Chapter Seven
THEA
I t had been a year. A year since she’d seen that glorious body, sculpted by the Furies themselves. It was every bit as chiselled and powerful as before: golden skin, broad, round shoulders, a torso corded with hard muscle, and a V-shaped dip of sinew that pointed straight to his —
Thea swallowed hard as Hawthorne’s impressive frame disappeared beneath the steaming water and his head tipped back to rest on the lip of the tub, his eyes closed.
Forgetting herself, she let her gaze follow the dark ink swirling across the warrior’s skin, noting the scatter of new scars cutting through the pattern, a sight that made her chest ache involuntarily.
She remembered tracing that tattoo with her fingers, with her tongue, the flash of memory sending a ripple of longing through her.
‘You’re welcome to join me.’ Hawthorne didn’t even deign to open his eyes. ‘If staring’s not doing enough for you.’
That wrenched her out of her trance. ‘I’d sooner claw my eyes out.’
‘That’s not the reaction I recall.’
‘Enough,’ Thea snapped, her face heating.
‘I’ve told you before, it’s never enough, Princess. You damn well know it.’
Thea’s toes curled in her boots, but she kept her voice flat, betraying nothing of the desire coursing through her traitorous body. ‘I thought you wanted to explain yourself? Get a fair hearing, or so you said.’
‘You didn’t strike me as being in the mood to talk… Something else, perhaps? To ease the tension?’
Thea ground her teeth. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she told him coldly. ‘It won’t work.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You want me to lose control —’
A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘That’s one way to describe it.’
‘Of my magic, you bastard. You want to report back to your masters about my powers? That ship has sailed. I’ve got nothing for you.’
‘Magic doesn’t just vanish.’
‘What would you know about it?’
‘More than you, Apprentice.’
The arrogant prick still hadn’t opened his eyes, hadn’t moved from where he lounged in the hot soapy water while she sat in her filthy, damp clothes.
Strong of mind, strong of body, strong of heart . She tried to ground herself with the meditation. And failed.
‘Fuck this,’ she snapped, jumping to her feet. ‘You move, I’ll kill you.’
At that, Hawthorne opened his eyes and fixed her with his silver stare. ‘We both know that if you wanted me dead, Althea Zoltaire, that arrow would have hit my heart, not my shoulder.’
Thea held back a gasp, her gaze dropping to the thick, raised line of jagged pink skin above his pectoral.
‘Don’t say my name… Don’t ever say my name again.’ Those were the last words she had said to him in those woods, in the moment before she’d let that arrow fly.
‘Next time, I won’t miss.’
‘You didn’t miss, Thea. You hit me exactly where you wanted.’
Thea couldn’t stand it anymore. Rage pounded in her ears, and with a scream of fury, she yanked the door open and left the traitor in the tub, slamming the door closed behind her.
She was so enraged that she nearly barged straight into Kipp, the ends of his hair wet.
‘It’s going well, then?’ he asked with a grimace.
‘Don’t even fucking start, Kristopher,’ she ground out. ‘Tell me there’s more hot water?’
He had the good sense to get out of her way with a flourish. ‘Level below, second door on the left.’
‘You’ll watch the traitor?’
‘He’s not really my type.’
‘ Kipp. ’
Her friend raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’ll guard the door, but we both know I’m useless. I’ve got no chance against that behemoth if he wants to get past me.’
‘In case you were wondering,’ Hawthorne called from behind the door, ‘the walls are really thin. But rest assured, I won’t be going anywhere until I’ve said my piece.’
‘Oh, I’m so fucking assured,’ Thea muttered.
Kipp simply shrugged, as though the word of a known traitor was good enough for him.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Thea sighed, and headed for her bath.
Although it was on her own orders that they were back in their saddles in the freezing cold, Thea mourned the loss of the giant tub she’d submerged herself in, and the perfectly adequate feather bed she’d left untouched in the inn.
‘We’re not taking the main road,’ she said, clenching her teeth to stop them from chattering.
‘The main road will get us to Vios faster,’ Hawthorne countered from atop his stallion. ‘Or do you want to spend more time with me, Princess?’
‘A former Warsword will attract attention on the main route. That will delay us more than uneven terrain —’
‘Couldn’t we have had this discussion by the fire?’ Kipp moaned, pulling his hood tighter around his face. ‘Rather than in the middle of a fucking thundersnow?’
‘This isn’t a fucking thundersnow. You said so yourself: there hasn’t been one in centuries. And this isn’t a discussion. We’re going through the forest,’ Thea declared, starting her horse towards the icy treeline.
She caught Hawthorne’s shrug from the corner of her eye, as though he’d known she’d make that choice all along.
Had he only suggested the road so she’d dig her heels in on the idea of the alternative route?
Was he playing games with her? Her body tensed at the thought of him humiliating her again. She refused to let that happen.
‘Move out,’ she ordered, squeezing her mare’s sides with her thighs, desperate to put some distance between herself and the fallen Warsword, the image of him in the bath still seared into her mind.
The days were getting shorter, reduced to a few fleeting hours of light hemmed in by the dark.
Night had long since fallen, and Cal and Kipp carried torches to illuminate the barren trees and snow falling in earnest around them.
Checking her compass, Thea led their small party from the main trade route of Aveum into the frozen forests, taking the less travelled path.
They made for the capital, Vios, where the rulers of the midrealms would soon gather for the eclipse, and to decide Wilder Hawthorne’s fate.
Thankfully, the forest offered shelter from the howling winds whipping down the main road, but in its place was an eerie quiet, broken only by the rattling of Hawthorne’s chains with every step of his horse.
Thea told herself to be grateful for the sound, for it served as a reminder that it was Hawthorne the traitor in her midst, not Wilder, her former mentor, former lover…
The man whose hands had guided hers across her weapons, teaching her; whose arms she’d slept in without fear of nightmares.
She shook the thoughts from her head and focused on the icicles glistening in the torchlight. Soon, they would arrive in Vios. She could shove her prisoner before the rulers and claim her prize – his swords and her dignity – and leave him to whatever sentence awaited him.
Movement to her left caught her eye and she ground her teeth as the fallen Warsword in question brought his horse up alongside hers. In the flickering light, shadows masked his face. Fitting , Thea thought as she tried to pull ahead.
Each time she steered away, he wove through the gnarled, naked trees and found her again.
On his fourth attempt, he leant across and practically growled at her, ‘You promised to give me a fair hearing.’
Thea’s jaw already ached from clenching it so hard. ‘So speak,’ she said.
‘It’s not a fair hearing if the judge refuses to actually listen.’
She glanced across at him. His expression was hard.
‘What could you, a traitor, possibly say to sway me? After everything you have done?’ Her cheeks burned despite the cold.
She knew Cal and Kipp could hear every word, knew exactly what she’d been like in the months after the battle of Notos, after Hawthorne.
The fallen Warsword’s gaze followed hers and a flicker of understanding crossed his face before that mask of indifference slid back into place. ‘You will hear me, Apprentice, one way or another.’
Thea’s grip tightened on her reins, her whole body going rigid with rage. ‘Tell me, Hawthorne – were you always a traitor? Right from the beginning? Or did something sway you along the way?’
Hawthorne narrowed his eyes. ‘You know nothing about it, Princess. Nothing.’ His voice, once melodic and gentle, now resonated with a thunderous timbre that echoed through the air. Each word dripped with venomous scorn.
‘And yet you don’t deny it,’ Thea challenged.
‘I don’t deny what you saw in Notos with the shadow-touched. But it wasn’t what it looked like,’ he told her. ‘Let me explain, please.’
Thea hated that her curiosity was piqued, that she wanted to know the reasoning behind his madness.
Seeing him free those half-wraiths in Notos had been like a knife to the gut.
Time had slowed as she’d felt everything between them unravel.
All of it lies. But in her weaker moments since, a tiny part of her had wanted it to make sense, for there to be a logical explanation.
She had spent the last year going over those final minutes again and again, trying to work out what she’d missed, trying to understand how it had all ended up the way it had.
‘Tell me, then,’ she said, fighting to keep her voice even.
Relief flashed in Hawthorne’s eyes. ‘The shadow-touched I saved – they weren’t part of the enemy force. They’re not in league with the reapers, or the other monsters plaguing the midrealms.’
‘No?’ Thea replied. ‘You’re telling me that the half-wraith creatures who leak shadow and darkness, who bear wings on their backs and talons at their fingertips, are not born of the same evil?’
‘They are victims of it, like so many other people in the midrealms. They may not have lost their lives, but they have lost more than you can know – a part of themselves.’ Hawthorne paused for a moment, seeming to gather himself.
‘A shadow-touched person is the result of a reaper trying to curse a human in the same way it would create a howler or spread its darkness to another monster. It nearly happened to you in the Bloodwoods…’