Chapter 7 #2
“I’d rather die.”
He bends to my ear and his warm breath tickles my hair.
“Stop fighting,” he whispers, close enough for me to shiver, and low enough for no one else to hear. “I’m trying to help you. Do you understand? Let me help you.”
My instincts have never led me astray. At least, not when I’m in full control of my anger. It’s more difficult to pay attention when I’m in the throes of fury and lost to the sensation. Right now, I’m struggling to reel myself back, and some strange tickling in my nerves gives me pause.
I want to believe him.
Maybe it’s because of how he fought on the battlefield. He’d been brutal and beautiful but never employed any underhanded maneuvers against his enemy. A fair fight, at least until the pale dragon did his worst.
“Please,” Kieran adds.
He straightens sharply.
How can I believe him when we’re head-to-head and I’m losing?
He adjusts his fingers against my neck, my collarbone, his large hands splayed over my skin. The world stops spinning, but I’m still in motion, still lost in the depths of those fathomless eyes. They darken as I watch until the rich brown hue becomes charcoal.
Help me? No.
He’s trying to damn me.
“Leave her alone!”
One of the children pushes away from the group at the same moment my jaw drops and words of agreement half form in my head. The fifteen-year-old boy, poised between child and man, throws one of the elderly farmers at the nearest soldier and cuts toward Kieran.
“Get off of her!” the boy yells. “Stop touching her.”
He makes contact with Kieran’s arm, tugging at the shoulder plate of armor, and Kieran loses his hold on my neck. My wrist.
My freed arm drops to my side and I gawk at the boy just as Tristan draws his dagger from the holster across his chest. He moves in a blink, his reflexes quick, cutting across the cave toward us.
The world resumes full speed with a sickening lurch. Shadows shift and the sun outside struggles to cut through the plumes of darkness. But Tristan reaches the boy. They clash together.
“No, don’t!”
The warning hardly leaves me before Tristan stabs the boy in the throat. My scream ramps up, the boy’s eyes widening and blood spurting from the hole. A terrible gurgle sends even more crimson sputtering free.
Kieran whips me away in the same motion, bending at the knees and throwing me over his shoulder, his hands rough on my legs. Blocking my view and taking me from the violence of the teenager’s dying breath.
“Contain the others,” he calls back.
“No!” Howling, I fight, beating against Kieran’s back, craning my neck in time to see the boy drop to his side and lie still.
My fault.
He’s dead because of me, because he tried to help me.
“You can’t save them,” Kieran grunts. He absorbs every punch. “This is what happens when you fight without knowing what you’re doing. When you don’t have a clear path forward.”
“You heard my cousin!” Tristan laughs. “Round them up. We’re off to market, boys.”
Market. They won’t survive.
My words devolve into a seamless tirade of sound. Kieran sets me on my feet hard enough to send my teeth clacking together. At the mouth of the cave, with the ground shaky beneath us and pebbles trailing down the hillside, he slaps me.
Once. Twice.
The reverberation of flesh hitting flesh does nothing to stop my screaming until he goes for a third slap. With each connection, my teeth rattle. My cheeks sting and finally the sound cuts off.
“He’s gone. It was an accident.”
Young. Handsome. Even as my enemy, those things are fact. I hate him.
That’s what matters.
“People die. People you care about. But if you let me help you, then I’ll make sure you don’t,” he insists.
His movements are sure as he meets my blows with his own. He matches me, hit for hit, my fists bouncing off his armor until I send my elbow into his side. He flinches, but it’s for show. He doesn’t feel anything.
He’s dead inside and still walking around like his body hasn’t caught up to the truth.
Then Kieran sweeps me off my feet with a curse.
“It won’t do any good for me to apologize.” Behind him, the sounds of a scuffle grow dim and distant. “Tristan would have killed the boy eventually. He does the same to anyone who fights back against him. It’s lucky you’re still breathing.”
My screams die away into a low moan. Golden rays of sunlight scald my retinas as he hauls me out of the cave.
The decline makes it difficult to traverse the mountains with any sort of grace but Kieran manages. He picks his way along the path like a goat or an elk, sure of his steps, sure of the path.
He makes good time and disappears into a thickened grove of trees. There, he drops me on my feet, facing him, stealing the opportunity to latch a length of rope around my wrist.
Where had he gotten it?
Why hadn’t I noticed?
Reality fades until it’s only the two of us standing in the middle of the blur. The scratchy material slices fissures in my overly sensitive skin as he wraps it around my wrists, binding me with a complicated knot.
“It’s for your own good,” he reminds me conversationally. “You have no reason to trust me but I’m telling you now, you’re here for a reason. You’re alive for a reason. Focus on that and it won’t hurt as much.”
The screams from the cave flay me, alive in my memory. I hear nothing now. Kieran draws the rope around my ankles and pulls it tight, looping it up to connect it to my wrists. His deft fingers manage expert knots.
“You want to hurt me. Right?” His tone is tight. “I understand. Trust me, I understand.”
He’s got me separated from the others. Separated and tied and responsible. So blasted responsible, the gemstone on Illonia’s necklace sinks into my chest bones.
The sapphire gives a throb of awareness when I acknowledge it, or maybe it’s my own imagination playing games with me. My mother would be horrified. She’d have fought harder, smarter.
I shouldn’t be alive right now.
Harsh, guttural breaths shake my chest. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost it entirely.
“It’s off to DragonSpear,” Kieran continues. The sound of his voice is another tether to this hellscape existence. “I have to finish searching the area around your village and then we’ll be off by night. Sometimes it’s easier to travel at night.”
A storm thunders in my head. He throws me over his shoulder again and takes the slender path between aspen trees with precision.
“I’ll be on my dragon but there are carts for transport. It shouldn’t be more than a few days before we reach the Academy.”
The sounds behind us slowly dissipate with distance and a hysterical cry tightens the muscle at the back of my neck. The ache in my head goes blinding and my vision cuts out for a second. Either the tears come and I cry in front of this muck-raker or they don’t and I die of an aneurysm.
Choice two is much better than the first.
Kieran makes no more assurances. He says nothing as he walks back to whatever camp our enemies have set up. He carefully picks his way toward the wreckage of the field, and I thrash harder to throw him off balance.
Servitude begins with the stench of burned flesh on the wind and the cries of the elderly and children who thought they were safe.
People like him understand violence. They understand resistance insomuch as they dominate and crush it.
The sweet scent of blood brands itself on the inside of my nostrils. It’s coming from him, from his armor, my face tucked against his back.
Oh, no.
Who does the blood belong to? Large hazy spots threaten to overwhelm my vision and I teeter on the edge of passing out entirely.
There is pain and sharp sunlight. There is the dark one towing me along and I move behind him, my thoughts as bleak as his hair.
He’s pulling me away from everything I know. He knows I’m afraid and the realization is a sharp, ugly laugh in the face of my confusion.
I’ve lost, and he’s going to ship me off to the school of my dreams as a maid instead of a student. It’s salt rubbed in a wound. It’s having my dreams twisted and warped into something out of a nightmare.
My entire body tenses and a beat of silence passes.
Kieran sets me against the base of a slender ash tree and loops the leather straps from his ankle harness around me to keep me tethered. He spares one final look at me before glancing out the way we’d come.
“I’ll be back.”
I don’t care.
I squeeze my eyes closed until the cadence of his footsteps fades. Eventually this place will heal from the wounds of fire and ferocity. I won’t be here to play witness.
DragonSpear is harsh enough. We’ve all heard stories of its failure to protect its students. What sort of horrors await me there as a slave?