“You stole the Azure Hide of Ruvyn!” called the elf from the tall grasses.
Damien rolled his eyes. “That was years ago, and the thing’s basically just a rug. You’d think they would be over it by now.”
Amma craned her neck to see the woman in vestments had run over to the fallen knight to lay a hand on his chest. There was a dull radiance under her palm, and the armored man finally began to twitch and groan. “Well, maybe you could just give the hide thing back?”
Damien frowned. “But it’s the only color in my bedchamber, and it really ties the whole room together.”
“Damien,” she hissed, “youstoleit.”
“Oh, fine, but it’s all the way in Aszath Koth, so there’s nothing to be done right now, and even if there were, we’ve sort of been running into one another since, and things have…escalated.” Damien focused on picking off an invisible piece of dirt from his chest.
With two members of their group nearly incapacitated, one still wrapped in tendrils thrashing on the ground, and another half-conscious, Amma could imagine what that escalation entailed.
“This is no accident,” murmured the knight as he pulled himself up from the crater his body had made, reaching out blindly for his sword and not finding it. “We came hunting a notorious criminal and happened upon our greatest rival. It is fate we end the abominable Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne this day.”
The woman who had healed him scurried to get his longsword. The thing was nearly as big as she was, and she dragged the blade through the dirt to him.
“Thanks, Pippa,” he said, taking the weapon as if it weighed nothing and brandishing it in one hand. “Xander Shadowhart will have to wait until our nemesis has been destroyed.”
“Hold on, hold on—you’re going afterXandernow?” Damien had been grinning when he’d heard the wordabominable, but that grin fell sharply off.
The knight charged again. Amma didn’t know much about sword fighting, but she didn’t think it was meant to be so…big. She went to step back, but Damien grabbed her and pulled both of them out of the way, the weapon striking down where Damien had been standing with enough force to have cleaved him in two, but it left the knight all out of breath.
The blood mage strode back over and tapped the exhausted knight, on his shoulder this time, and sent him coursing across the road in the opposite direction. Dirt sprayed up in his wake. “Bloody moron,” Damien grunted, going back to Amma and latching onto her arm. “That big one’s the worst.”
Pippa gasped and scurried after, giving the two of them a wide berth as she ran to the once again fallen knight.
“Wait!” The elf bound once more out of the weeds. This time no magic crackled between the pages of his book, and so Damien did indeed wait. “That woman. It’s her.” He pulled out a tattered piece of parchment that had been tucked into his tome, and Amma nearly choked at seeing her own visage, one of the posters that had been tacked up all over Faebarrow, dangling from the stranger’s hand.
“Oh, by Osurehm, not this again,” she murmured and rubbed her face.
“You!” The elf gestured wildly with the parchment. “You’ve stolen the Baroness Avington from Brineberth!”
Damien tipped his head, squinting. “Well, maybe, but she’s not from Brineberth. Amma, would you consider yourself stolen?”
Amma wasn’t entirely sure what the right response was.Wasshe stolen? And did it even matter? Damien appeared unconcerned about being blamed, quite different than back in Faebarrow when he had found out her truth and how he’d unknowingly been roped into the lie she’d told. She simply shrugged.
“We have been charged with the reclamation of the abducted bride of the Marquis Caldor from one Xander Shadowhart. We followed the whispers spread through the realm that the most nefarious blood mage who had taken her would be attacking Durendreg.”
“Well, I don’t know aboutmostnefarious,” Damien grumbled, a hand on his hip, the other still protectively on Amma’s arm.
“How unexpected yet fortuitous we would find her withyouinstead, Bloodthorne.” The elf gestured with a flourish, and a flame crackled in his palm once more.
“Kaz, do you mind?”
The imp squealed with delight and charged toward the elf. The spell was redirected at Kaz as he bolted, wings and legs working in a blurry tandem, and he was struck dead on. Amma shrieked, sure that he would be burnt to a crisp, but Kaz only sailed through the flames with a graceful, leathery flap, all claws and talons as he knocked the elf to the ground with a gurgling battle cry.
“The book, Kaz, just get the book,” Damien called, and the imp sprung off the elf’s chest and grabbed the tome. He scampered to the edge of the road, holding it up in his long arms in triumph. “Fire mages,” Damien scoffed, releasing Amma and striding over to the still-entangled form on the ground behind them, “you’d think they’d learn that fire imps are incombustible.”
“They’re here for me,” she said, heart speeding up even as she blinked out at the others scattered along the road in various states of near ruin. “They think Xander took me because that’s who you told them you were, and Xander put word out that he was going to be in Durendreg, so they found us.”
Kaz had taken to running in a circle with the book, the elf chasing after.
“Seems like it.” Damien was altogether too nonchalant, not with so little space between her and actual abductors, no matter how benevolent they thought they were being. He picked up the crossbow from where the fourth member of the Righteous Sentries had dropped it. “Amma, would you like this?”
“Release the woman, and we will…uh,” the knight cut in before she could respond, sitting up again and bobbing dizzily. The priestess was crouched at his side, biting a nail. “And we will let you go…unscathed-like.”
Damien didn’t even glance at him. “I think you should have it.” He brought the weapon to Amma. “It’s a good weight, compact, and look, extra arrows.”
