Then I realized they could not possibly suspect what we were. No, they were merely so downtrodden that anyone who appeared stronger or more prosperous represented a threat.
These people looked hunted because they were and not by a threat borne of magic. They were hunted by their own kind.
I recalled the crossing north. The evidence of poverty and famine everywhere. The bandits we’d encountered. Things had been bad then. Now they were worse. Without Fell leading the north, they had to be worse. I knew this. Felt it in the fog-less air. Tasted it upon my skin. Breathed it in my pores.
Profound guilt weighed on me, because I had not considered this before. I’d thought only of myself. Only of my pain and survival … my needs.
As we neared the town, I was made to understand the true decline of this world more fully. The road rounded a bend, widening as we neared the town. Several pikes lined the thoroughfare, and the sight jolted me like a slap to the face.
“Fucking hell,” Harald cursed beside me.
We stopped.
I went cold, my skin clammy even as sweat dampened my armpits.
My breathing came hard and fast. My mare wasn’t happy either. She danced in place, hoofing the ground, agitated by the scent of blood, by the cries of agony. I tightened my grip on the reins and pulled hard to bring her under control.
“And they call us monsters,” Vetr muttered with heavy disgust. “Look what they do to each other, their own kind.”
I did look.
I could notnotlook.
I stared and breathed heavily, stomach churning, the food I ate now threatening to return on me.
Pikes were buried deep in the soil on either side of the road. Bodies were skewered upon these wooden poles. Humans. People. Men and women impaled. Over a dozen. Perhaps twenty. Most dead already, corpses, but not all. Some still lived, writhing and crying, begging for an end to their lives, garbling words gurgled through blood and mucus, impeded by the blunt-tipped pikes poking out from their mouths.
“Sadists. They use rounded tips so the poor wretches don’t die instantly,” Harald pronounced. “No vital organs are penetrated, and they live longer. Bleed out slowly.”
I couldn’t fight the heaving in my stomach any longer. I leaned over my horse and expelled my breakfast onto the ground below. Pressing the back of my hand against my mouth, my tearing gaze returned to the bodies staked in the ground.
Choking down bile, I nudged my mount closer to an impaled woman. She was young. Close to my own age.
No one deserved such a horrific fate. It was beyond imagining. I looked to Vetr. His expression was cold, impassive. There was nothing at all in his frosty gaze.
I nodded to her. “Let’s get her down.”
“She is dead,” Harald pronounced flatly, urging his mount forward again, no longer looking at any of them. “They all are. There is nothing we can do.”
“But shestilllives. And she is suffering!”
Harald ignored me and continued ahead, avoiding looking left or right as he rode down the center of the road for town. Perhaps it was easier for him if he didn’t look at them—if he pretended they weren’t there.
Horrible as the sight was, I could not do the same. I could not look away from the gore and the blood and what once amounted to a life. I stared up into her wild eyes, into those pain-soaked depths, an unblinking blend of gray and green. Somehow, I felt that if I looked away, I would be deserting her, this woman I did not know, and yet in her I saw myself. Lost and terrified and alone even among others.
I was the only thing left to her now, in this moment that must feel like an eternity. I would not ride away. I would not leave her alone. I could not.
Whatever I was and would become, I could not do that.
Suddenly Vetr was there, moving between me and the woman, his big body atop his horse blocking the sight of her. He withdrew his sword with a singing hiss and swung his arm.
I leaned forward, peering around him.
The woman’s eyes widened for a fraction of a breath with a flash of surprise—and gratitude, then they diminished, shrinking, the misery fading away along with her inner light, leaving nothing behind. A dull film swept over unseeing hazel orbs.
I exhaled. She was gone.
“There,” he declared. “It is done.”
