His gaze settled on Anhuset. “You're a vicious cunt,” he told her. “Ogran was right when he said you were worth three humans in a fight. Day after tomorrow promises to be an exciting day indeed.” The maniacal glee in his voice sent splinters of ice through her veins. She didn't ask him to clarify or expound. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He'd only drop more obtuse hints as a way to torture her, hoping to seed her fear and drink it like a poisoned nectar. Instead she focused on his last statement. Ogran.
Her suspicions had borne out. He might not have the funds to bribe a warlord to murder a margrave, but he was just as involved in its planning.
Chamtivos gestured to the group in general. “Get her rinsed off. It's bad enough having to look at her. I don't want to have to smell her too.”
He strolled away but not before Anhuset spotted blood on his clothes and his hands. Dried blood that didn't belong to the dead Lewelis. Her heart thudded heavy. Serovek.
She clenched her jaw under the dousing of ice water, nearly breaking her back teeth in the effort not to screech from the shock of cold pouring over her. The shivers she couldn't control. They worsened every second until she almost convulsed from muscle spasms. At least she no longer smelled like a dead human's piss.
Karulin came to her rescue yet again, this time carrying a blanket. “My gods,” he muttered as he dragged her to a dry patch of ground. “You're a lot heavier than you look.”
You're just a sad, weak human, she thought, unable to stop her teeth from chattering long enough to speak.
Rescuer he might be, but Karulin was also cautious. He draped the dry blanket over her wet form, then pulled another strip of cloth from a pocket of his tunic. This time he didn't have to say anything for the attending guards to knock arrows and take aim.
“Chamtivos says no food. He doesn't want to waste provisions on you.” Karulin looped the gag cloth through his fingers as he spoke. “But you're allowed more to drink if you want it.”
Something in the way he dropped his chin and stared at her made her hesitate in accepting the offer. It wasn't what he said but what he didn't say that decided her. The water wouldn't just be water. “I'm not thirsty.” She reared back when he leaned forward to tie the gag cloth over her mouth. “Why?”
As she guessed, he understood the rest of her unspoken question. His features hardened though his voice remained mild, vaguely bored. “I believe in a fair fight. What's to come won't be fair.”
He knotted the cloth just above her nape, muzzling her before she could interrogate him more and pulled the blanket firmly around her shoulders. He stood with the same lithe grace that hinted at speed and agility. “No one will bother you tonight. You have my word.”
He was as good as that word. No one accosted her for the rest of the day and through the night. Only once was she moved, and then by Karulin himself who untied her enough so she could heed nature's insistent call and also ease the painful kink in her back.
Dawn came with a thin frost glazing everything exposed to the open air. Anhuset's hair crackled as she curled in on herself for any scrap of warmth. Her ears were numb as was the tip of her nose and her hands. The blanket she huddled under offered little in the way of a barrier between her still damp body and the morning cold. As a Kai, she actively avoided the sun. Now she eagerly looked forward to its rise and the heat it offered.
A flurry of activity at one end of camp near the tent made her peek out from the blanket's cover. She forgot about the cold and discomfort, the bruises and backache. Chamtivos emerged from the tent, followed by two of his men carrying a limp, bloodied Serovek between them. His feet plowed shallow furrows in the dirt as they dragged him to a waiting horse. Dark hair, matted with what looked like blood partially obscured his features, but not enough that she didn't see the swelling misshaping his features or the way both of his eyes were blackened and scabbed shut. A thread of crimson drool stretched from his mouth before breaking to splash on the ground.
Her emotions spun in a whirlwind. Relief that he was alive, rage at his mistreatment. In her mind, she cried out his name, a wailing that would have carried for leagues had she given voice to it.
As if he heard her, he slowly lifted his head, turning it in her direction. She growled long and low behind the gag. Her guards tensed and drop their hands to their knives at their belts. There was no way he saw her, not with those eyes. His face, once handsome by human standards, was a horror of welts, cuts and purple bruises. He looked like Magas had danced on his face with all four hooves.
Anhuset glared at Chamtivos as he gave instructions to the pair holding the margrave. The warlord left them to heave their burden onto the horse and approached her. “Stand up, princess,” he said. “We're going for a ride.” He waited impatiently for her guards to release the bonds that kept her hunched before shoving her toward a second horse. Instead of freeing her legs so she walked instead of shuffled and could mount the horse on her own, they lifted her, tossing her across the saddle like a sack of grain, feet hanging off one side of the animal, her head and shoulders off the other. The position caused pressure to build behind her eyes.
Chamtivos squatted so they were eye level with each other. “Remove her gag,” he ordered an unseen lackey. Karulin joined him, and it was his hands that carefully untied the gag and tossed it aside. Anhuset thought the warlord's unexpected consideration strange until he told her “Riding a horse like this will make you sick, and I don't want you choking on your own vomit before I've had a little fun with you.”
You'll be choking on your own blood when I'm finished with you, she wanted to say. Instead she asked questions she doubted he'd answer in any meaningful way, but she had to try. “Where are you taking us? Why did you beat the margrave?”
He chuckled, rubbing his hands together like a child anticipating a treat. “You'll see. As to your second question, the margrave refused to tell us how to break the enchantment protecting the monk. We used a little persuasion. He's much more stubborn than he is intelligent.”
He couldn't have been more wrong in his assumption. Serovek's intelligence far outstripped his obstinacy. “He won't tell you because he can't. He doesn't know how to break it. Only the Khaskem does. If you'd asked me instead, I could have told you and saved your men the trouble of trying to beat it out of Lord Pangion.”
Chamtivos gave a blithe shrug. “A few lessons in humility either builds character or breaks it. We'll see which it is for his lordship once he wakes.”
Talking while draped across a horse made her stomach roil. Her skull began to throb. She tried another tack. “He'd make just as valuable a hostage as the monk. The Beladine king will pay generously to have one of his military governors returned to him alive and mostly unharmed.”
“Maybe. But someone else has already paid me a king's ransom to capture him, and I'll gain something even better—power—if I dispose of him. A certain steward rises in the world if the margrave doesn't make it back to High Salure. Pangion isn't nearly as valuable alive as he is dead.”
The shock of his words left her almost as speechless as the ice water dousing she'd endured the day before. Bryzant had planned all this? Serovek's steward who'd stood on a kitchen prep table holding a skillet like a shield while she chased an angry scarpatine around the scullery? Her thoughts reeled. Why? And what did Ogran hope to gain from the alliance and the betrayal?