The lad would need stitching, but the bullet was far from any vital areas. He would be fine as long as they could get the bleeding under control.
Doraan's fingers moved quickly as he finished shredding the binding, but as soon as he pulled it free, he froze. His eyes widened in shock as they fell upon the lad’s chest.
The boy had breasts.
Zev was a girl.
13
Doraan
“Whatwasthatship,Cormac?” Doraan paced the length of his quartermaster’s room. The boy—who was actually a girl—was currently unconscious in his quarters.
He wanted to know who she was, why she had pretended to be a boy, and what in the flaming seas she was doing up on that railing.
Cormac shook his head in response to Doraan’s question. “I don’t know.”
“That's the second military ship this year that has been disguised as a merchant vessel.”
“Something is brewing in the realm.” Cormac’s brows drew together.
The soldiers had been wearing a uniform Doraan had not seen before, green with a golden sun. Who were they and where did they come from? There was no indication of their origins or allegiance.
“They were well trained men. Strong,” Cormac added, hands clasped behind his back as he watched Doraan continue to pace.
Cormac was always so bloody calm and poised. There was nothing that seemed to fluster the man or make him bristle. He was a stone wall—solid and unreadable. It was something Doraan had always admired about the man. Cormac always stood the voice of reason when Doraan’s mind ran frantically, when anger and anxiety struck, which they often did. And right now, he was not only angry and anxious, but something far worse. He was scared.
“Something isn’t right, Cormac,” Doraan growled. “There is a foreign army sailing in Aksahrian waters. Do you think my father knows? Does Aksahri know?”
Doraan’s visit home had been unpleasant for many reasons. If only he could have reached out, showed them that he was alive and wanted to come back home, but he couldn’t—that was a truly wretched piece of the curse. What use was it to see your friends and family knowing they had no idea you were there? It only sufficed to bring suffering and heartache.
He had tried once before, on his thirteenth birthday. After a hard year at sea trying to come to terms with the curse and his new seabound life, he couldn’t wait until he was able to go back home, even if it was only for a few hours. They had docked their boat behind Crescent Rock, paddling their small skiff to the shore, but the instant his foot made impact with the solid ground, his entire body shifted and became translucent in the moonlight. He brought a hand up only to look directly through it to the palm trees lining the beach. It was enough to make him jump into the boat and go straight back to theCursed Soul.
Another unpleasant discovery he had learned during his visit home was that his father was ill. He no longer sat at the helm of the Empire, but was instead bedridden with fever. Doraan hadn’t stayed long enough to see how truly bad the illness was, but the Emperor being ill with war looming wasn’t good.
“Did you see or hear any talk of a rising foe against the Empire while we were in Aksahri?” Doraan asked Cormac. He hadn’t heard or seen anything during his short visit that suggested they were preparing for war. If he was being completely honest, everything had looked pretty much the same since he had left all those years ago.
Cormac shook his head again with a sorrowful sigh. “Nothing.”
“Me either. I overheard many conversations while moving through the palace, and I didn’t hear a word about a rising enemy.” He grunted. “They were more concerned with the week's dinner menu. They didn’t seem like an Emperor and Empress preparing for battle, securing the Empire.”
Doraan came to a halt, rubbing the relentless pain in his thigh. “This isn’t good, Cormac. That was no mere rebel force or newly formed militia—that was a navy ready to attack. We are lucky to have gotten away with as little damage to the ship as we did and no casualties. If my father doesn’t know anything about this…” he paused, rubbing a hand down over his face, “We need to do something, warn them, help them.”
With the Emperor ill and no apparent heir to replace him, the kingdom was fragile. If this enemy was even remotely aware of Aksahri’s vulnerability, they would strike soon.
In his father’s absence, Aksahri was being run by the Peregrine Council, a group of power hungry idiots too concerned with their own social standings to care about things such as border and naval patrols. Anyone could enter the capital from the Aksahrian shores with little to no defense stopping them. If the Aksahrian military wasn’t prepared, then the Empire’s capital was little more than a sitting duck. The city wouldn’t survive an attack. Aksahri was so crowded with people that civilians outnumbered soldiers fifty to one.
His father had never seemed concerned about an attack on his city. With the Sorcerers gone, he would say, “The people rejoice! The Sorcerers are gone. There is no threat to our Empire. We won.” He was too proud to realize that even if the Sorcerers were gone—which was highly unlikely—not all the Ungifted agreed with his dictatorship. The possibility of an uprising could never be completely ruled out.
But what his father had always seemed to ignore was that many of the Sorcerers had simply gone into hiding after being forced from their homes and slaughtered on the streets. Many had found other ways to survive. Even with the military groups specifically created to snuff out any Sorcerers, there would always be some that survived. Who knew how many were hiding right under his father’s nose? This new enemy could very well be those survivors.
Doraan thought about the storm that had come almost out of nowhere during the attack. The sea and skies had grown angry in a matter of moments—almost as if they had been coaxed or created. Was this new enemy building an army of Sorcerers? If that were true, the entire Empire would have no chance of survival. The only reason his father and the Ungifted rebellion had worked all those years ago was because of the element of surprise. The Sorcerers had no idea the Ungifted were planning a mutiny. If war really was just over the hill and they had an army of Sorcerers ready to attack, it would be a bloodbath.
Doraan closed his eyes, rolling his neck from one shoulder to the other in a feeble attempt to relax them. He didn’t have the ability to help. He could do nothing but sit and watch the onslaught. The only thing he could do to try and help his people was to break the curse, and he had to do it now. He couldn’t just sit and watch his people, his home, crumble to ash in front of him. There was only one hope he had left. A single spark that, if ignited, could change everything.
The Temple of Gorria.
It had to be real. History told of a powerful assembly of Sorcerers known as the Tetrad. Legend depicted them as the most powerful Sorcerers to ever live—even more powerful than Forcina herself. If anyone could help him, it was them. And when he was done with them, curse broken and forgotten, he would finish them off before they could take back the Empire.
