Chapter 55 Aldric
Chapter fifty-five
Aldric
He woke to the taste of dirt in his mouth and a ringing in his skull.
Cold earth sprawled beneath his right side. Dry grass prickled his cheek. At least his captors had the decency to dump him on the shoulder that still worked.
His left—the one he had dislocated when he fell—felt like someone had tried to tear the whole arm out of its socket while he had been out. His body ached. His face hurt. His hand burned where his own glaive had stabbed straight through it. Pressure bit at his wrists and ankles. Rope.
He flexed his fingers to judge the tightness of the bonds, sending a fresh wave of pain lancing up his arm. Good. Pain was good. It meant everything was still attached and working.
It meant he was alive.
He cracked his good eye open to a sliver.
Night pressed in on all sides, the silhouette of trees a black wall ringing their clearing. Tents hunched in the darkness. A crackling fire spat sparks nearby.
He lay just outside the perimeter of that fire—far enough away that the heat did nothing to chase the cold seeping into his bones. Far enough away that he lay closer to the treeline than he did to the tents.
Shapes loomed and shifted nearer the flames. Arathians? Wellane’s men? The witch? He could not tell. Not from this distance. Not in this light.
He ground his teeth, memory surging. “I need the dwarf alive,” the wench had said.
Well, blight that. There were many reasons his wife’s enemies would want to take him captive. But only one for why they would want to keep him alive.
And he wanted no part of it.
Aldric turned his head a fraction, taking stock of the rest of the camp. A horse snorted somewhere behind him. But nearer at hand, a shape lay in the grass, bound just like him. Limp. Unmoving.
Calix. His second’s features were a smeared mess of cuts, dried blood, and swelling. But his chest moved. He breathed.
Just next to him, a broad mound lay half on its side, half on its stomach. Rakon. Unconscious, the man resembled a boulder.
He could see no one else.
The realization punched through his gut, leaving a hollow ache. Was that truly all who had survived?
Were his other Sons dead? Or merely hidden behind Rakon’s bulk?
“Calix,” he whispered, digging his boot into the sod to shove himself just a little closer to the other man. A mistake. Pain consumed his left shoulder like liquid flame.
He swallowed down his hiss of pain and shot a look toward the fire.
No changes. No one had yet noticed.
“Wake up, Calix,” he mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, splitting his attention between the man and the campfire.
But his half-Kunishi Son didn’t answer. He didn’t move.
Aldric scowled. “Are you dead?”
Finally, Calix twitched. His brow furrowed. Very quietly, his words thick, he muttered, “Unfortunately, no.” His Son’s one un-swollen eye cracked open, glinting in the dark.
Relief crashed over him. At least one of his men had survived. But it was far too soon to celebrate. “How bad?”
“Bad,” Calix whispered.
Aldric braced himself. He had to know how many casualties they had sustained, how many men had made it out of the fire. “How many?”
His Son glanced away, his bruised jaw flexing. “Too few.”
Too few. The words fell like blows. He absorbed them as best he could. “I want names, Calix,” he rasped, fighting to keep his voice low. “Who made it out?”
Calix’s mouth worked. “Me. Rakon. Leif. Kyn.”
Four. Four Sons left. That was it.
The thought gutted him. Screams—real, remembered—tore through his skull. They had needed him. And where had he been?
Being captured. Being stabbed by his own glaive. Bested by men who didn’t so much as flinch when they got a chest full of steel. Being trussed up like bait to lure Sera in. As if she would ever come for him. As if she would even care after what he did.
But here he was—alive—while his men lay dead somewhere.
Only. Four. Sons. Left.
“I’m getting you out of here,” Aldric snarled, his eye flashing back open.
Calix’s bloodied lips twitched into a humorless smile. “Yes, you seem to be in an excellent position to mount a rescue attempt, Your Majesty.”
He shot his Son a withering look. All he had to do was cut his ropes and make a run for it. The witch wanted him alive, after all. He could be the distraction while his men got away. But first he needed…something.
Maybe his captors were idiots. Maybe they hadn’t checked him for hidden blades. He could use his wrist dagger—
Wait. He had given his wrist dagger to Sera.
He had nothing.
Calix’s smile turned bitter. Knowing.
Aldric peeled back his lips and hissed, “I’m working on it.”
Keeping his eye on the campfire and the shapes moving there, he flexed his bound fingers behind his back, hunting for a sharp rock—anything with an edge.
He felt only dirt, grass, and the tree root trying to burrow into his ribs.
Think. What would his kirei do? She was clever.
He huffed out a breath through his nose and shoved himself backward with his foot, wincing when he jostled his dislocated shoulder again. Groping at that fresh patch of earth, he desperately searched for a stone.
Knowing Sera, she would be praying right about now, asking her God to drop a dagger clean out of the sky. As if such a thing would ever happen.
The forest behind him rustled. Leaves shivered. Wings fluttered.
A heartbeat later, something thumped into the grass just behind him. Frowning, he strained against the rope binding his wrists, trying to feel out the shape of the object that seemed to have dropped from the trees. His fingers brushed metal. A narrow hilt.
It was his boot knife.
Aldric froze. His breath caught in his throat.
But that was impossible. That was—
How…?
Carefully, he rolled a little more to his side, just enough that he could chance a glance over his shoulder. An odd shape lurked in the darkness between two tree roots: a scaled, serpentine body with dark wings.
Soot.
He stared into the usuru’s beady little eyes and blinked once.
The winged serpent blinked back.
But…how…?
No. Absolutely not. Impossible. Absolutely impossible.
Yet the dagger sat there all the same.
They must have simply made camp near where he had first dropped the blade. Except this patch of forest didn’t smell like smoke, nor did it look anything like the patch of forest where he had been captured.
Without uttering a single sound, Soot flared his wings and shot into the air, swiftly disappearing like a shadow bleeding into the night.
Behind him, Calix whispered, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Aldric lied, curling his fingers around the dagger and carefully rolling to his back. He could tell no one about what had—maybe—just happened. They wouldn’t believe him anyway. Except Leif.
And maybe Sera. This seemed like the sort of thing his kirei would believe.
He sawed at the rope—slowly, carefully. Every snapped fiber sounded as loud as thunder to his own ears, but the shapes near the fire did not look up. They did not move.
The rope fell away from his wrists.
“Calix,” he whispered, working as quickly as he dared. “I need you to get the others out of here. Get Easome, too. Take Mourn if you can find him.” He didn’t want any witch touching his horse. “Make for Goldreach. Find Sera. Find Reyla. Protect them.”
Contorting himself just enough to reach down, he tried to cut through the rope biting into his ankles. On one swipe, he missed. Heat prickled across his skin.
Calix narrowed his one un-swollen eye. “I’m not leaving here without you.”
“Yes, you are,” he growled. “I’ll be fine here. They want me alive. But you?” He jerked his head. More hostages meant more mouths to feed. He didn’t imagine his Sons would last long here.
One last slice. The rope binding his ankles fell away.
He didn’t waste a second. Sliding over to Calix, ignoring the screaming in his shoulder, he freed his second-in-command and passed him the blade. Their eyes met in the darkness. Confusion knitted the other man’s brow.
“Swear it to me, Calix,” he quietly demanded. “Swear to me you’ll leave. Find Sera. Find Reyla.” He wet his lips, feeling out the broken skin on his bottom one. “If my wife asks, tell her I’m dead.” Better his kirei grieve a ghost than waste any of her time thinking about what had become of him.
“Dead?” Calix echoed, venom in the word. “Why?”
Aldric’s eye slid toward the campfire, toward one shape in particular that finally moved. That shifted. That seemed to grow larger as it rose to its feet. A figure wearing red now instead of the drab gown she had been wearing when he first spotted her.
The witch.
“Because this has to be a trap for Sera,” he whispered, muscles coiling, preparing for what he had to do next. “And I refuse to be bait.”
Calix stared at him for a moment before he finally agreed, “I swear.”
Aldric didn’t wait to hear more. He didn’t need to hear more. Bracing himself, he rolled to his feet in one swift movement. His shoulder protested. His hand burned. His legs wobbled. The world reeled for a single, dizzying heartbeat.
Then he ran.
Branches clawed at his face as he plunged into the dark forest. His boots crunched against dead leaves. Every uneven stretch of ground tried to trip him.
Behind him came a shout. The witch. “Don’t let him get away!”
Faster. He ran faster, dodging around tree trunks. His foot caught on a root. He stumbled, caught himself, and kept going. The campfire glow vanished far behind him. The sounds of the camp faded away until only his own ragged breathing filled his ears.
Then the air changed. It thickened. The tang of magic assaulted his nose.
Flame roared into being just in front of him, carving through the trees, devouring the underbrush, forming a wall, and blocking his way forward.
Aldric slid to a stop, chest heaving, and turned in a slow circle, hunting for the witch in the darkness.
She stepped from behind a tree as though she had been part of the bark. Red robes whispered across dead leaves. Golden eyes glowed, fixed on him with something like delight.
“I do hope you enjoyed your spot of exercise, Crow,” she murmured, her voice sweet. “Because I fear you will not be escaping again.”
The very sight of her made his skin crawl. The sound of her voice in his ears made his stomach churn. Aldric twisted his lips and spat. “Your little plan won’t work, witch. You might as well kill me now.”
The Arathian arched a single eyebrow, her head tilting to the side. “Now why would I do a thing like that?”
It was almost funny that his wife’s enemies truly thought she cared enough about him to come and save his life at the cost of her own. If they were smarter, they would have tried to capture her attack rat, not him. Or her godparents.
He almost relished being able to say, “Because she will not come for me—”
The witch laughed, cutting him off mid-sentence. “Now that is where you are wrong,” she hissed, the words slithering through the darkness toward him, chilling his blood despite the raging fire lapping at his back. “The Lightbearer will come for you, Crow—”
Lightbearer?
“—because she must. And when she does…” She lifted her chin, her gaze seeming to glow all the brighter in the light of her unnatural flames. “I will give you the death you so clearly desire. But perhaps…”
She smiled, then—a sharp smile. The sort of smile that died long before it reached her eyes. “Perhaps I will let you live long enough to watch me cut off her head.”