Darice shot off, back to camp.
Hauk collapsed to the ground with a groan.
Swallowing in fear for him, Thia stepped forward and knelt by his side. “Uncle Hauk?”
“I’m all right, baby,” he assured her in a much softer tone as he reached to touch her hand. “I just need a minute… please.”
In a loving gesture, Thia buried her hand in his braids and nodded before she left them and followed after Darice.
In that moment, Sumi felt for all of them. Thia, who was terrified at the thought of losing another person she loved. Darice, who wanted to protect his mother’s honor, and Hauk, who had obviously been hazed by his eldest brother. It made her wonder what nightmares had turned an innocent boy into a warrior so fierce that he could walk for miles in the dead of night with wounds this severe and not even flinch.
Aching at where her thoughts went, she returned to prepping his wound for sutures. “Did Keris ever do that to you?”
He didn’t even tense as she pierced his skin with the sterile needle. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. Just hold still and I’ll be done in a minute.”
Hauk didn’t respond as he stared at the mountain range in front of them where he’d once climbed with his brother’s insults ringing in his ears. Memories surged with a brutal bite.
Because of the way Keris had been conceived, their father and paternal grandmother had always been lukewarm at best toward him. And their mother had pushed Keris hard to be the ultimate soldier, so that she could show them all that her bloodline was as good as the royal lineage she had denied to the Hauk progeny. It was why she’d named Keris after their Hauk ancestor who’d founded The League.
My sons will be legends, too…
Her constant demands on his brother and incessant bitching had been such that they’d embedded a vicious cruel streak in Keris’s heart. Something that had worsened anytime Keris drank or took drugs. Fain, alone, had been able to calm Keris’s rages. But after Fain had been disowned, Keris’s violence and cruelty had escalated. He’d acted as if he was afraid of meeting the same fate.
And he’d turned all that anger at their parents, whom he couldn’t attack, to his youngest brother – as if it was somehow Hauk’s fault Fain had chosen to be with a human over them.
But even before that, Keris had resented Hauk for the fact that Hauk had “shamed” them all when he’d been depledged after the pod accident that had left him scarred and humiliated by Jullien’s lies.
With the exception of Fain, from that day forward, his entire family had seen him as deformed and lacking.
Useless.
Worthless.
Embarrassing.
So much so, that only Fain had visited him the entire time he’d been in the hospital’s burn ward. Dutifully, Fain had watched over him as if he felt responsible for it and for Hauk.
To this day, even though Fain had never mentioned it, Hauk was sure Fain had paid for his surgeries and treatments. Had it been up to their parents, his mother would have left him to die.
Hauk didn’t blame her for that. It was, after all, the Andarion way. If you weren’t strong enough to survive, you were better off dead.
To this day, Keris’s first words to him when he’d finally come home from the hospital were carved in the bitterest part of his heart. “I hope that hybrid bastard kissed you before he fucked you in the ass. You should have died like a warrior in that crash. Not been dragged to safety like a human bitch by a worthless mutant dog.”
Fain had gone for Keris’s throat. But for their mother’s quick actions, Fain would have most likely killed Keris for it. But it hadn’t erased the scar those words had seared into Hauk’s heart.
Whenever Keris had been sober, he was the fun-loving, surly brother Hauk remembered growing up with. But the moment any drug touched his system… the stopgap was removed, and out came a monster even Dariana had feared.
Hauk had tried to use the same tactics Fain had to calm him. But that had only pissed him off more.
“You’re not Fain! You’ll never live to be the warrior he is. You’re just a sorry excuse for a brother, and a disgrace to your name, and to every War Hauk who’s come before you. It’s not right that Fain was cast out while you’re left to bear our badge in his stead. You’re worthless, Dancer. I hate you!”
Now Sumi was staring at every bit of shame he carried. All of it. His scarred back was a road map of the minsid hell he’d survived. Of all the people who’d found him lacking and rejected him for it.
But he didn’t see disgust in her eyes as she tended him. Only kindness and concern. Her gentle touch was so different from Dariana’s.
Not that Dariana had ever touched him except to publicly humiliate him.
Closing his eyes, he felt Sumi running her fingers over the claw marks that covered his burn scars, and the ones left behind from his Endurance. While her touch soothed him in ways he wouldn’t have thought possible, the memory of those wounds tore through him, and left him bleeding even more than the Partini’s knife had.
A light frown wrinkled her brow. “What happened to cause all these?” she whispered, fingering the vicious claw scars.
Normally, he’d have never answered. But before he could stop himself, the truth come out. “Dariana.”
“I don’t understand.”
Hauk sighed as she bandaged his sutures. “Every year, on the anniversary of Keris’s death, I’m required to go to her and ask if she’ll accept me as husband. And every year, she refuses unification with me.”
Sumi felt sick as she realized that these scars were Dariana’s annual answer to his marriage pledge. “She claws you?”
He gave a single curt nod.
“Why do you keep doing it, then?”
“I’m Andarion and I’m pledged to her,” he said nonchalantly as if that explained everything.
Her heart broke over the cruelty his family forced on him. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t just release you.”
He sighed heavily. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t have to tolerate it again.”
“What do you mean?”
“After his Endurance, Darice will be old enough to bond marriage.”
He said that as if she should understand its significance. “And?”
“Whenever a hero dies, there are three years of mourning for the spouse, to ensure the sanctity of both bloodlines and pay tribute to his life and service. After that, the widow has nine years to accept the pledge of her husband’s brother, provided there are no children. When children are involved, the two are pledged until the youngest goes through Endurance. If they haven’t unified by then, he’s released from his pledge.” He sighed in quiet resignation. “When I picked up Darice to do this, Dariana swore to me that on our return she would finally honor her pledge and accept me as her husband.”
Sumi sat back as she digested that vicious little nugget.
Surely the bitch hadn’t done what Thia had said. “Are you telling me that the whole reason Dariana had Darice was to keep you tied to her longer, without marriage?”
To continue denying and punishing him for as long as she legally could? Meanwhile, she got to keep the Warring Blood Clan of Hauk as her moniker, and maintain a place in their world that she couldn’t have without Hauk’s family?
Hauk shook his head. “She loved my brother. I’m sure she only had Darice to carry Keris’s line forward and to honor him and his memory.”
Then why not conceive him sooner? Why wait until the year she’d have been forced to either free Hauk or birth a child?