Chapter Eleven The Sword from Hell #3
I don’t think so. She lifted her sword to his heart in warning, careful not to prick him and draw blood.
Her grip was firm but relaxed, thumb and forefinger resting near the guard for better control.
It had been her older brother Leo, not their father, who had taught her to hold a sword.
Before the empire had taken his heart and twisted it.
Before her world had ended and begun anew.
“It’s not a hammer, Renny,” Leo grumbled, peeking around the sword she held pointed to the sky between them. “Move your grip down, here, like you’re shaking my hand.”
When she adjusted her fingers, the sword tilted forward, and Leo smiled. “There. Now you have some reach.” He was only six years older than her, but he already looked so much like their father it was bizarre.
“Stab him in the gut, Renny!” Paxton shouted from where he’d been firmly planted by their big brother a safe distance away, his wild blond curls flying into a tangle in the wind. Leo laughed.
“It’s heavy,” she whined.
“It feels that way because you’re small. So you have to get stronger, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she sighed.
“Now try not to drop it when I cut.”
She was totally going to drop it, and he knew it. He chuckled and ruffled her hair. “Don’t worry Renny, one day you’ll swing a sword with the best of them.”
Reya’s braid, far longer and wildly more intricate than it had been that day in the woods with her brothers, whipped the air as they traded blows. She’d warned Caelan that if he sliced off so much as a strand, she would be taking a limb in restitution.
“Oh, come on,” she said as he swept her legs again.
When Reya landed on her tailbone with a grunt, she rolled and scrambled to her knees, but Caelan brought the flat side of his sword down on her backside again, and she fell face first into the dirt.
The smack to her rear wasn’t playful this time. It was sharp, and it burned.
Heat rushed to her cheeks, and the hair on her arms rose as the magic sprung to life inside her. She hardly noticed.
“That one’s going to leave a mark.” She looked up slowly and cracked her neck to one side.
Caelan flashed a wicked grin as her violet Ire raced down her arms and legs.
“That’s it,” he growled.
Reya sprang forward.
It was obvious he was holding back, letting her work herself out on him.
She felt it in every hesitation. He was brutal yet controlled—almost artful in his movements.
Meanwhile, she saw red. She drove for his jugular, which was downright foolish.
Literal sparks erupted between them as Hellfire deflected the blade over his shoulder and her momentum screwed her.
Caelan wrapped one obnoxiously muscled arm around her, pulling her flush against his sweat-damp chest. She flashed back to the night they met, and she checked her wince at the heat of his skin against hers, hating the images it crafted in her brain.
Her chest heaved against his own, and he eyed the fabric of her wrap like he knew one tug was all it would take.
Caelan leaned in, the heat of his breath on her cheeks. “You fight like you’re already dying. It’s stunning to watch, if sloppy.” The more she wriggled, the more he seemed to enjoy himself. “The things I could teach you.”
He didn’t sound like he was talking about swordplay at all. And stars if she wasn’t on fire. She made a pathetic, truly outraged sound, and he smiled. It was a true smile, the first she’d seen on him. “Careful making those sounds around me, thief. I like them.” He released her.
That’s when she noticed his scent had deepened. Smoking cedar logs and newly tanned leather. It was the basest form of honesty to which even he, for all his iron control, was not wholly immune. Caelan Halcyon might not want to want her.
But in that moment, he did.
He saw her self-satisfied smirk, and she barely had time to catch her breath before he came at her again. He was too damn fast. Caelan feinted right, and then she was staggering back, clutching her bloody arm. Her sword clattered to the ground.
“Here,” Caelan said, reaching for her as though they hadn’t just been at each other’s throats. There was no victory in his eyes, and she winced as he laid a glowing hand atop the slice on her bicep. When he let go, only a barely visible white scar and a faint sting remained.
“Are you all right?” he asked, the healer in him so at odds with the warrior.
Reya looked at the cut, then at the blue blood glistening on Hellfire’s sharp edge. Blue blood, not red. Her last blood tonic must have worn off.
She nodded. “It’s just another scar.” When he didn’t seem convinced, she tried for humor. “Don’t look so concerned. I keep my bargains. Where are you taking me, fire fingers?”
“You’ll see,” he murmured, wiping her blood on his leather pants. She didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Are you certain you’re all right?”
Reya hummed in affirmation, avoiding his gaze. “Only a fool swings a sword expecting not to get cut. And I’m no fool.”
Reya waded into the pond, cringing as her toes squelched in the mud. She held her breath and sank, hair pooling on the surface around her. The cold water was such a relief from the torrid night that she moaned upon surfacing.
The moment Caelan’s body had begun to twitch in the onset of true sleep, Reya had started stripping. She was supposed to be on watch, and technically she still was—she could bathe and watch at the same time.
Her clothes swayed over a low branch, and moonslight rippled on the water near where Ash lay curled on the moss-scalloped shore, head resting on his front legs, watching over her as he had done most of her life.
She had been six years old when Hector Connery found Ash, haggard and hollow-eyed, in the woods outside his smithy. Her father assumed that the horse belonged to one of the traders who often passed through their village on the way to Port Talluah.
The same instinct that made Hector welcome Reya into his home, to raise her like his own, had brought Ash home that day, too.
That was who her father was: He did what was right, even when it cost him.
He was good and generous and everything Reya wasn’t.
That’s why he was gone and she still walked the earth.
When no one claimed Ash, Hector had tried to sell him. But every time he brought back a buyer, Ash turned into a wild beast. He refused to allow anyone on his back except Reya and her brothers and even went so far as to charge at those who tried to take him away. Eventually, Hector had given up.
Reya and Ash had been inseparable ever since. They were two of a kind, both abandoned to the mountainside.
Using her pinky, Reya scraped the dirt from under her nails and scrubbed it away with her wildflower-and-honey-scented soap.
Caelan could wake any moment, and she did not want him to find her wet and naked.
Mostly because she didn’t trust herself not to invite the beautiful bastard to join her.
She scoured her skin and hair until she was so lathered the suds ran into her eyes, and then she dipped below the surface, running her fingers through her hair to rinse it.
After, she lay back, letting the water cocoon her ears and savoring the feeling of weightlessness.
Reya scented them well before she saw the torchlight through the distant trees. Ash rose and stomped his hooves in warning, and the soap slipped from her hand. There were horses. And men. Lots of them.
She clicked her tongue twice as she swam for the shore, and Ash, understanding her plea, trotted into the shadows. There wasn’t much time. Cursing under her breath, she only managed to pull her white tunic over her sopping hair before a hand slipped over her mouth.
“Don’t speak.”
She knew the voice. And the scent.
Caelan.
His other hand wrapped around her middle, and he dragged her behind a fallen cedar and into the shrouded darkness of an evergreen shrub.
Her father’s sword. She jerked like an alley cat, but Caelan bore down. The men were already too close. Sharp branches scraped against her wet skin, but Caelan’s body, curved as it was around hers, bore the worst of it.
Reya only stopped trying to wriggle free when several men approached where they were hiding. All she could do was stare at where the sword was propped against the tree, utterly helpless to do anything but pray they wouldn’t see it.
One of the men turned, and his torch made visible the flaking blue stripes along his cheeks, marks they all bore—painted in magic-born blood.
Blood Watchers.