18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Keera
My mouth was full of cotton, and my belly was full of snakes.
I tried to groan, but the sound came out dry and broken, and the effort made my stomach twist. Afraid I was going to vomit, I tried to roll onto my side, only to find that my hands and feet were immobilized, making movement almost impossible.
I managed to swallow down the bile in my throat as my eyes snapped open to stare up at a rough canvas ceiling.
Confusion and panic coursed through me in equal measure.
I had fallen asleep safely cradled to Erix’s chest, my limbs inordinately heavy as sparks of pleasure still danced lazily across my skin.
Now, the warmth and security offered by his arms were gone, replaced by the rough scrape of rope at my wrists.
I began to squirm, testing how well bound I was.
It wasn’t as bad as being trapped beneath the mountain, but being restrained still made the wildness of my magic buck and snort like a horse that didn’t like being tied.
“They won’t come loose. She ties her knots far too well for that.”
I froze at the sound of a voice nearby, the tone both resigned and sympathetic. It was distantly familiar.
In my inelegant struggles, I managed to roll in the direction of the voice, falling onto my side to face the wall of the tent. Sitting against it with her bound hands hanging between her bent knees was a woman, looking at me sorrowfully.
Her face was as familiar as her voice—I knew I had seen her, but my brain was still too muddled to place her.
“I’m sorry we had to meet again under such unfortunate circumstances. I planned to challenge you to a friendly spar when next we met, but it would appear both of us have been relieved of our weapons.” She smiled ruefully and memories surfaced of a friendly clasp of forearms and a newborn foal.
“Badha?”
She nodded, a quirk of a smile at the edge of her lips, although it did not reach her eyes.
“Where am I? And what are you doing here?” I asked, mind whirling.
“Clan Katal’s encampment, where I’m a prisoner of sorts too.
I guess we get to share a jail,” Badha said, gesturing around us at the tent.
It wasn’t as sparse as I might have expected for a prison.
A sleeping mat and a blanket lay in one corner along with several luxurious pillows, and I noticed a water skin and empty plate on the ground near the entrance.
My stomach clenched in hunger even as curiosity washed over me at the relative comfort of my jail.
“But the ocean…” I glanced around, half expecting the beach to materialize around me. How had I reached a clan encampment when I had fallen unconscious to the distant sound of waves?
“It was a long journey for the better part of four and a half clans to make, but Izumi was adamant.” Badha grimaced as she crawled toward me and helped me sit up.
She was not as tightly bound as I, just one of her wrists attached to a tent pole with a length of rope that gave her a surprising amount of slack.
My stomach flipped both from the change of position as I sat up and the implication of Badha’s words.
I thought I might heave from the dizziness that overcame me once more.
Now that I listened closely, I could just hear the faint crashing of waves against the beach and smell the salty tang that lingered on the air.
“She led the clans to the ocean? But why?” I asked. Before the words were out of my mouth, the answer struck me, my brain not quite keeping up as I awoke from my haze.
“She made a deal.” Badha’s already grim expression grew even heavier. “She’s obsessed with destroying Kelvadan, and she was convinced she had to do anything possible to get the army she needed to destroy it.”
“General Warrick,” I breathed. Fear for Kelvadan—and the desert—reached beneath my ribs and clutched my heart.
He may have supplied the antidote that saved me from Calix’s poison, but it was out of hatred for Viltov.
Not out of any love for me or my home. He would do what it took to destroy Calix and his family, even if Kelvadan was crushed in the process.
Warrick had been there the day Izumi refused to surrender in the courtyard. He would have seen the fire and fury in her eyes, and he was more cunning than the simple warrior’s facade he wore let on.
“It turns out now that Kelvadan has fallen into the hands of outsiders, others have a vested interest in seeing it destroyed as well,” Badha sighed.
Even as my fears were confirmed, that Warrick would decimate the desert to wound Viltov, I frowned at her. “This is an awful lot of information for a prisoner to have.”
“The clans don’t usually keep prisoners,” she pointed out. “It seems my situation is unique.”
Erix told me Badha had betrayed Izumi to let them escape with Kelvar’s journal.
She had refused to escape with Dhara and Erix though, insisting that Izumi needed her.
It seemed she paid the price for that betrayal.
Although Badha seemed clean and well fed, especially considering the murderous fury that had sparked in Izumi’s eyes at Erix’s surrender.
I would have guessed death would be the punishment for disloyalty.
“I’m surprised she didn’t kill you.”
Badha’s lips quirked. “You shouldn’t be. Izumi isn’t a cruel person. Just… driven.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. Izumi had fed me by hand when I was to be sacrificed to the desert. Erix had always painted her as a cutthroat leader, blind to all but her purpose.
Then again, that had been Erix when I first met him—a blade hell-bent on destroying anything that stood between him and restoring the Heart is ancestor stole.
“She tells me that she will reinstate me as her warlord if I agree to help her command the riders against Kelvadan,” Badha continued.
“But I refuse unless she agrees not to destroy the city after driving out the occupation. Still, when Lord Nathaira demanded I be made a sacrifice for my insubordination, Izumi nearly took off her head.”
I stiffened at the mention of my former lord but tried not to show it. I needed Badha to tell me everything she knew if we were to escape.
“And Izumi can’t bring herself to truly treat me as a prisoner. She comes and talks to me—even takes my advice from time to time. And I can’t say she’s let me be uncomfortable either,” Badha shrugged.
“Why?” I had an inkling from the way Erix told the tale of her betrayal. I wanted to hear it from Badha’s own lips.
She looked away, as if she couldn’t bear to meet my eyes as she spoke.
“Is it wrong to love your jailer? She feels so deeply, and I feel like it has been used to set her down the wrong path, even though it may be a strength.”
My heart twisted with the pain I had felt not so long ago. “I jailed the man I loved once, and he still stood by me. Eventually, though, he had to make the decision to turn off the path he was on, before it destroyed him.”
Badha swallowed thickly. “She’s a good leader.”
“She’s made a lot of mistakes.” The words felt far too harsh coming from my own lips, for I had made far too many blunders as a leader as well, costing many their lives.
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve to be loved. And it doesn’t mean she isn’t a good leader. She makes mistakes because she cares so deeply, and she continues to care and try even after she fails.”
I blinked at her words. They pierced me like an arrow in my heart, although I knew she hadn’t aimed them at me.
Perhaps Izumi did deserve to be loved, just as Erix deserved to be loved in all his brokenness.
I wasn’t yet sure if I had earned the loving belonging I craved, in spite of my failures. My chest ached all the same.
The moment was interrupted by a sudden influx of light and the rustle of a tent flap. I twisted where I sat, almost falling over, immobilized as I was. Izumi strode in, her dark eyes hard and her arms crossed over her chest as she took me in, crumpled on the floor.
“And here we have it, the woman who made the mighty Viper abandon his purpose and his people.” She glared down at me with hard, calculating eyes.
“What did you do to him?” I demanded. We had both been in the temple when the odd sleepiness had overtaken me, and my heart sank that she had found us both there.
“Nothing,” Izumi shook her head. “It was all too easy to drug both of you with one of the poisons General Warrick supplied.
I built a fire and wafted the smoke of the sedative leaves into the temple until I was sure you were both unconscious.
But I only took you and left him there to realize you were gone.
“It’s a horrible feeling, you know? Waking up with half of yourself vanished and realizing you slept through the whole thing.” The hardness in her voice was betrayed by an age-old hurt.
“What do you want with me?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“I can’t afford to let him stop me,” she said. “Our force is large, but he has destructive power that I cannot match. If I have you, though, he won’t strike this camp, and I can lead the riders of my clans and the armies of Doran to destroy Kelvadan.”
Heat bubbled up in my chest, warring against the sluggishness still weighing me to the ground. “I am as powerful as he is. I could destroy this camp too if I wanted to.”
With my own wild power only fed by Erix’s growing madness spilling down the tether between us, even as far apart as we were with the bond muted by sedatives, I knew I was right.
When I was barely more than a child, I had collapsed the earth around my clan’s encampment, casting all who were too close into a dark chasm. My power had multiplied since then.
Erix would do anything it took to get me back—he had nearly torn Kelvadan down when our bond had gone quiet.
I could not let him risk the mission to restore the Heart though or agree to let Izumi and her army march for Kelvadan unhindered.
I had to get free before he made a deal that would bring more harm to the people of the desert.