Calavia slowly nodded. She turned her face to the flames. She wanted to believe his words, but her heart still dropped to her gut. Things had changed more for her in the last fortnight than they had in the many, endless years of her life. She didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to see her home destroyed, nor the townsfolk slaughtered. Her mother most of all.
A nervous energy filled her veins and fought the calming effects of the cove in her system. She pushed her palm to her belly.I need to find my mother.It had been days since her mother wandered off, ever since Astegur arrived.I need her magic…
The scrape of wood and blade filled the room in a soothing rhythm, but it did not stop her worry. She glanced around and found Astegur working his knife along the end of the wood, shaping it into a point.
Calavia licked her lips. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“I have not thanked you for your acquiescence. I know now, that what I have done to you is unforgivable. I forced you here for a choice I made. I did not need to help your brother, but I did, regardless of the inevitable outcome.”
“You may have saved his human’s life.”
“I may have made things worse.”
“War is inevitable. My tribe often warred when we roamed the deadlands. Out there, where the world is old and the labyrinth walls have been gone for countless years, exist creatures that rarely come to the barrier lands. Giants, leviathans, monsters as big as mountains. Nothing exists out there long unless they are made for it, as my people have been made for it.” Shavings of wood piled around his hooves. “Liches with armies of undead, goblin kingdoms with entire civilizations deep within the dirt, packs of barghests with countless numbers, poised to swallow cities whole. My kind has survived out there for hundreds of years, my brothers and I will survive in this new land for just as long.”
“Why did you come to the barrier lands now?”
“My father, the warlord of our tribe, was killed, and those that did not agree with his rule blamed my mother.”
“Your witch mother?” she asked.
He nodded. “When she disappeared, they would not admit their treachery. They took her. They would not give her body to her children to bury, and so we spurned them and left. My brothers and I decided we would follow in our sire’s brutality and return to the barrier lands and remake our tribe. With the strength of Steelslash, and the power of my mother, we would find human females to breed with like the God queen of old did with a human male. And in our quest in doing so, we will conquer a new land to call our own.”
Calavia watched Astegur put down the stake and start on the next one. She pulled the newly carved tip of the stake into her lap. “I am sorry to hear about your sire and mother.”
“War is inevitable,” he repeated. “We fought a clan of harpies for the mountain we sought, we spent a season establishing our foothold and rule of the mountain, and now we must fight centaurs to keep what we have claimed.”
“Why were you and your brother away from the mountain?” She never thought of leaving her own people behind.
“Vedikus was supposed to scout the barrier lands here and to the north, while I was sent to scout the southern lands and gather information.”
Worry swirled her gut. “Why?”
Astegur caught her eyes with his and she swore they darkened to black ash. “War is inevitable.”
“You planned on claiming the lands closer to the wall…” Some of those lands were her own.
“Yes.”
“Mine as well?”
“Yes.”
She slid her gaze from his to the fire. “Would you have killed me?”
“If you fought us? Yes.”
She closed her eyes tight, but saw her world drenched in blood and quickly reopened them. She knew when the minotaurs arrived, when they killed the harpies to the west, but instances like that happened often. The mountain had been shifting ownership her entire life. But never her land. No one wanted to live in a swamp, nor travel through one, and so she had assumed Prayer would remain as it always had.
Ignored.
She had picked a side in a war that had not even yet begun, without even realizing that it was on the horizon. “These lands…they are not wanted, not easily conquered, and there is only one sacrificial zone. There are not only centaurs to be dealt with, but tribes of hobgoblins and orcs. The centaurs that rule the Greymis coast have the largest army on this side of the continent—the current labyrinth walls—until you get to the forests far north. I have only seen two minotaurs.”
“I hoped the centaurs would not get involved. In a way, we are made of the same cloth, beasts with humanity, but Vedikus has made his move, and there is naught to be done but fight and ask for blessings from the moon and our God queen. The smaller tribes that fight for a hold here are nothing, which is why we chose to settle here. In number you are right, there are fewer bulls when compared to the horses.”
She inhaled. “Can you win? You and your brothers?”
