And then she’d sensed it with her curse: thatsomething,the strange zing that came from Shadowbloods alone. Along with something else. Something that had set Sonara’s knees to quaking, something that was…
“Impossible,” Azariah said now, the very same word Sonara and Markam uttered when they’d loaded the Wanderer’s unconscious form onto Razor’s back and soared away.
Azariah kept her distance from the Wanderer, her lips set in a frown as she stared down at him. “So he came back, then,” she said. “In… in the same way we did. But how?” Her pupilless eyes found Sonara and Markam, who understood that moment of coming back from death to a second life. “He’s not from here. He’s not Dohrsaran.” She frowned. “How is he breathing our air? He’s not wearing his helmet.”
Thali emerged from the edge of the cave, her Canis mask stark against her dark robes. “Who are we to say that only natural-born Dohrsarans should receive the Great Mother’s gift? It is a miracle,” Thali said. She knelt and pressed her gauntleted hands to the cave floor as if she were touching a holy relic. “Something I havenevercome across, in all my readings or travels. A Wanderer, come to Dohrsar, andchanged.”Her voice wavered with reverence. “The Great Mother’s hands are upon him now. He is forever bound to this place.”
“No,” Markam shook his head. “Tell yourmotherwe don’t want him.”
“I will do no such thing,” Thali hissed. “To do so would be heresy.”
“But he’s a Wanderer. Whose people shot the hell out of ours.”
“And now he is a Child of Shadow, too.” Thali stepped closer. Her eyes glittered from deep within the sockets of her mask. “I wonder what magnificent gift swims within his blood, alongside his bones.”
Azariah approached the Wanderer slowly, eyes narrowing as if she were waiting for him to spring to life and strike like a snake.With a deep breath, she removed one filthy glove and touched the young man’s forehead. Her skin was no longer burned, though deep scars that looked like jagged lightning ran across her wrists, towards her elbows. “He is warm. Feverish.”
“Rags and cool water,” Thali said, then faded into the darkness at once.
“So he’s our pet now?” Markam asked. “We’re going to care for him, and feed him and—”
“He’s collateral.” Azariah looked up with narrowed eyes. “Language I would think you, of all people, would understand.”
Markam stiffened. “It wasyears ago,Azariah. How long will you make me pay?”
She lifted her chin. “As long as it takes.”
The two froze like that, glaring back and forth at each other; his hand on his dagger, her hand on the Wanderer’s forehead.
“Nevertheless,” Azariah said, backing down from the fight, “we have to keep him alive until we recover what is rightfully ours. Watch him. I’m going to help Thali gather supplies to care for him.”
She stood and glided past him, her shoulder grazing his.
Markam muttered something under his breath, then marched across the cave to his pack, cursing as he shoved his bedroll aside. “Who the hell went through my things?”
Sonara swallowed her shock and focused on Markam. “We have a Wanderer turned Shadowblood, and you’re worried about who touched your things?”
Markam shrugged. “Steal a man’s wineskin, and you may as well ask to borrow his blade, too, so you can stab him in the heart.”
Sonara sighed and knelt before her own things. She flipped open her saddlebag and began searching. Over her shoulder, she added, “Azariah, find something to bind him with.”
“The boy is one of us.” Thali returned from the shadows, an old pail full to the brim with water and strips of cloth in her gauntleted hands. She set them before the Wanderer, then turned her Canis gaze up at Sonara. “We will do no such thing.”
“Wewilltie him up, unless we want to risk losing him when he wakes to find himself in a blasted cave, surrounded by a pack of outlaws, one of which wears a corpse for a face and another being the one who killed him in the first place,” Sonara practically growled at the cleric. She didn’t have time for Thali’s games, her strange belief in magic and miracles. There was only good and bad, darkness and light. Everything else was happenstance. “We needed a prize to ransom. We got it. Bind him.”
“A Child of Shadow is not a prize,” Thali said. “The Great Mother—”
“Can kiss my outlawing ass for all I care,” Sonara said. “Bind him.”
She turned back around, not waiting for the others to answer, for she knew Markam would eventually take her order and see it done. At least he knew the way of jobs such as these. Feelings weren’t allowed in the mix.
Though, perhaps he’d let that rule slide, judging by whatever had happened between him and the princess in the past.
Sonara continued to dig through her pack, rummaging for that ever-present form of Soahm’s journal.
She had to find it, had to make sure that she didn’t lose the scent she’d picked up on when…
“Sonara.”
