Chapter 16 #2
I can’t. I don’t understand what happened here. I can’t understand it. Who would do this? And why? For a moment, I wonder if this was Tesni’s doing somehow, but no, she would never come out of hiding and risk her safe, cushioned future with Hastings and the ransom for this.
I can’t seem to pry my eyes from the pile, despite the bile rising in my throat and Soren’s whispered pleading for me to look away. My eyes scan every inch of mountain of death before me. I see long, tumbling locks of charred hair, and small hands reaching…
Women and children.
Women and fucking children were burned alive in this place.
“Makers.” It’s a choked whisper, and then Killian is there, reaching for me.
“Tess, look away. You don’t need to see—”
“Why??” I cry, tears blurring the morbid visage before me, cold and scalding and I swear they’re leaving deep scars in my cheeks, a brand that will never, ever leave me. “Why would someone do this?”
“It’s a message,” he says, voice low and laced with such white-hot anger that fear skitters down my spine. I’ve never heard him sound so…terrifying. Soren growls low, echoing Killian’s fury.
“A message?” I rasp, throat aching, fingers still digging into Soren’s fur. I still can’t seem to breathe, my chest aching as a deep, resounding sorrow fills my heart. All these people. The fear they must have felt, the agony...
“From Amon,” he growls and my stomach drops. Amon. The Abyss. That heartless monster did this. I finally tear my gaze away and look at Killian.
“Why?” I whisper, eyes stinging from the smoke and tears.
“He knows we’ve been watching him, tracking his forces. This is his open invitation to battle.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, clawing at my chest with one hand, desperate to ease the pain, desperate to breathe.
“What is so important about this fucking war that this,” I throw a hand out towards the pile, “is a part of it?!” I scream and my Gift nearly breaks free, the raw power and rage making it course through my veins like never before, like it’s a living, breathing beast desperate to lash out and punish.
Killian quirks a brow, obviously feeling the spike in my Gift’s energy with his own.
I knew that Amon was fierce. I knew that there was war brewing.
But I couldn’t have imagined it was like this.
So…brutal. So intense. So horrible. And for what?
To try to take some Gifteds from Dorian? ? It makes no fucking sense!
“Tess, I’ll explain it all to you soon, I swear it. Right now, we need to get back.”
“We can’t…we can’t just leave them like this,” I whisper.
“There’s nothing to be done, love,” he says quietly, so quietly only I can hear. Odessa strides up and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Come, Tess,” she says, gently.
I turn back to look at the horror before me, something inside of me shifting and hardening at the sight.
This is why I needed to come here. I needed to see this, to allow the seeds of understanding to begin to take root within me.
This is all much bigger than I knew, and I’m to be a part of it.
I know it now, somewhere deep in my soul.
So, I look. I memorize every single detail of this horror before me.
I say a silent prayer to every Maker I can think of.
I tell the souls in the blasphemous funeral pyre that I’m sorry and that I will make sure this never happens to anyone else again.
I don’t know how in the hells I can make such a promise.
I’m one Gifted. A scared one at that, one who has hidden her whole life and never truly used her power.
But I make the promise all the same.
Finally, I turn away, walking with Odessa as the snow begins to fall.
The invitation to battle is one that Killian accepts immediately. We travel a few more hours before making camp and they begin preparing. Scouting reports say that Amon’s army waits not far from where we’ve stopped, which makes me nervous, but Killian assures me that we’re perfectly safe.
“He won’t attack here. He’ll meet us on the battlefield.”
“War is strange,” I mutter, surprised at the odd…civility of it, the sharp contrast to the brutality of what’s to come, of what I saw at that village. “You schedule a time to meet and kill each other like you’re meeting for tea or a standing appointment to fuck.”
He quirks a brow at that, his hand freezing mid-slide as he sharpens his great sword.
“Have many standing appointments to fuck, do you?”
I roll my eyes and ignore that. “And you just trust each other? After what we saw him do?”
“There is an honor in war, a code…” He shakes his head. “It’s hard to explain. But yes, in this, I trust that he will not attack this camp as we will not attack his. It’s cowardly.”
“What he did to that village was cowardly,” I say in a deadly voice, fists clenching against the cold pooling in my palms. I can’t stop seeing it.
The bones. The ashes. The bodies. The faces set in eternal agony.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to breathe around the memories, swearing I can still smell the burning flesh.
It had taken me hours before I could speak to anyone, even Soren, though his presence inside my head was a quiet, necessary talisman that I held on to for dear life.
Big, rough hands are suddenly cradling my face ever so gently. I open my eyes to find Killian staring, fire in his own stormy ones.
“We will avenge those people, Tess. I promise you. The ones in the village, the ones that Lyanna has taken, all of them.”
I frown, not quite understanding what he means.
What people has Lyanna taken? Now isn’t the time to ask.
I need him focused on the battle to come—and on coming back from it.
He presses his lips to mine and crosses back to his desk, looking at the map once more.
He runs his fingers along the worn parchment, all of Hypathia before him.
“We’ll meet them here, on this tundra.” I get up and come to stand beside him, staring at the map. My eyes drift immediately to Helios and I send a quick prayer to the Makers to keep the forces at bay, to keep Cece and Math safe. I shift my gaze to where Killian’s finger rests.
“And we’re here?” I ask, pointing to the area just on the other side of the small forest beside what will soon become a battlefield. He nods.
“And Amon’s forces are here.” He points to an area to the northwest of the tundra.
“How many are there?” I ask, twirling my hair around my finger. Killian watches, a slow smile curling his lips. “What?” I ask.
“You do that when you’re nervous or worried or thinking,” he says. I drop my hand.
“A very old habit,” I tell him, another truth I can share. “Can’t quite seem to break it.” Warmth fills my chest realizing that he’s noticed enough to know when I do it.
“Our scouts say three hundred or so,” he says, answering my initial question. “Nothing we can’t handle.” Odessa told me that they are nearly six hundred strong. I should feel better knowing that Killian’s men outnumber Amon’s but something still feels wrong.
“I still don’t understand why he’s coming at you without more troops…” And then it hits me. “Oh! He has Gifteds.”
“I’m fairly certain, yes.”
My lips curl upward. “But they don’t know that you can block them?”
“That knowledge is a closely guarded secret,” he says with a wink.
“So, he thinks he’s going to have the upper hand with offensive Gifteds on his side…”
“And will be unpleasantly surprised to find that his Gifteds are utterly fucking useless.”
I let out a long, relieved sigh, feeling much better. I know that it’s still battle and there are still lives to be lost on both sides, but at least these people that I’ve come to think of as my own are safer than I initially thought.
“I wonder what kind of Gifts they wield for Amon to think he’ll be able to thwart the great Killian Blackheart.”
Killian grins, and shifts, pinning my body between his and the desk, quickly lifting me atop it. I gasp quietly but immediately spread my knees to let him wedge his hips between my thighs. He puts his palms flat on the table on either side of me and leans in close.
“None so brilliant as my great Flame of Lyanna,” he says softly, face so close that his breath tickles my lips.
“Although, I do believe we should change that moniker. You don’t belong to that bastard anymore.
” He leans in and kisses just below my ear, making me shiver.
My hands slide beneath his shirt, settling on the hard planes of his stomach.
“And who do I belong to?” I whisper, gasping when he sucks gently on my pulse point, an appreciative rumble vibrating through his chest when he feels how hard it's racing. He pulls back and meets my gaze, and I wait for the words I know are coming. You belong to me.
“You belong to yourself, Tess,” he says seriously, his dark eyes intense and unyielding, and I inhale quietly in surprise.
“No one owns you. You are your own, your Gift is your own.” Tears spring to my eyes.
How can someone from a kingdom where the regent collects people like artwork feel this way?
But I know in my heart that he does. Again I wonder why he serves Dorian, what hold the king has on him.
“Killian,” I whisper, voice nearly breaking.