Chapter Fourteen
I grab the sleep elixir with my shadows, throwing it into Seth’s mouth as he opens it to say, “What the—”
Larus shatters my shackles and then Taran’s as Ronan rushes over to me, taking me in his arms.
“Sylvie,” he sighs as he pulls me to his chest, his arms wrapping around my back in a tight embrace.
Oh, gods, the relief. The relief is unbelievable.
My entire body relaxes instantaneously. He’s here. He’s actually here, alive and well and holding me again.
Being in Ronan’s arms again feels unreal after everything I’ve been through since I was taken from him. All of the panic and doubt and fear melts away in his embrace. He strokes my back gently, kissing the top of my head. “I’m here,” he whispers.
Ronan runs his hands over the spots where the nightgown exposes my skin, finding my injuries and healing them. The touch of his light on my body is so perfectly warm and soothing, like waking up with the sun filtering through a window on a cold day.
Then he lowers himself to the floor to heal the spots on my ankles where the shackles rubbed against my skin, and his hands linger there on my legs, rubbing soft circles on my calves and then running up my thighs as he looks into my eyes, dropping his disguise to let me see him.
The sight of him down there on his knees.
My gods.
It sends a flood of warmth and desire through my body as I look at his perfect, beautiful face.
But my need for him goes far beyond physical desire.
“I couldn’t feel you,” I say, reaching down to trace the line of his strong jaw, to feel the scratch of stubble on his cheeks.
And then to hold on to his face to remind myself that he’s real, and he’s here.
He closes his eyes and presses his lips to my palm. “I know. I’m sorry. I knew if you felt me, you’d try to escape, and I didn’t want it to affect our plan. I had to close myself off to you. It was so painful, lying to myself like that.”
His warm brown eyes are haunted. What had he endured to find me? “I tried to tell you not to come. I tried to beg you with my feelings. Ronan, if they find you, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill us all.”
“Sylvie.” He sighs, standing and pulling me back into his arms. Then he breaks the dam he’s kept on his own feelings, letting the entire flood of them free until I’m drowning in him.
His love for me, his anguish at not being able to protect me.
His guilt that loving him has put me in danger.
His primal, undeniable need for me, to be with me, to be in me.
It hits me so strongly and so suddenly I can barely breathe.
“Gods. You must know I’ll always come for you.
There is nowhere you can go where I won’t find you.
I felt you all the way in the palace. Vahlo himself couldn’t keep me away. ”
“You felt me in the palace? How is that—”
“There’s no time,” hisses Larus. “We have to go. Now.”
Ronan kisses me quickly on the lips, lingering there for a brief moment that’s just long enough to send my heart racing before taking my hand. “Come on,” he says. “It’s time to move the prisoners. Hold your hands together like they’re bound. Taran, you too.”
He claps Taran on the shoulder and then pulls him into a brief hug, healing his wounds the rest of the way. “Thank you for keeping her safe for me.”
“If anything, she kept me safe.”
Ronan grins. “I should have known.”
Larus is waiting for us at the tent flap, but I stop at Seth’s desk.
I look at Seth there slumped over on his papers. He’ll be furious once he realizes he drooled on them, maybe even more furious than he’ll be that we escaped.
But there’s something soft about him in his unconsciousness. Something about him that I’ve seen in my time with him that isn’t warm or kind, per se, not in the way that someone like Ronan is. But when Adria said he has an affection for me like Larus does, I think she may have had a point. “Wait.”
“Something wrong, my love?” asks Ronan, coming quickly to my side.
This is probably a monumentally stupid decision, but I know what I have to do. I can’t leave him here. “We have to take him too.”
“What?” says Larus. “Sylvie, let’s go. We don’t have long until the guard change.”
“Ronan,” I say, sharing with him my feelings about Seth. “He could be useful.”
Ronan sighs. He’s not fond of my brother, but he can see his value as a prisoner.
And he’ll do anything for me.
He lifts Seth’s unconscious body from the chair and tosses him over his shoulder. “I wish this were you and not him,” he says to me, and I laugh.
Oh gods, it’s so good to laugh with him again.
I take the stack of papers from the top of the desk, and Taran stuffs them into his pockets. He reaches into the drawer and retrieves some of the elixirs and a throwing knife, handing it to me. He keeps the dagger we stole a few days earlier.
Just as I’m about to walk away, something draws me back one final time.
I dig into one of Seth’s drawers and pull out the scrap of paper he showed me. The palimpsest. He’s been carrying it around for so long, I know he would be devastated to lose it.
And I want to read what it says for myself.
“Are we good?” asks Ronan.
Taran and I nod back.
Larus leans out the flap. “Let’s go.”
I lower the shadows around us as we slip between the tents, keeping a steady walking pace to avoid attracting attention.
This part of the camp is quiet at night, a requirement Seth imposed after another of his hangovers left him in a foul mood a few days ago.
We make it through several rows before encountering a guard.
“Sorry, I’m late!” she says, mistaking Ronan for a supervisor of some kind. Then she notices Taran. “What are you doing with the prisoners?”
“Moving them,” says Ronan, his voice falsely gruff. “Too many for the tent, he said.”
“On your own? He gave us strict orders not to be alone with them. Who do you have on your back there?” Steel sings as she pulls her sword halfway out.
“This one was supposed to be helping,” says Ronan, turning to show her Seth, who’s now disguised as someone with dark hair using Ronan’s magic. “Had a bottle or two too many.”
The guard smirks, pushing her sword back in. “Sounds about right. Say, I’m not sure I’ve seen you around here before.” Her fingers hesitate on the pommel of the blade. “Or him.”
“Sylvie,” says Ronan.
“Sorry,” I say, shoving the sleep elixir into the guard’s mouth before she can yell.
She collapses to the ground almost instantly.
“Drag her over there out of the torchlight,” says Ronan to Taran, shifting to adjust Seth’s dead weight on his shoulders.
“Do you want me to take a turn carrying him, sir?” asks Taran once he’s finished.
“Oh, please. He’s so fucking heavy.”
Taran bends at the knees to take the burden of Seth from Ronan’s shoulders, but as Ronan hands him over, Seth’s eyes snap open.
“He’s awake!” I whisper loudly.
Seth struggles in Taran’s arms, trying to shout just as Ronan covers his mouth with his hand, and I restrain him with my shadows.
“Do not move,” says Ronan. “You’re coming with us.”
Seth replies in a normal voice, but his words are muffled.
Ronan looks at me, wondering if he should release my brother to hear what he has to say.
“I doubt it’s anything worth hearing,” I say.
“There’s no time for this. Where’s the sleep elixir?” asks Larus.
I shake my head. “I just used the last of it. Taran? Anything from the drawer?”
Taran reaches into his pocket. “Aloe, willow bark, silphium…”
“Godsdammit,” says Ronan. “Scream, and I’ll burn a hole through your head. Got it?”
The threat is entirely empty, I can tell by Ronan’s feelings, but Seth can’t perceive them. He nods furiously, reasonably convinced.
Ronan drops his hand.
“Oh, thank the gods,” says Seth, rubbing his face where Ronan had his mouth covered. “Who the fuck are you? Where are you taking me and my prisoners?”
Oh, right. He can’t see through Ronan’s illusion.
Ronan drops his disguise again, revealing his face. “I’m taking my people back home where they belong. And you’re coming too.”
Seth regards Ronan for a moment with chilling disdain, and then he turns to me. “This is your doing?”
“Yes.” I don’t have much of an explanation for him. Taking him wasn’t in any of the plans Taran and I had discussed, and it certainly wasn’t in Ronan’s plan. It just felt like the best thing to do at the time.
“Very well,” says Seth. He turns and looks out over the rows of tents we’ve just walked through, sloping up and away from the river. Finally, he spots what he was looking for.
He raises his hand and produces a ball of flame no larger than a walnut before I manage to get a grip on him again with my shadows.
“Seth!” I hiss. “What are you doing?”
But it’s too late. He’s already done it.
He fires the ball of flame at a tent in the distance with arrow-like precision. It catches on the green fabric, and the entire tent is on fire within moments.
I stare at him in stunned disbelief. “Your tent. You destroyed your own tent? After all that trouble?”
“If I’m changing sides, might as well not make it easy for them,” he says with a shrug, swiping his blond hair from his face with a complete lack of concern, like his precious tent meant nothing to him at all.
“What he’s done is alerted half the camp that something is wrong. We have to go now,” says Larus.
“Lead the way,” says Seth.
“Taran,” says Ronan, giving him a look that says he’s in charge of my idiot brother.
“Understood, sir.”
“Oh, fun. I have a babysitter now,” says Seth as he reluctantly jogs along with the rest of us. “A pity I won’t have a chance to torture you. I was so looking forward to it.”
We keep a steady jogging pace towards the docks. Seth calls out orders to extinguish the fire, and no one even looks twice at the “guards” and prisoners running with him away from the blaze.
Even Larus will have to admit that taking Seth was a good idea.
We leave the dry dirt of the pasture where this camp was erected and enter the marshy flood lands once more. The dock here is long, constructed more as a boardwalk than a single structure jutting out into the water to account for the changing water levels.
At the end of the dock waits a vessel flying Nithyrian blue and green, a small patrol ship of the variety that carries our peacekeepers and the guards who travel the northern stretches of the river Mara, protecting the shipments of phoenix cypress ash.
I hesitate, but Ronan squeezes my hand in comfort. “It’s ours. A false flag.”
The dock appears unguarded, which feels wrong. There are many docks along this stretch of the Mara, but I’m surprised Seth didn’t have anyone posted to patrol the area at least. Maybe they’re busy putting out Seth’s fire.
Then we hear voices. Several of them, mostly male. They’re laughing and jeering in a way that turns my blood cold.
Then there’s another voice. Female, distressed. She’s turned away, so I can’t make out what she says, but I can sense her fear.
I can sense her fear.
A group of male guards is herding a peasant woman from the marsh to the south towards the docks. There are a lot of them—five, no, six. They’re of varying heights and builds, but all of them are young. All of them are armed and wearing Nithyrian chainmail.
There are five of us, but only three of us are properly armed, and one of those people is barely mobile, still fighting off the effects of a sleep elixir.
I’ve seen Ronan take on this many people on his own, but most of those weren’t trained soldiers. Seth has had his legions on a punishing schedule of drills and maneuvers for months. Most of them haven’t seen battle yet and are itching for a fight.
The least risky thing for us to do would be nothing. We could leave the soldiers to it, waiting until they’re out of sight before making for the docks. Even if we can win this fight, the commotion could attract more soldiers. The patrols could arrive and severely outnumber us.
The entire camp could be alerted to our arrival.
But the woman. There’s just no way I can leave her to her fate. Even if I couldn’t feel her fear, even if I didn’t recognize it, remember feeling it myself, I couldn’t leave her.
I feel Ronan reach the same conclusion.
And then I grab Ronan’s arm as I notice one of the men is missing a hand.
It’s him. The brute who threatened me.
“Sylvie? What’s wrong?”
Ronan’s eyes snap to mine as he senses my feelings.
And then they darken.
“He hurt you,” he says, his voice strained.
“Not badly,” I whisper back, trying to soothe the anguish that threatens to consume him. “He tried. Seth stopped him. He took his hand—”
Ronan’s breath intakes sharply. “What was he trying to do to you?”
I don’t need to tell him. He can sense it in my feelings. He can sense it in her feelings, the woman’s.
I have never seen a more venomous look on Ronan’s face. It’s pure loathing of a kind I barely thought him capable of. It’s unadulterated violence and danger, and it should be terrifying. On anyone else, it would be.
But when I see it in him, I’m not afraid.
I am proud.
This is the man I love. This is one of the things I love about him.
It’s a dark part of him that I know frightens him, a part of him that is frightening him even now.
I know he fears the pleasure he takes in vengeance; I know he worries that if he lets himself, he’ll fall back into the abyss that devoured him when his father died.
When he let his desire to kill my father to avenge his own consume him.
I can feel the strain that our time apart has put on him, how needing to save me has tested him and forced him to confront a part of himself he didn’t want to face again.
A part he thought he’d buried or lost or forgotten.
But it’s still here, and it rises in righteous anger as the woman cries out.
“We can do this,” I tell him, taking a step closer to him and turning his face to mine. “Together. And when it’s done, I’ll help you find your way back to yourself.”
And then I’ll do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And as long as it takes until this war is won.
He nods, his face softening for just a moment at the sight of me before hardening again with fury.
“Ready?” he asks the others. Larus and Seth draw their swords. Taran draws the obsidian dagger.
I draw the knife.
And then I darken the shadows as we march forward, the woman’s fear clawing at my heart, but nothing but fight in my soul.