“Don’t,” she ordered, kicking her mother hard in the chest as she attacked her again.
Astegur stopped.
“I need to take her magic by force.”
Chapter Nineteen
Astegur had never had so much freely offered blood in his life.
His eyes glazed over with potent, intoxicating, euphoria. Calavia’s pure blood burst in rapture over his tongue, down his throat, only to settle in his belly where it swirled with his smoke, igniting it into flames. His pulse quickened, his muscles strained, and every fiber of his being vibrated with power. He wanted to lick Calavia’s wounds until she was clean from it. He wanted todevourher.I will devour her.
But despite the rush that seized his soul, he could still see and understand what was happening around him with fierce clarity.
The mists that always lingered around the edges fled, repelled by her humanity in a way he had not seen since his own mother, Amia, had fed her blood to the clan before battle.
Through the haze of his vision, he watched Calavia release her mother. He moved to help her, but her command to stop him from intervening grounded his hooves to the spot. She kicked the thrall in the chest, sending it backwards, and to his surprise, she pounced on her mother before the thrall could rise off the ground.
Calavia gripped her mother’s throat and screamed, “Give it to me!”
Her mother screamed back incoherently and clawed at Calavia’s chest, ripping her garments to shreds. Fresh blood, tainted and pure, filled his nose as the two females fought for dominion like barghests.
In horrid awe, he watched them, toppling one another, wrestling, wrenching, biting, each had a will of their own. But neither one went for the killing blow. Calavia’s dagger remained at the edge of the circle, abandoned.
What seemed like hours went by, and he couldn’t take his gaze off of the crazed scene, even after he realized the yells of the centaurs outside had died. They were all listening to the women, even those that could probably barely hear what was going on, were quiet.
Astegur shook his head and swiped his eyes, just as the war cries outside returned to a crescendo, and the altar room had taken on a thick, mottled green aura.
“The barriers!” Calavia yelled his way, wakening him further. “They’re falling!”
Calavia’s mother grabbed Calavia’s hair at that moment and slammed his female’s head hard into the ground, knocking her slight form unconscious.
Astegur roared just as the familiar thunder of hundreds of hooves pounded through his skull. The mother jumped up and came after him, limbs wild and rabid, but stopped suddenly at the edge of the circle, pressed against it. Her screams ripped his mind in two. He stumbled back, pulling his weapon from his belt, and sent one last glance at Calavia, who was slowly lifting her hand to her forehead, moaning.
“Go,” she whispered without looking back at him. She began to rise.
He raised his head in fury and breathed flames into the air. Turning his attention to the exit, he made his way to the front line.
Astegur pushed through the thralls lingering in the hallway and to the barricade they put up blocking the temple entrance. The thick green aura of Calavia’s magic had beaten him to it, engulfing the smoky air from the bonfires that tainted it. The thundering grew with each step, and behind him, he could hear Calavia and her mother return to the fight.
He did not have magic of his own. Not like some of his brothers who were born with traces of it from their mother, and he had never been so thankful and so furious for his lack until right then. When Calavia told him of her plan, he’d been dubious, but now—with her blood pumping through him in such a large quantity—he understood her loyalty to her family.
He and his brothers had doomed their tribe when they left. They were their fiercest warriors, born leaders, honed with strength. They left because of treachery, because of their missing mother, without a backwards glance to the fates of their cousins and friends. But unlike Astegur and his brothers, Calavia refused to leave, refused to give up. It made him wonder, for the first time since he departed the deadlands, if his choice had been the right one.
Not every bull of their first tribe was teaming with guilt. There had been innocents among them.
And we left anyway.
The thunder grew like a wave around him as he stopped before the barricade. It sucked up the air from his lungs and vibrated the ground. The vines along the walls shriveled up in fear to the cracked ceiling overhead. Dust flew up into the air around his hooves. Astegur cleared his head of his thoughts and leaned forward to look through a crack in the blockade.
Not that far in the distance, right on the edges of the first broken huts and houses, were the centaurs, dozens of them side-by-side, with their weapons drawn, galloping in place where the barrier began to fade.
Astegur tightened his grip on his axe.
One burst through and rushed right into the high grasses and deeper water, where their bonfires could not reach, and stumbled forward with a yelp, tripping over the tied reeds within. It got up and fell again.
Several more broke through immediately after and two quickly fell right into their traps. One made it halfway through the settlement before it, too, stumbled over the net of hidden reeds. It struggled back up and without picking up a gallop again, limped its way toward the temple.
He had no idea how many more stumbled their way to Prayer’s center out of his sight.
