I could tell he'd been affected by my story, that he grieved for the loss of an innocent boy from the lower rings, but when he looked up at me again, his eyes were hard, his jaw tense.
“Darius?” I asked, blinking away the tears.
“What am I supposed to do about it, Adrian?” he asked again, annoyed as he tossed his hands into the air and shook his head. “Drop everything? Drop my whole life and go back? For what? To be next in line for a beheading?”
“We could help them,” I argued, disbelief and bewilderment lacing my tone. “They need us. They need—”
“Who are you to know what they need?”
I stopped, mouth agape in pure shock.
“I…I feel like I don’t even know you anymore,” I breathed, in awe at the man standing before me and how utterly different he was from the man I’d known before.
“Yeah? Likewise.”
With that, Darius stormed from his own tent into the night.
Chapter Thirty-One
Dante
“Executing them is only making martyrs. Another solution must be reached. Perhaps imprisonment? Rehabilitation?”
— A Letter from Atticus, Heir of House Avus, to Cadence, Matriarch of House Lynx
An encampment for nine was much harder to build than one for three. But, with the additional supplies Rainier and his riders had brought with them, we managed.
Night having fallen, I stared into the roaring fire at the center of our camp, covered head to toe in blood that did not belong to the massive beast one of Rainier’s men had hunted for dinner. He and Roman were discussing the animal now, the former telling the latter that such creatures were common in the forests ofArchí, a place we were now close enough to for theZverand their riders to hunt within, apparently.
I was hardly listening. Boys. They'd been just boys, fresh recruits from the human slums ofPavos, promised a destiny of legendary proportion only to be delivered to death’s door in the form ofZver’steeth and mine and Roman’s blades. My hands shook so I hid them beneath my bowl of venison, but I couldn’thide the haunted gleam in my eyes. One of Rainier’s riders noticed.
“Never killed before?” She was pretty in a mundane sort of way. Mousy brown hair and hazel eyes. Everything about her screamed human and she seemed to delight in that, dressing the part in plain leathers and simple boots.
“I…not like that,” I replied.
She arched a brow.
“That was a slaughter,” I clarified. “They didn’t have a chance.”
“They shouldn’t have been blocking the pass,” she replied with a shrug, turning away to finish the last of her meal.
Disgusted, I set the remainder of mine aside, rising from my place at the fire and brushing my hands off on pants I'd forgotten were bloody. I wished for a bath or even a steam. I would settle for a simple change of clothes. Anything that wasn’t covered in the blood of children.
I shuddered. I'd seenZverkill before, up close even, but there was something about being on the other side of it, on their side, that was unsettling. Not as terrifying, true. I didn’t have to worry about death swooping down from above, but their ferocity, their predatory talent, the way they killed, shredding and gnashing and poisoning, it was brutal. And to be the ones who loosed those weapons upon young, untested recruits, it broke something in my soul. Something that, apparently, the others I surrounded myself with had lost long ago.
“Are you okay?” a familiar voice called from the direction of the tents.
I looked up briefly, my enhanced vision pickingKseniaout easily in the shadows.
“I’m fine,” I muttered.
“Did you know any of them?”
I hesitated. No one else had bothered to ask me that.
“No,” I said.
“Small mercies,” she replied.
