His mouth drifted lower until he reached her neck. She flinched when he grazed his teeth across the long vein below the skin and felt the heavy pulse of her blood surge under his lips. “Another knows your secret and will only keep it as long as I’malive. Burn me,” he murmured, “and you seal your fate and the fate of Beroe.”
His heart beat as hard as hers did as he waited to see whether she’d sniff out his lie and call his bluff.
Rage bubbled in her voice, deepened it until she was almost growling. “It would be worth it.”
She didn’t break easily. A woman who willingly suffered through the Rites of Spring each year for half a decade wouldn’t. Strands of her hair, fine as silk threads, tickled his nose. “Would it?” He drove the point home. “Do you want Beroe to become another Midrigar?”
Midrigar. The township that once refused to tithe its women and grain to the Krael Empire and paid a terrible price. Even for those who thrived on watching the violence and bloodshed of the arena, the destruction of Midrigar was an abomination, its name spoken only in whispers.
For a moment, the heat strengthened, searing his sides before disappearing altogether. A soft sob broke the tense silence as gladiator and witch stood together. To other eyes, it might seem as if they embraced, his face hidden in her neck, her hands now resting against his ribs.
“You bastard,” she said in a defeated whisper.
Azarion kept her trapped, determined to gain her cooperation and content to taste her skin. “What say you,Agacin? Help me and none will ever know the village of Beroe has made a fool of the Empire.”
She leaned away from him so that her gaze met his, and in the dark depths of her eyes a calculating hatred settled. “What do I have to do?”
Triumph nearly made his knees give way. The plan he hadstrategized for the last three years, with thisagacinat its heart, had only a slim chance of working, but it was at least a chance. Without her consent, extorted via threat, it had no chance at all.
He had only moments before the guards came for him, and he kept her trapped against the wall as he spoke, the wandering caress of his hand over her shoulder and breast in sharp contrast to his pragmatic instructions. Anyone watching might think the Gladius Prime wooed his plain companion to his bed.
She listened with a close ear and barely checked anger. “It won’t work,” she muttered when he finished, and swatted his hand away from her hip.
“It will.” He cupped her buttock to pull her into him and buried his nose in her hair. “It must.”
The clatter of keys and a thump on the cell door signaled visitors. He kept his back to the door, but the girl’s face had gone a sickly pale shade as she stared past his shoulder at the barred window. Azarion casually turned to find a face leering at them.
“Time’s up, bull. If you haven’t tupped the bitch yet, it’ll have to wait. Herself is wanting you. Now.”
Theagacinretreated to a corner as far from him and the guards as she could get. She busied herself with righting her tunic and retying the laces.
The guard gave Azarion a puzzled look. “I saw this year’s offerings. You could have done much better than her.”
Azarion didn’t reply. He almost never spoke to the guards, and they had learned long ago he was far too dangerous to tease without risk. He kept his attention on the second guard, who trained the crossbow on him and held the hated shackles.
That first guard motioned him forward. Azarion held still as the iron collar encircled his neck, growing heavier—tighter—when the guard snapped it closed. A length of chain hung from the iron ringbolted at its center, the links kept short so that he was forced to hunch when the guard attached it to the chain connecting the shackles that bound his wrists and the ones that gripped his ankles. Trussed in irons, he shuffled after his escort as they led him through the door and into the corridor—a broken beast of burden. It was how the empress liked to see him when he first entered her apartments.
He sighed inwardly when no cup of drugged wine was forthcoming. It seemed the empress hadn’t yet had her bloodlust appeased, even after witnessing a full day of slaughter in the arena. He wondered whom he’d be forced to fight and kill for her pleasure before she bedded him.
And kill he would. Again and again. With his freedom at the tips of his fingers, he’d do whatever it took to stay alive and fulfill that dream. He glanced at theagacinhuddled against the wall. She stared at him, eyes wide. Frightened. Hostile.
“She’ll still be here for you to enjoy when you return, stud,” one guard said. “That’s if Herself doesn’t take it into her head to geld you just for fun.”
The taunt elicited snorts of laughter. Azarion paid no heed and concentrated on keeping his feet as they navigated the slimy floor toward a set of steps that ascended to street level.
They exited the underground labyrinth and entered an enclosed bailey. The guards shoved Azarion toward a waiting wagon. He half fell into the back and was joined by the guard with the crossbow and another who gripped an ax. The driver whistled, and the wagon lurched forward into the city’s narrow streets.
Night had descended on Kraelag as they traveled toward Palace Hill. Lamplight illuminated signs advertising pub houses and brothels. Revelers made drunk on wine and made poor by pickpockets spilled into the streets, continuing the weeklong celebration of the Rites of Spring.
The hill overlooking the city blazed with light, a beacon of brightness that hid a corruption far fouler than the worst of Kraelag’s middens.
The wagon rolled up the hill, leaving behind the closes for the wide, cobbled avenues lined with gates attended by guards.
Behind the gates, the Empire’s wealthy and noble enjoyed the fruits of their riches. The closer they drew to the hill’s peak and the palace that crowned it, the larger and more lavish the manors became. And the greater the number of soldiers guarding these sanctuaries.
Azarion found it all suffocating. Even with the wider streets, the buildings seemed to loom above him, sometimes blocking the moon from view. Trees grown as privacy barriers were clipped into shapes that defied nature’s hand. Like the manor houses and temples, they towered above him, a green wall threatening to collapse on top of him.
A decade spent as a slave in the Empire’s capital hadn’t dulled his memory of the open steppe, with its wild grasses bent to the ceaseless wind. The Sky Below was an unforgiving land, nor were the nomadic clans that roamed its expanse peaceful, but he missed it. Fiercely. He went to sleep each night with its image behind his eyelids and woke up each morning to its memory. If his plan succeeded, he would ride across its grasslands once more, a free man.
