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“On your knees,” he seethes at the Brethren Guard.
When no one moves, the invader soldiers force the guards to the ground until they’re kneeling in a row before us.
“Who is leading this unit?” the invader asks them.
The only sound is the crackling of flames.
Tentatively, a man toward the end of the row says in a shaky voice, “I-I am.”
The invader strides along the row until he’s standing in front of him. “Where were you taking my mate?”
Hiswhat?
Is he talking about me?
The guard stumbles over his words. He’s never faced an enemy soldier before, only bullied young women and threatened unarmed villagers. I relish the fact that he’s just about wetting himself. “That’s not…I don’t… My orders are to…”
The invader grasps the front of the soldier’s uniform and drags him up until his feet are dangling off the ground. The soldier wears half his poundage in armor, but the huge invader is holding him aloft with one hand as if he weighs nothing.
“I said, where were you taking my mate?”
“To the end of the Proxen Road,” the man gasps, twisting back and forth. “We were told that someone would meet us there. That’s all I know.”
With a snarl of rage, the invader hurls the man away from him, and he lands in the flames. With a scream of pain, the guard rolls back into the circle. One of the dragon’s clawed feet descends and pins the man in place. The creature lowers its monstrous head until the tip of its snout nearly touches the guard’s nose and snarls.
The invader strides over to him. “Did you hurt my mate? If you lie to me, Scourge will know, and he’ll rip your head off.”
The guard’s eyes are bulging and he struggles to draw breath into his lungs. “Only her face. She spat at the High Priest. The rest wasn’t me.”
“Therest?” The invader’s face goes blank, then it suffuses with even more rage than before. With burning eyes, he strides back to me and scours every part of my flesh that he can see. The shirt that I stole from one of his men is slipping from my shoulder, and I can imagine how my skin looks. Fresh red and blue-black bruises over fading yellow and purple ones. Thin, vicious stripes of the cane, some fading, some vivid red.
The invader exhales slowly through his nose as if barely clinging to his temper. “How much of you doesn’t hurt right now?” he asks in a low, furious voice.
I moisten my lips and gaze up at him, not wanting to answer.
“I thought so,” he growls, turning away.
The invader and the dragon meet each other’s eyes, and I have the strangest idea that they’re communicating silently. The dragon clenches its claws, driving them through the guard’s armor and into his flesh. The soldier screams, but the scream is cut short when the dragon rips his head off with one bite and tosses it through the flames. Blood gouts from his severed neck, a grisly sight that I can’t tear my eyes away from.
A moment later, a shriek of panic claims my attention. The invader has drawn a dagger and pulls the nearest guard to his feet. The man is begging for mercy, but the invader slashes his throat with the blade. With a roar of anger, he throws the dying man aside and grabs another, slitting his throat as well. Two men are gurgling and clutching their throats at his feet, but his thirst for blood isn’t slaked. A third man tries to run, but the invader is too fast for him. With a savage grab and a wrench of the blade across the guard’s throat, another man dies, and the invader tosses him aside.
Breathing hard and with blood gleaming on his chest plate, the invader says to his soldiers, “Kill them all, and then leave this place.”
The soldiers obey without a word, drawing their swords and plunging them down inside the guards’ armor at the neck. One by one, the bodies topple forward into the dust.
The invader’s soldiers turn away and walk back through the flames, which are finally beginning to die down. One by one, they climb up onto the backs of their waiting dragons—all different shades, all different sizes—and fly away.
The horses have had enough of dragons and screaming and blood, and they bolt into the darkness.
Silence falls, and I’m alone with the invader and the dragon that he called Scourge. The man sheathes his knife and strides over to me, holding out his hand to help me up.
There’s blood all over his palm.
I get to my feet by myself, gazing at all the dead bodies. This war is crueler than the life I’ve always known. “You killed them all. Why did you kill them all?”
I have no love for the Brethren Guard. They chained me to a wall and beat me for the crime of not wishing to be burned alive. They terrorized everyone in Maledin for decades. Centuries. They beat helpless girls and old women. These were not good men.
“Because they hurt you, and no one hurts my mate and lives. And because you wished for it,sha’len.”
