Tyriel groaned. “Please tell me you weren’t traveling in by the southern roads.”
“Very well.” Aryn shot her a grin over his shoulder. “I will not tell you that I came via the southern roads. I’ll simply say my village lay south of Thanisbridge and at the time, I was a green youth of nineteen summers. I had never ventured more than a few days travel from my home of Brita.”
“So you were unaware of the swamps.”
“Yes.” He turned and leaned his hips back against the solid shelf jutting out from the window. Tyriel left a decorative hair comb there and he picked it up, absently running his thumb over the teeth of it. He knew little about women’s fripperies, but he did have an eye for things with a resale value, since more than once, as a hired sword, he’d collected bonuses in ‘spoils’ when bandits would attempt to raid the caravan or traveling traders he guarded. The piece in his hand had no jewels, but it would feed a small family for a month. Elvin work, it had been carved from carnelian. Dragging his thumb along the finely carved teeth, he thought back to that terrifying time. “I had nightmares about that time for years. Sometimes, I wondered if they’d ever stop. But that was a long time ago.”
Putting the hair comb down, he met her gaze. “This mage, whoever he is, how do you plan to take him?”
It was an inelegant way to change the subject. But the sympathetic light in Tyriel’s eyes told him she understood.
“Ah, the plan. It figures you would want to know about the plan.”
Aryn lifted a brow. “I’m hardly about to sit by while you traipse off without knowing what you are going to do and how I can help. I’m the reason you’re here.”
“Yes, yes.” She huffed out a breath and fell flat onto the bed, lifting one hand to sketch through the air. “The problem is…I’m still working on said plan. I know his scent now, his blood, his feel. He cannot hide from me. But as to how we can contain him…”
Her words trailed off as she let her hand drop, falling to lay carelessly over her belly.
A silence, heavy and cold, stretched out. Or perhaps it only felt cold to Aryn. Give him a foe of blood and bone, one he could strike down with his sword or a knife across the throat. But magic-users, they never sat easy with him. Although he’d survived more than a few magical attacks since he’d started selling his sword to earn coin, he knew it was just as likely the next one could kill him.
Now he thought of a magic-user targeting Tyriel, and all because she’d come along to aid him.
“He will know you as well.”
Tyriel pushed up onto her elbows and gave him a narrow look. “Please. The fool was too busy seeing me as prey. He had no idea I was the hunter. Had he any sense, he wouldn’t have blindly sought to attack someone with fae blood without making sure he or she was alone. We rarely travel alone outside the kingdom and anybody with sense knows that—so, he’s either senseless or he’s never tasted fae magic before. Either way, he has no idea what he faces.”
She lapsed into a silence and her lashes drooped, a look of distaste on her face. “His magic is fouled. So unclean.”
Thinking of it made Tyriel long for a long, hot bath, or a long hard swim through the icy waters of the river behind her father’s ancestral home back in Eivisa. Part of her wanted to leave for home now, to get distance between herself and a monstrous mage who had befouled the very land around him.
It was a sickness, his magic, something sinking into the very land around him. Tyriel had been fighting a low-level headache for several hours and had brushed it off as stress. She wasn’t completely fae and had taken ill a few times in her long life, most of the time with an illness that had a magical cause.
But that was rare, so rare it had taken her hours to realize her headache had a magical root as well.
The land around her was tainted—the land, the source of energy for her elven magic.
The mage she would soon hunt had committed acts so unnatural, it was fouling the natural energies around him, energies that came from the earth. It was little wonder she longed for her father’s lands.
And maybe she’d travel there for a visit, soon.
But first—there was a battle to win, an enemy to fight.
“There’s no need for complicated plans, I suspect. He will come looking for me, and soon. His greed demands it. Already, he’s searching.”
She saw the hard glint in Aryn’s gaze and wasn’t surprised when he said, “Then you’ll stay shielded.”
“Oh, is that so?” She sat again and brought her legs up, crossing them in front of her as she studied the blond swordsman. “It will make it hard for us to trap our prey if we don’t offer bait. And if I don’t offer a tempting morsel for him, he’ll look for another elsewhere. His blood lust demands it.”
“You know all of this from one chance encounter when you were doing…” Aryn scowled and sketched a hand through the air, fingers wiggling in an imitation of what some street mages used when they used bits of their magic for entertainment to earn coin. “Whatever it is you fae do when…you do whatever it is you do?”
“Do you realize how little sense you make?” Cocking a brow at him, she decided against being insulted, because while Aryn carried an enchanted blade, he understood little about true magic. “And for the record, I don’t need…” She wiggled her own fingers in a mockery of what he’d done. “To do that to use my magic.”
Aryn stared at her, hard-eyed. “You understand my meaning, Tyriel. You’ve not even laid eyes on this mage you say we must hunt.”
“He gathers power, harvests it from the young ones he kills. And when he can’t find a youth with power, he settles for reaping the power he wants through fear and blood. We can’t let this continue.”
“And there is also the brothel he runs—the ones he doesn’t kill, he breaks and they serve there it would seem,” Irian added softly, his voice gruff with sympathy for the lost.
“So why are we standing here talking about it instead of killing him?” Aryn asked, his voice rough and deep with rage. He held out his hand for his blade and Tyriel offered it with a lifted brow and a bow of her head. He closed his hand around the pommel, feeling his fingers settle familiarly around the curves and grooves, like an extension of himself. As he touched the blade, he felt Irian’s own rage. It felt like coming home, oddly, or like the other half of his own soul as he donned the sheath and settled the blade in position down his back.
Tyriel continued to sit on the bed with her legs folded, her long narrow feet bare, a slim gold ring around her second toe winking at him in the dim light as she studied him with calm, appraising eyes.
“Aryn, if we go in there and kill him, be it with steel or with magery, you and I will be risking our necks. Now, it may just be, literally, a pain in the neck for me. But it would good and well kill you. And if my Da hears of a bunch of humans laying hands on me for trying to help them, tsk, tsk, tsk, do we really need an elvish army raining down on mortals if I miscalculate and end up getting us both killed?” she asked, unfolding her legs and shifting to lie on her side, stretching her long legs out and crossing them at the ankle. “Da would be well and truly pissed, and I wouldn’t be very happy myself. Not to mention the reaction from my mum’s clan.”