Chapter Five
THEA
T hea charged down the rise towards the banks, where villagers stood in small huddles on the icy shores, shaking and in shock. Plumes of smoke drifted from the pyre into the wintry afternoon sky. Black stained the snow.
‘What happened?’ Thea called, drawing her horse up short and leaping from the saddle, her hands already on her weapons.
She heard Cal and Kipp catch up, the snow crunching beneath their boots as they too dismounted and scanned the area.
‘What happened here?’ Thea demanded again, reaching a group of elders who met her gaze.
A silver-haired woman stepped forward, her lined face wary, grief-stricken. ‘The howlers came.’
Thea whirled around, surveying the shores for signs of more danger. ‘Where from? How many?’
‘From everywhere,’ the woman said. ‘Pockets of darkness opened up all over like portals, and they came through.’
Frowning, Thea adjusted her grips on her sword and dagger. ‘What… Where are they now?’
The woman raised a finger, pointing to the flaming pyre. ‘Dead,’ she replied, before turning her finger towards the lake’s edge, where black smears mixed with red. ‘Or dragged back to the darkness.’
Thea glanced at Cal and Kipp, who were both looking baffled.
‘You have warriors here? Guardians from Thezmarr stationed nearby?’ Thea pressed, still unable to understand how a group of fishermen had fended off the significant attack.
The woman shook her head. ‘He came from the forest.’
‘Who did?’
‘The man. Some said he was a Warsword.’
Thea’s stomach bottomed out and she felt her friends tense beside her. ‘What Warsword?’
‘He slayed the cursed men, protected our village… We would have perished, met the same fate as them if he hadn’t.’
Thea wasn’t sure she was breathing; wasn’t sure she could move. ‘Where is he now?’
‘It took him. That… thing.’ The woman was still pointing a shaking finger towards the lake.
Thea took in the sight of the red blood mixed with the black, so stark against the pristine white of the snow.
Something sharp clawed inside her, constricting her airway, clouding her thoughts.
She didn’t even realise she was walking to the lake until she stood at its frozen edge.
There, she crouched in the blood-stained snow, tasting the ash from the pyre on her tongue.
It took him .
Thea turned her gaze upon the vast lake.
There was not a single crack in its surface, no sign of a breach but for the mess at its shore.
She grasped a fistful of snow, letting the cold seep through her glove as a sense of disbelief settled over her like a heavy mist. It wasn’t true.
It couldn’t be. She hadn’t scoured the midrealms for a year to capture Wilder Hawthorne, only for him to be snatched up by a monster beneath a frozen lake.
Every breath felt heavy, threatening to pull her under.
‘Thea?’ Kipp asked, coming to her side with Cal.
‘It can’t be him.’ She stared at the snow melting between her fingers. Beside her, she sensed rather than saw Cal and Kipp exchanging another one of their looks. Thea’s vision blurred, her muscles suddenly going weak. ‘He was mine to capture. Mine to —’
A scream pierced the air like an arrow.
Thea shot to her feet, turning in time to see a tentacle of darkness shoot from beneath the lake’s surface, shattering the ice and wrapping around the closest villager.
With a shout and no regard for her own safety, Thea surged towards it, brandishing her sword as she tore across the ice. Fighting to keep herself upright as the surface grew slick beneath her boots, she made for the monster and its victim.
A young woman dangled in its grasp, her mouth open in a silent scream as black poison dripped from its suckers, eating at her skin.
‘Hold on!’ Thea shouted, swinging her blade as she reached the limb protruding from the ice and slicing through its rubbery flesh with a sickening wet sound.
At the contact, something rumbled beneath the surface, the ice creaking loudly. Thea thrust her blade in deep this time, blood spurting from the creature’s wound, but it didn’t let go – the girl was still flailing in its grasp overhead. She screamed in agony as its poison seeped into her.
‘Thea, watch out!’ Cal shouted, just as something broke through the ice beneath her and grabbed her ankle. A pale hand, webbed with darkness, a blackened nail at the tip of each clawing finger.
Thea cried out in surprise and severed it at the wrist, sending it skidding across the frozen surface of the lake with a smear of black blood.
‘What the fuck…’ she panted, starting back towards the festering tentacle.
There was no time to think, to feel, only to act.
As she ran, another hand, and another, shot up through the ice, sending shards flying like glass, grasping for her feet, her ankles, trying to trip her up, to pull her down.
Thea dodged their attempts and palmed her dagger of Naarvian steel as she eyed a second tentacle tearing through the ice, reaching for the poor girl’s kicking legs, as though it meant to tear her in half.
With all her might, Thea thrust her dagger into the base of the monster’s limb, twisting viciously before bracing her feet on the ice as best she could and swinging her sword overhead, hacking through the skin and muscle, hot blood gushing across her.
A shriek sounded as the young woman held hostage by the creature fell to the snowy banks of the shore.
Villagers rushed forward to pull her to her feet.
Dazed, Thea watched for a moment; the girl could walk, could move her body fully.
She would be battered and bruised, no doubt, but she was mostly unharmed.
Just as a distant sense of relief blossomed in Thea’s chest, ice shattered by her boots and another black-veined hand broke through the surface.
With a swipe of her blade, she severed its fingers.
She kicked it back beneath the ice just before a cry from the lakeside snatched her attention back to her friends.
She inhaled sharply, the cold hitting her lungs anew.
At some point during her battle with the tentacled creature, several cursed men had broken through the ice and breached the shore. There, Cal and Kipp, along with a handful of fishermen, fought them back.
Adjusting her grip on her blades, Thea made for the fray, ready to spill blood, ready to carve the enemy into tiny pieces and add them to the pyre. She would choose violence, for everything she had gained and lost, for everything that had hurt her, for —
Thea became lighter than air, more fluid than water.
She felt the world shift around her, felt the kiss of a blade before it struck, saw the decision in a man’s eyes before he made it.
This, this was what she lived for now: the song of steel, the splatter of blood, the final breath a host of darkness stole before she took its life.
With her own blood roaring in her ears, she couldn’t feel the bite of the cold, or the blows of her enemy. She felt only the call to fight, and keep fighting. She carved through one howler after another, relishing each demise with a cold smile.
Until the ice groaned.
Burying her dagger in her opponent’s gut, Thea turned to the lake, where three creatures had emerged, shadows rippling from their slimy, squid-like bodies.
‘What the fuck are they?’ she gasped. The monsters were revolting, their bulbous heads looming over flailing arms, giant beady eyes seeming to stare at everything all at once.
‘Juvenile reef dwellers,’ Kipp managed, shoving a howler away, allowing Cal to thrust his blade through its side.
‘Like kraken from the storybooks. Cursed ones, by the looks of it. Don’t know what they’re doing here, though.
They’re supposed to be from the sea. Mind the suckers – they’re poisonous.
’ He panted as he momentarily rested his hands on his knees, not taking his eyes off the monsters that had now reached the snowy shore.
‘I’m guessing they’re the offspring of the big one that had that girl in its grasp. ’
As if in answer, two more massive tentacles shattered the ice, sweeping across the shore, snatching up one of the slower villagers and tossing them aside with a sickening thud.
The rest of the common folk began to scream in earnest then, and a good portion of the men who’d been fighting alongside the trio fled.
Thea was already twirling her sword, eyeing up the smaller monsters. ‘Any particular way to kill them?’
Kipp seemed to gather his strength. ‘Cut off all its arms, shove your blade in its brain and light it on fire for good measure?’
‘Suppose that’d do it,’ Thea retorted. ‘And the big one?’
‘How about we deal with one terrifying monster at a time,’ Cal said, his eyes widening as the giant tentacles thrashed the banks of the lake again, toppling over the pyre of burning bodies.
Thea charged.
The reef dwellers were each about the size of a horse.
Having fought rheguld reapers and shadow wraiths, Thea conceded that she’d dealt with worse.
But as she battled the first of the water monsters, she realised its eight arms were the problem.
She severed one, and another was already lashing out at her, threatening to swipe her legs out from under her, or worse, wrap itself around her middle and lift her up into the air.
These creatures didn’t belong on the banks of a frozen lake. They had been sent here, cursed with darkness just like the howlers and set upon a place in which they had no business being. There was no other explanation.
Thea kept swinging, ignoring the exhaustion that had latched onto her bones.
A powerful tentacle hit her in the side, sending her sprawling across the snow, knocking the air from her lungs.
On all fours, she gasped for air, winded, only to be struck by another tentacle.
A sharp pain blazed through her head as she hit something hard beneath the snow.
Dots swimming in her vision, she staggered to her feet, almost falling over herself.
She should have listened to the others. They weren’t at full strength.
Thea’s skin burned through her shirt as another tentacle made contact, but she ducked beneath it, messily dodging its attack in order to get close to its body.
With a cry of disgust, she lunged at what looked to be its head, driving her dagger into its skull, right between its many sets of eyes.
The creature made a last surge to grab her, but as she yanked her dagger from its head, it sagged into the snow, its tentacles twitching.
A blood-curdling shriek echoed across the lake – and the entire frozen surface shattered. More tentacles shot out at them, sending a tidal wave of freezing water raining down on the banks.
And the thing that emerged…
A scream caught in Thea’s throat.
The cursed reef dweller surged towards them, Cal and Kipp still locked in a battle with one of its young, Thea covered in the blood of another.
The monster drew closer, close enough for Thea to see the texture of its skin, and the poison leaking from its suckers —
It wasn’t attacking. It was falling .
The monster plunged through the air, raining down glacial lake water and poison. Thea bolted out of the way as its body fell, as though time had slowed, before it collapsed in an enormous heap in the snow, black blood and shadows oozing from its corpse.
Ice crunched. A figure landed deftly on the shore, his powerful frame dripping wet, a giant, bloody black mass grasped in his fist.
Thea’s knees buckled, but she remained upright as the heart of a cursed reef dweller landed with a splatter at her feet.
She looked from the still-pulsing organ to the silver eyes that met hers, her breath catching.
She hadn’t seen him in a year.
But that steely gaze was as fierce as ever; more so – it was utterly ablaze as it latched onto her.
Thea didn’t move. Not yet. She didn’t know if she could trust her sight.
The man towering before her looked more savage than he ever had, with a new fracture on his nose, his beard longer, his plain armour in tatters.
Icicles clung to his thick lashes and dark hair.
A tremor ran down the strong column of his throat as he returned her stare, his knuckles paling as he gripped the hilt of his sword.
Even in the icy wind, the scent of rosewood and leather enveloped her.
Everything else faded around them.
It was just her and him, and Thea felt herself teetering on the precipice… of what, she didn’t know.
He took a step towards her, and another, closing the distance between them.
The memory of him struck her without warning, so visceral she could taste him on her lips, could feel the push of him inside her. The longing that surged through her was intense, uncomfortable. All the while she warred with herself.
Wilder Hawthorne reached for the lone piece of hair that had escaped her braid and tucked it behind her ear. ‘Thea…’ he murmured, his voice broken and hoarse.
The breath lodged in her lungs loosened and she stepped forward, eliminating that final space between them and looking up at him, at those silver eyes she’d known so well, her heart pounding.
‘We need to talk,’ he said softly. ‘I can explain everything.’
Thea couldn’t help it. She leant in close, her body alight with fire despite the cold. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to talk,’ she heard herself say, her clothes growing damp against the press of his wet armour.
A subtle quiver traced his strong jaw. ‘Gods, I’ve missed you.’
‘Have you?’ she whispered against his lips.
‘Every day…’ He rested his brow against hers, his chest rising and falling as he inhaled her scent. ‘Every fucking day.’
She lingered for a second longer, meeting his gaze. ‘You may come to regret that,’ she said.
Before she snapped the manacles into place around his wrists.