Chapter
Five
Galantia Present day, the village Larpen
stared at the spurts of blood that sprayed from Risa’s neck in slowing intervals, my mind trapped somewhere between nerve-wracking shock and heart-breaking anguish.I When Risa’s knees buckled, Lorn gave a shove, letting her body slump to the ground. “There, I let her go.”
She skipped over Risa’s twitching body with the giggle of a scotch-hopper. Just like that. As if the woman bleeding out from her neck was more amusement than a hurdle. At her next step, she shifted into ravens and flew off.
My gaze went back to Risa. Thin, dark purple veins webbed across her pallid face, framing her mouth that gaped unnaturally wide, her tongue entirely black. Her twitching slowed. Slowed more.
Stilled.
My heart stopped.
No, this couldn’t be.
“Risa?” Why my knees suddenly pressed into the bloodied mud, I couldn’t remember. Perhaps I’d
collapsed beside her, trembling fingers stroking over her distorted face. “Please say something…”
Why didn’t she answer? My Risa always answered; she never ignored me, never pretended I
didn’t exist. Except…
Risa was gone.
Dead.
A deep cleft cracked open somewhere in my heart, letting new pain pour into my chest until the pressure ached behind my sternum. I wanted to cry, and scream, and thrash, and wail, but I… didn’t.
Instead, I remained so still, breathing down each onslaught of hysteria with paced gasps. Exhale.
Don’t cry, Galantia. Inhale. Don’t cry, Galantia. Exhale. Don’t you fucking cry, Galantia!
“Alright, up you go.” A set of strong hands clasped my waist, then the world shifted around me.
With a thrust upward, Sebian hung me over his shoulder. “I’ll carry you to where you’re wanted. Be a good girl and save your antics for when I’m gone.”
I dangled upside down, chin shifting over the brown plates of his cuirass that smelled of beeswax and herbs, the leather chaffed as if he’d worn it for many years. The wood of his bow caught uncomfortably on my strands, pulling away on my overhead tangle of tresses, revealing a sight of utter savagery.
Women cried—clinging to fence rails, sat in front of shops among corpses, wailed over little bodies inside their homes behind open doors. Some clutched a hand to their lower bellies, while others hysterically bunched the cotton tatters of their dresses between their legs, wiping at their womanhood.
As much as I wanted to join in their agony, weeping would do me no good. In the back of my mind, I knew I had to fix my thoughts on how to escape my captor and reach Tidestone. No, not Tidestone! Ammarett.
“Who is this p-person you’re taking me to?” I asked, struggling down the shake in my voice.
“This… Malyr?”
“Oh, I have no intentions of taking you to Malyr, and Lorn doesn’t fucking command me,” Sebian scoffed. “My job was to track you down, capture you, and bring you before the fate. Alive and unharmed were his words, which is the only thing left standing between me and a warm meal. If I take Brisden’s daughter to Malyr… well, sweetheart, we might find ourselves struggling with the unharmed part.”
Blood pooled in my head, turning me dizzy and scrambling my thoughts. “Fate?”
“Captain Asker.” When the ground beneath Sebian’s boots turned from grass to wet leaves, his shoulder vibrated against me with a shout. “I got the girl from your vision!”
Vision? Like a magical vision? Why would I be part of a vision, yet they hadn’t known who I was upon my capture? My temples ached from all the blood trapped in my skull. I understood none of this.
Except for one thing.
This… fate—whatever that meant—Captain Asker wanted me for reasons I couldn’t grasp yet, but he also wanted me alive and unharmed. That knowledge was no small comfort.
“Fantastic…” Sebian mumbled before he abruptly stopped and lowered me off his shoulder.
My ruined shoes sunk into a blanket of moss as I swayed and glanced around the copse of trees we’d entered. Several tents sat nestled between evergreen shrubs, as abandoned as the half-burned logs in the nearby fire pit.
“Where did Asker go?” Sebian asked loudly.
I frowned at him before I glanced about the silent camp. Water bladders hung from low branches, rolled-up furs were stacked on a stool beside one of the tents, a wooden bowl with a half-eaten chunk
of bread sat beside the cold fire pit… there was nobody here. Who was he talking to?
“Malyr…” Sebian lifted his gaze toward one of the firs while pinching the bridge of his nose. “It took me five days of scouting from the sky to find this damn village. In the rain. I didn’t have a decent meal in just as long, and I’d like to be home before the clouds break again and soak me to the downs.
Where’s that damn fate?”
I followed his line of sight, stomach dropping when I finally spotted the raven that sat quietly on a branch. Head tilted, the bird watched me, the bit of light filtering in through the canopy casting a blueish hue over its black plumes.
When a hrk-hrk resounded behind me, I spun toward the noise. Yet another raven sat on a young oak across, whetting its long, curved beak on the rough bark. Another perched beside it with its head tucked away beneath a wing, yet one of its eyes poked out from between feathers.
Kra-kra!
The raven’s call drove a shiver down my spine as I turned my head toward the one that sat in the shadows beneath a shrub. It tilted its head this way and that, watching me. Another stretched its wings, flapping them a bit where the animal sidestepped along the branch of a maple. Watching me.
All of them watching me.
It unnerved me, the way ten pitch-black eyes scrutinized me where I’d only ever been ignored… Wings flapping brought my gaze back to the one on the ground by the shrub. The bird had taken flight, gliding toward me. Another shifted in my periphery. A third dove from the oak to my right, flying my way.
When a sudden flare of wind tousled my strands, I let out a little squeal and ducked just as a raven flew over my head. It circled around a tree, then dove straight at me, along with the other four, making me stagger back a step.
Wafts of black shadows twisted and whirled from their feathers as they all descended at rapid speed. They clashed in a burst of darkness and black feathers. Some drifted away on the current, while others floated to the ground right in front of me, gathering around a set of black boots.
My heart quickened, filling my veins with liquid terror the higher my gaze wandered along black breeches, an equally dark but intricately tooled leather cuirass, a set of impressive shoulder guards shaped like pointed feathers… until I saw his face.
Then my heart cracked.
The shocking intensity of the man’s empty, passionless stare sent an ominous sensation through my body, paralyzing me. Long open strands as dark as pitch framed smooth skin, angular cheekbones, a firm jaw, and a chin held high.
It gave him an aura of forlornness. A sort of apathetic look filled with old sorrow, with his narrow lips in a flat line, his tall stature at ease, the tendons along his neck unmoving, the chest beneath his cuirass lifting slowly with each inhale. He was young, couldn’t have reached his thirtieth name day yet. Not nearly.
Sebian stepped up beside me with a shake on his head and a smirk lining his lips. “That shift was a bit dramatic, even for the Lord of Shadows.”
Dread expanded in my chest. Oh gods, of course it had to be him who’d decimated that village, killing the men, raping the women. What would he do with me?
I held Malyr’s cold stare, trying not to shiver in the throe of his unsettling presence. “You are the one they call the Lord of Shadows?”
Malyr’s head tilted sideways—a gesture so similar to the one of his raven, it amplified how my skin cooled at his nearness. How panic clasped at my throat, choking me, making it clear that I stood
before the Raven responsible for slaughter, rape, famine, and war.
Chaos.
Terror carved itself a hollow in my chest. How could this be? He was too young to hold such power, too inexperienced to defeat nearly every lord between Tidestone and the southern seas. Or was he simply evil enough by nature to spread such mayhem over the realm?
“This is her?” His dangerously dark voice spilled into the forest, pebbling my skin. “The young woman from Asker’s vision?”
“I fucking hope so, because I’m not going back to that writhing shadow-mess you left behind at the village,” Sebian said and slowly turned away, gesturing me to follow. “Where is he? I want this settled and done with.”
Malyr reached his hand for my face, cupping my chin. The warm touch sent a flinch through me, surprising in the way his thumb traced the line of my bottom lip. He turned my face to the left. To the right. Up. Down. Scrutinized me from every angle, shifting my face toward every bit of light the forest offered.
“Who… are… you?” The question came slowly, quietly, as though I’d caught his attention by great surprise. “Why did the goddess bring you here? To us?”
“I…” A gasp cut through my words as his face sunk into the crook of my neck, where the cool tip of his nose brushed along a tendon, stubbing my earlobe before it wandered higher and into my hair with a long inhale. Smelling me? “I don’t know.”
It was the safest answer I could give before I looked at Sebian for guidance as how to remain alive and unharmed exactly, but I only found a hint of confusion on his face before he said, “Are you going to tell me where he is or…?”
“He flew off to have a look at the carriage, likely to see if his gift offered any insight on his anoaley.” Malyr pulled back to stare at me, studying my face with great focus as if he expected to find answers along my eyebrows, down the length of my nose… on my lips. “Tell me who she is.”
Sebian folded his arms in front of his chest, frowning at the way Malyr pinched a strand of my hair between his fingers, inspecting it closely. “Someone who needs to remain—and I cannot stress this enough, Malyr—unharmed.”
“So you do know.” Malyr let his eyes roam over my form with an appreciation no man had given me before, rousing strange tingles beneath my skin. “I have half a mind to take her to my chambers for the night.”
Sebian chuckled. “Unharmed is not how women come out from there in the morning.”
Cold swept over me, making me shift away from Malyr’s touch. What did that mean? Women never came out unharmed?
Malyr pouted his lips with a slight uptick at the corners as he looked over to Sebian. “You truly worry I won’t like who she is, don’t you?”
“On the contrary, my friend… I worry that you’ll like it too much.” A smack of his tongue. “If I mess this up, Asker will pluck me bare.”
“There is always the option of me ordering your wedding.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“After what you did to that purse of salted shadows?” Malyr arched a brow at him. “Try me.”
“I hadn’t meant to lose them at the card table.” Sebian exhaled a long breath. “Fine, you’ll find out soon enough from Lorn, anyway. Malyr, this is Lady Galantia.”
“Galantia…” Malyr breathed. His dark gaze snapped back to mine, eyes burning into me with such intensity, it cast feverish chills across my skin. “She’s the bastard’s daughter.”
My throat tied shut.
Lips thinning into a straight line, stature tensing under the sudden strain of his muscles, tendons along his neck protruding, chest lifting and sinking in an erratic pattern… Everything on him changed, twisting his apathy into unrestrained, frightening interest.
“Mm-hmm, now I truly want to take you to my chambers.” His grip slipped to my throat faster than I could dodge it, robbing me of air with how tightly he squeezed, his dark whisper nothing but a purr against my temple. “Or I might just snap your neck, little white dove.”
I tossed and writhed, but there was no escaping the bruising grip of his hand as shadows crept up along his arm. Ice-cold tendrils slithered along my chin, my cheeks, my temples. They crawled into my nostrils, wriggled my lips apart, only to invade my mouth, my throat, my lungs. They strangled me,
suffocated me.
My vision darkened.
Blackness swallowed me whole.
