Chapter 11
I could only stare stupidly, blinking at the sight, but Rhyder instantly had a hand on me, forcing me behind him, and he wrenched the post out of the ground.
There was a strange ringing in my ears, the ground spinning crazily around me with how fast Rhyder had to set me down. For a moment, there was silence, then I heard the screams.
Women’s voices loud in pain, men shouting over each other, the roars of other animals.
Rhyder knocked the bear away with the post, a hard sharp thump on its nose, and the animal roared again as I cowered behind my brother.
“Go!” he ordered the animal, swinging the post again, and the creature lurched away, grunting in thwarted anger.
There were more dark figures running in the incense haze and then I heard Eli’s voice:
“ATTACK!”
“Godsdamn!” Rhyder said sharply. “Temperance, get on my back.”
But my arms were like limp noodles, my legs like water as he attempted to hoist me onto his back.
“They gave you too much,” Rhyder growled. “Temperance! I’m going to need you awake enough to hang onto me. I’ll need a hand free to fight.”
He shook me gently, but still my head lolled, my naked body spread before him.
The noise of fighting seemed to come from far away, and I wanted suddenly to giggle as arms and legs loomed through the smoke like giant stick insects.
“Just put me under the bushes somewhere,” I gasped, and my brother had his hand spread over my jaw so fast my head spun.
“I’m not going to leave you anywhere,” he said fiercely. “I can’t risk losing you again.”
Then he yanked me over his knee by my hair and spanked me as hard as he could.
It was like being dunked in the Silver River for a baptism, the loud, sharp smack of his hand making my ass burn immediately.
And he did it again, several more times in a row, landing on my ass and thighs without stopping as I gasped, the pain making my eyes slowly focus.
The pain burst through the lovely bubble of my incense-haze, and when I moved feebly to push him away, he finally stopped and swung me onto his back.
“Hold on tight,” he said grimly, and I could only obey, my ass and thighs aching from his painful blows.
I clung to his back as he moved into that bloody clearing, my thighs still dripping with my release as he pulled out two sharp knives.
The clearing was still choked with incense, screams and death-rattles.
There was a man grappling with Eli, and Rhyder barked out a prayer as he approached.
The assailant twisted, and Rhyder plunged both knives into his chest as he roared his battle-cry in the man’s face.
Then he whirled around, like a prowling lion seeking who to destroy.
I saw fallen bodies covering the clearing, barely visible in the thick fog that still hung over the space.
Which Congregation were they?
I saw a shock of bright yellow hair on the ground and my stomach roiled.
The woman who had told me I had nothing to worry about
Like a coward, I buried my face in Rhyder’s neck and didn’t look as Rhyder cut his way through the other warriors.
My head spun as I heard bone crunch and the slick, wet sounds of Rhyder’s knives.
The jagged injury on his shoulder was bleeding all along my collarbone, and I moved feebly to place my breast over it to stop the bleeding.
I counted time in the pump of blood from his wound and when it had stopped I realized that the Congregants were gathering in the dark clearing, bringing lights to count the bodies.
“Theudhar’s men,” Eli said in disgust. “He knew we’d be coming from Osric’s and thought to ambush us here.”
“I can see the influence of the Gray One,” Rhyder said darkly.
“We will pursue,” Eli said. “Rhyder, take these Avenging Angels to the borders of Ronan’s land. They are set to dam up the river. Temperance will stay with us.”
“No,” Rhyder said. “Temperance comes with me.”
“She is needed to clean up the dead,” the Enforcer said.
Clean up the dead? I felt afraid as Eli glared at us.
What if this was Eli’s way of trying to kill me since obviously the incense didn’t do the job? Why was he so angry I had come back?
Whatever he saw on Rhyder’s face must have made him not want a confrontation, since he nodded his head curtly.
“Don’t let a tight cunt keep you from the way of righteousness,” he warned.
“I know the Allfather’s blessing when I see her,” Rhyder retorted.
Then he was off, and he kept me on his back as he moved silently through the dark night.
When we got to the border to Ronan’s lands, Rhyder set me down and took out a long-sleeved collared shirt from his pack that he carefully buttoned around me.
“I need to wash and clean your wound,” I insisted, but he brushed me off.
“It is nothing in the service of the Allfather.”
Then he took out some kind of specialized tool, so heavy and unwieldly that it would have been impossible for another man to even lift, and held it to a segment of the dangerous buzzing length of Ronan’s boundary gates.
For a few minutes, nothing happened, then with a flash of greenish light and a gentle whirring, the thick cords of the boundary gate began to fall.
I watched in astonishment as that segment of the boundary gate fell to the ground in pieces. Rhyder instantly stomped with his big boots on the fluorescent green flames that sparked into little wicked fires on the ground.
“Allfather pray they’re so sunk in sin they’re too asleep to hear that,” Rhyder said as he turned to me with a grin.
Oh shit, I recognized that grin.
There was another unshakeable truth about Rhyder, and that it’s my attention made him reckless .
A word of praise from me or a specially-baked cake would go to Rhyder’s head, fill him with such emotion that he’d stretch even his massive power and abilities to do something wild, and untamed.
“I’ll set the drones and then we’ll go see their settlement,” he said, holding his hand out for me.
“This is a bad idea,” I said, but I reached for his hand as I always had.
It was not safe to let Rhyder go anywhere alone when he was in a mood like this, and I crossed over to the forbidden place with him.
My brother stood with his arms crossed looking out over the rolling lands. Even in the chill late February night, it was obvious these were prime lands, streams full of fish and lush, fertile fields.
There were soft tufts of grass under my feet. This place was paradise .
“Soon holy warriors will have reconquered this land for the Allfather,” he said.
“ Ronan !” he called into the night, spreading his arms wide as he faced the breadth of the rival Prophet’s rolling green hills. “Show yourself!”
“Rhyder, stop!” I gasped.
“Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand again and drawing me down the soft hillsides. “They’ll all be asleep. I want to see what their settlement looks like. Maybe I can end the holy war now.”
We crept down through the hills and trees, and I saw the first little silvery glimmer in the sky that indicated it would be early dawn soon.
The abandoned guard post we passed made me more nervous, though.
What was wrong here? Why would the gate be so well-maintained but the gate house empty?
Their settlement looked unimaginably prosperous and cozy as we crept up to it, rings of well-made stone or deep well-polished wooden homes around a neat settlement center. We peeked in the window of a big, fragrant storehouse, looking at the rows of cured meats, grain, and abundance of frozen fruits, vegetables, and berries for the long winter months.
“Stay here for a moment,” Rhyder whispered in my ear as he pressed me firmly in the shadow of a large thyme bush and melted in the darkness.
I realized I was nestled up against a bedroom window and, to my horror, I began to see movement inside it.
A big man, hard to see in the darkness, was moving on the bed.
As I watched, embarrassed, he moved over the woman sleeping beside him, her soft curves visible in the sliver of early morning light slicing through the window.
She slept soundly and he moved a big arm over her, bending his head to kiss her throat, all I could see of him his dark, pitch-black hair. He made low, aroused noises as his hands caressed her all over. Her face looked like an angel’s in the dim room, plump pink lips, long dark lashes, with long beautiful honey-brown hair spread across her pillow.
I felt my stomach turn with the wickedness as he settled between her thighs, entering her with a swift thrust.
Shocked, I closed my eyes tightly, but I could still hear his thrusts, slick wet sounds as he moved in and out of her pussy.
When she made a sleepy little sound, my eyes popped open, and she was rubbing her face like a kitten.
“Husband,” she said, her voice raspy and thick with sleep, and he flipped her on all fours.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said, his voice a low growl, and I watched as her lips parted with pleasure.
Just then, I felt my brother beside me. “I found someone awake,” he said, putting a finger to his lips, and I followed as he stalked silently behind a man wandering out sleepily to grab something from the storehouse.
Rhyder stepped in front of him and shoved the other man against a nearby wall.
“The fuck?” the man grunted. “Who are you and how the fuck did you get in here?”
He was in his 20s, medium-height with messy brown hair.
Rhyder closed his big hand around this other man’s neck. “Which house is your Prophet’s?” he asked. “What is your name? Repent of your time under the Apostate and you yet may be saved.”
The man made a choked gargle. “You’ll kill me if I don’t tell you? That would be a fucking kindness compared to what he’d do. I’m Edmund Knowledge-seeker. Who are you that you’d dare to come right into our settlement?”
My brother moved in the early morning light and I held my breath.
“Oath-bringer,” Edmund rasped. “I’ve heard of you. Shit. You’re huge.”
“ Which one is his house ?” Rhyder repeated. “War is coming to this land. Your Prophet’s time on this earth is growing late.”
“Kill me then,” Edmund said. “I’m not looking Ronan in the face and telling him I led you to his fucking door.”
With a snarl, Rhyder knocked the other man out and took my hand, looking around the corner at all the neat settlement homes.
A man walked onto the porch of a home a few doors down and I recognized the house shamefully as the one I had been peeping into. The man was barefoot and in a pair of jeans, buttoning his long-sleeved shirt as he looked out into the mountains. Behind him, the door was open, and I saw a flash of pink inside. The woman from his bed.
“There,” Rhyder hissed. “I know that’s the Apostate. Stay behind me.”
He drew an arrow from a nearby quiver and set it alight, then threw it, high in the air so it hooked with a solid thump on Ronan’s roof, setting it ablaze.
Then Rhyder charged forward, flicking both knives in his hands as he stalked toward the Prophet.
“You have been weighed and found wanting in the Allfather’s eyes, Ronan Demon-rebuker. Apostate . Go to Hell where you belong.”
Ronan’s face didn’t change expression, but I saw him look toward the other end of the porch where freshly sharpened knives sat on a table, as if judging how much time he had.
And then Ronan moved, not toward his weapons, but toward the open doorway, leaving himself even more vulnerable to Rhyder’s deadly knives.
Weighed and wanting , Rhyder chanted.
Weighed and wanting
In the name of the Allfather
My brother raised his arms, his massive shoulders for the killing blow.
But when Ronan’s body covered the doorway, the woman’s scream inside suddenly echoing horribly in my skull, he ripped the flaming arrow out of the roof and swung it at Rhyder, just barely meeting the sharp point of Rhyder’s knife, forcing it away from him, the tip of Rhyder’s knife only making a shallow cut across the Prophet’s bare chest.
My twin growled in frustration, swinging his other knife, and when Ronan blocked that the arrow splintered into pieces.
Ronan’s leg shot out, knocking Rhyder slightly off balance.
“Since when does your shithole little Congregation send only one man and his wife to Holy War?” he said coldly and fuck, he’d already found the one chink in my brother’s armor as Rhyder looked anxiously over at me.
Just then I heard Edmund’s voice.
“Shoot to kill?”
And he was there on the other end of the clearing aiming a heavy bow and arrow right at Rhyder.
“Not the girl!” a woman’s voice called, and I saw Ronan’s wife in the doorway, handing two heavy butcher knives to her husband.
Then everything was a blur as my brother rushed at me, grabbing me in his arms, shielding me as he ran.
Edmund’s shot went wide, but Ronan’s hit, the butcher knife lodging in my brother’s calf, but Rhyder was so big he only stumbled a bit but kept going.
As we disappeared into the woods, I heard the alarms begin to ring and Ronan’s voice calling loudly:
“Where the fuck is Cenhelm and why wasn’t he at the guard house?”