Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A trius’s horse was certainly Obitraen. The thing just radiated otherworldly power—a big, muscular draft horse, ghostly grey with dark, dappled legs marked with pink scars. It was one of the largest horses I’d ever seen, leaving Atrius towering over those who rode beside him. Unlike many of the other horses, who were clearly uneasy about their new vampire lords and needed to be constantly shushed and calmed, this one was stable as stone. Atrius constantly wove his fingers through the beast’s mane as he rode, eyes drawn out to the horizon, like he was staring a million miles away into the past or the future or both.
That little gesture—Atrius’s constant stroking of his horse’s mane—kept drawing my attention. It was… confusing. Most Glaean warriors were careful to never display weakness, ever, and such blatant affection for an animal would certainly count. I found it hard to reconcile this gesture with the man who had burst onto our shores with the vicious animosity of a wolf, ready to tear Glaea apart in his jaws.
We rode for a long time, Atrius taking up the front of the army. Erekkus and I weren’t far behind him, though off to the side, isolated from most of the other soldiers who trailed behind. This, I was sure, had to have been Atrius’s command—forever concerned about my safety among the other soldiers. That, too, was probably why Erekkus was constantly at my side. He was chatty, and often about nothing in particular, which got very old very fast—worse, because being in such a big crowd for so long tended to be exhausting for Arachessen. I was starting to feel the strain of it after a few days on the road. The headache at the back of my head and behind my eyes was now a constant, sharp pain.
Unpleasant. But I’d have to deal with it. I could be spending months in this position. Maybe years. It depended on what the Sightmother expected of me.
The Arachessen were never far from my mind. We operated independently on our missions, but given how important this one was, I’d be expected to find a way to make contact with the Sightmother soon and update her.
But I wasn’t given many chances to sneak off on my own. I thought that the first sunrise on the road would be my opportunity, but we didn’t even set up a proper camp that day, just enough to keep the vampires packed together and sheltered from the sunlight. With Erekkus two feet away from me, I wasn’t willing to risk sneaking out, especially not since I quickly learned the man basically didn’t sleep.
Finally, after a week of travel, we came to a wide, flat grassy patch of land. It was easy to defend, and spacious, and Atrius seemed conscious of the fact that his soldiers were growing weary after a week of nonstop travel and little rest. He had us erect real tents again, a camp that wasn’t as expansive as the one I’d been initially dragged into, but close.
That meant privacy. Room to move around without attracting attention.
My tent was placed on the outer edge of the encampment again, far from all the others except for Erekkus, who was placed right beside mine. But once the work of setting up camp was done, Erekkus seemed more than eager to go socialize with people much more pleasant than me. It was a little surprising, actually, how quickly he ran off into the rest of the camp.
I stood outside my tent for awhile, arms crossed, observing the others in the distance. A great bonfire had been lit in the center of the camp, and many of the warriors clustered around it, drinking and talking. Their presences were dim with weariness, yes, but also unusually lively. A number of deer had been hunted and dragged into camp that night, still alive and twitching while the vampires crawled over their corpses and fed on them directly, or emptied their blood into goblets that they raised in drunken toasts. I shivered as the wind shifted and I caught a glimpse of those beasts’ auras—different than the acute fear I would have expected. It was there, yes, but it was dull and fuzzy, coated instead with a thick layer of euphoric docility.
Vampire venom. That was a mercy, perhaps.
This wasn’t a normal night. It felt like… a celebration of some kind. Maybe some kind of Obitraen festival? Some religious night? I almost wished Erekkus was around to ask him about it. Almost.
Instead, I planned to take full advantage of my newfound freedom.
I crept around the outskirts of the camp, noting the layout of the tents and guard posts. I wouldn’t try to sneak off until daybreak, but it couldn’t hurt to at least see what I was working with now.
I kept expanding my circles, until the bonfire was a distant glow and I was beyond the final bounds of the camp. Too far—I was pushing my luck while the others were awake.
I froze, scanning the horizon.
I felt something out there, not far from me now. A presence that almost seemed familiar, but twisted from what I typically knew, that stone stillness warped into molten steel—sharper and more dangerous.
My curiosity—a dangerous quality—got the better of me.
I lingered in the shadows and clung to the rocks, and edged closer.
Atrius.
Atrius, on his hands and knees, clutching the head of a stag with bare arms, his teeth sunk deep into its throat. His shirt and jacket were discarded in a pile nearby, his bare skin covered in blood.
The beast was enormous—one of the biggest stags I’d ever seen around this area. Atrius’s arms barely encircled its head, though he held it tight, muscles straining. Blood soaked the creature’s neck, matting its white fur and dripping into the gritty sand.
I stilled, unable to move .
I’d witnessed predators work countless times before. But even what I had seen the rest of Atrius’s men doing near the bonfire seemed… different than this. This was primal and foreign and yet, at the same time, deeply, innately natural. I was repulsed by it and fascinated by it and…
And, ever so slightly, frightened of it.
Or maybe frightening wasn’t the right word to describe the way the hairs stood upright at the back of my neck, the shiver that ran up my spine. It was more that something had changed in the way I saw him, a mismatch between what I had thought he was and what I was witnessing now.
Atrius’s eyes opened. Looked right at me. For a split second, we were both frozen there in our sudden awareness of each other. Then, in a movement so swift and oddly graceful it seemed instantaneous, he was standing, the stag twitching on the ground at his feet.
Blood ran down his chin and covered his bare chest, stark against the cold pale of his skin under the moonlight.
“What are you doing here?” He was, as always, soft-spoken, but his voice was a little hot with the anger that flickered at the center of his presence—quickly tamped down.
“Walking,” I said.
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, though the attempt mostly just smeared it across his face.
“Go back to your tent,” he said.
“Why? When everyone else seems to be celebrating?” I tilted my head, pointedly, at the stag. “Feasting?”
“Exactly why you should be away.” His eyes narrowed, as if in realization. “Erekkus left you alone?”
Oh, Erekkus was going to be in trouble.
I took a step closer, curious, and Atrius lurched backwards so abruptly that he nearly tripped over a cluster of rocks, as if frantic to get away from me.
That made me pause.
He collected himself fast, so fast that maybe someone else might have dismissed it, but I saw that… that fear. Not of me, exactly. Not quite.
I observed him closely, reaching for the presence he kept so carefully guarded. His chest rose and fell heavily. Nose twitched.
Hunger. He was hungry.
“Go back to your tent,” he said. “Stay there until morning.”
“What’s happening tonight? Is this a… festival? Ritual?”
He let out an almost-laugh. “Ritual. No, only your kind do rituals.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a festival in the House of Blood, to celebrate the birth of our kingdom. It takes place every five years, under the waxing moon closest to the spring equinox.”
“Every five years,” I remarked. “Must be special, then.” After a moment of thought, I added, “Maybe not, considering how many years your kind have in a lifetime.”
“It is special,” he snapped. “And they?—”
He cast an unreadable glance back to the camp—the bonfire, and his warriors surrounding it. His throat bobbed, then he turned back to me. He wiped his mouth again, seeming to realize all at once how he looked—half naked, blood-covered.
“Go back to your tent,” he repeated. “That’s an order.”
An order? He said those words to me with such casual authority. I bristled at them without meaning to, being reminded far too clearly of the last time they were thrown at me—the night I came so close to killing the man who stood before me now.
I bowed my head, mostly hiding the sarcasm in the movement. “Very well, commander. I’ll leave you to your…” I tipped my chin, motioning to the stag corpse on the ground, my eyebrow twitching. “…meal.”
I turned away. He watched me go, unmoving. Weaver, he was capable of being so very… still. Not just his body, but his presence, too. His inner self. I sensed that something thrashed beneath the surface of that calm, like a beast that did not so much as ripple the glass surface of the water, but I couldn’t even begin to reach into those shadows.
“Beware that curiosity, seer,” he called after me. “It’s a dangerous thing.”
I paused, turned back. Smiled at him.
And there it was—just a hint. A single wisp of smoke against the impenetrable velvet-black of his presence:
A glint of interest.
Careful, commander.
I smiled at him. “So it is,” I said, and continued on my way.
I had every intention of obeying Atrius’s command—though I admit I chafed at it a bit, on principle. But I also liked staying alive, and his advice to stay away from his horde of vampire warriors on a night dedicated to drunken, delirious feasting seemed objectively wise.
I was, however, going to take a quick detour.
I wouldn’t have much time now that Atrius had caught me, and I was convinced that he would certainly have Erekkus guarding me during the daytime, so I had to be fast. I had spotted a pond not far from here when we arrived in this area—actually, it seemed more like a collection of murky standing water collected from a rainstorm, but I’d take what I could get. I could reach the Arachessen through stone if I had to, but that was a much more stubborn, unworkable element, and I’d never quite mastered it the way many of my Sisters had. The Keep was designed to sit at an apex of several powerful collections of threads throughout Glaea, stringing across key elements throughout the country. This way, a Sister could communicate with the Keep from virtually anywhere, so long as those veins of energy ran there.
I came to the pond quickly and knelt beside it, water lapping at my knees through my skirts. I hastily drew several sigils in the sand and pressed my hands into the muck, letting the cloudy water cover them.
I let myself fall forward. Forward.
Forward…
The threads collected here. Through the water, I could feel them extending in all directions. It was always easy to find the one that would lead me to my home—it always felt close and warm, as if vibrating at a higher frequency .
I reached for that thread, and pulled…
One second passed, then two. I waited. I could feel the Keep, but it was possible no one there would be able to talk to me. I resisted the urge to bite down on a curse as seconds became a minute. I wasn’t sure when I would next be able to get away like this.
But I breathed an exhale of relief when the Sightmother’s face appeared before me, as if projected on the surface of the water.
“Sylina,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
The Sightmother was kind and warm in person, but while we were on missions, she had no time for pleasantries. That was fine. Neither did I.
“I’ve made it into the conqueror’s army,” I told her. “I’ve been taken as his seer.”
Normally, the means through which I accomplished this task would not be relevant to the Keep. But this detail was important to the Arachessen.
“It was difficult to get him to accept me,” I went on. “He recognized me as an Arachessen, and I told him that I was an escaped Sister. He offered me protection from the Arachessen in exchange for my loyalty during his war.”
The Sightmother said nothing. It was impossible to read presences through a thread this distant, but the silence held a strange tinge to it—something I couldn’t read even if I had tried to.
“Good,” she said, at last. “Wise. So long as he believes you.”
“He believes me.”
“Make sure it stays that way.”
“Yes, Sightmother. He had me seer for him once already. His next target is Alka, and my Threadwalk was to help him strategize his attack.”
“And did you?”
I paused, coming up with the best answer to this question. “Yes and no,” I said. “I had a productive Walk. But I changed the information I gave him. Just enough.”
Again, a beat of silence that I did not know how to decode.
“Why, child?” the Sightmother asked, a question that left me stunned .
Why?
“Because—of course, I can’t actually help him conquer Alka,” I said.
“Alka has few resources. It’s drug infested and weak. He can have it.”
She said it so dismissively. As if she was sacrificing marbles on a game board.
Words evaded me. Or… no, the words were there. They were just not appropriate to say to my Sightmother.
“Sylina?”
“I—” I collected myself, choosing my response carefully. “There is a human cost to allowing him to conquer them, Sightmother.”
“The state is ruled by warlords. Inhabited by a drug-addled populace. It is not our place to judge the morality of an individual act. We are playing a bigger game.”
Hypocrite.
The word shot through my mind before I could stop it—a word I never thought I would think of the Arachessen. With one sentence, she damned a city-state to death as punishment for their crimes. In the next, she told us we aren’t arbitrators of morality.
I kept my temper close, filtered through decades of careful training.
“I’ll shed no tears for the warlords either,” I said. “But thousands of people live in that city. Many of them innocent. Children.”
It was the last word that betrayed me. I knew it right away.
The Sightmother’s face shifted into understanding. It was a little pitying—the way one looks at a well-meaning dog who is prone to peeing in the plants because it mistakes them for the outdoors.
I cursed myself. I hated that look. That look was the rift between me and my Arachessen Sisters. That look was directed at the gap of time that made me different from all of them.
“You will never be free, Sylina, until you let go of the hold your past has on you,” she said. “The past cannot dictate the future.”
“I know, Sightmother.”
“We fight for what it is Right. What is Right goes beyond good or evil.”
I hated being lectured like this. I didn’t show it. I kept my face placid. My presence calm.
“I understand, Sightmother. I’ll choose differently in the future.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Commotion stirred in the distance. Probably just the festival debauchery going on too long—but I was still conscious of how long I’d been gone.
“Go,” the Sightmother said, as if sensing my concern. “You have our faith and our Sisterhood, Sylina.”
She paused at that sentence, as if to let it sink in—as if she knew, even over this distance, that I needed to hear it. I would never admit that I did, never show her that insecurity. But of course, she saw it anyway.
I bowed my head. “Yes, Sightmother. May the threads guide you.”
I severed my connection to the Keep, rose, shook off my now dirty, wet skirt, and retreated back to the camp.