Even the distant, guttural shrills and moans of the thralls faded from his ears.
A hush rushed through Prayer, a gasp, and a touch of nothing. Calavia’s magical green aura that had bloomed from her spell disappeared before his eyes.
No…
She cannot be dead.
But he could not deny the sudden emptiness he felt. The noises returned in a rush as a figure emerged in the thick gloom above him.
Kryiakos appeared, raising his spear with both hands above his head, aiming the sharp tip straight for Astegur’s neck.
But then Astegur smelled it. So thick, so delicious, so deviantly wonderful that he settled in for the deathstrike to come. Calavia’s pure blood filled his nose and calmed his hearts. His smile returned, softer than before, to rest on his face.
“I avenge you Elscalian Enios, Telner Enios, centaurs of the royal bloodline,” Kryiakos sputtered and coughed. “I avenge all those who fell.” He raised his spear high.
Astegur closed his eyes.
“There’s a human here! A pure one!” someone shouted.
“Do not touch her!” Kryiakos yelled.
“She’s wounded. What is she holding?”
The deathblow never came. Astegur reopened his eyes to see Kryiakos looking away, his spear going lax in his grip.
“That’s not a mistfucking human!” one of them screamed. “Kill her!”
Astegur lifted up on his elbow just as a very familiar, very shrill, skull-shattering scream assailed the air. He jerked upright, gritting through the pain, as Kryiakos lowered his spear to cover his ears. Astegur yanked the weapon from the general’s hand.
Suddenly, a bloodied figure scurried toward them on all fours and slammed into Kryiakos’s side stabbing at him continuously with Calavia’s ritual dagger.Calavia’s mother.She was quickly torn off Kryiakos by the other centaurs, and Astegur heard her dying wails as they pinned her to the ground with the ends of their spears.
Astegur reached for his fallen axe, turned to their leader while they were distracted, grabbed Kryiakos’s loose hair above the helmet, and jerked his head straight back, opening the exposed skin of the general’s neck. With one final moment of clarity from his victim, Astegur hacked the centaur’s neck in two.
And with blood raining down upon them both, Astegur dropped Kryiakos’s head and fell unconscious back to the murky, wet ground.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Astegur woke sometime later to screams all around him.
His lips peeled back in pain, he rolled heavily to his side to find Kryiakos’s severed head lying next to him, the centaur’s dead eyes staring at him blankly. Astegur searched for his axe in the shallow, muddy water, finding it between him and the dead centaur. With smoke diminishing his sight, he tried to rise to his hooves.
Agony in its purest form crashed through him. He dropped back down and looked at his body. There was a terrible gash straight through his muscles and almost to his bone. The wound ran from his collarbone and ended deeply on his left bicep. It was why his left arm had grown so weak. But it was the stab he’d taken to the chest that truly made him feel pain. He let go of his axe and pressed his right hand over the opening.
Mists!He gritted his teeth. Pressing his palm harder against the wound, he took a moment to look around as another wave of hurt passed through him.
The first thing he spotted was the half-dozen thralls guarding him, with wounds that made his own look slight. He blinked out the glare in his eyes again and looked beyond them where centaurs and the remaining thralls fought each other. They fought much like they had before, with frightening, uncaring devastation, a group of them attacking one centaur at a time, flooding over their victim like a violent wave of limbs, teeth, and weapons, forcing their victim to the ground in a pool of their own gore before immediately moving on to the next.
They neither acknowledged their wounds nor the centaurs trying to force them back.
Beyond them, he saw the remaining centaurs still trapped outside the barrier, but as he watched, more and more forced their way through. He knew the thralls would soon be outnumbered, but for now they managed to hold the centaurs back and keep them distracted.
Hope flooded his veins. He concentrated on it, and when he did, he felt the tendrils of Calavia’s magic brush over him again. He twisted his neck to look at the temple behind him, and growled. A group of centaurs were in the process of breaking through the barricade, with several mutilated thralls under their hooves.
Astegur glanced down upon his wounds, his fallen weapon, then closed his eyes, searching for the strength to rise. With his weakened left hand, he rummaged through the small satchels still attached to his belt.
He immediately felt the clump of wax he’d collected the day before, to bring with him to Bathyr for Calavia. He exhaled through another wave of pain and pulled the mass out. Switching hands, he let his left hand drop to his side and rolled the wax with his other, loosening it up. He took another steadying breath and pressed the wax hard into the opening in his chest.
A gnarled groan escaped his lips, and he collapsed back onto the ground.
