Барб Хенди - First and Last Sorcerer

He already knew who was in the bedroom ... who Chap now guarded. What came next was also expected in part.

As Shade settled beside the table of tall chairs, her right front foreleg gave way a little. Wynn was at the dog’s side in an instant, dropping down to feel Shade’s leg and shoulder. With one hand still on the dog, she twisted on her knees and looked up at Chane.

“What happened?” she asked, almost accusingly. “You were supposed to stay clear of the guards once you drew them off.”

Chane was uncertain what to say after promising her that he would not kill anyone—and after what had happened in the dead-end alley.

Shade snarled once and clacked her teeth.

Wynn shrank away as she jerked her hand back.

There was no knowing what Shade had passed to Wynn in that touch—either a few words or even a memory. Wynn dropped her eyes and hung her head. Chane heard her shuddering quick breaths. Of course, she was worried at the thought of Shade being injured again.

“I’m ... I’m sorry, Chane,” Wynn whispered without looking up. “I didn’t mean to ... It was just ...”

As she lightly touched Shade, the dog settled her large head on her forepaws with an irritable huff.

Chane waited, for he did not believe the matter was settled.

Wynn had once said that any one of them might be lost in seeking their goal. And yet after Shade’s last dire injury, Wynn panicked at the dog’s slightest wound. Perhaps Chane envied Shade a little in that, though he as well had reacted in kind once the threat to Shade had been eliminated in that alley.

Strangely, Wynn said nothing more, whether or not Shade had told or showed her what had happened.

“Enough,” il’Sänke warned, clunking down a large brass bowl upon the table. “Keep your personal issues to yourselves. We must get the others fed and tended.”

Wynn nodded and rose, but something more puzzled Chane as he looked away from her. Osha stood off near that unnerving front door, his expression flat and his unblinking eyes fixed on the floor. Why he had not gone to see the others in the bedroom was puzzling.

Il’Sänke slapped a pile of folded cloths into Osha’s stomach, and the elf’s eyes popped open as he grabbed the pile in reflex.

“Make yourself useful,” the domin ordered. “Take these and go with Wynn. Wynn, you get the bowl and that water pitcher to clean any wounds. Use bed cloths for toweling as needed and report any injuries that require medicinal care.”

With a nod, Wynn hurried for the brass bowl on the table.

Chane peered toward the partition. He could imagine Chap standing beyond it, still on guard at the bedchamber’s entrance. When Chane turned back, Shade was watching him, but he could not read her expression, so he closed his eyes once in a brief nod to her. That was as much thanks as he could risk in the moment, and she slowly closed her eyes to rest.

Aside from the so-called dhampir, whom he had helped rescue, he was in the company of two majay-hì, natural enemies of the undead. Even more bizarre, one wanted him dead for a final time, while the other had shielded a secret from Wynn—and done so for his sake.

Chane’s world grew more complicated with each night because of the woman he loved.

Chap still stood at the bedchamber’s entrance, though from his vantage point the only one he could see was Osha. That young one’s surface thoughts were filled with something chilling: an arrow in the dark from his bow had killed one of his own.

Chap and those with him had known since first meeting Osha that he was ill suited to the calling of an anmaglâhk. That the young one had fallen from—been forced from—his calling did not change this.

Now Osha had killed for Wynn’s sake.

Chap would have wished it otherwise for the once innocent young an’Cróan. All of them except for Wayfarer had committed questionable acts. The necessity of those acts would never lessen their burden.

Wynn broke his thoughts as she came around the partition with a large brass bowl under one arm and a matching, sloshing water pitcher in the other. Before he could speak with her in the way that only they could, she pushed past him into the chamber. Osha followed her, and Chap spun around into the room.

Leesil knelt beside the first bed, where he had laid out Magiere, and covered her with bedding. Wayfarer stood near him, watching only Magiere. When Leesil looked up at Wynn’s approach, his gaze quickly shifted past Chap and Osha to the bedchamber’s entrance. And his features twisted in a glare, as if he might rush out at someone in the outer room.

“Don’t start,” Wynn warned. “Everything else waits until we get the four of you fed and tended. Then you need rest, not another fight ... or argument.”

Leesil neither answered nor looked at her again. He turned back to watching his wife, who lay on her side with her eyes almost closed.

Chap understood Wynn, though if Magiere were well enough, the young sage might not have gotten her way so easily. Chane’s presence could not simply be ignored. As Wynn settled on the bedside, and Osha brought her the pile of folded cloths, Chap glanced again at Magiere but then dropped his gaze.

He was supposed to watch over and protect all of them, including Wayfarer.

From the instant they had stepped onto the docks of this city, he had failed. And Brot’an had vanished and remained free. Chane was not the only one who Chap wanted gone—or dead. As to secrets that might have been ripped out of Magiere in a moon’s worth of screams, he already knew one she did not have.

Chap had insisted on hiding two orbs without Magiere or Leesil knowing where. What only he knew could never be taken from them, but this was not enough. Something had been taken from Magiere.

When that gray-robed figure had come to the cell, the darkness within its hood had turned toward Chap. It remained fixed on him for too long, as if that one had known him long before that visit. Whatever it might have related to Leesil in that cell, Chap knew by his friend’s last question what the robed figure had come for.

How did he do that ... get in my head like ... like you?

No, not like him, but there was no doubt that Magiere had suffered worse in being subjected to sorcery. On the rushed walk from the shrine, he had seen snippets of recent memories in her half-conscious mind. He knew some of what she had endured in that cell. Somewhere in her memories was what he had done—hidden two orbs—if not how and where he had done so.

The robed figure could not have taken such information from him. A Fay-born into the body of a Fay-descended majay-hì was not easily overcome, but ...

How long had it taken that robed figure to learn from Magiere that he knew the whereabouts of two orbs? How long had she been tortured simply to get at him before the torturer came to silently taunt him, face-to-face? And in an act that only Chap knew of, he had done far worse than Osha.

The guide Leesil had hired to take Chap into the wilderness had been left a mindless husk. Without hands of his own, Chap had possessed the man’s body with his own spirit—that of a Fay—in order to handle and hide two orbs.

And there was another orb here in this room, in a chest.

He knew , for Wynn could not help letting that slip into her thoughts.

Yes, they had all done terrible things, some worse than killing and some worse than what he had done to that innocent guide. In the moon of Magiere’s screams, he had done worse in doing nothing.

He would have let her die rather than reveal the location of any orb.

Chap’s sins had grown until he now shrank from weighing them as a whole, and this was no time to do so. Someone else in this place was linked to everything since that day on the docks. When he, Magiere, Leesil, and Wayfarer had been mysteriously released, he had recognized the stranger with Wynn.