Chapter 26
When the caravan stopped for lunch the next day, Azreth went off on his own while Raiya ate with Jai and Madira and some of the others. When she went to look for him later, she found him near the herd. The sun was bright and cold that day, and he was a vibrant spot of alien blue in the landscape of green and brown. He was still wearing her gauze bindings, though she guessed he’d probably healed quickly enough that he no longer needed them.
She watched from a distance as he approached the behelgi. He hadn’t attempted to get close to them since that first time he’d seen them, when they’d encountered the Paladin riders.
The behelgi watched him closely, their heads raised, eyes angled toward him. As soon as he came near, they darted away.
Raiya sighed quietly. Azreth didn’t try to approach again, but contented himself with observing them quietly. Animals were sensitive to magic. Behelgi were sturdy, even-tempered creatures, but even they shied away when approached by a demon.
This was the way it would always be. Azreth was not of their world. He couldn’t change what he was, but she wouldn’t have asked him to even if he could.
“The caravan is moving again,” she said softly. “Are you hungry? I haven’t seen you eat anything in a long time.”
“The Roamers don’t like the way I eat.”
She thought about how she’d seen him eat, ripping into raw meat like a wild, ravenous carnivore, and she couldn’t help but be amused. The Roamers who had witnessed it must have been as unnerved as she had been.
“So I eat in private,” he added.
“You don’t have to do that. Eat with me next time you’re hungry.”
“You were sleeping last time.”
“Wait until I wake up, then.”
“Why?”
“Eating is a social activity for mortals. We like to gather and talk and enjoy our meals together. It’s important.”
He tilted his head in that curious, interested way he often did when she explained the intricacies of mortal life to him. “All right,” he agreed.
They kept away from the other Roamers, for the most part. Some of the people in the clan were surprisingly accepting of his presence, but many still had mixed feelings about him. It probably helped that he had shown he was willing to protect the clan from threats. Even if people didn’t like him, they liked having the extra muscle around.
Raiya had no desire to cause tension between any of them, and it appeared Azreth didn’t, either. They walked at the very back of the group, almost out of sight of the others, where their presence was less obtrusive. She was content there. Azreth was the person in the group she most wanted to spend time with, anyway. Sometimes, Madira and Jai dropped back to walk with them. Other members of the clan also approached occasionally to ask if Azreth was healing well, or just to say hello. Raiya got the impression they mostly just wanted to get a closer look at him, but they were polite enough.
“What are you thinking about?” Raiya asked after they’d been silent for half an hour or so.
“Your husband.”
The mood instantly soured. “I would rather think about anything else,” she said.
“I think of him often. I imagine tearing off his limbs or burning him until he is blackened and crisp. I dream of his screams.”
Raiya gave him a sidelong glance. “I am not sure even Nirlan deserves those things,” she said carefully.
“Does he not? Even after what he’s done to you? What he’s done to me?”
She didn’t know what she wanted anymore.
She had once thought she wanted Nirlan dead, but the more she was confronted with the reality of killing him, the more she feared it. She imagined his body broken the way Azreth had described, and it made her sick. She wanted him dead, and she didn’t.
“I’m not sure I can go through with it,” she admitted quietly. “I’m not sure I can just… kill him.”
Azreth studied her, his eyes sharp. This must have felt like a betrayal to him. It was a betrayal. Her palms began to sweat, and she balled her fists into the fabric of her cloak.
“I spent every day with him for the better part of two years,” she explained. “We were a part of each other’s lives for so long. I thought I would spend the rest of my life with him, for better or worse.”
“Do you still care for him?” Azreth asked, his tone even.
Gods, no.
Did she?
She went too long without speaking, and she feared Azreth’s judgment. He was conspicuously silent, hiding whatever he was thinking.
“I hate him,” she said. “I hate everything he’s done to me, and how he makes me feel, and how much of my life he’s taken away. Everything about who he is disgusts me.”
She sniffed. Azreth was silent, and something heavy hovered between them.
“Was he never kind to you?” Azreth asked after a while.
He was backing her into a corner. “Of course he was, sometimes. Or, I thought he was. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise.”
He hummed his agreement.
“Just say what you want to say,” she said.
“You love him and hate him.”
She was surprised he’d identified the feeling so accurately.
“I don’t love him,” she said. “Maybe I loved the person I thought he was. That person was never real, but I still miss the way I felt with him in the beginning.”
“You mourn the future you thought you would have together.”
Tears pricked her eyes. “Yes.”
“But you will never have that future you imagined. He destroyed it. There is nothing left for you to love.”
A tear fell down her cheek. She gave a heavy sigh, rubbing her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m…”
Azreth stopped. He knelt down and put a hand on her face. He held her there for a moment, looking alarmed, and it seemed that he didn’t know what to do next. He’d wanted to comfort her, but didn’t quite know how.
“Think of a future with me, instead,” he said.
Raiya stared at him. Was he being serious?
He was very still, his jaw tense.
He was serious.
“I do think of that,” she said. Azreth’s eyes brightened, almost imperceptibly. As impossible as it was, she did. She thought about it every day.
There were raised voices ahead. The caravan had stopped. Raiya and Azreth both squinted down the road.
The road sloped gently downward, giving a clear view of someone coming up the road from the opposite direction. They were moving fast, their wagon bouncing unsteadily on the rough road. A swarm of large birds followed.
The birds were like none she’d ever seen. They were as big as grown men, and so black that they seemed to consume all the light around them, but their eyes glowed like green fire. One of them swooped down, talons extended, and ripped into the shoulder of the woman in the wagon. The woman screamed, clutching the wound and ducking her head.
“Do you have your bow?” Azreth asked, moving quickly toward the approaching wagon. She handed it to him without comment.
He quickly strung it and took the arrow she offered him. They weaved through the crowd of Roamers until they reached the front of the caravan, where Azreth stopped and took aim. The bow looked comically small in his hands, but his shot was perfect. The arrow arced gracefully, piercing the chest of one of the birds just as it dove toward the wagon.
The rest of the creatures continued circling, watching Azreth as he took another arrow from Raiya’s outstretched hand. He rested the arrow against the bowstring, but didn’t draw it yet.
The birds seemed to think better of their choice of targets. They turned and flew back the way they’d come. It appeared that lesser creatures of the hells knew better than to try to fight a demon.
As the wagon rolled to a stop, the riders turned their attention to Azreth. He met their gaze as he handed the bow back to Raiya.
Then a man in the back of the wagon stood up. “Lady Han-gal?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “Is that really you?”
She realized she recognized the man. He was a baker in Frosthaven. They were not close, but her stall had been next to his in the market before she’d married and closed her business. She knew he’d lived in Frosthaven all his life. She hadn’t expected he’d ever leave, but the wagon looked like it had been packed up with everything the family owned.
She hurried closer. “What are you doing here? Are you all right?”
He climbed down from the wagon, his limbs struggling a little. He looked a decade older than she remembered. Perhaps it was just nerves from the attack. “We all thought you were dead,” he said.
Raiya blinked at him. “What?”
“Lord Han-gal said…” He waved a hand. “Well, who cares what he says? Apologies, lady, but your husband is mad.”
Nirlan was surprisingly well liked in town. She’d never heard anyone talk that way about him. “What’s happened?”
The woman driving the cart, the baker’s daughter, spoke up, still cradling her bleeding shoulder. “You don’t know?”
She looked behind Raiya suddenly, stiffening. Raiya looked up to see Azreth approaching, wearing his human glamour.
“Your wound needs to be sealed,” he said pragmatically. Healing magic swirled across his palm. He knew they had already seen his true form, so Raiya knew he wasn’t trying to deceive them. He must have decided that this form would frighten them less when he approached.
The woman paled, but said nothing when Azreth moved closer to her. Raiya wasn’t sure if her silence was consent or just fear, but when Azreth had finished and the wound had closed, she looked cautiously relieved. “The lord has gotten involved with dark magic,” she said. “Involved with the cult. He and that priestess have done something awful up at the castle.”
Raiya exchanged a dark look with Azreth. The priestess had to be Gereg. “How many other monsters have you seen?” Raiya asked.
The baker shook his head. “Dozens?”
“They’ve been pouring out of the castle gate and into the streets,” the woman said. “There are those flying ones, and tiny, angry, ratlike ones with too many legs, and pale, eyeless creatures that almost look like humans, but they crawl around on all fours at night…” She shuddered.
“What about others like me?” Azreth asked.
“None like you,” the baker said. He seemed hesitant to actually say the word demon aloud, as if by not saying it, they could pretend that wasn’t what he was. “We’re heading for Ontag-ul. Lord Han-gal has doomed Frosthaven.” He glanced at Raiya nervously. “No disrespect intended, lady. There’s no point in staying. The town is done for. Everyone with a good head on their shoulders is leaving now, while they still can.”
Raiya was in disbelief. This was the worst thing Nirlan had ever done, and he’d done a lot.
But in a way, she wasn’t surprised. Nirlan’s father had lived in Frosthaven for much of his life, but Nirlan had hardly stepped foot in the town until just before his father’s death. He’d grown up in boarding schools in the big cities to the south and abroad. His heart wasn’t in Frosthaven. He didn’t care if the place she’d lived her whole life was destroyed. He didn’t care if the tiny temple and the lively market and the cheery lamps that lit the streets during the long, dark winter all turned to dust.
She took personal offense to it. It angered her more than when he raised a hand to her alone.
Azreth put a hand on her shoulder. She realized her anger had been steadily building. She took a breath.
“No offense taken,” Raiya assured the baker. “Thank you for warning us. You should get to Ontag-ul. Astra keep you.”
“And you, lady.” He gave them an appreciative nod as the caravan parted to let him go by.
The caravan erupted into chatter.
“Azreth.” Fu-lon, who was driving a wagon at the front of the caravan, beckoned him. “What do you know about this?”
“The birds are of the hells,” he said.
“Color me surprised.”
“There will be more like them. They are fierce, but they are not invulnerable, as you have seen. You should keep your weapons in hand. Keep your eyes open, especially at night. But if you see one that looks like me, run.”
The chatter quieted to nervous murmurs as he spoke. Many of them were already stringing bows and drawing swords.
The road they traveled headed north before it curved east, where the caravan was going, meaning that they would have to move closer to Frosthaven before they could move away from it.
Azreth turned to Raiya, his expression grim. “I will not have such an easy time fighting off another of my own kind.”
“Then Nirlan needs to be stopped before he summons another demon.”
Azreth said nothing, waiting for her direction.
“Do you think he and Gereg could perform another summoning without Eunaios’s help?”
“They have his work to build from. The remnants of the spell are still in that room where they imprisoned me. And I have begun to wonder if the priestess was holding back some of her knowledge from us. Perhaps she never wanted to help me. Maybe she had an idea of how to dissolve the binding all along, and she hid it from us because she wanted to bind me herself.”
Raiya felt sick. “We can’t wait until after we find a way to remove the binding. We don’t have time. If he’s found a way to loose monsters all over the countryside, people are in danger right now. We have to stop him.”
Azreth nodded. “We are in agreement.”
“But what will we do when—if—we get to him? You can’t touch him while the binding still marks you.”
“I know,” he said darkly.
That meant it was up to her.
She began unbraiding her hair, only to comb it out with her fingers and braid it again. “What could he have to gain from this? He really has gone mad.”
“Maybe he is like me,” Azreth said, earning an arched eyebrow from Raiya. “Maybe he is naturally filled with anger and a desire for destruction.”
“Maybe he is filled with anger,” she replied. “But don’t ever think that you are anything alike.”
Jai appeared at her side, Madira trailing after her. “What in the name of the Goddess is going on?” the girl asked, nudging the dead demon-bird’s wing with her toe. She wrinkled her nose. “How many more of these things are there going to be?”
“This is only the beginning,” Raiya said.
“Not if we deal with it,” Azreth replied.