Chapter Seven #2
Not for the first time, that little voice in Thea’s head pressed: What if he’s telling the truth? But she had to be doing the right thing, for what was the alternative? That she’d gone too far down the wrong path? That her choices had led them all here? No. That wasn’t an option.
She didn’t look at him. She kept her mouth shut, affording him the opportunity to continue his tale, just as she’d promised.
He forged on. ‘Only, a shadow-touched person remains true to themselves. We don’t know if it’s to do with willpower or strength of character, or something else entirely.
But the shadow-touched are those who fight against the curse when a reaper attempts to turn them.
The result is a human with special abilities and wraith traits.
They are nothing like the monsters themselves.
Those people in that cage in Notos were innocent, Thea. ’
But it wasn’t the prisoners who Thea pictured.
It was the winged storm wielder who’d held Wren captive with her shadows, her face a mask of menace, her taunting words laced with cruelty.
She pictured the carnage on the battlefield, the mutilated unit of Tverrian soldiers and the terror-etched faces of those forced to live through their nightmares in a relentless cycle.
A derisive laugh broke from Thea’s lips then. ‘Innocent?’ she scoffed. ‘I don’t know what’s worse… If this is the best lie you can come up with, or if you truly believe it yourself.’
Hawthorne’s expression twisted with pain. ‘Open your eyes for a moment, Thea —’
Her hand flew to the hilt of her dagger. ‘Oh, my eyes are wide open, traitor. I see you for exactly what you are.’
Hawthorne stared at her for a moment, as though debating how far to push her.
‘You don’t,’ he said at last, shaking his head and allowing his horse to fall back. ‘But you will.’
Thea hated that he’d had the last word, but she hated his presence more.
Hated that even after everything she had seen him do, he thought he could change her mind about him.
She had seen him with the enemy; she had heard the familiarity with which they spoke to one another.
He had freed the monsters the warriors of the midrealms had lost their lives to capture, and she had witnessed him vanishing amid the shadows.
Within the depths of Thea’s soul, a tempest brewed, dark and unyielding.
Hawthorne’s betrayal, not only of the guild, but of her, was like a poisonous viper that had struck the very core of her being.
Her rage blazed through her, ready to consume all in its path.
And yet… she felt no magic, no storm waiting to break from the confines of her body, no lightning singing through her veins.
Though her heart pounded fiercely, its merciless rhythm like the beat of a war drum, she felt not a whisper of otherworldly power at her fingertips.
It was as though it had never been there.
Why? Anger had been the key many times before, tapping into that symphony of fury that so often simmered beneath her skin. There was no denying she felt that way now. Lately, her body was always coiled in anger, always ready to strike. She yearned to unleash the full force of her wrath, and yet…
Thea inhaled the icy night air, hoping it would smother the inferno within. She had no such luck. Instead she fixed her eyes upon the snow ahead and pushed on, as she had done for the past year.
Hours later, Thea could no longer dismiss the sheen of sweat on her mare’s coat and called the others to a halt.
‘The horses need to rest,’ she said flatly, swinging down from the saddle as she spotted a nearby stream.
‘They’re not the only ones,’ Kipp said, following her lead and bringing his horse to the water’s edge. Cal was already starting a fire at the base of a large oak tree.
Gods, she was glad for Kipp and Cal. Anything to avoid being alone with Hawthorne again.
Thea scanned the forest in a sudden panic, but spotted Hawthorne collecting branches despite the irons around his wrists. She loosed a breath and averted her gaze, opting to sift through her saddlebag to distract herself.
But soon, his voice pierced the frigid air. ‘There has been no call from the Rite, I take it?’
Kipp was already shaking his head, but Thea flung out a hand.
‘Don’t tell him anything,’ she commanded.
‘He’s not to be trusted.’ Seating herself on a nearby fallen trunk, she unsheathed Malik’s dagger and turned it over in her hands.
The weapon, once gleaming with a deadly shine, now bore the scars of time, its edge dulled by the countless enemies she’d slain with it.
‘I taught you to care for your blades better than that,’ Hawthorne’s voice sounded again.
Thea ignored him, having already reached for her whetstone.
Esyllt, the weapons master of Thezmarr, had given it to her before she’d departed Tver.
Its coarse surface was a testament to its years of service to him.
Thea dropped her shoulders and unclenched her jaw, trying to remember one of Audra’s meditations as her hand closed around the hilt of her dagger and she drew its blade across the unyielding edge of the whetstone.
The sound took her away from the fallen Warsword in their midst, and back into echoes of battles past. It was the seemingly insignificant details that came back to her: the weight of a lifeless body, the trail of dragged feet in the sand, the suspended moment of time between when a gutted opponent realised he was a dead man and when he took his last breath.
Her focus narrowed. She was glad to lose herself in the task at hand, her movements fluid as the blade’s dulled edge gave way to a renewed sharpness.
‘Did you get my gift?’ That rich timbre speared through her thoughts.
Tensing, Thea glided the last stroke of the whetstone across the dagger’s edge and held the weapon to the flickering campfire.
It gleamed with a brightness that seemed to defy the darkness around them, the blade now ready to slice through the heart of a monster, or sever the bond between body and soul.
She pinned her former mentor with a cold, hard stare. ‘I threw it into the river,’ she told him, sheathing the sharpened dagger.
She waited for some smart-arsed retort from Hawthorne, but he simply looked away, staring into the flames of the campfire.
Where she expected the sweet taste of victory, there was only bitterness on her tongue.
Suddenly restless, she stood, swiping Cal’s bow and quiver from his side and walking off into the night.
Thankfully, her friends didn’t try to stop her.
They had learnt long ago when to give her space.
Thea shouldered the quiver of arrows and clutched the weapon in her gloved hand.
They didn’t need any game, not when their saddlebags were packed with rations from the grateful villagers.
But Thea couldn’t think straight. She needed to move, needed to get away from the deceptive lull of the fire and the molten silver eyes across from her.
Without her magic, everything felt so bottled up inside, with no outlet. She desperately wanted to conjure the bolts of lightning she had once mastered, to summon the clouds and thunder that soothed her heart like a healer’s balm. But that power did not speak to her any longer.
I am the storm…
She scoffed. She was no storm. She didn’t know what she was anymore.
Moonlight penetrated the skeletal canopy of the forest. Thea scanned the snow for tracks, glad for the distraction when she found what looked to be the hoofprints of a deer.
Snow had been falling since they’d started out from the fishing village, so the tracks couldn’t be that old.
Relishing the kiss of icy flakes against her face, she followed the prints to the stream.
They continued on the other side, and so she leapt across the narrow channel of water with ease and followed on.
Thea’s breath clouded before her face as she wove through the barren underbrush, following the imprints in the snowy ground. With each step, the tension in her shoulders eased and the winter air hit her burning lungs, soothing that fire that raged white-hot within.
With a stifled gasp, she stopped short.
In the ethereal silence of the wintry woodlands, a graceful doe lowered its mouth to the ground, seeking roughage beneath the snow. It was a beautiful animal, elegant and regal, its long lashes framing wide, innocent eyes.
Silently, Thea reached for an arrow, nocking it to Cal’s bow and drawing the string taut. For a moment, she simply breathed, appreciating that all-too-fragile balance between life and death as it teetered on the edge, frozen at her command —
‘You’re still dropping your elbow.’
Hawthorne’s low voice skittered along her bones.
She nearly jumped, only just managing to master herself. But the damage was done – the doe’s ears pricked and the creature darted away.
Thea relaxed the bowstring and whirled around to face him. ‘Happy now?’ she ground out.
‘Are you?’ he countered, eyes aflame.
Thea reminded herself to unclench her jaw, starting towards where the doe had fled.
‘Why isn’t Callahan the Flaming Arrow doing the hunting?’ Hawthorne asked, following.
‘I was trying to get away from you,’ Thea said through gritted teeth, pausing at the spot where the doe’s fresh tracks began. ‘You take all the air.’
Hawthorne raked his bound hands through his hair and sighed. ‘It’s me who can’t breathe when I’m around you…’
White-hot fury lanced through Thea and she rounded on him. ‘You have no right,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘You don’t want to hear anything, it seems.’
Thea stormed deeper into the forest, following the hoof imprints in the snow, the trees becoming denser as they led to a near-vertical rock face. ‘No. Not from you. Not after you betrayed the guild, betrayed the midrealms, betrayed —’
‘Betrayed you? ’ he finished for her.
A tidal wave of anger crashed against the shores of her composure, threatening to shatter the walls she had built as she took in the warrior before her. ‘I owe you nothing . Not a moment of my time, not a single —’
‘Do you truly believe me to be evil?’
‘Stay away from him, Thee… He’s the worst one,’ Wren had warned her once, a long time ago. If only she’d listened.
‘You truly think I have fallen to the side of the wraiths?’ Hawthorne pressed, his gaze intense. ‘You think I’ve aligned myself with the monsters who did that to my brother? To Tal?—’
Thea stepped towards him, hand ready at her dagger. ‘How did you vanish earlier? Your tracks just stopped. Am I supposed to believe that you’re not in league with them? That you didn’t use shadow magic to —’
Hawthorne took a step backward and ran his hands along the rock. ‘There are tunnels and secret passages all over the midrealms… If you know where to look.’
‘There was no passage there,’ Thea argued.
‘Wasn’t there?’ Hawthorne said cryptically, starting along the base of the cliff. He cut a striking figure in the moonlight, snow drifting around his powerful frame. Thea had no choice but to follow him.
They walked for a few minutes in silence, Thea stewing in her own rage, her hand still clamped around her dagger. She shouldn’t be out here alone with him.
Hawthorne slowed when he got to an overhang in the cliffside, icicles hanging like knives from the mouth of a cave. ‘This is part of the network. Leads through to the other side of the mountain.’
‘This proves nothing. For all I know, it’s just a hole in the rock.’
Hawthorne ducked inside. ‘If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said coldly, her fingers reaching for the poison-tipped pin Wren had prepared for her.
‘You seem a bit too far away to stick your little needle in my neck,’ he taunted, shifting deeper into the dark cave.
Thea palmed her dagger and brandished the pin. If she had to tie the traitor up and drag him through the snow with her horse, she’d do it in a heartbeat. Anything to be rid of him, rid of the unending wrath that haunted her every day he escaped his retribution.
She stepped into the cave.
‘Think you can bring me down, Princess?’ he murmured in the dark.
Thea braced herself for an attack. ‘When I’ve given you over to the rulers,’ she said quietly, lacing her words with venom, ‘I’ll wash my hands of you forever. I’ll never have to see you again, will never have to utter your name… It will be as though you never existed.’
‘Well…’ Hawthorne’s voice was like golden honey. ‘I can’t have that.’
Thea found him in the dark, right by the mouth of the cave. She locked eyes with him, just as he lifted his manacled fists to the wall, striking an all-powerful blow.
She lurched forward, panic spiking.
‘You bastard —’ she cried, as the whole mountain above rumbled.
‘I never claimed to be a gentleman.’
Beneath the blow of his Furies-given strength, snow and debris rained down at the mouth of the cave.
Trapping both Thea and the traitor within.