“You sure? Talking helps, it’ll be good for you.”
Scoffing, I grab my boots and shove them on my feet. “Don’t tell me what’s good for me. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I can handle.”
I storm out of the tent, muttering to myself. What an arrogant arsehole. Who does he think he is? Like, I don’t know how to feel.
I’m a princess for fuck’s sake.
Stomping through the trees, leaves, and twigs crunch behind me, I spin around to shout at Ronan for following me.
“Maybe you should…” My words catch in my throat as a man stands before me, in a deep purple robe, with gold stitching along the front. His hood covers his eyes but shows his wicked smile.
I step back, the man doesn’t move, just watches me grinning a horrible smile. Ronan appears behind the man, shoving his large dagger up through the robed man’s chest. But he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t move.
Ronan’s face drops. “Run!”
Chapter Forty-Four
Wyatt
I’m awoken by feet scuffling and shouting outside. With my eyes half open, I grab my weapons from the bottom of my bedroll. Rushing out of the tent, I find Ronan fighting a losing battle against a man in a purple robe, weapons pierce his skin but have no effect on him.
I make for Andi’s tent, but she is nowhere in sight. Kicking awake the younger guys—who were supposed to be on watch—to go find her and to keep her safe while we deal with this impossible task.
I aim my bow around the trees, hunting for hidden dangers, but I see no one else around. Why would this robed man be here by himself? It makes no sense. I instruct men to do a search around the camp before training my bow on the hooded figure, loosing my arrow, it flies through the air and ricochets off of him, his mouth twists into a sneer.
Caelan rushes from the back end of the tent. “There’s no one else here.”
Arel runs up behind him, frozen in place, and they both watch the arrow bounce off his body. “What the…”
Arel’s eyes stretch open wide, Caelan barks orders, although I doubt any of it will make a difference with this beast. Ronan retreats. The hooded man rotates to face us, smiling, eating up the shock and fear we’re feeding him.
“He’s after Andi,” Ronan pants as he reaches us. Fighting an unstoppable man has exerted his strength. “What is this guy?”
“He is a Majos, an elder mage. I thought they were long extinct, seems like they were biding their time.”
“Or someone woke them,” Arel interjects. Cowering under Caelan’s glare, he waves his arms, enchanting the tree roots to intertwine and build a cage around the Majos.
A smile grows on his marked face; golden streaks cut into his skin under his eyes. He grins a line of black needle-like teeth, stepping with his hand stretched out like a claw, the branches burn away into nothing.
“Oh shit,” Arel says. In a silent agreement, we all make a run for it, following the direction Ronan indicates that Andi ran.
Blasts of fire and ice chase us through the woods, smashing into trees, burning holes in the trunks. We dodge and dive under branches, zigzagging between the timber. Portals open in the sky, dropping soldiers out of thin air, blocking our path.
Dead soldiers.
We skid to a stop, Ronan dives forward swinging his Katanas, Arel enchants large branches to swing down behind us, crushing the soldiers, before he unsheathes his sword. I aim my arrows one by one, taking them down. Caelan’s brute strength is apparent at the rate he is slicing through the bodies, but they regenerate as quickly as we can kill them.
While we fight the endless amounts of soldiers that keep spawning, the man struts past us like he’s going for his usual woodland walk, ignorant of the fighting. Walking with a purpose. Past the trees, my eyes find Andi, fighting her way through the corpses as well. I shout to the others to follow the robed man, to stop him reaching Andi. We punch and kick, slash and stab our way past the army, all the while keeping an eye on the flowing purple robe as he walks into Andi’s plain.
I reach to pull out another arrow, but my fingers find none. Tossing my bow to the ground, I draw my sword and stab it at the first fighting corpse I see.
Kicking the dead body off my sword, I spin to catch sight of the robed man walking coolly towards Andi. Her panic-stricken eyes find me, pleading with me to help her.
The young Unbound guarding her are good fighters, they should be, they’ve been training for years, far longer than I have, but they’re still young and susceptible to fear. We all are. I can’t blame them when their hands shake, taking in the man’s hideous smile, as he sneaks closer.
Andi engulfs a circle of fire, tight around herself, but it’s no use, the man walks straight through it as though it was never there to begin with. What god does a Majos follow that allows them to have such power? No one can control all magic, it's unnatural. But yet he’s here, strong, fireproof, using various forms of magic to keep us at bay.
Yelling her name, I try to run towards her, but soldiers keep dropping from the sky, blocking my way. Ronan yells for Andi, too, but he is also bombarded with soldiers, unable to get past them.
