“Are you ready to yield?” he purred.
“Haik ilo biloi nu takimi,” she spat. I’d rather fuck a goat. Since she hissed the words into his mind as well as through her busted and bruised mouth, her meaning was quite clear.
“Will you yield?” He turned and lifted a whip, topped with little metal balls. “I’ve broken better mages than you. You were foolish, wandering around unshielded, alone. I could smell the stink of that man on you. Perhaps I should have waited before taking you, shouldn’t have beaten you so cruelly. Ahh, but that’s in the past. Will you yield?”
“Will you die a thousand and three painfully slow deaths?” she rasped, her throat achingly dry.
The whip lifted and flew, and her shrieks filled the room.
Tainan purred, “And now you are trapped.”
“Va takimi,” she muttered. She turned her head aside and withdrew into herself. She barely managed to close the door inside her mind by the time the second blow fell.
She took the first month of abuse with almost good humor. She wasn’t De Asir, but she had trained with them. And the legendary assassins knew how to take abuse and torture, for years and months on end.
But Tainan was after something.
He’d guarded that intent well, so well, she almost didn’t see it in time.
Time passed, time that left her weakened and malnourished, her reserves not just drained but completely emptied.
Then he made a casual mention of his true goal, when she was almost too weak to fight at all.
As she stared in stunned, sickened amazement, Tyriel realized just how utterly fucked she was.
It wasn’t her body, or even her blood he wanted.
It wasn’t her suffering or pain.
She could have taken the abuse, the rapes, and the starvation. She had the ability to retreat so far into herself, nothing he did to her body would even affect her.
But it wasn’t just her own suffering he was after, though he reveled in her pain, drinking it and feeding from it, the way a demon could feed from blood.
It was her magic, her knowledge, her soul.
He was a soul-eater and he called up magics only those versed in such dark practices could call.
Tyriel fell back away from the black shadows that came to her, reaching for her, touching her, grabbing her. A scream fell from her lips, terrified and broken, and she slashed out with magic even though she had sworn not to. The iron on her body burned her with every bit of magic she used, and it blinded her, deafened her, sickened her, weakened her even more.
He would get her.
Eventually. Her fear would break her.
She fled inside herself and wrapped herself in the lights of the magic that made her what she was, the sorcery, the mage gift, letting the bright, burning lights warm her. She felt safe here—which was laughable. As long as these lights burned, he would torture her, pursue her, try to take her soul.
As long as they burned.
If the lights went out—
It was forbidden.
“Da…” she called out to him, but the stone around her neck that bound her to him had been taken and smashed. And some power blocked her from him. She was alone. Well, and truly, for the first time in her life, completely alone.
She knew what she must do. But was so terribly afraid of it.
Some of the Kin could not even manage what she was thinking. It was dangerous. It was deadly. It was beyond foolish.
But if the magic was not there…
She could not let him take her soul. She could not. He would have too much, too many secrets, knowledge of the elvin kin, the haunts and hiding places of the clans. No, he could not have those. And Irian. Ahh, the damage he could do with a blade like Asrel, with Irian bound to him?
To have Irian, Aryn must die.
No.
It was with a shuddering, frightened spirit that she reached out to the first light, and put it out.
Chapter 15
Aryn stood outside the gates of Ifteril and closed his eyes.
The last place to look. There was little else left to do after this.
“As though you intend to stop lookin’,” Irian murmured. The enchanter stood at his side, his long hair in a thick braid that hung over his shoulder. He seemed so solid at times, it often surprised Aryn that no other seemed to notice him. “We will find her. Something here will be leadin’ us t’ the elf, I know.”
Aryn’s hands closed into tight fists.
“I never should have let her leave. You knew this would happen. Why didn’t I listen?”
“We did not know she would drop off the face o’ the earth, or that she would slip away in the wee hours. I tried, truly, to convince her t’ stay.”
“I bet,” Aryn muttered sourly, sliding the long-dead warrior a bitter glance. The question was how?
The third in their group—or, second, as far as the wide world was concerned, was a Wildling named Kellen, from the clan of Tyriel’s mother.
Kellen stood at Aryn’s side and barely blinked when the mercenary started talking seemingly to himself. Kellen had learned that the swordsman had odd ways, to put it mildly.
He had the odd habit of waking at night, riding off in silence to a town miles and miles away, where he’d find a young child cowering in fear from a monster, human or otherwise.
Several times Tyriel had come to the clan with an ‘orphan’ she’d come across. Now that Kellen had seen the swordsman return with an ‘orphan’ himself, and he knew the story behind the child, he had to wonder.
It had happened more than a dozen times since his cousin Tyriel had taken up with the swordsman.
It was the blade. Others in the clan speculated, but Kellen knew. His own da had been a mage. Kellen was not gifted, but he knew how the craft worked, had the sight of it, if not the powers. And his eyes itched every bloody time he looked at the sword.
When he looked toward Aryn, sometimes he thought he was damn well going insane. He would catch a sight, just behind his eyelids, like nothing he had ever seen, a towering, powerful Wildling with yards of wildly curling hair and a savage smile, and eyes so achingly sad it made Kellen’s heart hurt.
And then it was gone.
Kellen glanced at Aryn now and asked, “To the inn?”
Passing a hand over his eyes, Aryn nodded. “The inn is really all we have to work with. Tyriel was here but a few days. Irian had ways of keeping up with her. He knew when she had left us.”
Kellen knew when the man’s attention had left him again. Irian. Over the weeks since they’d started trying to track Tyriel, Aryn had finally spoken of Irian, the Soul trapped inside the sword Aryn carried.
With a sigh, Kellen brushed aside the itchy feeling it gave him and followed the tall swordsman to the town gates, boldly meeting the guard’s eyes with a smirk as the guard studied the Wildling appraisingly.
Soon, they were off into the city.
And Aryn, Kellen could see, was arguing again, seemingly with himself. Again.
“Like a hole in our souls, she left. Do you admit it yet, swordsman? That she is yours?”
“I always cared, always wanted her.” Aryn tossed the enchanter a snarl. “But why pledge my heart and soul to a woman who will still be young when I am no more than dust in the ground? Why wish that grief upon her? Do you think I didn’t realize she cared? And could do more?”
“Your foolishness has cost you and her much. And my silence hasn’t helped.” Irian retreated back into himself, gone in less than a blink, a cold wind of grief blowing across Aryn’s body as they came to the inn where they had last seen Tyriel all of twelve months past. A night he didn’t remember, when Irian had swarmed up and taken over—what had happened?