No, Petur needed this distraction. He needed Deyvid Cleareyes, at least for the duration of this mission. He needed to see the man in action again: the way he moved so fluidly for a regular human being, and the way he had crept up on those mages … Yes, there was plenty for Petur to learn from him, and he had every intention of learning it in the most intimate way possible.
It hadn’t escaped Petur’s notice that Deyvid was, despite the dyed skin and the colorless eyes, a very attractive man. His nose was sharp and hawklike, his face narrow but strong, and his expressions were capable of saying so much with a quirk of his mouth or a raise of his eyebrow. He was decidedly laconic, but Petur felt like he could read the man anyway.
I wonder how he would respond to an invitation into my bed.It was probably too soon to offer that, but Petur’s chest swelled with a new sense of determination.
Yes. If the rest of this hunt went as well as he expected it to, then by the end of it, he would have that man where he wanted him. Petur was eager to see if Deyvid could use his tongue cleverly for more than just his words, and at least Petur knew he was interested in men. The scent of lust was hard to disguise, even buried beneath cold water and fatigue. Whether or not Petur would be able to talk the High Harrier into acting on it, well … Petur was willing to bet on himself.
Chapter four
Deyvid
Gods, this would be so much easier on my own.Yet here he was, entrenched beside a group of people largely disposed toward killing him, with a leader who kept him around out of a sense of entitled curiosity.
Fantastic. Simply fabulous.
Deyvid knew a little of his pique stemmed from the fact that, logistically speaking, it was better to be working with Prince Petur and his people instead of trying to take these mages out on his own. He was so much faster with a horse to ride even though the mare honestly wasn’t a very good one. She was fractious and high-strung as so many of the Riyalian gentry’s “finely-bred” animals tended to be.
There were other benefits too. They had brought a great deal of their own food along, bought more when they needed it, and had no compunction about sharing it. They carried an air of respectability that immediately made townspeople willing to work with them, which was an area where Deyvid had floundered since coming to work in this border zone.
That said, he had never met a group of more singularly arrogant individuals in his entire life. Petur was the exemplar, of course, but theyallsuffered from dire levels of overconfidence.
It wasn’t that they weren’t skilled. They were very skilled as shifters and in working as individuals. But when it came to working in a group …
“Out of the fucking way!” Brannan blared at one of the other men in the squad as he drew his sword. “Out of the damn way, Rhys!”
Rhys, one of the younger members of the squad and currently in the form of a stag, startled, then froze. Unfortunately, it was a natural response for an animal such as his second shape. Unfortunately, he froze right in front of the group of mages that he had led them to in the first place. That much had been smart; an animal didn’t set off the mages’ warning systems the same way a human’s did. But then Brannan had charged in after him too quickly, and now the stag shifter was caught between two warring sides.
Damnation! Deyvid grabbed his rarely used slingshot from his back pocket, already fitted with a small stone. He usually only used it to create a distraction, but in this case, he loosed the stone at Rhys’s rump, hard enough to startle the stag out of its frozen stance. Rhys bolted, and a second later, a familiar, fiery spell came hurtling through the clearing at Petur and his squad.
“Scatter,” he heard Petur bellow, but Deyvid knew it was already too late for that. He threw himself forward into the path of the spell to bleed off the excess power.
The magic was like nothing to him. He hadn’t even felt the heat of it before it vanished, yet the grass singed several feet to either side of him as the spell kept burning its way through the fortunately damp forest. Deyvid charged forward, closing the distance as fast as possible, and hurtled one, then another dagger at the nearest spellcaster. Both blades found the man’sthroat, and he fell back with a choked gurgle as blood spurted from the wound.
The other two mages in this little party wasted valuable time casting spells when they should have been drawing their swords. By the time they gave spellcraft up as a lost cause, Deyvid was nearly upon them. He threw another dagger, but it only took the hooded mage through the shoulder. They screamed a high, feminine scream.
A woman this time, hmm? He moved toward her but ended up having to duck the quarrel of a hastily fired crossbow.
“Gods above and below, who are you?” the mage who had just fired demanded with a snarl, already fitting another quarrel to his weapon.
If Deyvid had been Petur, this would have been the perfect time to respond with a little quip, some sort of sassy, banterish moment that both distracted and enraged his opponent. Having fought alongside the man for the past week, Deyvid could confidently say he understood far more than he really wanted to about the man’s fighting style.
Deyvid, however, was not like Petur. He didn’t waste his breath with getting a verbal jab in. He simply jabbed, penetrating the mage’s chest with his short sword and slicing through his heart with almost no resistance. Just because they had magic, they thought they needed no armor. Would these people never learn?
Deyvid turned back to take care of the other mage, but she had already been captured. Petur, in his warrior form, had each of her hands pinned, leaving her unable to draw on the spell-laden gems that she wore or the enchanted papers that she likely carried at her belt.
Many spells could be cast upon objects to be reused at a later date. It was one of the things that made mages so incredibly powerful on the battlefield. They could pre-arm themselves, andwith a large enough supply of offensive spells that they only needed to trigger, outlast most opponents. But Deyvid hadn’t lived this long, even with his immunity to magic, by being overly trusting.
“Good.” Deyvid nodded once. “Kill her.”
Ginnie turned shocked eyes on him. “She’s surrendered. We can’t just kill her. It wouldn’t be right.”
“What does right have to do with this situation?” Deyvid asked. “She tried to kill you. No questions asked, no quarter given. She’ll try again if she gets the chance, and she’s been killing your common people for months. She needs to die.”
“She’ssurrendered,” Brannan said slowly, emphasizing each word like he was speaking to an idiot. “Maybe that’s something that you Harriers aren’t familiar with. Probably never even occurs to a High Harrier, given that you sneak around murdering people in their beds. But now that she has surrendered, we are duty bound to accept and leave her alive.”
Gods above and below.It was a wonder these fools had lived so long. “And deliver her where?” Deyvid asked, cleaning the blood from his blade and flicking it to the side with his fingers.
“That’s yet to be determined,” Petur finally said as he morphed back into his human shape. Deyvid was reluctantly impressed. The ease with which the prince could move between his shifted forms was incredible, beyond anything he’d ever seen before. It would have been more intimidating, however, if he hadn’t been so focused on Deyvid that he missed the fact that the mage beneath him had craned her neck far enough down to bite at the necklace around her neck. She broke the strand, spit a bead straight into Petur’s face, and began a vicious incantation. The bead was red-hot, and although Petur blocked it handily, all of them heard the sizzle where the bead impacted the flesh of his arm.
