Page 21 of I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy

I rested my arms against the railing and just took a moment to bask in the idiocy.

“Today’s the day I take your head, Osid!” Yengro roared, and tried to hurl a fireball at me. This was a bad idea on two counts. Strike one, his legs were still bound. Strike two, his spooked horncrest was in the process of trying to buck him off and run for her life.

Predictably, he shot wide and fell off the horncrest. When I heard the vindicating sound of a bone snapping, followed by a pained wail, I decided that Yengro was indeed the biggest idiot of them all.

I picked up the guard’s water cask and threw it on the fire. Smoke hissed as the water broke against the flames, and all my adorable little idiots continued to punch and kick at one another until they realized it was too smoky to see who was hitting who.

“Are we done?” I called down.

“Never!” Yengro roared.

A fireball broke against my shoulder. “All right, Yen, now I’m really gonna hurt you.” I motioned for the guard to raise the gate and ducked under it to snatch Yengro from the ground by his neck.

He threw a punch at my head, and I blocked him. Then headbutted him hard and dropped the unconscious idiot. “Biesabu,” I called. “Take this traitor to the cells.”

Biesabu emerged through the smoke and threw Yengro over his shoulder and took him away.

I pulled Hakri from his seat and guided him to rest against a fountain far enough away from the flames, then turned to address the crowd. “Look, I’m a reasonable man. You’ve made vows to your old king. To fight and serve at his side until his death or yours robs you of your service. I can respect that.”

The rebels shuffled uncomfortably. “When he faked his death, he had all of us fooled for a while. Even I believed it to be true. Then you all decided to make new vows. To. Me.”

“But that was before we knew he was alive!” a rebel shouted. “Now that he’s back—”

“What do you mean now?” I interjected. “I’ve been hearing about the ghost of the mighty General Ghoszi Lokbaatar for the past two years. You’ve known he’s been alive. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your little scouting parties anytime you idiots think you’ve tracked him down. Yet he hasn’t let you catch up to him, has he? I hate to be the one to break this to you, gentlemen, but I just don’t think he’s that into you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” a man snarled. “Lok has already discovered where the females live, and he’ll be the one to guide us to them!”

“Great.” Gesturing to the road out of town, I asked, “Where is he?”

Finally, the fire in their eyes began to waver. With gritted teeth, Lok’s remaining loyalists lowered their weapons. “Good. Now clean up this mess and tend to the wounded.”

The crowd dispersed, and I was left alone with Jivorn. From the calculating look on his face, I knew he had something on his mind, and I motioned for him to spit it out.

“Do you think she could be in league with him?” Jivorn asked.

The suggestion hit me like a brick. “Blair? Impossible, she doesn’t even speak our language.”

Undeterred, he rubbed a hand against his chin. “We don’t know that for sure. She could have played us all for a fool.”

Jivorn was a keen strategist, and I often relied on him heavily both on the battlefield and off. Yet his constant suspicions often gave me the sense that the tactician might be getting on in years. “You’ve grown paranoid in your old age,” I said, turning to walk away.

“Am I?” he retorted. “Or did Lokbaatar send her to you deliberately?”

I stopped in my tracks.

“Think about it,” he continued. “This creature suddenly appears in a forest fire and saves your life. Gaining our trust enough to allow her into our fortress. Then she sends our men right into the path of King Lokbaatar and a loose bonecrusher and vanishes in the middle of the night. You can’t tell me you don’t find that suspicious. Yengro even said he saw another one of her kind with him.”

“Are you saying she lured us into a trap?”

Jivorn took a step forward, determination blazing in his eyes. “I’m saying we both know bonecrushers don’t travel that far west. And the bloated buttons used in the assassination attempt against you didn’t float there by themselves. Someone would have had to find a way to stabilize them long enough to survive the trip.”

“And you think this was Lokbaatar’s doing? He’s been dormant since we landed here. Why would he try and take my head now?”

“Maybe he’s just been biding his time. When you absorbed the men from Stormforge and the Arrows he abandoned, you set the Dulba Empire up to be one of the strongest forces on this planet. If he wanted to come after you now, he couldn’t do it alone. And our last reported sighting of him was traveling north through the Badlands.”

Realization made my eyes widen. “Toward the Bloodcry clan.” The Bloodcry clan was made up from the survivors of a ship that landed in the volcanic mountain range in the north. The stories say that the ship was headed farther inland, but was caught in a storm and crashed right into an active volcano. The survivors had to abandon the ship and all its supplies when the mountain erupted. Then, half starved and weak, they had to travel through the Badlands toward the swamps that lined the eastern sea. Such an inauspicious start left all those who made it out alive deeply territorial of their new home. Outsiders were often blown to bits before setting foot anywhere near their stronghold.

Their leader has been on the warpath as of late. Snatching up any unclaimed territories along the coast and decimating anyone that got in his way. I suspected Bloodcry was behind the recent increase in raiders we’d been dealing with, but I couldn’t understand why they’d be so focused on expansion now. And to join forces with Lokbaatar, of all people.