Kavya saw only blood.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Tallis had witnessed the beheadings of Dragon Kings. He’d dispatched more than a few. Visceral memory would not let his hands forget how the metal hilt would crush the bones of his palm as he struck a Dragon-forged sword through a neck. Neither could he forget the warm spray of the blood. When he’d committed his first murder at the behest of the Sun, that of a long-dead Pendray priest, he’d left behind the ring that bore his family’s crest, claiming the kill and marking himself as the target of his clan’s hatred. Better that way.
Yet he’d thought about Lady Macbeth. Although he’d wiped clean his armor and his weapons, he would never be able to wash away the stains. The exact temperature of a dying man’s blood became an indelible detail.
Subsequent kills had meant less to him. The repetition of it. The rhythm of following orders and detaching his morality. The deaths he’d brought about had created peace in places where Dragon Kings squabbled, where rifts threatened to break fragile alliances. His dirty work had been successful—until it had ruined Nynn’s life.
He was unnaturally good at his work.
Pashkah of the Northern Indranan was better.
Had the man felt any emotion about beheading two fellow clansmen, it would be satisfaction. He stood like a triumphant god who, dissatisfied with sacrifices made in his honor, had taken the task upon himself. Two lifeless bodies slumped at his feet. Two heads had rolled away—distended tongues, bulging eyes, matted hair. The pair of Guardsmen stepped back from what remained of the prostrate men they’d forever immobilized. Their expressions were even more vacant. They radiated none of Pashkah’s silent triumph.
If Tallis could ever read minds, this was the moment. He sensed more than satisfaction radiating from the murderer. He sensed glee.
The camp was a riot.
The Black Guard descended from the altar and strode through the tents. They grabbed women. Young women. Dark robes and saris were subsumed by men in black brigandine armor. Little blackbirds chased by avaricious ravens. In the melee, only flashes of mirrored armor plates distinguished predator from prey.
The Indranan men fought back. Their punishment was that from which a Dragon King could not recover: crippling injuries. Their kind had remarkable healing powers, but they couldn’t regenerate limbs. Extreme wounds left scars. Suffering those ramifications could last the length of their two-century life span.
“We have to go,” Tallis said plainly. His mission hadn’t changed, no matter the hysteria that tainted the air as surely as his nostrils scented blood. “Wouldn’t they love to get their hands on you.”
“They wouldn’t keep me for long. They’d hand me over to Pashkah and my severed head would lie on that altar within minutes.” The Sun had revealed herself as just an Indranan woman, not a goddess, but she shot sparks from her eyes. “You brought this on us.”
She stood and scampered free of the tent so quickly that Tallis was thrown off-balance. He caught his momentum with a backward twist of his hand. Without wasted motion, he grabbed his pack and tucked one seax into the scabbard crossing his back.
He launched into the crowd, gripping the other blade. The unmistakable swirl of a golden sari was his only means of tracking Kavya through a circus of flailing, screaming, and maiming. She headed toward the outskirts of camp, not toward the round valley’s sole exit—a narrow ravine. Likely she’d chosen this place for symbolic reasons. Circles and unions and the security of being held within the majesty of timeless mountains. She’d also chosen the worst place for a group of defenseless parishioners to escape trained killers.
He glanced up. Along the craggy ridges, more Guardsmen stood in anticipation of an ambitious refugee.
Tallis chased the Sun. No lazy pursuit, as if he were the moon tracking across the sky in a never-ending dance. He chased her with the speed of a Dragon King about to lose his sanity.
An Indranan man caught Tallis by the forearm. “Help us, friend. Help us.”
“Use what your family gave you. Every pod has a Dragon-forged sword. I’ve lived among you long enough to know that.”
“So few of us remain!” His leathery skin shone with sweat. The tightness of his creased eyes couldn’t hide his distress.
“Then make sure you’re one of them. Unless you want to see the Juvine repeated, with your daughters stolen for breed stock.” Tallis shrugged free. “The Sun has made you complacent. Peace. Unity. This . . .” He nodded toward the chaos. Two members of the Black Guard held a young man’s arms while another gouged his eye with a dagger. Shrieking, clutching the empty socket, the victim was helpless while the guards dragged away a sobbing girl with long honey-brown hair. “This is the world we really live in.”
Tallis turned toward where he’d last seen Kavya.
When he couldn’t find her distinctive sari, he resisted the urgency of his gift. These people, this riot—followed by the sinking doubt that perhaps he’d been partly to blame. For whatever reason, Kavya couldn’t read his mind, but what if Pashkah could? Tallis’s focus on her whereabouts might have led the madman here. Those self-recriminations conspired to conceal Tallis’s rationality in the steam of a swirling, claustrophobic rage. He needed to find her. No one needed his spinning berserker rage in that quicksand of gore.
Whatever trick blocked his mind from her telepathy didn’t protect him from the rest of the Indranan. Their previous, almost polite tap-tap curiosity about a Pendray in their midst had become splatters of toxic confusion. Every mind writhed with the same thought: escape.
The shove and crush of bodies overwhelmed his path. He was tempted to use his seax for more than intimidation. However, the chances that some terrified Indranan carried an inherited Dragon-forged sword put him at a disadvantage. His aggression would appear little different than a Guardsman on the hunt for young female flesh, and he wanted to keep his head. Literally. The body count was currently two—at least.
Tallis of Pendray would not fall victim, too.
There.
Golden silk.
His heart jumped with a kick of adrenaline. The dam holding back his gift was weakening.
Kavya was not alone. A large Indranan woman stood at her side. She wore what appeared to be ceremonial brigandine armor, similar to that worn by the Black Guard. Called “the coat of a thousand nails,” its wool and leather padding was backed with rivets. Penetrating that dense overlapping iron with a blade was almost impossible. Pristine and unscathed, the armor was decorated with pale Northern turquoise. Only the woman’s posture suggested her clothing and the curved talwar saber she held were more than for show.
A burst of pain shot down Tallis’s backbone, from his temple to the base of his spine.
What the hell?
He dropped to one knee and looked up. The female stranger glared down. More pain sizzled his every nerve. Another man might’ve been crippled by that stinging, blinding blow, but Tallis had nearly lost the Sun. His prize. He wasn’t going to lose her again.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, working past the agony that centered at the base of his skull. He caught the Sun’s gaze. “No matter what you and that butcher of a brother have done.”
“You blame me for this?” Wide, almost innocent eyes narrowed with concentrated anger. At least the chaos had stripped the last of her ability to draw false impressions from the crowd.
“You’ve led your people to slaughter,” he said. “We won’t be victims, too.”
Lunging forward, seax at the ready, he attempted to grab her waist with his free arm.