Chapter 25 Hedley
Chapter twenty-five
Hedley
It was already over.
By the time Hedley reached Mysai’s inner city, the bells had long since gone silent, and the screams had thinned to nothing, stamped out by the Drakmori and Arathian soldiers patrolling every quarter. The streets now lay still. Quiet.
In a single day, Mysai had become a city for the dead and damned.
A city filled with ghosts.
The dying light bled crimson across the sky. Tendrils of smoke hung heavy in the air, providing cover for him as he crept atop the buildings overlooking the cathedral square.
Desperately hunting for any sign of survivors.
Bodies littered the streets—bodies of Elmorians, Drakmori, and Arathians. Hedley’s throat tightened as he watched the Arathian soldiers who still drew breath piling the dead into large heaps in front of Mysai’s cathedral.
Was Dane among them? He couldn’t tell.
A ripple of fresh movement down below drew Hedley’s attention just as two women glided into the square with effortless grace. One older, one younger. Both impossibly tall, undeniably beautiful, and draped in blood-red silk.
Witches.
Hedley dropped to his belly atop the roof as a familiar pain pierced his chest. An old pain. As if another witchblade had just been thrust into his heart.
It was her. She was here. His…“mistress.”
The witch who had stolen a piece of his soul.
Skatia.
“We must find it,” the younger of the two fretted, her words just barely audible to his ears. “The Lady demands it.”
“Patience, Sister Talia,” Skatia snapped, sending his pulse stuttering to a pause. He hardly dared to breathe as he peeked over the edge of the roof and watched her red-painted lips wrap around the words, “The Lady has not yet even revealed to us what She wishes us to find.”
A mad desire to fling himself down into the square seized him in that moment. His body ached to be near her. To close the distance between them. To submit himself to her will at last.
His mind recoiled at the thought.
My soul. That was all he wanted from her—that vile serpent posing as a woman. That was all he needed: to retrieve the lost sliver of his soul. To be whole again. To be able to bleed.
To be able to die.
While he watched, Skatia’s nostrils flared. Her golden-eyed attention snapped his way, as if she could see him hiding within the deep shadows of the roof just as well as he could see her.
He flattened himself again and prayed she could not.
“What is it, sister?” asked the other witch, the one named Talia.
“He’s here,” Skatia hissed. “He’s close. I feel him.”
A sudden bout of discordant laughter rang out in the near distance, sharp and bright. “Sisters! We have something you might like to see!”
Footsteps drew closer. Boots scraped against stone. A thud. A grunt.
Skatia gasped. “A survivor?” She sounded utterly delighted by the prospect.
Hedley’s pulse quickened. Someone had survived the massacre? Hope sparked to life in his heart—a desperate hope.
What if it was…Dane?
Cautiously, he raised his head again and chanced a peek.
But his hope swiftly curdled into bitter disappointment when he spied the blood-spattered soldier being forced to his knees in the square by a witch’s glassy-eyed slaves.
Though he was still fully armored, it was easy enough to see that the man wasn’t his brother. He bore a sword.
Only Elmorian knights and nobles could bear swords.
Come to me. Those three words pierced his mind again without warning. Dark. Silken.
Skatia. She called to him, just as she had been calling to him since she first arrived at the dunes outside Fort Mysai two days ago.
And each time she called, it grew that much harder to resist.
Slinking back from the roof’s edge, Hedley pressed his brow against the cool marble and clenched his eyes shut as another wave of need crashed through his body. A need to join the viperous witch down in the square. To answer her call at last.
It would be so easy. All he had to do was…submit.
No! He needed her witchblade. That was all he needed. Surely, her witchblade was the key. But then what? Could he smash the jewel embedded in its hilt? Could he melt the accursed blade?
And how was he supposed to get it off her in the first place?
The woman was never alone.
More footsteps pounded against the streets below. More voices. Angry voices. Drakmori.
“That man is our prisoner.”
“And he is our prisoner now.”
“You are not in command here, witch.”
“Neither are you in command of me. I answer only to Our Lady Below.”
“I don’t care who you answer to, but that man is mine. The ones with him called him the Lord Commander. We can ransom him back to his family.”
Come to me, my wayward witchsworn. Come to me…
Hedley’s stomach churned. His head swam. He had to get away from here—from her—until he could steal her witchblade. But not now. There were too many watching now. He would have to wait for nightfall, when his odds of succeeding would be better.
Dane. Hedley narrowed his focus to that one single flicker of hope still sputtering weakly in his heart. There was a small chance that his brother might be hiding in the city somewhere. Or perhaps he had already fled east toward Drakmor with the rest of the deserters.
Or perhaps he was simply dead.
A gasp rang out from the square below. Something metallic thudded against the cobblestones. “It is the phantom,” a woman’s voice declared.
Hedley’s blood ran cold. He had been spotted. But how?
“No!” Skatia’s voice cracked forth like the snap of a whip. “This man cannot be your phantom, Sister.”
“How would you know? We have been the ones plagued by this little rat for months. I have seen his face many a time. I would know it anywhere.”
“I’m not—” a voice started to protest. A voice Hedley knew all too well.
The sound of flesh striking flesh plunged the voice into silence. “That is for the trebuchets,” a witch hissed. Another slap. Another strike. “And that is for my witchsworn.”
Like a man caught in a dream, Hedley crawled back to the edge of the roof and stared down at the captured Elmorian whose helm now lay off to the side, revealing his face. A face he knew despite the blood now marring it. It was a face he had known all his life.
Because he wore it, too.
“Dane!” he screamed, his brother’s name ripping forth from some place deep in his fractured soul before he could stop it. Dane was alive. He was alive. Praise the Lord, he was alive.
Time seemed to slow as all eyes lifted his way, including the sky-blue pair belonging to the prisoner. It was like staring into a reflection. Dane. His identical twin. His brother was older by only ten minutes, yet they had been a matched set since birth
Until they arrived in Mysai and were assigned to different units to keep their commanding knights from becoming confused about which Wilsham was which.
His position already compromised, he slowly pushed himself to his feet. Five witches stared back at him. Nine witchsworn. A dozen Drakmori. His brother.
He was sure he looked like a madman standing on that roof, smudged head to toe with soot to turn his brown hair black and dulling the color of his borrowed armor from bright Arathian red to muddy brick.
The witch Talia widened her eyes. “There are two of them.”
Skatia narrowed hers. “Now there is your phantom, Sisters.”
The Drakmori captain now with them barked, “Bring him down!”
“No!” Dane shouted, horror writing itself across his face. “Hedley!”
One of the other witches peeled back her lips and snarled, “Do not waste your arrows.”
But the Drakmori didn’t listen. Their bows lifted. Their strings snapped taut.
A barrage of arrows sailed through the air toward him.
Ignoring the projectiles, Hedley dropped and rolled straight off the roof, plunging himself into freefall for a few dizzying moments before he landed hard. Inelegant. His hands and knees slammed into the stone of the square with a sickening force. He should have broken something.
He didn’t.
His Arathian sickle-blade—a khopesh he now knew it was called—still hung at his hip.
But he snatched up an abandoned halberd from the pile of the dead anyway as he rose to his feet.
The witches watched him with open wariness, their golden eyes sparkling in the swiftly fading light.
The Drakmori exchanged confused glances.
Dane stared.
“Release the prisoner,” Hedley instructed, addressing the witches rather than the Drakmori.
One of them, whom he was entirely too familiar with and yet still did not know her name, arched an eyebrow. “Or what, phantom?”
He leveled the point of his polearm at the hulking brute standing at her side, eyes dull. Dead. “Or I’ll decapitate that puppet of yours just like I did your last.”
The air around the witch shifted. The acrid tang of witchfire crackled on the wind.
Hedley bolted for the nearest alleyway just as a bout of flame engulfed the space where he had been standing a mere second ago. The heat of it lapped against his back, threatening to singe what remained of his already tattered and scorched cloak.
Come to me! Skatia’s voice boomed within his mind again, sending him stumbling, threatening to drive him to his knees. You insolent fool. Come to me at once!
Drawing in a shaky breath, Hedley kept running and dove down the next street, prepared to loop back around and return to the square from another vantage point. He had to get Dane. They had to get out of there before even more troops arrived.
Behind him, a man’s voice rang out in a wordless shout. Shooting a glance over his shoulder, he caught sight of an Arathian patrol further down the way, looking straight at him.
He cursed beneath his breath.
Too late.
Please, Lord. He had no plan. No idea what he was doing. But still he ran full tilt back into the square, halberd at the ready. Closer to Dane this time.
Closer to the witches, too.