Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back in the saddle, Keeran grimaced as he adjusted his position.
Gods, he hated travelling on horseback. It was uncomfortable, and slow, and such a waste of time.
He could have flown the distance they’d travelled since leaving Callodosis in a day.
A day and a half with breaks. It was another very good reason for him to have left Aelia…
For the hundredth time in the hour since they’d left camp, Keeran fought the urge to turn and look at her.
She’d been quiet since last night, when he’d thrown himself under his blankets and rolled to face away from the fire, away from her.
He’d been stiff as a board listening to her get herself ready for bed, tucking herself up in her own blankets on the opposite side of the fire.
It had taken everything in him, every single iota of self-control, to stop himself from going to her.
She wanted him to, of that he was now sure, and that knowledge kept him up half the night.
So now he rode next to her, eyes scratchy and trousers tight.
He gritted his teeth at the discomfort, his need for her seeming to grow with each moment.
Her taunt from the night before played over and over in his head, his embarrassment at his flustered lack of response alleviated only by the thoughts of what he could do to her to prove her wrong. Thoughts that would not go away.
He gritted his teeth, trying to banish the images from his mind, when Aelia’s voice jolted him from his purgatory.
“Keeran.” Aelia pointed with a trembling finger.
Smoke, and lots of it, rose in the distance from behind a crest of a hill.
Keeran looked back at Aelia, and his stomach fell out of the saddle and into the grass.
He’d never seen her so angry, the maelstrom of emotion she’d been enduring since Callodosis finally having something real to aim at. He almost pitied the Astraea.
“You don’t think…” she whispered, not taking her eyes off the ominous column. He didn’t want to answer, not when he recognised the seething rage behind her eyes. In that moment, he dreaded the hatred he saw there, fearing the recklessness that might arise from it.
“It could be,” he eventually replied, although he had little doubt as to who was responsible.
Aelia looked into the distance for a single moment, the wind picking up around them, seeming to drive them towards the smoke. It was all the encouragement she needed.
With little more than a touch of her heels, her horse sprang away, reaching a full gallop within a few paces to tear through the grassy plains.
“Dammit Aelia, wait!” He gathered his reins and chased after her. “Wait! Aelia!”
The wind tore the words from him, flinging them back over his shoulder.
Her horse was built for speed in a way that his was not, and she beat him to the brow of the hill, not pausing before she careened back down the other side.
Time slowed despite the pounding of his horses’ hooves as he lost sight of her, a thousand thoughts racing through his mind as he imagined what might be waiting for her beneath the column of smoke.
He finally reached the top, accompanied by the rhythmic flutter of his horses’ nostrils, the beast blowing heavily as he tried to keep up with his friend. There was no time to rest, however, as Aelia was ploughing dangerously down the steep bank on the other side towards the source of the smoke.
He could only assume it had once been a hamlet, one far too small to have been put on any map. Now it never would be. Charred beams lying amongst smoking piles of ash were all that remained of the homes they had once formed, their inhabitants nowhere to be seen.
He drove onwards, checking his horse lest gravity take their descent into its own hands, even as his heart seemed to reach through his rib cage towards the too small figure ahead of him.
Aelia finally slowed to a walk as she reached the hamlet. Only when he reached her side did his breathing return to normal, although his horse needed a little while longer.
He dismounted and tied the reins safely in a knot. Aelia slipped off and copied him.
“Watch yourself, we may not be alone,” he cautioned.
The smoke was acrid on his tongue, promising to linger at the back of his throat long after they had left this place.
He walked a few paces in front of Aelia, scanning for some clue as to what had happened, hoping they were wrong in their assumption. They weren’t.
In what used to be the centre square sat another pile of ash, smaller than the others and free of beams. Instead, the ash held an array of bones. Too many to count.
A post had been hammered into the ground in front of it, the poster at its tip whipped at by the sudden wind, folding the paper over on itself.
Aelia walked with heavy solemnity to expose the words the wind had tried to hide from them.
Demuto shall be cleansed.
Rid yourself of your Human pests or face their fate alongside them.
“Aelia…” He tried to reach over to where she stood staring at the words in her hand, to offer what comfort he could… but comfort was the last thing on her mind.
Before he could touch her, she was striding around the pile of ash, her eyes hard and dangerous as they searched the dirt. He watched her read the story it had to tell with an ominous sense of foreboding.
“Aelia, don’t be foolish.”
She ignored him, bent low as she followed the tracks until the plains opened up before them, uninterrupted by smouldering piles of ashes.
“They went this way,” she said, looking out to where the trail undeniably disappeared.
“Towards Llmera. That’s hardly surprising,” he grunted.
“Good, we won’t even need to make a detour.” She finally looked at him, not a hint of humour in her face.
“We need to wait. They could have joined a larger unit by now.” It was true, the tracks suggested only a small band of the Astraea were guilty of the massacre that smouldered behind them, but who knew what kind of force they could end up chasing down.
Aelia turned back to the horses, not deigning to respond.
He grabbed at her arm, holding her back.
“Aelia, think this through. This is foolish.”
He let her snatch her arm free, her anger momentarily focused on him.
“I’m not asking you to come. Be like everyone else and just walk past the problem that burns at your feet, but I won’t.” She glared at him, those green eyes boring into him with well-aimed accusation. She spun around and stormed back to the horses, each stride more determined than the last.
“Fuck,” he sighed before following.
She’d already leapt into the saddle by the time he reached her.
“Do you have your dagger?” he asked. She lifted her top to show him. “Good.”
He pulled his sword out from his saddle and slung it between his shoulders, fighting the urge to mutter under his breath at the lunacy of what they were about to do.
She’d snapped at him once and he was in no rush to experience it again, so he gritted his teeth and swung himself onto his horse’s back wordlessly.
“See if you can keep up this time.” She flipped her braid over her shoulder and urged her horse onwards.
Safely out of earshot, he risked a few mumbled expletives.
They ate up the ground, the horses egging each other on as they hurtled towards the murderous pyromaniacs.
Stay in control, stay in control, stay in control, he chanted in time to the beat of the horse’s hooves. He was in no doubt that their little game of chase would end in violence, and he just prayed he could keep Aelia alive without showing too much of his other side.
The trail led them beside the tree-lined edge of one of the lakes, shielding them as successfully as it blocked their view of the Astraea. So it was with inevitable surprise that they rounded a corner at considerable speed and hit straight into the back of the band of Astraeans.
There were more than he had anticipated, but less than he’d feared; about fifteen armed artemians jumped into action. Fortunately, the only horses they had with them pulled an enormous, caged cart, meaning the Astraeans themselves were on foot.
To her credit, Aelia didn’t hesitate for a moment as they ploughed towards them at a gallop. Her dagger was in her hand and bloodied before the first Astraean had a chance to draw his own weapon. Blood sprayed from his neck, his body hitting the floor long after Aelia had passed.
Keeran was hot on her tail, unable to think of anything other than watching her back. She was not ready for this, nowhere near.
His sword whistled through the air, the last sound those who felt its cold touch ever heard.
Aelia’s dagger was no match for the swords the Astraeans had now had time to draw, not from horseback and certainly not in her inexperienced hands, but in a rush of swinging steel, they managed to emerge on the other side of the Astraeans unharmed.
Wheeling their horses back around, they faced the now ready group of warriors, their blades high and formation held.
“Aelia, be careful of the…”
She didn’t wait to hear the rest of his caution. Blood flecked her face as she turned to him.
“They have the humans.”
Keeran looked back and felt the familiar red mist start to descend.
His attention had been so focused on the threat of the Astraeans, he hadn’t noticed what was in the cage they were transporting.
It was crammed full of humans, so tightly squeezed that some of their limbs poked through the bars like hay from a net.
He closed his grip around the hilt of his sword and met Aelia’s eye.
As one, they charged.
He got ahead of her, breaking into the Astraean formation and sending them scattering. A few of them Shifted, and it was these he focused on, cutting them down as quickly as he could. The more he killed, the less Aelia had to face in his wake.
He twisted to look her way and saw she had leapt from the saddle, sending her dagger flying towards a looming Astraean. She missed. Keeran cursed and dragged his horse back around.
Skidding to her knees, Aelia swiped a sword from a still groaning corpse and raised it just in time to block the blade that swung her way.
Her face contorted with the strain, but she flung the Astraean off her.
The speed of her reflexes was the only thing that had saved her, but she was facing an experienced soldier, and she couldn’t make it to her feet in time before he was upon her once more.
Keeran hacked his way through the soldiers blocking him from Aelia, the blood he spilt dripping from the dark coat of his horse, but he could see another two Astraeans moving to surround her. The red mist enveloped him, pulsing in his ears and boiling his blood.
He kicked his horse, spurring it on, but it could only go so fast, mangling the corpses it trampled over. By some miracle, she blocked another attack from the first Astraean from where she knelt on the floor, completely oblivious to the two that approached her from behind.
He would not make it in time, and there was no way she could hold off all of them, not when she had never held a sword before in her life.
He watched them descend on her, saw the fear of death flash in her eyes as she noticed she was surrounded, the inevitability of it as clear to her as it was to him.
In that instant, he made a choice. He would give up his search for those who had betrayed his kind, he would flee Demuto, he would face Aelia’s repulsion.
Because he would not let her die.
The flames were always with him, just a psychic touch away from life, and he reached for them now. In his mind’s eye, he guided them even as they woke, already planning their path of swirling incineration, turning the Astraea’s weapon of choice against the soldiers who encircled Aelia.
The oxygen was sucked from him when Aelia grabbed hold of the sword she wielded with both hands and slashed at the feet of the man closest to her with enough strength to cleave bone from bone.
The man hadn’t even hit the floor before she threw herself over him, rolling away from the other two with unnatural speed. It gave him all the time he needed.
The flames died before they were even created, but the steel in his hands came to life, singing through the air as he launched out of the saddle and rolled to his feet between the two remaining Astraeans.
It took every single ounce of self-control to kill them with restrained movements, the beast in him yearning to rip their souls from their bodies with his bare hands.
In a matter of seconds, the road was quiet once more.
Aelia stood looking at him. Her sword hung by her side, her chin held high despite the frantic rise and fall of her blood-spattered chest. There wasn’t even a flicker of regret in her eyes, just pure, unadulterated defiance. She’d never looked so beautiful.
His heart thundered in his chest at the sight of her and as he held her gaze, he wondered how the fuck he was ever going to find the strength to leave her.