Against the backdrop of the distant yelling, the mercenary scrums down so our heads are on the same level, and I have to look at his boots to make sure he doesn’t see inside my hood.
“They’ll kill you. Each and every one of them, including the two that are between you and what’s outside that village wall. You can be in charge all you like, but some decisions are mine and mine alone.”
Abruptly, I’m furious at him, and not just because he’s making a kind of sense that my conscience can’t live with. I’m angry because I can’t be mad at the Fulcrum. Or those cruel, dead boys. Or those families who are suffering and scared, but also prepared to condemn me to a brutal, public slaughter, even though I saved their bairns, and eased their pains—and had nothing to do with what happened in all that sand.
And fates, I have just become this mercenary’s whore.
I lift my chin. “We go to the right.”
That chuckle comes back, and he inclines his head like he’s humoring me. “Lead on. For the moment.”
I am more than happy to get running again. It’s a better outlet than so many others.
The cobbler’s former storefront is around the next corner, and before we make that turn, I have to force myself to stop to make sure no one is ahead. In our pause, I’m breathing hard. The mercenary looks like he’s been out for a stroll.
I feel like kicking him in the shins.
“Stay here,” I tell him.
“Why.”
“Because I said so.” Stepping out into the lane, I glare at him from under my hood. “I’ll be right back.”
Tears gather in my eyes as I tenderfoot it to Mare’s door. I don’t know how I’ll say goodbye to her—
The entry is ajar.
I glance around. Push the rickety panel open a little farther. “Mare?”
There’s a smell that registers, but my brain refuses to label it.
“Mare.”
Ordinarily, I never wait for a response from her when I come here with my herbs. I wait now, even though I am hunted. On the threshold, my heart thunders—and I know what’s happened, even before I see it—
The mercenary elbows me aside and goes in first.
His black boots leave footprints in the blood as he enters.
TwelveThe Start of the Scarring.
A scream rips from my throat and I claw him out of the way. A bloody trail marks the way to the bed, and my dear friend’s withered body is lying on her pallet, on top of the blankets I brought to her. Her chest is cut open and the cavity inside her ribs is empty, and I fixate on the smell of burning meat that crowds into my nose.
They took her heart and lungs out and threw them in the little hearth that is aflame with the wood I gathered for her.
And that is not the worst of it.
Two daggers protrude from her eye sockets, one from her mouth, and a fourth has been stabbed into her lower abdomen. The hilts are cockeyed because the ritual murder was committed in a hurry.
Her hand is still gripping the edge of the pallet.
She was alive when they started, when they took her eyes first.
I fall to my knees and sob. “Mare…”
Over the pallet, on the only flat wall in the abandoned shop, a crude crescent moon has been drawn in her blood, the depiction sloppy and still dripping, it’s so fresh.
Those four men I saw, with their bloody knives out. That was no mortal oath of the hunt, sealed with the streak of a blade across their palms. They were the ones who came here, thinking she was hiding me.
