“You’re asking me to kill my mother,” she whispered, haunted. “I can’t.”
His eyes softened. “Your mother has been gone for a long time. What you see now, it’s not her, it has never been her, not since the mist stole the last of her humanity. She’s your weakness. Let her go. If you do so now, we still may be able to escape while it’s dark.”
“No.”
The softness in his gaze hardened. “I will do it for you.”
“No. You will not change my mind.”
“Then you leave us no choice but to fight.”
Calavia let go of her mother, and the moment her touch left hers, her mother began to claw, wail, and fight her binds again. Calavia tried to ignore them, tried not to recall the wounds still on her mother’s wrists where she had tried to bleed herself out.
Astegur released a plume of steam from his nostrils. “To hurt. To die. To join an already dead place that prayers fled long ago.”
Calavia rose to her feet. “I called you here for a reason, bull.” She wiped the rest of her tears away as she stepped up to face him, back straightening. “To do exactly that.” The noises, the terror-striking sounds of a hundred horsemen just beyond, closed in around them. “I will not kill her, not even for you. You’re asking me to kill the only being I have ever loved. You’re asking me to commit matricide.”
She stared him down.
His nostrils flared, the muscles in his biceps strained. She fisted her hands at her sides.
“She wants this,” he said, his voice low and dark.
Her mother’s ghoulish noises emphasized his words. Calavia refused to hear them, couldn’t allow herself to hear them. Her throat constricted. She had to think of a plan, of something to convince him to let her mother live.
“We will win,” she said.
He reached for her, and she dodged away from his hand. “She is killing you, Calavia. She’s the weak thing holding you back. Stop hiding your nature for a dead thing.”
No.She shook her head and looked past him, out the shadowy exit, where the centaurs screamed. There was no more time, their enemies were here, and the swamps had not stopped their journey.
There was one thing she could do, one last terrible ritual she could perform.
“Let her go.”
She barely heard him as the wheels turned in her head. A darker shadow skitted through the temple passageway, and she took a step toward it. Astegur followed on her heels but didn’t stop her as the sounds from outside threatened to engulf them. Her mother’s wails grew louder the farther Calavia moved away.
She entered the dark hallways of her temple and saw her thralls standing around, aimlessly, as if waiting, with weapons in their hands. She pushed through them to the open entryway of her temple. The smell of blisterwood smoke filled her nose. Astegur’s hand clamped down on her shoulder as she stepped into the threshold, looking out.
Prayer was lit up in an eerie gold and orange sheen. The light cast from giant bonfires pierced through the mist on the outskirts of the settlement, obscuring and destroying her green lights in their flames. In and among them, between the riotous fires, were centaurs pounding their hooves to the moist ground. There was a shadowy wall of them on every side she looked.
As she stared at them, they raised their bows in horrifying unison from their backs and nocked their arrows, aiming them at her temple.
“Even the mist has left us to our fate,” Astegur said harshly, pulling her back into the shadows of the only building that could protect them now.
She swallowed her fear as the first of the arrows struck.
Chapter Eighteen
Calavia knelt at her mother’s side and brushed back the tangled hair from her face.
Darkness had begun to fall since she retreated deep within the confines of her temple. There was nothing else they could do without the mist shielding them.
She closed her eyes and tugged on her hair, wishing she would have listened to Astegur many days ago, when he told her they could not take on a battalion of centaurs on their own. Her eyes watered as she looked again at her mother.
As her regrets whirled in her mind, she knew that even if it all played out again, her choices would be the same.
But in the last few hours, as she listened to the warband outside drawing ever closer, she began to consider Astegur’s words. She replayed the conversation again and again in her head, staring at her mother. Calavia had begged, pleaded, held her tight, then did so again, already knowing deep down inside that everything she did meant nothing. Her mother was gone.
