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“Move, you fuckers!” she shouted. “Put some spleen into it!”
Gregor stepped up next to her then and murmured something in the general’s ear. She cut him a glower, her strong jaw working, and then stepped back.
“Feel the heat in your veins! Don’t fight it!” Gregor’s voice boomed across the parade ground. A few of the warriors cast him baleful looks as they continued to spar with blunted blades. But Gregor wasn’t finished.
“Let the earth magic fill you … fuel you. Open yourselves up to it!” Gregor shouted. “Now!”
His voice died away, and then something shifted. A new smell whipped around the parade ground, encircling Darach as well. It was pungent, yet not unpleasant. Peat, pine, and campfire: the scent of earth magic.
Years ago, before Darach’s uncle—the former king—died, when druids had served at Braewall, he remembered watching enforcers train, and that familiar scent had followed them.
As he looked on, some of the warriors seemed to almost grow in size, their already bulky muscles thickening. Power rippled across their faces, and then silver ignited in their eyes. Moments later, the tattoos inking their skin started to glow as well.
The fighting shifted, becoming frenzied, vicious.
One of the warriors, a woman, fell in the onslaught. But the earth magic had all of them in its grip now, and her combatant showed her no mercy. Standing over the woman, he clubbed her with his sword in the head again and again until she lay still in the mud.
No one moved to intervene.
Darach scowled. Shit.
He knew that his brother wanted an unbeatable army. That was why they’d brought Kayla here, after all. But seeing these men and women fight was something else. These leashed warriors might hate what they’d become, yet they’d kill in his brother’s name, all the same. That warrior had lost control. Had he even known what he was doing?
Tearing his gaze from the frenzied fighting, he pushed the barrow through the gates, past the sentries, and down the churned-up causeway. The going was even harder now; each step was an effort.
A squalid village had sprung up around the fort over the past moons. Clusters of roughly built roundhouses and huts where the Circines tribespeople who’d once thrived in this area now served Niall and his army. They kept the goats, sheep and fowl, and grew the vegetables that fed this huge fort.
And every time Darach passed this way, he saw their pale, strained faces and frightened eyes.
Round-shouldered locals passed him, some hauling barrows of peat to warm the hearths inside the fort, others with baskets of neeps and cabbages on their backs.
In his first days, he’d learned that these people were the families of those Circines now bound to Niall. They didn’t follow the southern king yet stayed at the fort out of concern for their own people.
Darach crossed the village and down the rutted path to the midden heap, a stinking mountain of refuse on the village’s southern outskirts. Crows circled here, their caws rising and falling with the wind. And as he made his way down the path, Darach stole a quick look over his shoulder.
His two overseers still followed. They both wore deep scowls now, their shoulders hunched. Aye, they’d witnessed that woman’s death. And just like everyone else, they hadn’t stepped in to help her. However, two more guards also followed now, as they always did. Sentries from the gates.
Every time he made his way down to the midden, four of them accompanied him.
And today was no break with routine.
Darach tensed, readying himself.
Inside him, the beast stirred, growling softly. It had been quiet of late, nevertheless, only waking occasionally. The iron kept it subdued.
What a Gods-damned irony. If only he’d known that when his tattoo had first soured. Carrying iron weapons hadn’t made any difference to the beast, but having the metal pressed against his throat did. If he’d taken to wearing an iron collar then, he might never have set out on his quest to find Kayla.
He might never have gotten entangled with Ailsa—and he certainly wouldn’t have ended up a slave, shoveling shit day and night.
Ailsa.
Suddenly, breathing became an effort.
Curse it. He couldn’t leave her to rot in this place.
No, after he killed his brother, he’d free her and Kayla. He’d failed the lass, and he’d lied to her too. She likely thought him a worm.
It didn’t matter though. If she hated him, she hated him. He couldn’t change what he’d done, or the choices he’d made. Nonetheless, if he could help her, he would.
