Chapter Forty Nine #2
Kyra rarely spoke to him at all. Dust and sand lay thick on her skin, and sweat constantly dappled her hairline, even at night when the dry heat was not as harsh.
A body not used to Zarynth’s climate would struggle to regulate its temperature, let alone one that had spent weeks atop the highest and coldest point of Droria.
Gedeon himself found it difficult to adjust. He had only just melted from the block of ice he’d become a few weeks back.
Kyra’s quietness had not bothered him too much.
Only when he scented an escaped tear or two when she’d thought he was sleeping, did it ache him to console her.
To talk to her. But each time they laid down to find rest, she did so with her back deliberately to him, as far away from him in the rock chasm that she could be.
Gedeon would not push conversation if it was not wanted.
By the sixth night, his power had rekindled enough to shroud them in shadows once more. Right on time too, for they had finally reached the outskirts of the Agni slave camps.
Tents of permanence in perfectly lined rows haunted the barren landscape, the streets between them teeming with slaves.
Many of them Agni natives. Amala’s people.
He idly wondered if the fledgling’s family were amongst those trudging through the dusty roads, their ankles chained.
Miners, builders, bladesmen and wielders.
The four categories that each slave was assigned to once their talent was realised.
There was a fifth, though it was not openly spoken of.
Rearers, as Amala’s mother was, their sole purpose to continue breeding in the hopes that their babes be born with the ability to wield magic over all else.
A sour taste filled Gedeon’s mouth.
In all his years, he had never seen what had become of the Agni Lands with his own eyes. His mother had always discouraged it, needing him in the castle, fulfilling his duty as teacher of the fledgling wielders that were reared here.
Had she kept him away because she’d known that if he had actually seen the slave camps, he would never have approved?
Or would the ignorant Gedeon of then have seen the camps and not been bothered by it?
‘This is horrific,’ Kyra said at his side.
Gedeon, having just finished donning himself in the button down brown jacket of the dead slaver at his feet, grimly murmured, ‘It’s about to get worse.’
It had been a necessary kill. An unconscious man would eventually wake and talk. A dead man would not. Most slavers were volunteers, and for the cruelty he clearly thrived on, he’d deserved to die.
Kyra hadn’t said a word when Gedeon swiped his sword along the man’s throat.
Together, they dragged the now naked man (who had been alone on guard duty on the outskirts of the camp) toward a large cart dumped carelessly outside the cage-like fence surrounding the entire perimeter.
Limbs and lolling heads were visible through the horizontal cracks in the wood.
Gedeon’s eyes watered at the stench of the rotting corpses, and a glance at Kyra, with a hand over her nose and mouth, told him the smell was assaulting her the same way.
Aside from the stench of decaying bodies, the dead did not appear to affect her at all. He found himself wanting to learn what had hardened her heart to the sight of death at this scale.
Now was not the time to ask.
‘Do it quickly,’ he said.
Disgust tainted her soft features as she wrenched her hand from her nose and mouth and hoisted herself into the cart. Through the cracks in the wood, her smooth golden-brown skin became visible as she stripped herself bare. Gedeon averted his gaze to the sky above.
A minute later she reappeared, dressed head to toe in a dead slave’s beige apparel. It hung from her figure like a sack. The rags were fairly clean, with no signs of blood or death, save the smell. Gedeon whipped his magic through the material, cleansing the stink.
Kyra breathed. ‘Thank fuck. I thought I was going to throw up.’
Gedeon almost grinned at the remark. A tongue as vulgar and wild as hers would be condemned in his mother’s court. Profanities were untoward, a language for commoners. Though, as brothers did, he and Sekun had flung their fair share of obscene words at one another growing up.
Rarely in jest.
‘Take your hair down,’ Gedeon ordered Kyra. She glared at him. Mother above, she was stubborn. He added, ‘To cover your ears. The slaves are human.’
With a quick hand, she loosed the strand of leather that bound her hair in a swirling nest atop her head. It tumbled about her shoulders with no pattern, the curls falling this way and that, like the roots of a tree twisting to find rich ground.
There was beauty in this female. Such raw beauty.
She flung the ribbon into the cart.
‘Well. You look the part,’ he said, looking her up and down. ‘Can you play the part?’
‘I suppose this will be the performance of my life.’
‘It will need to be. Ensure they do not see your ears. Do not let them cut you, or they will see you heal too fast. Don’t talk, or they will hear your voice is not of this land.
Run slow. If they fight you, fight back like a laboured, human slave.
If your movements are too quick or too strong, they will suspect. I will be right behind you.’
‘And if they go for the kill?’ she demanded. ‘Then we’re fucked.’
Judging by the pile of dead in front of them, the slaver’s took no issue with killing their rebelling subservients.
But Gedeon was sure he knew what words to say to keep their blades from drawing blood.
He had told her this already. Patiently, he reminded her, ‘This will not work if you do not trust me.’
‘Are you honestly surprised that I might not?’
Gedeon arched a brow. He hadn’t considered that her mistrust of him came from doubting his integrity as an ally. ‘You think I'm duplicitous.’
‘Who’s to say you only agreed to this mission to deliver me to the Empress yourself? Surely there’ll be an abundance of forgiveness and glory awaiting you if you did.’
‘Do you doubt your own instinct, Kyra?’ Gedeon replied. ‘Search yourself for the answer to your question. Let me know what you come up with. I’d be intrigued to know what you truly think of me.’
‘Oh, trust me, you don’t want to know.’
Gedeon looked at her then, but her hard gaze was on the horizon, set with a cold, simmering anger. It was difficult to imagine she had ever felt called to save his life.
‘Shall I tell you what I think of you first?’ Gedeon offered.
‘Let me guess,’ she said with heavy sarcasm, then began reeling adjectives from her fingers. ‘I’m a reckless, impulsive, stupid, powerless brat who doesn’t think-’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But you are also so much more than those things.’
She shot him half a glance. ‘You don’t know me very well.’
‘I know you well enough to know that there is power in you that even you don’t see.
And I’m not talking about magic. I’m not talking about being a Warden.
’ Soft surprise flitted over her face. ‘All of those things you mentioned, they are surface level. But beyond them, at your core, there’s something stronger that drives you…
and that’s your power. It led you to free your brother.
It led you here. And I believe it will lead you to be a great Earth Warden. If only you get out of your own way.’
Gedeon brushed dirt from the front of his jacket, then looked up to find her staring at him. He smiled. ‘Now, would you like to tell me what you think of me? I swear to only be a little offended.’
The corners of her mouth tilted up. ‘I do doubt my own instinct, you know.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because my opinion of you changes every damned hour.’
The torn expression between amusement and annoyance on her face lifted some of the shadows weighing on his heart.
There was something about her, something that made him want to forgo the prince and the Fire Warden altogether.
Something that made him want to play. He found himself chuckling like a fool as he roughly tucked his hair and ears under the slaver’s cap and nodded to the camps.
‘Shall we?’