“You used the scroll. Catseye will never send that skeleton into Stow’s Peak now. Our odds of success were slim from the get-go, but thanks to your negligence, we’ve nearly no chance of victory.”
“No,” she retorted. “He promised. He gave me his word that he’d aid Nyllmas—”
“Sikras Nikabod is a compulsive liar. He’s been so for all seven years that I’ve known him. His word is as good as that fake scroll.” Defeat tempered the banneret’s aggression as he glowered, chin high. “Be gone from our camp, demon. The only mercy I’ll afford you is time to get your parents from Vinepool before I return. I don’t care where you go, but if you’re still there upon my arrival, I’ll cast you all into Chthonia myself.”
“Rowan, I know this seems bad, but—”
“BanneretRowan to you. I should’ve known better than to relent to the queen’s request that the Red Sentinel welcome you as a member. Nyllmas is no place for your kind.”
Stunned into paralysis, Helspira clutched the blanket and said nothing.
“I’d hurry if I were you,” came the banneret’s words as he strode toward the exit. “We’re returning to Nyllmas at first light to regroup our numbers and devise a new strategy. You have a ten-hour head start.”
The banneret disappeared, leaving Helspira to her shock.
Ten hours to crawl back to her parents in the dead of night with an aching stomach. Ten hours to pack everything they had acquired during their two years of freedom from Chthonia. Ten hours between now and when she had to tell her parents that she had failed them, their queen, their new homeland.
Should she leave Sikras a note? No. She didn’t need him chasing after her. He promised her that he would save Nyllmas, and the Red Sentinel needed all the help it could get, whether it came from the Catseye or Sikras Nikabod. Besides, what would she even say? She would need far more than ten hours to gather her thoughts, let alone summarize everything he meant to her in a letter. And so, she did the only thing that made sense to her frazzled, spinning mind. She donned her armor and vanished quietly into the night.
Chapter Seventeen
Sikras
HE WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTENany sleep even if he hadn’t slept on a rock generously labeled as a bed. Sikras knuckled his spine, feeling less like a man in his thirties and more like an ancient temple on the verge of collapse.
Steam wafted from the bowl of food warming his palm as he stood outside Benjamin and Helspira’s tent, but warmth was the only credit he afforded the vile gray mush. Perhaps instead of prioritizing the cleric’s health, they should’ve prioritized the cook. Alas, the cook’s legacy ended at being another statistic in Vessik’s reign of terror. A shame, that. The man made a damn good curry. Now they were left with—he sniffed the bowl and cringed—this.
Perhaps he should’ve been grateful. It was a miracle the Red Sentinels offered up their food at all, given how they all tiptoed around him, as if they walked on a frozen pond and he was the thin sheet of ice deciding whether they lived or died.
Sikras scanned the horizon for signs of Vessik but couldn’t locate any creepy undead birds. Nor advancing enemies. Nor long overdue apologies for the atrocities he had committed. Nothing but an endless horizon of twisted black trees and blinding snow. Stow’s Peak had faded from their line of sight when they had retreated into the woodlands yesterday, and there seemed to be no indication that his old friend planned to leave it.
And with powerful magic protecting his very own village, why should he?
“Where-oh-where did you learn to pull off spells like that, Vessik? We were only supposed to excel at necromancy.” Sikras stared outward, mindlessly tapping the edge of the bowl, until he refocused on the mush. What was Helspira’s preferred breakfast, he wondered? Did she even eat breakfast? Maybe she was more of a lunch person. He should’ve asked. There were so many things he didn’t know.
It was strange to learn a person’s likes and dislikes again. Stranger still that he wanted to. Vinepool had no shortage of attractive men and women, but after meeting Imri, Sikras only ever had eyes for her. She had been his everything for so long. Picturing someone else on the pedestal he had erected for her was ... uncomfortable.
