added light would change the horrific scene laid out before her. She looked at Azolirum. “I thought you said we were past his hunting grounds.”
Azolirum rolled his eyes at her. “The monster doesn’t hunt where it eats. And we haven’t even made it to where he eats. These men died by something else.”
Magnus crept forward and squatted down near the limbless body of a prone Ebronian. He held the torch over it. “They look like they were eaten.”
Azolirum grunted. “That’s not how most of them died. The Rasteel gnawed on their corpses afterward. To their credit, they made it farther past him than I would’ve wagered. Or at least, some of them.”
Nadine’s brows drew together at the sight before her. Was this not all eleven of them? Yudvir. Was Samar a victim of this massacre? She began counting heads, unable to identify most of the faces. Then she counted corpses and limbs. The numbers didn’t add up. And she only made it to seven. Or only six? Possibly six men had made this much of a mess.
“So what killed them?” Nadine asked.
A groan echoed through the room, drawing all their attention to the left. Nadine didn’t hesitate. She bolted toward the fleshy mound in the corner. Magnus and the Nozverak followed her. A heap of bloody rags and slack limbs lay against the wall. Nadine dropped her torch and thrust her open hands toward the corpses. She grabbed the lifeless body on the top and hauled it off with a grunt. It rolled away, revealing the face of Rushil, Samar’s lieutenant.
He looked up at her with eyes that simmered in agony. His lancet arm was gone. Both his legs twisted under him in angles completely unnatural. His body was a mess of tears and pooled blood that Nadine was sure would run out of him like water from a bowl should she tip him to the side. She swallowed back the bile rising in her throat, grateful she was no stranger to gore. But this? She’d never seen anything like this.
Nadine grasped Rushil by the back of the head, anger at his mutiny still bright in her mind. Despite herself, she ended up nestling him more than restraining him. “What happened?”
She could feel Magnus standing over her. The barbarian made a choking sound that was surely for the carnage. Or perhaps it was at seeing a human being struggle so to hold onto the last frayed thread of his life. Perhaps Rushil’s only real struggle was in embracing death before he could suffer another excruciating moment. Nadine used her other hand to cup Rushil’s cheek. “Answer me, Lieutenant. And I’ll put an end to the pain.”
“I—” Rushil’s voice gurgled through blood that spattered upon Nadine’s clothes. She ignored it, keeping her eyes fixed on him so that he knew she was listening. “Some of us fell to the beast. We retreated.”
He started a fit of coughing, and Nadine panicked, fearing he would die before he could finish the tale. “Where’s the Eye, Lieutenant?”
His breath was coming in heaving pants now. “Captain took it. They took h-him. And two of the others . . . I think.”
“Who?” Magnus asked from over Nadine’s shoulder.