Chapter Thirty
Grand Duke Enzi is two things: beautiful and terrifying.
Many have made the mistake of falling for his perfect face and stunning body only to discover that he is not interested in a casual night of fun.
The Seducer might use pleasure as a lure, but if you decide to play games with him, you will discover that his pleasure comes only in your absolute destruction.
Those who survive the experience often wish they had not.
The Illicit Lives of the Imperial Court
Anonymous
(banned in the Empire)
By the time Einar and the crew reached the village, it had descended into chaos.
The dragon might be gone, but buildings still burned. Shouts rang out in every direction—fear and rage and panic and pain, twisting with the rare sound of steel against steel, and the far more common thud of swords meeting staves or makeshift weapons.
The people of Rahvekya were not warriors, but they fought trained Imperial soldiers with a fury nurtured by generations.
Einar didn’t have to issue a single order. The crew of the Kraken were warriors—some with hundreds or even thousands of years of experience—and they knew what to do with simple human soldiers.
Silvio rolled from person to person, his daggers so quick that soldiers fell before they realized he’d targeted them.
Brynjar was less subtle, wielding a giant axe as if he was felling trees.
Bexi guarded his back, her wood carving skills being put to terrifying use in carving up any of Brynjar’s victims who refused to stay down.
Petya spun into the fray with her sword flashing in the newly risen sun, prompting cries of relief and excitement as the villagers realized one of their legends had arrived.
One of the mercenaries—one wearing the kind of too-fine armor that marked him as someone of importance—turned, eyes lighting up when they landed on Einar.
“The Emperor promises one thousand gold to whoever kills the monster!” he bellowed.
The closest soldier swung his sword at Einar. Not a Dream- or Void-forged weapon, but simple iron—a foolish choice that proved Sorin had not bothered to provide adequate tactical information to whoever led these men.
Einar lifted his hand and closed it around the blade.
The man’s face went deathly pale when he realized even the sharp edge of his weapon couldn’t pierce Einar’s toughened skin.
Einar ripped the sword from the man’s grip and swung it by the blade, cracking the hilt into the man’s armored helmet hard enough to drop him.
Stepping over his prone body, Einar flipped the weapon around and caught it by the hilt. It was serviceable enough to let him fend off the next two attacks, but he needed little attention to defend himself against humans wielding steel. Most of his attention went to searching for Aleksi and Naia.
He didn’t need the island’s help this time.
Power pulsed on the rocky plains beyond the village, and as he cleared the corner of one of the cottages, the ground beneath his feet trembled.
A hundred paces away, Aleksi and Sorin slammed to the ground again with enough force to raise a plume of dust. It slammed into nothing and arced upward, as if an invisible dome surrounded them.
Fury and fear twisted Einar’s guts as he realized what Aleksi must have done—a guess confirmed when Aleksi’s sword sliced across Sorin’s arm.
The blood coating his blade splattered in an arc that stopped abruptly a few paces from where they stood, and sunlight almost seemed to shimmer on an iridescent bubble before the red drops slid down.
Aleksi had locked Sorin away from them, preventing him from doing harm to those Aleksi loved—and preventing those who loved him from reaching his side.
A growl of protective fury rumbled up into Einar’s throat, and he barely noticed his current opponent stumble back in sudden terror. Einar took a step forward, only to freeze when Inga’s voice rose over the sounds of battle. “Einar! We need you!”
Whatever it takes. Repeating the promise to himself, he turned reluctantly away from the fight he couldn’t wage to the one he must. It took little effort to find the Witch—her power blazed brightly enough that he could see it without trying.
Deep pink had bled almost into ruby red, the sparkle of it wild as she gripped a young man’s knee and closed her eyes, oblivious to the fighting around her.
Of course, she could afford to be—Arktikos stood snarling guard over her in his massive bear form, savaging anyone who dared venture close.
The teenage boy fought a whimper, one torn pant leg steeped in so much blood it had stained the sand. The tattered edges of fabric revealed a wound deep enough that he might have bled out without a healer, and even the best mortal medicine might never let him walk again without pain.
Inga’s magic was far less limiting. By the time Einar had reached them—pausing once to disarm a soldier and knock him out with a swift fist to the jaw—the wound slicing across the boy’s leg was a mostly knitted scar.
“Go,” Inga told him, eyes fluttering open to reveal glowing power. “Go to the priestess.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, staggering to his feet. But before he could take two steps toward where Agata and a group of elders were desperately trying to herd the children away from the fighting, the air shimmered.
A woman appeared with five men who had the hard-eyed stare of practiced mercenaries. Then the woman vanished, and Agata lifted a sturdy staff just in time to block a sword swinging toward her neck. “Petya!”
Instantly, Einar understood the chaos of the battle. The villagers couldn’t form a defensive line or lead the vulnerable to safety, because every time they tried, that woman appeared with fresh soldiers to block their path.
It was a terrifyingly effective tactic for letting a comparatively small number of soldiers keep the village’s defenders scattered and pinned down. It didn’t matter that the soldiers were mortal; all they had to do was threaten the children—it was the one thing none of their opponents could ignore.
The soldiers would die, of course—against a pirate crew with centuries of experience and literal gods like Inga and Arktikos, they could do little else—but if you were willing to spend their lives recklessly, it was brilliant.
Eirika’s work, no doubt. As brilliant as Elevia, without Elevia’s respect for life.
Einar swept up a second sword from the nearest fallen mercenary and lunged into the chaos, taking the head from the man who had targeted Agata as Petya appeared at his side to gut another attacker. “We need to clear a path,” she told him when the last man had fallen. “I just don’t know how.”
Inga staggered to her feet, and for the first time Einar realized that Inga looked as if she had crawled directly from her blankets to this battlefield.
She was wearing a plain borrowed shift that left her arms bare and stopped at the knees, just above a pair of rugged boots.
All of that pale skin was streaked with blood and a dozen thin scars, some pale white and some an ugly red.
The long one across her left leg that she had taken from the teenage boy still looked fresh enough that he wasn’t sure how she was standing.
“Arktikos has been tracking the woman,” she said in a raspy voice. “He can feel her when she’s about to appear, he just needs—”
Arktikos roared and snapped his jaws closed on empty air.
Except it wasn’t empty anymore. The air shimmered, and for one dizzying moment a woman was there and not there—as ephemeral as the mirages sailors sometimes saw on the distant horizon.
His eyes couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing, as if light itself was uncertain.
The illusion ended when Arktikos lunged with another snap of his jaws—and blood spurted.
The woman was abruptly there, her savaged arm trapped by Arktikos’s powerful teeth. She screamed, shrill and panicked. The soldiers who had started to appear around her wavered, as if they were caught between the beach and wherever they had come from. Arktikos snarled and bit down harder.
The woman’s arm disappeared from between Arktikos’s jaws in a spray of blood as the woman and the soldiers all vanished.
A few beats passed. No more soldiers appeared.
Petya let out a curse of relief, and Inga buried her hand in the fur at Arktikos’s neck.
Einar wasn’t sure if she was petting him, or using the bulk of his body to keep her knees from going out.
She still hadn’t recovered from healing him the night before, and she would be going with Agata and the children into the mountains, whether she wanted to or not.
It would break Aleksi’s heart if something happened to her.
“Gather the villagers,” he told Petya. “We have a chance to—”
“Petya!”
The panic in Jinevra’s voice was enough to whirl Einar around. The corrupter from last night was back, his twisted black vines already racing across the ground. But this time, he wasn’t alone, and the handsome man who stood lazily at his side set every instinct Einar had to screaming.
Dark power whispered across the battlefield, twisted and wrong, and even though Einar had never seen the man before, he knew exactly who had joined the fight. Enzi. Another member of Sorin’s shadow court.
The Empire’s twisted version of Aleksi.
The man was attractive, that was not in question.
Dark hair, elegant bone structure, a lean body wrapped in stylish clothing meant to show it off.
But superficial beauty was where his resemblance to Aleksi ended.
The Lover’s grace and strength had been twisted into something furtive and cruel.
Without weapons or armor, the man seemed totally ill-equipped for battle.
Yet he watched the violence with malevolent pleasure as he leaned closer to the corrupter and whispered something in his ear.