Chapter 29 DARE
TWENTY-NINE
DARE
Dare’s hand has only just come down on Samick’s shoulder when they are severed, as though a sword has cut down between them.
“Alasdare Varos!” General Raske’s commanding voice drums through the air—and silences the whole camp. “Come state the purpose of your presence.”
All that can be heard is the faint cracklings of the fires strewn around the snowfield, and the subdued coughs of a kuri down the way.
But every fae is staring at him.
Dare’s mouth twists in an almost smirk, one that Samick does not return, before he saunters up to the head of the camp.
He takes a bow at the podium.
Knee digging into the ground, his head is dipped, and he explains his presence to the general in a murmur, and as he does, those green eyes are giving him a cold burn on the back of his head.
Dare doesn’t doubt that if he looks over his shoulder at the ice statue down by the metal barrier of the road, he will not find any kindness on Samick’s face, but a dark curiosity, and a pinch of irritation.
Dare keeps his tone low, a murmur he hides from the prying ears around the camp—and it takes the time of meals dished and handed out to the warriors, the length of the meal.
The kuris are collecting the dirty bowls to wash by the time Dare is strolling back.
Samick turns his back on the steel barrier and watches Dare approach. His weapons glint, a ripple of firelight bouncing off the edges of blades and daggers.
This close to the road is at least a pinch of privacy from the watchful eyes and listening ears around the camp.
Dare drops onto the railing with a breath.
Weariness fades his grin into something withered, and he stretches his arms out, one after the other, until the popping and crackling sounds ripple through him.
Samick turns his cheek to him and considers the darkness draped over the town. “The general said what to you?”
“Told me to behave—and warned me about the punishment I’ll receive when I return to my unit.”
“Punishment,” Samick starts, and turns his cold gaze down on Dare, “would suggest you left your unit of your own accord.”
Dare runs his hand through his hair. The darkness of his waves ripples like a black ocean against a striking white shore. A face once pretty, now scarred. “I had to.”
Samick’s face darkens.
“I chased Fate’s call,” Dare adds, before Samick can dive into his verbal assassination of him. “In fact, that call brought me here—to you.”
Dare lifts his gaze. Once a set of golden pots for eyes, one is ruined now. An eye whose gold was stolen by the cut of a black metal blade, a scar that cannot be undone.
He wears that now, in his pale eye, in the jagged mark of the scar running from his eyebrow to the arch of his sharp cheekbone.
It warps as he lets bitterness twist his face.
Samick traces a passing clattering noise to a kuri, a human man bustling by with a dozen or so bowls balanced in his arms.
Dare snaps at the kuri, “Bring meals.”
The man falters, eyes wide, like he sees his life flash in front of him at a mere command—then he dips his squared head before rushing off to the kuri end of camp.
Stares follow from all angles. Many of the fae haven’t lost interest yet, watching Dare, but never approaching.
And they won’t.
Not with Samick standing with him.
“That’s a lot of kuris,” Dare notes.
He doesn’t count them, but it looks to be about twenty. There is only half that number in his own unit.
Samick doesn’t look over at them. The constant ice of his stare frosts over Dare’s face. “Some are evate.”
Dare runs his hands down his tired thighs, firm, as though trying to push out any tension in his muscles.
The patter of boots on the frosted grass draws nearer. The man rushes back to them, two bowls full of a mixture of food.
Dare takes both.
The kuri hesitates, as if fighting the urge to glance at Samick, to get reassurance from him that Dare is allowed to take both servings, but he knows better than to actually look at Samick—then he’s turning on his heels and scrambling back to his end of camp, where he is somewhat safe.
Safer than out in the open, mixing with the fae.
Dare sets down a bowl on the ground between his boots. “You’re not going to sit?”
Samick doesn’t respond with words.
The soft leather of his thin-soled boot whispers the faintest creak as he plants it on a boulder. His weight leans onto that one hiked knee as he stares out there, into darkness, into nothing.
He doesn’t sit.
Dare steals the fork into his grip, then shovels it into the mush.
“Have you wondered about that?” he asks between slow, unwilling bites. The food in the human lands is flavourless, bland and sometimes slimy. Like each time before, Dare has to force is down with a hard swallow.
Icy strands of hair fall out of place and drift over the arch of Samick’s eyebrow. “What?”
“Wondered why dark males are suddenly having evate with all these humans?”
“It isn’t the first time a dokkalf has bonded with a human. Soul mateships don’t know those bounds.”
Dare shakes his head. “Not in these numbers. Have you ever been in a unit with your fellow warriors—and so many of them find their evate in one mission?”
The harshness of the light washes out his pallor, even the pink of his lips that move around his slightly annoyed words, “What are you saying?”
Dare shrugs, “I have a theory.”
Samick runs his distasteful stare over Dare’s mouth, the reddish sauce stains on his lips, the food trolling around his mouth.
“Explain it between bites,” Samick drones.
Dare throws a dull look up at him, then makes sure to give a bloody grin, but the blood smearing his teeth is just a red sauce.
“I think Mother is saving them through Fate,” Dare says. “Perhaps the individual souls themselves, or a group of the species.”
Samick considers it for a moment. “The humans are her children as much as the fae are, and so, yes, perhaps she saves their kind through evate bonds. Perhaps those soul tethers existed before we came here.”
“Do you think it has meaning?”
Samick looks into the darkness as though he can see home itself, not Dorcha, not the dark lands, not even the Midlands, but rather, the mountains he descends from, the ice mountains forever white and wisped in mist, of ice in the air, of magic in the bones, on an isle far off the mainland.
“I find it best to never question Mother or attempt to understand Her,” the icy male says. “Mother’s ways must only be accepted. And,” he turns a cold look on Dare, “as much as it brings me relief to see you alive, I do wonder why you were brought here.”
Dare trades the empty bowl for the full one.
Samick doesn’t allow his hesitation, his delay. Frost trickles along his voice, a voice that steels the strongest of bones, “Why did you leave your unit?”
“Bee.”
A heartbeat passes before, “The kinta?”
“The very one.”
Samick turns a look over the kuris, faces he has never spared a moment on, humans he has never once taken even the slightest, shortest interest in.
“Is she here?”
“I chased her down to a lake—but I lost her when her sneaky human friend shot the ice out from under me. I intended to track them, but Fate called me here.”
Samick stares blankly at him for a long moment. Then his mouth tugs up at the corner. “A human shot you into a frozen lake?”
The look Dare tosses up at him is withered.
Again, the corner of his pale mouth tugs, higher this time, the ghost of a smile. “How mighty can a warrior and assassin be—if he is bested by kintas and humans?”
Dare holds that dark stare on Samick. But he doesn’t take it further than a look.
Samick is one of his oldest friends.
But Dare is not fond of a brutal end. He’ll only ever take it so far with Samick.
Tossing aside the second empty bowl, he steers away from the bitterness on his tongue. “I need to trap the human friend—in order to trap Bee.”
“Why must you trap her?”
Dare picks at the snow sticking to the whip coiled around his forearm. The black leather grooves curve around the edges of the whip and end where the silver razors are embedded.
One hell of a whip, serrated, and once it’s latched on, there is no slipping out of its grip.
Samick decides, “It is easier to kill her.”
“To kill the human is to release all the leverage I have on Bee. If I keep the human, Bee will be easier to control.”
Samick frowns down at him. The shadows of the darkness slash over his cheek, but the glow of the campfires illuminates the fine shape of his nose.
“You,” Dare states, firm, “will help me keep the human alive—but separate from Bee.”
A moment passes, the crackling of campfires and murmurs in the distance, the clattering of pots being cleaned out and bowls stacked in the kuri section.
But in that one moment, tension has rippled under Samick’s leather, like dark waters running over boulders.
The way his tongue moves over the words, the way his lips curl around the question, it spreads an iciness through the air, like a sudden pocket of ice mist—
“You want me to mind a human?”
Dare feels the pressure of the look from Samick, an ice dagger grazing over his flesh.
He steels himself against it.
“Have you mistaken me?” Samick challenges, and that chill strengthens through him, sheeting his eyes pure white. “Do you think me of kind heart, that I am so generous to even you?”
“Kind,” Dare scoffs, bitter. “You, the least among us.”
There is no lie in that, and no insult to be found.
Of Samick’s kindness, there is little. And if it does occur, like an eclipse, it is shrouded in a darkness born of selfish motivation.
Dare has no mistakes in the calculations of his nature. And yet, Fate brought him here—to Samick.
Not to Rune, his closest of the soul brothers, and perhaps the kindest among them, and Fate did not return him to Daxeel with his own unit, but instead charged him through the lands to find a brother carved from ice, inside and out.
Fate brought him to Samick.