“Get your own. This one is ours,” says the brute. Even missing a hand, he seems like the leader of the group.
His face is every bit as hateful as I remember it, anger contorting his already too small features until it looks as though his head is being held in a vice. His stump of a hand is still bandaged from Seth’s unscheduled surgery.
I hope it still hurts.
The other soldiers shift and straighten their posture, but they don’t draw their weapons—Ronan has kept his sword sheathed.
“Doesn’t look like she agrees with you,” says Ronan, gesturing to the woman. She’s hunched over, trying to assess whether she should run towards or away from the stranger. Her face, from the glimpse I get of it as she looks down the bank to where the rest of us are creeping around the group in the shadows, looksyoung, several years younger than me. Fifteen, maybe. Sixteen at best.
Not a woman. A girl.
It makes mesick.
The brute laughs cruelly. “Spoils of war. Doesn’t matter if she agrees.”
“You see, sister? This is what you get for mercy. You try to think practically. It’s wartime, and tempers are high. You need soldiers, and if you kill every person in your army that steps out of line, you’ll fight the enemies’ battle for them. You try to give someone a chance. Andthisis what you get in return.”
The soldiers and the girl look around for Seth’s voice. They twist from side to side, trying to track his movement, but all they see is an unnatural darkness. A place where their torches just won’t reach.
They reach for the swords at their sides, but what they didn’t feel as Seth was talking was the tendrils of shadow, silent and precise, pulling them from their sheaths one by one.
“Say, Tarsus, what happened to your hand there?” says Ronan, his voice falsely warm and genial, filled with strange, alluring comfort.
“Tarsus? Who the hell is Tarsus? I’m Remus—”
Ronan draws his sword and stabs Remus the brute in the groin, striking up under his chainmail, as Seth fires a flame into the forehead of the guard to his right, dropping him instantly.
Larus cuts down the one to the brute’s left by the neck and then the soldier next to him as well as he turns to see what happened to his companions.
The remaining two turn and run. The shorter one starts to scream, but I’m there with my shadow. I restrain them both, drawing on Ronan’s rage to split the tendril in two. Then Taran cuts their throats with the dagger.
“I’m Remus,” the brute chokes out. He’s doubled over, blood pouring from his lower body.
The woman is near him on the ground watching him bleed out, but there’s no relief in her eyes. Only fear.
Larus reaches a hand to the girl, helping her up. She takes it cautiously, relaxing only when I lower the shadows to let her see me clearly.
Ronan looks at me, sensing what I want. I know he’ll kill this man for me if I ask it of him. I know that he wants to, that Seth wants to, that they’ll all want to once they learn what he did to me. What he wanted to do.
But this is my fight. And I want to be the one to finish it.
“Please. I’m not Tarsus; I’m Remus. You made a mistake—”
“There’s been no mistake,” I say, my voice sounding strange and unfamiliar in its cruelty. In its cold malice. “You’re exactly who I thought you were.”
He looks up at me, and his eyes flash with recognition.
I lean down close, whispering to him as he whimpers. “You’reno one. You’re nothing. And you will never hurt anyone ever again.”
I thrust the sword once, cleanly, into his windpipe, and then I withdraw it.
Remus stumbles forward, grasping for me but finding only air.
And blood. A seemingly endless spray of blood that pours from his body into the marshy ground before fading into the murky water as he collapses, his body lost in moments among the reeds.
“Damn. Did I miss all the action?”
An Enezian woman in Nithyrian armor helps us onto the deck. Only once I’m onboard do I realize that it’s Octavia.
