“Stay here.” He doesn't look at me when he says it. “Lock the door. Don't come out, no matter what you hear.”
“Kovren.”
“Promise me.” Now he looks. Those gold eyes fixed on my face, burning with something desperate. “Whatever happens out there, whatever you hear, you stay inside.”
“What are you going to do?”
He opens the door. Ducks through it. Doesn't answer.
The door closes behind him.
I should stay. Should do what he asked, what he begged, should wait in this room and hope he comes back in one piece.
I'm moving before I finish the thought.
The village is chaos when I reach the street. People screaming, running, slamming doors and barring windows. The guards from the gate are converging on the square, weapons drawn, faces white.
And in the center of it all, tearing through a market stall, is something that used to be a man.
I see the shape of a Bogatyr in it. Broad shoulders, long arms, a frame that might have been powerful once, before something twisted it. The joints bend wrong, shoulders hunched too high, spine curved at an angle that shouldn't be possible. Its skin ismottled gray and black, cracked and splitting, and where its eyes should be there are just pits of darkness that seem to drink the light.
It moves in stutters. Jerking, halting, like something is pulling it forward against its will.
Kovren meets it in the center of the square.
I've seen violence before. The aftermath of it, the broken bodies and the blood and the wounds that tell stories of edge and force. I've cleaned up what violence leaves behind.
I've never seen it made.
He's fast. Faster than something his size should be. The creature slashes at him and he's not there anymore, spinning, driving his fist into its ribs with a sound that carries across the square. But his eyes are wrong.
Gold, burning gold, no white visible at all. And his face has gone empty, stripped of everything that makes him Kovren, replaced by something older and simpler and infinitely more dangerous.
The berserker. The rage that all Bogatyr carry, waiting for the right trigger to set it free.
I can't move. Can't look away. Can only watch as he tears into the creature, each blow landing with a force I can feel through the ground, each movement flowing into the next with a speed that doesn't match his size.
The creature screams again. That same broken sound, but underneath it, words.
“DESERTER. OATH-BREAKER.” Its voice is wet and wrong, speaking through a throat that barely works. “BROTHER.”
Kovren freezes.
One heartbeat. That's all it takes.
The creature's claws rake across his chest, opening fresh wounds over the ones I stitched closed, sending him staggering back against the stone wall of the well.
The creature lunges after him. Claws raised, that broken mouth stretched wide, darkness pouring from where its eyes should be.
I don't think.
The torch is in my hand before I realize I've grabbed it, pulled from the bracket by the tavern door.
I'm running before I know I've started, crossing the square in a sprint, driving the burning end into the creature's face with every ounce of strength in my body.
Something hard under the flame. Not flesh. The torch connects and the impact jars up my arms.
It screams. Higher. More like pain.
