Gilene stared at him for a moment before striding to the dead archer. She knelt beside him. “I spilled blood in there too,” she said. She rose and approached Azarion, opening her hand to show him what she clutched in her bloodied fist—a pottery shard. Its edge, darkened with blood, was sharp as any knife in some spots. “The last man to enter the barrow saw me.” Her fingers played over the shard’s surface and the broken lines of lost engravings etched into the clay. “For now I am a captive. I refuse to be a slave.”
Azarion stared at her with new respect. At some point during their time in the barrow, she had found the shard, recognized it as a possible weapon, and hidden it. “I’ve underestimated you, Agacin. You’re as dangerous without your fire as you are with it.”
She dropped the shard and kicked it aside with her foot before using her skirt hem to wipe her hand clean. “If you tell me again it’s a blessing, I will find a way to feed you to that wight.”
He believed her. “When will the fire return?”
She shrugged, tucking a windblown strand of hair behind her ear with a bloodied hand. “It usually takes weeks, though after my first time, it was longer.” She tilted her head to one side. “You believe me when I say I can’t use it yet?” He nodded. “Why?”
Gilene wielded her power with skill; he’d seen that with his own eyes, and if she still had any left to summon, the perfect opportunity to exploit it had just presented itself.
He coaxed her toward the spot where their own horses huddled with those belonging to the dead Nunari. “Because if your power were fully returned, you’d be on one of those horses and riding for home. The barrow is as much a trap as it is a defense. You could have burned me and the men I killed and walked out untouched.”
She halted, her expression dark. “I don’t like being so predictable. Nor am I a murderer.”
If that pottery shard in her hand, and the Nunari she had disfigured with it, were anything to judge by, she was anything but predictable. “You aren’t, but you’re driven and as intent as I am on surviving.”
The sour look was back, along with the shadow of sorrow. “This is why I hate the Empire most of all,” she said. “Because it’s twisted us into people we despise.”
The wind whipped her tattered skirts around her long legs and bent the grass to her feet in supplication. Moonlight silvered her hair, and those dark, dark eyes watched him, bleak and despairing.
CHAPTER NINE
After five more days of hard riding and sleepless hours worrying over pursuit by more Nunari, they topped a low rise whose sweeping views encompassed more of the swaying plume grass and a shimmering orange line in the distance.
Azarion pointed to it. “There. That’s what we ride toward.”
Gilene stared at him, bleary-eyed and exhausted. “Will they know you when you return?” Ten years was a long time of separation, and the boy taken had changed into a man she suspected none of his clan would recognize now.
“Maybe.” His voice was muted, thoughtful. “Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. The Sky Below is the land of my spirit. It’s where I belong.”
She turned away. She envied her captor and his obvious love for his land. Gilene had been born and raised in Beroe. It was the village she lived in, yet she felt no connection to it beyond the guilt-ridden obligation, ingrained in the history of its existence, to protect its denizens and most of all her family. The gift of her magic came with a terrible price. She could grieve for the women who died in the Pit each year, endure a night with a gladiator who might not live through the next afternoon, and persevere through the pain of the magical backlash created by wielding so much power at once. But the crushing guilt of knowing Beroe expected her to pass on her knowledge and her burden to another girl cursed with fire magic ate at her.
She envied Azarion because he’d broken free of the shackles the Empire had put upon him. Though she had been one of the Empire’s many victims, Gilene had never been one of its slaves. She belonged to Beroe instead, and those chains would hold her until she died.
“I may curse your name for dragging me here,” she whispered, “but I shall never forget this place. I shall never forget you.”
She turned back to meet his gaze, admiring the way the rising sun gilded him in the colors of morning: bronze and gold, hints of fiery red, and the last fading lavender of night. His eyes glittered with a thousand untold secrets. “Then you will have made me immortal, Agacin.” The corners of his mouth lifted a fraction. “At least for a little while.”
They continued to stare at one another while her stomach did somersaults under her ribs. She shook off the feeling and clucked to set her horse in motion toward the glowing horizon. “Let’s get to it then. It looks another day’s ride, and I’m sick beyond words of being in this saddle.”
The landscape changed as they rode, rising subtly. The plumes of the tall grasses lightened from pale linen to snow white and grew in haphazard clumps now, dotting the steppe amid the fringed sage that had deepened from a silvery green to an ash blue.
The orange thread of light they rode to widened and brightened the closer they got, and soon Gilene gasped, stunned at the sight before her. Azarion wheeled his horse in front of hers, and they slowed to a stop before a colossal wall of flames.
The wall stretched high above them, far too high for a horse to jump clear to the other side. The flames didn’t crackle; they roared, pulsing upward as if the land itself had captured a slice of the sun and tethered it to earth, where it strained and stretched to break free and return to its origin.
“The Fire Veil.” Gilene had grown up hearing tales of the Veil. Never in her life did she think she might see it for herself. If she managed to return to Beroe, she’d have quite the story to tell her family.
Raised by nomadic spellworkers generations earlier to shield the Stara Dragana from invasion by the Krael Empire from the west, the Fire Veil worked in tandem with the distant Gamir Mountains in the east to protect the Savatar clans that claimed this part of the Stara Dragana as theirs.
Azarion stared at the endless length of fire that stretched to either side of them as far as the eye could see. “On the other side is the land of the Savatar, the Sky Below. For all its power, the Empire still hasn’t found a way to tear down the Veil and take it from us.” The reverence in his voice matched hers.
Gilene’s stomach fluttered at the yearning in his features, the near disbelief in finally returning to something he’d lost long ago. Were she here as a friend and not a captive, she’d congratulate him. Instead, she turned her gaze back to the majestic Veil.
“Is this why your fire witches are of such importance? They built and hold the Veil?”
Azarion’s faint smile was wry. “It’s one reason. An important one. Agna is the goddess of fire, of birth and death, of horses. We call her the Mother of All, the Great Mare. She gifted fire to men so that we would keep warm during the winter of the world.” His gaze raked her, as if he expected her to scoff at him. She didn’t, and after a moment he continued. “Agacins are holy to the Savatar. You’re one of Agna’s handmaidens, even if you don’t worship her.”