Gail Martin - The Sworn

Aidane tried to run, but without Nattan out of the way, she was clumsy, tripping over the rug. Zafon grabbed her wrist, twisting her arm behind her. Aidane screamed, and in her mind, Nattan whimpered, nearly beyond sanity with fear. On the floor, Jendrie quivered, still huddled on her knees, face down.

“Look at me, Jendrie!” Zafon roared. “I may not be able to kill you without risking your father’s hired blades, but I can kill your lovers. This time, you get to watch.” He pushed Aidane toward where Jendrie cowered. “Look at me, or I’ll tie you to the bedpost and make you watch.”

Jendrie raised her head. Tears streaked down her cheeks, which were already mottling with the bruises from the choking. Her eyes were no longer confident and lively. They had gone dead, paralyzed with fear. She was crying hard enough that she gasped for air, and sobs racked her body.

Aidane’s heart pounded. Nattan’s ghost fled. He left her suddenly enough that it felt as if he had ripped his spirit free, tearing along her magic and leaving her, for a moment, magically blind. She expected Zafon to draw a blade, thought that he would plunge it into her heart. Instead, Zafon’s huge fist slammed into the side of her face, knocking teeth loose and sending her reeling. Blow after blow fell, and his heavy boots kicked hard into her stomach or slammed their soles down on her fingers. Aidane had felt many ghosts leave her body, but now it was her own soul that seemed to hover, gauzelike, in her mind, its grasp fading. Blood choked her as she tried to scream, but nothing appeased Zafon’s rage.

I’m dying. She could feel her heart slowing. It hurt so much to breathe. Zafon lifted his large foot over her chest and cast a triumphant look at Jendrie, who clung to the bedsheet, gray-faced and terrified. “When I’ve gotten rid of the body, you’d better be waiting for me between those sheets, by damn,” he growled. “I paid enough dowry for you to buy a houseful of whores, and I’ll have value for my coin.”

His boot slammed down, and Aidane was swallowed up by blackness.

Gradually, Aidane became aware of a rocking motion. I must be dead. Perhaps this is what it feels like when a spirit crosses the Gray Sea.

She lay face down on a pile of refuse. As consciousness returned, so did pain. Aidane felt as if she was watching from outside herself, not as she did when she hid during her clients’ couplings, but in an odd way, from a distance. She was still naked, and the cold she felt had less to do with the night air than with the certainty that life was fading. She was in the back of a wagon, and the driver was pushing the horses to a full gallop down a road that made the wagon jostle hard enough that Aidane slipped in and out of awareness.

Finally, the wagon stopped. Zafon came around and grabbed her by the ankles, flinging her to the side of the road with a curse. Too weak to cry out, Aidane lay where she landed as the wagon rattled away. Will I bleed to death before the cold takes me, or will the wild dogs finish what Zafon started? It wouldn’t be long. Dreams and voices came to her, and ghosts pressed all around her, waiting. She had nothing to offer them now, but still, they came. Some of the spirits taunted her, and others tried to force themselves into her dying body for any chance to live again. Still others just watched, sad-eyed and silent, as if her flickering soul were a candle and their gray spirits the moths.

After a while, footsteps sounded along the road. “What have we here?” a man said. His foot nudged her over, and she fell onto her back, too spent to make any effort to cover her nakedness.

“Not much left of her, is there?” his companion replied. Aidane’s vision was blurry, but from what she could make out, the two men were dressed all in black, wearing neither the robes of the Crone priests nor the uniforms of the king’s soldiers.

“Take her. She’ll do,” the first man said.

The second man lifted Aidane gingerly, less to keep from hurting her, she guessed, than to avoid soiling his cloak. He did not put her into a wagon as she expected, but instead, the two men veered from the road down a trail into the darkness of the forest. Branches stung as they slapped against Aidane’s bare skin, and brambles tore at her. She shivered with cold, and the shivering made her injuries hurt more. She lost all sense of time. Even the ghosts fled.

Finally, they slowed. In the moonlight, Aidane could see the entrance to a cave. One of the men lit a torch, and then they began to wind their way down rocky passages. Sharp rocks skinned Aidane’s knees and shoulders. Aidane was beyond fear, sure that death would come soon. Even if her new captors wished to inflict more pain, their amusement would not last long. She knew that. It comforted her. No more pain. No more ghosts. No more clients like Jendrie.

“Put her in there.”

The man set Aidane down in a cage made with iron bars. “She’s not a biter; that’s her own blood. And if she was a shifter, I reckon she’d have made the change and bitten us. Doesn’t look like she’s got fight left in her.”

“Do as I say.”

With a shrug, the man turned a key in the lock. The first man pressed his face against the bars with an unpleasant smile. “Don’t spill any more of that precious blood now, darlin’. We’re going to need it for the Moon Feast.” With that, he turned, and the two men left the chamber.

Aidane managed to shift, just a bit, to look around. It hurt to move much, but she could see other cages, and in them, huddled shapes. In the cage next to her, a man lay with a stake through his chest. He was as pale as a corpse and he did not breathe, but his face was turned in her direction and she could tell that there was consciousness in his eyes.

A groan sounded from another cage. Aidane mustered the energy to move far enough to see. A naked man lay curled in pain, arrows protruding from several places along his body. Aidane’s eyes widened. That many arrows should have killed a mortal. Then she recalled her captor’s comment about “shifters” and “biters.” She knew little of either, but she had heard tell that both vyrkin and vayash moru could withstand injuries beyond a mortal’s endurance.

The naked man seemed to sense her gaze. He turned to look at her and moved his leg to cover himself. His violet eyes seemed to see right through her. “Why are you here?” His voice was tight with pain. “You’re mortal. What do they want from you?”

“Blood,” Aidane managed through swollen lips, barely above a whisper. “My blood.”

It occurred to Aidane that she was naked, and in the next moment, that she was too badly injured to feel shame. The man in the cage drew a labored breath.

“Sacrifice. They want you for a sacrifice. To Shanthadura.”

Shanthadura. A name used to frighten children, spoken only in whispers. The Destroyer. The Great Darkness.

“You’ve heard of Her?” the vyrkin asked.

“She’s not real,” Aidane replied, her voice shaking with the strain of talking.

Those violet eyes locked her gaze. “Oh, yes, She’s real. And we’re all here to feed Her so Her disciples can let Her rise once more.”

Is there anything I can fetch for you, m’lady?”

Kiara, Queen of Margolan, looked up at the servant who waited anxiously in the doorway. “No, thank you. That will be all.”

The door closed, and Kiara’s attention returned to the baby in her arms. Cwynn looked so peaceful when he was sleeping, but Kiara had already learned how loudly the new prince could cry when he was hungry. Kiara’s auburn hair spilled down, unbound, to brush against Cwynn’s downy scalp. His skin was several shades lighter than Kiara’s tawny hue, a combination of Kiara’s Isencroft and Eastmark heritage and Tris’s Margolan blood.