Disbelief was stamped on every part of her body and face. “And why would you keep your word once you’ve gained your prize?”
“Because, despite what you might think, I have honor.”
Acerbic laughter greeted that statement. It died as quickly as it erupted. “Do I truly have a choice?”
“If you want to see Beroe again? No.”
She shook her head. “Honesty for once. There’s hope for you yet.”
He swallowed back a cheer at the thread of agreement in her voice. “Will you help me?”
“As I really have no choice, then yes.”
“Do I have your word you won’t try to escape again?”
“Absolutely not.”
He hadn’t expected a promise, so her reply didn’t surprise him. “Then we know where we stand with each other.” He settled back against the wall, feeling the hard thumping of his heart calm a little. “You’re a brave woman,” he said. “A bitter one, but brave.”
She didn’t acknowledge his backhanded compliment. “What will you do to your cousin when you see him again?”
Ten years of smothered rage threatened to boil up inside Azarion. He pushed it down, back to the cold, dead place that had kept him alive for so long. “Kill him and mount his head on a pike outside my tent.”
He cocked an eyebrow when she tilted her head and gave a shrug of her own. “That seems only fair.”
This time, Azarion didn’t bother hiding his grin. “You may not look like a Savatar woman,Agacin, but sometimes you think like one.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stealing horses was easier than Gilene imagined. Either Azarion was as good a horse thief as he was a gladiator, or the drunken sentries and grooms paid to watch the stable yard and take care of the animals had imbibed enough wine and ale to drown an army. It might have been both, as she soon rode away from Wellspring Holt on a stolen chestnut mare, heading toward an unknown future.
Azarion rode beside her on a bay mare with white fetlocks. While Gilene had to use all her concentration to stay on her horse’s back and not fall off, he rode with ease. The Savatar were known throughout the world as excellent horsemen, and obviously ten years fighting in the Pit weren’t enough to make him forget how to ride.
A pouch containing the foods he’d stolen earlier at the market as well as rations and leftovers uneaten by the drunken stable hands was tied across the back of his saddle, and he was armed with a crossbow, a quiver of arrows, and two knives—courtesy of one of the sentries, who didn’t see Azarion creeping stealthily up on him until it was too late.
Gilene didn’t ask whether the sentry was dead or merely knocked unconscious, and Azarion didn’t offer an assurance either way.
They rode east and north through the night and by dawn had passed out of the heavily forested territories belonging to Kraeland into more open terrain where the trees grew in solitary majesty or clumped together in small clusters. Fields of waist-high grasses brushed the horses’ bellies as they galloped toward the distant silhouettes of the Gamir Mountains.
Azarion pointed to a set of hillocks that marched east under a rising sun. “We’ll stop there and take shelter in one of the barrows to rest the horses and sleep through the day.”
“Another grave?” she grumbled. “What is this desire of yours to sleep among the dead?” She covered her mouth to stifle a yawn. She was saddlesore and irritable, and unprepared to spend hours in a tomb, no matter how much she might want to get warm and fall asleep.
“One of those barrows will be big enough to house even the horses. We’ll be warm, out of the wind, and with a roof over our heads.” He nodded toward the sun. “That’s a blood dawn rising. We’ll be in for storms later and can wait them out until nightfall.”
His reasoning was sound enough. Still, she remembered a similar argument before they stepped through the shattered gate and into Midrigar. What had lurked there made standing in the middle of a savage gale seem safe.
Her expression must have revealed some of her thoughts, because Azarion guided his horse closer to hers. “These are old barrows, scoured clean of spirits and anything of worldly wealth. And they were built to honor the dead, not imprison them. Midrigar is an abomination. Barrows are simply resting places—mostly for the dead, sometimes for the living.”
“Barrows sometimes house wights,” she argued.
“True. Those ahead don’t. Just the occasional mouse or a colony of bats if grave robbers cut their entry hole into the roof.”
Her hands felt frozen to the reins, and the two shawls Halani had given her before they parted ways did little to ward off thecold. She was tired and far from home, with a stranger who kept her for purposes of which she wanted no part. They had escaped a demon thing in a cursed city and found solace with free traders who dealt in questionable goods. The idea of sleeping the day away in a barrow next to the bones of the departed didn’t seem all that strange at the moment. She just hoped her fear of a lurking wight didn’t come to fruition.
Azarion took her silence for agreement and tugged on her mount’s bridle to get her moving again. They reached a gradual rise just as the sun’s lower edge cleared the horizon to spill morning light across a flat landscape that purled and swayed in a tide of tall, pale-plumed grass. She gasped at the sight. “Have we reached the Stara Dragana?”
Azarion spared her a glance, his attention mostly on the barrows before them. “Within its western borders. This part of it belongs to the Nunari, vassals of the Empire. The city of Uzatsii sits about a league from here.”
