The position prevented her from rolling over and put a crick in her neck when she lifted it for a better view of her surroundings. The pungent scent of horse manure and hay filled her nostrils, and the ground she lay on was instead a floor of weathered boards that creaked beneath her with every rotation of wheels on a rutted road. A wagon. She was bound and gagged in a wagon with a cover stretched over it, hiding her presence. The confined space was a sweltering box. The thin shift she wore offered little protection from the splinters that found their way through the fabric to pierce her skin.
How did she end up here and in this wretched state?
Her mind grasped at memories, coming away at first with only cobwebs, then a flickering line of images. Her bedchamber, waiting for Brishen to finish with the difficult sejm. She’d just downed her second cup of a well-brewed tea. It had made her sleepy, and she worried she’d doze off before she could keep her promise to Brishen to be awake when he returned. A series of strange thumps from the nursery had pulled her from her somnolence. There had been something menacing about the sounds, something that put her senses on alert and made her bolt from her chair, ready to race for the door connecting her bedroom to the nursery.
A dizzying fog rolled across her mind, and she struggled to recollect the rest. The door had opened before she reached it, and two figures rushed toward her. Ildiko frowned, her efforts to claw back more of her memories failing. She remembered nothing else, but it didn’t take recall to recognize the obvious. She’d been abducted.
The ropes binding her and the position she lay in rendered her nearly immobile. The gag around her face wasn’t much better, but if she could pull that down enough, she could breathe easier and call for help if the opportunity presented itself.
She bent her head to rub her cheek hard against her shoulder, trying to scrape the gag down on one side. It moved a fraction but not enough to make a difference. She continued the effort, switching to the other cheek when the first grew sore. Her face felt as if it were on fire when she finally stopped, and the gag remained firmly against her mouth, though it had moved a hair’s breadth lower toward her jawline. At this rate, she’d rub her skin off before the cloth ever dropped below her upper lip. Ildiko snarled her frustration into the gag.
What she wouldn’t give at this moment to be Anhuset. The Kai woman would have already chewed her way through the gag with those formidable Kai teeth, broken the knots in her ropes,kicked her way out of the wagon, killed the driver, and driven the wagon back home by herself. That was if someone even managed to capture her in the first place. They’d have to drug her into a deathless stupor beforehand. But Ildiko wasn’t Anhuset, and she’d have to find her own way out of this debacle using the strengths given to her.
She continued rubbing at the gag, feeling it creep down by minuscule increments as she sought explanations for how she’d ended up here. The spin of conjecture halted as abruptly as the wagon, sending her sliding forward hard enough to embed a few more splinters into her legs and midriff and tighten her shift so that the fabric cut into her shoulders. She yelped at the sharp stings.
Heavy footsteps sounded along one side of the wagon, pausing at intervals to move something that scraped along its high sides. They finally stopped at the wagon’s end, before a blast of fresh air buffeted Ildiko. Tears blurred her vision, seeping between her lashes as she squinted against the sudden onslaught of sunlight. She slowly opened one eye to see the edge of the wagon’s sides, bearded in tufts of hay lodged in the spaces between the boards, and above the sideboards, a wall of trees and a blue sky festooned with clouds.
She struggled to turn onto her side, groaning softly at the fire in her shoulders and the ache in her back. Whoever stood at the wagon’s end watched her thrashing without comment. Ildiko stilled, fear suffocating her as her captor remained silent and let the weight of a stare send gooseflesh over her entire body. She was so very vulnerable, tied up and unable to defend herself, dressed in nothing more than a shift now torn in several places and her legs exposed to mid-thigh. Her breath gusted fast through her nostrils, the sweat of terror pouring down her sides.
Her protesting cry was nothing more than a garbled squawk behind the gag as the unseen abductor grabbed her with roughhands and lifted her out of the wagon. She squirmed in their relentless grip, panic suppressing any pain and lending her a strength she didn’t know she possessed. Rough hands scrabbled over her shoulders, pausing at her neck. Ildiko fought even harder, fury combining with terror as the man grabbed the chain of her prized necklace and yanked it free. A sharp cuff to the head exploded dark stars across her vision that bounced and scattered she was dropped and struck the ground. More stars. She gagged on the droplets of mud she inhaled through one nostril, feeling the blood surge into her face as she tried to sneeze it out. She might have vomited had her captor not finally shown some small mercy and crouched to yank the gag down. She inhaled a deep breath, instantly regretting it as bile hurtled up her throat from her stomach. Ildiko closed her eyes and clenched her jaw shut, forcing back the bitter surge.
Once she exhaled hard enough to clear her nose, she risked another inhalation, albeit a shallower one, and opened her eyes again for a first good look at her tormentor.
He was human, with grizzled features and flat gray eyes devoid of any emotion—even lust—and he stank worse than a privy in high summer. Her eyes watered at the stench. He said nothing to her, but she didn’t mistake the warning gleam in his gaze. If she tried to cry out, he’d either hit her, gag her, or both.
Ildiko felt it worth the consequences. All she needed was one chance. One chance for someone to hear her and either come to investigate or mention it to the right person so that it traveled back to Brishen. Just as she opened her mouth to bellow for all she was worth, he jerked the gag back over her mouth. He didn’t cuff her a second time, but the yank he gave to her bonds hurt just as much. She screamed, and her shoulders screamed with her. She lay compliant at his feet after that, her thoughts and memories still murky as she planned her next attempt to get help. Questions heaped atop one another in her mind.
It was obvious why he’d stolen her necklace. The workmanship alone would garner a significant handful of coins, but why had he stopped and taken her out of the wagon to sit on the side of the road?
The sound of horses’ hooves crunching leaves, then gravel, alerted her they had company. Her captor didn’t move from where he stood beside her. From her contorted perspective, Ildiko couldn’t see more than equine legs and boots in stirrups as the new arrivals drew closer. She froze at the male voice that spoke above her, addressing the wagon driver in accented Common.
“She has blood on her. Is this your doing?”
Since her marriage to Brishen, Ildiko rarely saw humans. Her thorough immersion into Kai culture had given her the opportunity to learn and begin to understand her adopted people, and that included the language and accents. She couldn’t see the person speaking but she instantly recognized the accent. This was a Kai, and by the sound of it, not here to rescue her.
The driver responded, not with words, but with quick gestures of his hands and body movements.
The Kai spoke again. “Cut her bonds enough so she can stand. Leave the gag in place.”
Ildiko’s relieved groan thundered in her ears when the driver cut the length of rope securing her wrists to her ankles. The fire burning in her shoulder blades instantly faded to a dull ache, matching the one still throbbing in her lower back. She rolled to her side and curled into a fetal position, but not for long. Her captor grabbed her arm, wrenching upward so that she tottered to her feet. Tears rolled down her cheeks at the new pain shooting across her left shoulder. Her knees buckled, but she remained standing thanks to the grip on her arm and the fact her bare feet were stuck in mud made by the heavy rain that had fallen the day before.
Her view of the company before her was no longer limited to feet and legs. Two Kai, cloaked and hooded against the midday sun sat astride their horses, one carrying field satchels draped behind the saddle. Surely, she thought, they must be sweltering under those cloaks. She wore only a thin shift that offered little protection from the biting insects swarming around them, and the fabric stuck to her skin courtesy of the sweat streaming in rivulets down her body.
Yellow eyes glowed like lit lamps from the hoods’ shadows as the Kai regarded her. Ildiko couldn’t make out the details of their features, but she didn’t miss the gleam of a fang as the one closest to her and the driver curled his upper lip. “Stupid human,” he said in bast-Kai, and she wondered to which human he referred. He inclined his head to the other Kai. “Blood to cover blood. See to it.”
Her already queasy stomach somersaulted at the grim order, and she squirmed in her captor’s grip to break free, even as the sucking mud anchored her in place. He didn’t even have a chance to turn away before the second Kai was off their horse, sword flashing in the sun.
Ildiko screamed behind her gag as a splatter of hot blood struck her face. The wagon driver still held her arm in an unyielding clasp, his headless body canting hard against her until they both fell, and she lay pinned beneath him. His head lay not far away, eyes staring wide at the endless blue above.
His executioner pulled the body off her and yanked her to her feet once more to face the Kai who’d given the command to kill. That one dismounted and came to stand in front of her. This close, Ildiko had no trouble discerning his features and committing them to memory. If she made it out of this alive, she had something useful to relay to Brishen. A tiny scar cut through the line of his right eyebrow, and his upper lip was noticeably thinner than his lower one. It was all she had time to note beforehe seized her chin in one hand while the second Kai pinched her nostrils closed with thumb and forefinger.
Ildiko fought against their hold, struggling to open her mouth and take a life-saving breath. Her vision grayed at the edges, and the high whine in her ears drowned out any other sound. As she teetered on the edge of consciousness, the Kai holding her chin let go and jerked the gag down. Ildiko sucked in a great gasp of air only to choke when he pressed a vial hard against her bottom teeth and forced a bitter brew into her mouth. He held her jaw closed, forcing her to swallow. At her loud gulp, both Kai let go. Ildiko coughed and gasped while her lungs burned like hot coals in her chest, and a familiar taste lingered on her tongue. The black spots didn’t disappear. They merged instead with the grayness that didn’t recede. She blinked once. Twice. The world listed to one side and then the other, the two Kai tilting with it as they watched her with glowing eyes and inscrutable expressions. Soon there was more black than gray. Then nothing.
She awakened a second time from a drugged sleep, no longer trussed like a pig and hidden in a wagon but slumped in a saddle. Her first view was that of a horse’s coarse mane and the ridge of its neck that led to a pair of ears. They swiveled back briefly at her deep inhalation. That alone made her more alert. The gag was gone.
“You’re awake,” a voice said behind her. “Make too much noise, and I’ll dose you again, Hercegesé.
Were she not still so woozy, Ildiko might have been startled off the saddle. Her backrest was one of the Kai, and he held her in front of him with a heavy arm draped loosely around her waist while the other clasped the reins guiding the horse. They rode under moonlight, and his claws shone like black daggers under the silvery luminescence. She heeded his warning. Suffering from the effects of whatever poison they’d administered, shewas worse than helpless; she was witless. No more, she thought. She’d bide her time, remain biddable, and plan how she might escape. It was a far easier thing to do conscious.
