Chapter Six
The Earth Warden
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Avaldale, Vrethian.
Kyra.
Apparently Cristian’s ego had been badly hurt.
Kyra gave a low, deliberate laugh as she stood. ‘Feeling brave now my blade’s not at your groin?’ She lowered her voice to barely a whisper, her next words meant only for Rosary: ‘When I say run… you run.’
Rosary pinched the back of her arm in protest.
All six of the mercenaries were moving slowly toward them, closing the gap with each step closer. ‘Six against one…’ Kyra mused, her gaze flickering between each of them. ‘Very brave. Is this a job, Cristian? Or just a pathetic attempt to settle the score?’
Cristian smiled. ‘Well, when the Lady of Shadows offers a sparkling sum to bring back her fighting dog, who am I to refuse? Especially when that dog threatened to make me a eunuch not an hour before.’
Kyra gritted her teeth on a curse. They shouldn’t have lingered in the tavern. She and Rosary could have been well on their way to Taru by now if they hadn’t been so keen for a taste of damned wine.
‘Lady Lilion failed to mention in what state we should bring you back to her,’ Cristian drawled. ‘Shall we see just how quickly that fae blood of yours heals you?’
‘Rosary, go,’ Kyra hissed.
Cristian laughed. ‘We won’t touch her. But only if you come quietly.’
Purposefully showing her canines, Kyra grinned. ‘Oh, I never come quietly.’ Rosary choked on a laugh beside her.
‘Have it your way,’ Cristian sneered, his eyes flashing with malice. ‘Grab the girl.’
Five mercenaries rushed forward, gazes locked on Rosary, hands outstretched.
Kyra’s heart lurched into her throat. Rosary was not a fighter, and Kyra herself had never fought more than two opponents at a time in the pits.
She couldn’t even kill them here; the Union wouldn’t care who provoked who, nor would they care if the kill was made in self-defence.
All they would see was the arch of her ears, the pointed facial features, the infamy of her name, and that would be enough to condemn her.
No matter if her crime had been just.
And they’d hound her far more vigorously than Lilion would.
She whirled toward a mercenary, her sodden, heavy hair whipping with her, and kicked him square in the chest. The breath in his lungs puffed out of him and he fell backwards, completely winded.
Someone grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanking her back. She scraped her nails deep along the skin of the man holding her, and he yelped, releasing her immediately. The air was now tinged with blood.
‘Bitch!’ a furious voice hissed.
It had been Cristian she’d cut, then. Good.
She sent another one of them curling over, arms clutching himself from a well-aimed knee to the stomach. Rosary yelped, and Kyra’s head snapped up.
A mercenary had her arm pinned behind her back. Another kicked the back of her knees so she was forced to the floor.
The split second of stunned hesitation cost Kyra.
A fist collided with the side of her face, and she stumbled backwards, hitting the wall with a thud as stars danced in her eyes.
Strong hands pinned her to the wall. There might have been three pairs, all struggling to keep her there as she growled and thrashed against them. One of them tried to prize the dagger from her hand, his stubby fingers scrambling against hers, but it was futile.
She would die before she let a fucking mercenary disarm her.
He gave up trying to make her drop it, though his knee was now pinning her wrist to the wall in an attempt to keep her from using it. Ever so slowly, she swivelled the dagger around so that its point lined with the back of the mercenary’s knee. If she could just get him off her-
Cristian stepped in front of her, breathing heavily. She snarled at him, pulling forward, but the mercenaries slammed her back against the wall. Cristian lifted his blade, letting its point pause at her throat. Slowly, he sliced a shallow cut into her skin.
‘Kyra!’ Rosary screamed.
Cristian grabbed Kyra’s face, squishing her cheeks with his dirty fingers. ‘We could have done this without her,’ he sighed heavily. ‘But now I suppose she can watch the fun part.’
He lifted his blade to her face, but before its tip could maim her further, all six mercenaries, including Cristian, were thrown away from both Kyra and Rosary by a great force. They groaned in pain as they crumpled to the wet floor.
Rosary lurched forward onto all fours. Kyra ran to her, not lingering to wonder what mighty power had aided them, and pulled her to her feet. ‘Come on, quickly, before they recover.’
Rosary nodded, swaying slightly, her breathing laboured. They hurried down the alleyway, Kyra’s hand tight around Rosary’s arm. If they could just get out into the street, perhaps the mercenaries would lose them in the crowds-
Cristian shouted desperately after them, ‘Your parents ran too, you know! Well, at least, they tried to. We caught up to them in the end.’
Every thought emptied from Kyra’s mind.
She stopped dead. Rain pounded the top of her head. Her voice was a lower murmur as she turned to him and said, ‘What did you say?’
‘Kyra!’ Rosary hissed.
‘I’ve wondered for years if your blood is as thick and dark as theirs was.’ Cristian surveyed her blood on his blade. ‘I wish Lady Lilion would just let us kill you too. Maybe she’ll let me buy your oaf of a brother instead.’
Kyra began to tremble.
Not with the bone-deep cold that came with the rain, but with the monster that was stirring with her rising fury from a life-long slumber. A monster that had always been there, laying dormant and malnourished of attention.
It growled, ravenous for blood, begging to finally have its freedom.
Rosary whispered, begging. ‘Kyra, please, let’s go!’
Kyra could barely hear anything but the pounding of her own pulse. ‘You… you killed them?’ she rasped.
Cristian shrugged. He shrugged. ‘It was a joint effort. Much like this. Though you’ve proven a lot harder to over power than them. Even your father. It was a bit pathetic, to tell the truth.’
Visions of her parents, weapon-less and swarmed by the mob that surrounded her now, clouded her senses. They had not been fighters, not like she was. Even with the enhanced strength of a fae, they wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Her mother had likely never even wielded a blade.
‘Kyra, please!’
‘Say that again,’ she demanded Cristian. A deadly calm slithered over her skin.
The mercenaries behind Cristian were slowly getting to their feet. ‘I said, it was pathetic. The great daughter of the famed warrior Winvara Daeiros went down like a sack of shit.’
That was the moment Kyra forgot who she was.
The monster within writhed to the surface as she streaked toward Cristian. Rosary called after her, and the mercenaries moved as one into formation to counter her, but what they saw on her face made their sneers drop, and the bitter tang of terror soon coated the wet air.
Kyra hadn’t drawn her blade.
No. She would do this with her bare hands. With her soul that was stained with red.
She relinquished a roar that pierced the air.
The mercenaries ran the other way. Cristian slowly backed away too, face no longer sneering, limbs clumsy, as if it were an otherworldly, merciless creature prowling after him.
Kyra pointed at him.
And smiled.
Breath pounded in and out of Cristian’s mouth as Kyra gained on him. He turned, a pitiful attempt to run from her, and she sprang.
Her fingers dragged through his hair and he yelped as she wrenched him backwards. She didn’t hear his whimpering words, not as she sank her teeth into his throat and tore through flesh and veins.
Blood poured from Cristian’s neck, spurting like a broken pipe.
As he fell to the ground, lips soundlessly moving, Kyra sat atop his dying body.
She grabbed his chin in her hands, forcing him to look at her.
His eyes were wide, the light in them fading fast. In an unnervingly calm voice, she told him, ‘This is for them.’
Then she ripped his head from his neck.
For a moment, she stared down at his face, forever frozen in a mingled expression of terror and shock. Then she screamed into it, guttural and full of grief and pain, her tears splashing onto his bloodied and rain-drenched cheeks.
That was when she felt it.
A slumbering power stirred within her. The monster stretched its wings and limbs, drawing up and up in mounting excitement. Free, finally free to use her, free to be one with its conduit.
Driven by that force, Kyra smashed her fist to the ground and watched as a fissure split the earth apart.
The mercenaries fell one by one into the severed alleyway, their screams like a lullaby to Kyra’s ears.
The stone walls buckled and fell too, smashing the heads of those whose desperate fingers clung to the jagged ground.
All of them, dead. She could feel their mangled corpses in the earth, Cristian included.
A sudden tremor ripped through Kyra’s body, so intense she almost toppled into the open mouth before her. The sun shone from every pore on her body, and she watched in horror as the veins in her arms became stark against the brightness, like roots of a tree sprouting sporadically beneath her skin.
‘No…’ she breathed.
That ethereal voice began to sing again, an ode from a memory, some faraway dream, the words curling and twisting in that long lost language she hadn’t understood before.
Now, the words made sense. Even if the phrasing was fragmented and distorted, as though a higher force was stopping the voice from singing clearly:
‘…rage blinds… takes… is known…
…her power… forth and… throne…
…bonded must earth… be…
…and dark… eternally…’
The blinding light dimmed, the vines disappearing with it. ‘No… it can’t…’ she whispered to no one. ‘I can’t be…’
For though she couldn’t decipher the meaning of the voice's song, she knew now who it belonged to. She knew what the monster was now, knew its purpose, where it had come from.
It wasn’t possible. How could it be possible? How could she not have known?
She forced herself to stand but staggered back against the alley wall that hadn’t been destroyed, her strength spent, all energy depleted.
Her gaze rested on the crevice she’d made.
The mercenaries' bodies were out of sight, but she could smell their blood. She could feel their deaths, more profoundly than any kill she’d ever made.
She’d known what she was doing, every second of it, but it somehow felt as though a deadly haze had been lifted now-
And Cristian… Goddess. She’d destroyed him without a second thought. She was glad of it but-
Had that been her… or the monster?
Hands shook her shoulders. They cupped her cheeks. ‘Kyra! Kyra, look at me!’ She blinked into Rosary’s face. Rain dripped from her slim nose. ‘The Union are coming for you, Ky! You have to go, you have to run!’
‘Rose,’ Kyra croaked. ‘Rosary, I’m… I’m the-’
‘I know,’ Rosary said desperately. She peeled Kyra away from the wall and shoved her away. ‘Please, Kyra! Run! NOW!’
The words had barely left her mouth when a throng of Union soldiers hurtled around the corner and careened down the alley toward Kyra, their commander bellowing orders from his position at the front.
‘Go!’ Rosary cried.
With the shred of energy she had left, Kyra kicked off from the wall behind, catapulting herself to the other side, her fingers gripping the top of the worn bricks.
She grunted with the effort of pulling herself up onto the slanted roof of the townhouses, then broke into a desperate run, feet unsteady and struggling to find grip on the wet tiles.
A Union commander’s voice barked orders from the street below.
Still she ran, mentally readying herself for the jump at the end of the row of houses to the next.
So close now… just a few more paces-
A tile came loose under her feet and then she was tumbling down, rolling from the roof and landing with a splash on the hard cobblestones.
Her frozen bones ached as she forced herself to stand, trying and failing to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her. Soon enough, rough hands were pulling her arms behind her back, forcing her face-down in the wet, dirty street as they attempted to bind her wrists with iron shackles.
She fought against them, kicking and screaming, until something sticky and unyielding slithered over her very bones. It locked them in place so she couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but watch as they fused the iron around her wrists.
The shackles clicked into place and they yanked her to her feet. The immobilising spell lifted. ‘Walk,’ a harsh voice behind her commanded, his hand grasping her shackled wrists.
‘Fuck off,’ Kyra snarled, refusing to move.
‘Walk, or I’ll make you.’
She stayed firm and repeated with more vigor, ‘Fuck. Off.’
‘I warned you,’ the soldier growled, seconds before he ripped the cloak from her shoulders and lashed a whip across her back so hard she lurched to her knees. The sting of the blow throbbed absolutely.
‘NO! KYRA!’ Rosary’s voice cut through the rest like a knife.
‘Get up,’ the Union soldier demanded, jerking her up to stand once more. ‘Now, walk.’
‘No,’ she breathed through gritted teeth. Another lashing whipped against her, not once, but twice more, the barbed whip ripping through her cotton shirt to flesh and muscle. She cried out this time as she felt the skin on her back slice open.
‘STOP! Let her go! Kyra! Kyra!’
The Union soldier pulled her up again, one hand on her shoulder as he stabbed his fingers into the fresh gash on her back. She recoiled away, gasping as pain blinded her. ‘Walk now, or I’ll detain your friend too for assisting a murder.’
No. No.
His fingers retracted and she breathed with relief.
It was for Rosary that she put one foot in front of the other, surrendering to defeat, walking without further protest to whatever certain doom the Union had planned for her ahead.
She wanted to open the earth again and let them all fall to their deaths, let them all be crushed. But there was nothing within her left to give. She wasn’t even sure the newfound magic would come if called.
Where was Roheia? Would she not save the female who had finally succumbed to the power she had bestowed upon her? Where was the Earth Goddess now, when there were those who would hurt her muse, her ward… her cherished chosen one?
For that was what Kyra was.
And suddenly that wild power within her, that writhing monster made sense. She was the Earth Warden. She always had been. And she'd never known.