It couldn’t be.
He spun back the way he came and the same rotting pathway lay before him—broken houses and all—with thralls on either side, standing there, watching him. The green orbs in the distance. He was back at the center of Prayer.
“I am sorry,” said a saddened voice at his back. “But I cannot let you leave.”
Chapter Five
She sat on the edge of her steps again and dangled her feet into the water below, watching the minotaur from afar and listening to his roars of fury. His presence was something that she couldn’t ignore. He had been trying to find a way through Prayer’s barriers for the past day. That, and avoiding her by any means necessary.
She needed a moment to get used to his presence. That she could not outright bend him to her will stressed her to no end.
He’d killed the remaining centaurs roaming the barriers, but how much longer would it be before more arrived? She looked down at herself and shivered, tightening her hands around the old ceramic cup she held.
She raised it to her lips, allowing the boiled water, bitter blimwort, her wax, and cove enter her mouth, and drank deeply. The pain she’d endured from summoning him still tore through her body. Her ability was as great as her body, and her body was that of a weak human woman.
She looked up and scanned the vicinity for her mother, but she was nowhere to be seen.I haven’t seen her since he arrived.
All through the night, the minotaur had tried making his way through the mist around her settlement to escape, having used all manner of trinkets and minor concoctions from his satchels in an attempt to tear down the wards that protected her. Nothing worked.
The only way in or out was through her—literally. She had swallowed the lifeforce of the bull and used her will to bring him here. If he wanted to leave, he had to kill her.
He couldn’t. Not as long as the spell was in effect.
He was trapped here as much as she was.
Having him here was only one part of the plan. She needed him to fight for her and this place if she wanted to keep Prayer from falling to the centaurs.
She had never had trouble with the centaur warbands from the south until now. Previously, their warrior studs and scouts had avoided her land, and the swamps in general, but that was before she helped the minotaur. Now, she and hers were in their path, and that path led to the mountains and the vengeance they sought.
Calavia raised her feet from the water and made her way quietly to her altar, hoping the minotaur wasn’t watching her as much as she’d been watching him. She could not see the direction of his gaze so far off in the brume.
In the sanctuary of her temple, with its heavy stone walls all around her in her altar room, she broke off a chunk of wax at her feet and placed it in a nearby bowl. She lit a candle to burn her wax over and waited for the mixture to loosen. The milky grey wax soon melted, and she cut the tip of her finger to give it blood.
Images appeared in the wax soon after, showing her the centaurs to the south.
A group of them, adorned in trophies and fetishes, argued around a giant bonfire on the Greymis coast. Human men and women served them, and many of the women had large, pregnant bellies. Their spears indicated the north.
They had been at it for weeks, reveling around their campfires and weaving tales of their glorious conquest of Burlox she could not fully hear, long before the band of centaurs appeared outside her home, chasing down the human they sought and the minotaur who stole her. She did not know why the centaurs gathered and prepared their weapons, but the more she spied on them, the more afraid she’d become.
She worried that helping a human woman, one who looked so much like herself—still alive and trying to survive—might have been a mistake.
If the centaurs chose to march north and take over her lands, there was little she could do about it. Not unless she wanted to give up everything she held dear and submit to them. She’d seen the way centaurs mated, and the image alone terrified her into action. When she saw Aldora fleeing straight for her sanctuary—away from the centaurs no less—she could not let the other human female suffer such a fate, not when Calavia could stop it.
Once out of the wetlands, where the ground hardened toward the coast, it was an easy run for a centaur. It was why the beaches of Greymis were ruled by them and her swamp was not. The fact that they had moved so far north did not bode well.
Nothing wanted these lands—not even the undead. Nothing but her…
Until now.
A deep growl and the heavy pounding of hooves filled her ears and pulled her attention away from her wax. The vision within the bowl disappeared. Calavia startled and straightened, seeing the minotaur striding straight for her, ripping vines from the walls as he stormed through her central passageway where she could just glimpse the entrance far down the broken hall.
He stepped into her sanctuary, eyes alight with fury. “Release me!”
A trickle of intimidation coursed through her but she managed to meet his gaze. “No.”
He roared, making her wince as it echoed throughout the temple. She studied his bulging physique with alarmed curiosity as his body grew bigger with the sound.Minotaurs grow when they’re angered?She had never encountered such a trait in the labyrinth.
“I will call the Bathyr to this place and we will raze it to the ground, witch. Do not tempt me!”
