Gilene summoned witch-fire to join the flames consuming the kindling surrounding her. She breathed the acrid smoke of charring wood and the burning dead. Deaf to the victims’ laments and the spectators’ applause, she concentrated on the internal river of magic, captured its flames, and swelled it to a ravenous creature that bit and clawed at the cage of her will. Smoke and heat swirled around her. She ignored both, bound by the rise of power.
She shrieked as the fire erupted around the pillar’s base, then shot skyward in a column of white flame. It fountained back to the ground, servant to her silent bidding, incinerating within and around it in an instant. The sacrificed women, the pillar to which they were tied, the dead upon which they stood—all turned to ash in the space of one breath to another. Flames shot toward the stone firebreak surrounding the Pit and protecting the spectators in the lower seats. Still, many of those fled, not trusting that the wall would contain the hellfire tide that clawed at its unyielding surface.
Only Gilene stood untouched within the conflagration, now cloaked in another illusion. Freed, she leapt off the burning platform and sped through the fire, nothing more than flame herself to the eyes of the exuberant crowd. Spirits of the newly dead fluttered past her. She thought she glimpsed Pell’s vaporous features before the hot wind generated by the fire shredded the apparition.
Power leached from her like oil from a broken lamp. By the time she reached one of the deserted entrances to the catacombs, she was stumbling and bent with the urge to vomit. The cool interior offered respite, and she collapsed against it, sloughing off her disguise.
Her trial wasn’t over. Gilene wiped the sweat and tears from her face and straightened from the wall. Fire exacted a steep price for its subservience. She didn’t have much time left before that price left her helpless. She exchanged one illusion for another and descended into the underground. The clusters of guards ignored her, uninterested in an old slave who clung to the shadows as he went about his daily tasks.
Azarion occupied the last cell at the end of one of the long corridors branching off the underground’s main hub. Once more Gilene incanted a spell and became the much-despised Hanimus.
Her vision turned hazy at the edges. She flattened her palm against an archway to stay upright and concentrated on the illusion. The chief handler’s appearance proved the most difficult she had ever attempted.
A solitary soldier monitored the hallway. When he saw Gilene lumbering toward him as Hanimus, he straightened from his indolent pose and saluted. Her luck held when she gestured for his keys. He dropped them into her waiting palm without question.
Azarion regarded her from the cell’s narrow window. Gilene unlocked and opened the door, stepping aside just in time as the gladiator rushed the opening. The guard had no chance to cry out before Azarion grabbed his head and snapped his neck. He dropped to the ground without a sound. The years of traveling to Krael’s capital and witnessing its casual cruelties had left Gilene hardened to many such sights, but her stomach still roiled at the sound of cracking bone.
Unfazed by the killing, Azarion stripped the soldier of his breastplate, helmet, and weaponry and tossed the body into the cell. He caught the keys Gilene tossed him with a nod of thanks.
Torchlight cast his sublime face in sharp relief, transforming it into a skeletal mask made even more macabre by bestial-bright green eyes. Gladiator, Pit fighter, he’d probably shed enough blood to fill a dozen washtubs.
A jagged ache pressed needles into her right thigh, hip, and lower back—the first warning of the agony to come. She flinched and surrendered her illusion of Hanimus with a moan.
“Woman?” Azarion gave her a puzzled look.
She ignored him, intent on escaping the city before the price of her magic brought her to her knees. She assumed the illusion of the old slave again and turned her back on Azarion. “Our agreement is met, gladiator,” she said over her shoulder.
“What is your name?”
Fresh air and the promise of escape gave her tired feet wings. “Forgotten,” she murmured as she hurried away from him.
His gaze burned holes between her shoulder blades as she fled back the way she came. An invisible fire licked at her leg and back, slowing her stride and making her whimper. She cast off all illusion just as she escaped the catacombs. By the time she merged into the flow of foot traffic on the narrow streets, she limped.
Sanctuary, personified by her two brothers and a pony cart, waited at the nearby Fell Gates. Nylan’s face twisted into a fierce frown when he saw her. She was so close. Each year she fell into his arms and sobbed on his shoulder as he and their younger brother, Luvis, settled her into the cart for the trip home. This year would be no different.
Sick with pain and desperate to reach her siblings, she barely heard the thunder of hoofbeats or the panicked shouts of the crowd behind her. Nylan’s horrified expression and Luvis’s shouted “Gilene, look out!” made her pivot.
Time slowed. Road dust hung in the air in a choking miasma. Pedestrians stood flattened along shop walls or leapt into the shallow safety of doorways. A soldier bore down on her at full gallop, his mount’s hooves pounding out a relentless beat as he consumed the distance between them. Gilene glimpsed the rider’s eyes—as green and hard as sea glass. Familiar.
“No,” she whispered and spun away in a futile bid to avoid him.
Too late. He leaned from the saddle, arm outstretched toward her. A terrific force wrenched her upward, almost garroting her with the collar of her own shift as the fabric pulled tight. She landed belly down across a pair of muscled thighs. Air gusted from her lungs in a hard whoosh.
It was nothing compared to the crippling shock of pain that torched her back and thigh. Reduced to emitting only breathless grunts, she arched and twisted in her captor’s imprisoning grip.
The world careened in all directions as the horse balked at her struggles, and Azarion fought to bring it under control. Snarled curses, her brothers’ diminishing shouts, and the mount’s protesting whinnies all blended into a mad cacophony while Gilene thrashed even harder on the gladiator’s lap.
A sudden crack of agony blossomed across the side of her head. Her vision went dark, and she knew no more.
CHAPTER FOUR
The captive agacin twitched across Azarion’s lap like a dying trout. His mount, stolen from one of the cavalry stables, snorted in protest at the strange movements and jerked against his rider’s guidance. With a hand on the fire witch’s back and another holding the reins, Azarion maneuvered the horse across the narrow bend of a feeder stream that traveled down the mountains and merged into the Holstet river. Kraelag lay behind him, hidden by a cloud of wind-stirred dust and the blinding rays of the setting sun. He kept an ear tuned for voices, the bays of hunting hounds, even the thwang of a bowstring as an archer loosed an arrow to bring him down.
This was a temporary reprieve. He’d barreled through the city’s crowded streets and out the main gates without raising a single warning cry from his guards. Some of the soldiers he passed had even laughed and cheered him on his way at the sight of the unconscious woman draped in front of him across the saddle. No one was the wiser that the Gladius Prime, a priceless slave and a favorite toy of the empress, had just escaped his prison. Dressed in the military garb of the Empire, he was only a soldier, hot for a woman and eager to tup her, willing or not, in the nearest straw heap.