Chapter Fourteen What You Use It For
He yelled in surprise, but the cry was cut short when the sword pressed deeper into the skin of his neck.
“None of that now, little Exile,” the Defender breathed into his face, smelling of garlic and rancid meat, a combination so disgusting that the Prince almost emptied his stomach.
But he swallowed and held back, and was able to steal frantic glances to his right and left in an effort to locate Leah and Tomaz.
Their bedrolls were empty. There was no sign of where they’d gone.
He tried to understand what was happening, but the pieces didn’t seem to fit together.
How had this happened? It was just past dawn, and the shadows of the forest still lay long and cool across the campsite.
The fire was still banked, and their bags were stashed where they’d left them the night before.
There didn’t appear to be any sign of a disturbance.
“Don’t worry, your friend is here, too.”
The Defender grabbed a hank of his hair and, careful to keep the sword close, pulled him upright. The Prince was able to turn further around, and finally he caught sight of Tomaz.
His heart lurched and skipped a beat before beginning to pound more insistently.
The big man was sitting calmly on the ground, though he was neither tied nor bound and no sword or dagger threatened him.
Instead, a man dressed all in black, head shaved and arcane symbols tattooed into his skin, stood over him, holding a blood-red crystal into which Tomaz was staring helplessly.
A Soul Catcher. A Bloodmage.
“NO!” the Prince cried, suddenly heedless of the blade at his throat.
The Bloodmage threw up a hand, and immediately three Defenders closed in on the Prince, all equally unwashed and dressed in the notorious red-and-brown uniform, with insignias of the triliope on their chests.
They held him down, despite his thrashing.
“How… how?” he asked no one in particular.
“Came on you in the night,” said one of the Defenders. “Shulmun there, our Bloodmage, he sensed you a ways off and said we’d wait for dawn, and then he’d come and hypnotize the guard and we’d have the other two of you no problem. Happened just like he said.”
“Quiet,” said a deep voice, and the Prince knew it was the Bloodmage speaking, for the voice had the raspy quality of all that cursed fellowship.
“Sorry, Shulmun,” the Defender said, with obsequious deference.
The Prince was thinking hard and fast. What could he do?
“Is the girl secured?” the Bloodmage asked.
“Yes, sir,” the Defender holding the sword to the Prince’s throat responded. “On her way to Formaux. Captain Toraine is seeing to it himself.”
Confusion and panic fought inside the Prince. Why had they taken Leah? Had the orders changed about him? Was he to be killed here, by the Bloodmage, and his soul harvested to feed the mage’s power? But no, that made no sense—if they wanted to kill him, why would they take Leah?
And then it came together, the pieces falling into place with almost audible clicks: They didn’t know who he was. They had no idea who they were holding. They had stumbled on the three of them and decided they only needed one of them for questioning, and the other two could be sacrificed.
His mind expanded, taking in every detail of their appearance.
All had several weeks’ worth of beard growth on their cheeks, and all smelled so foul that it was clear they hadn’t bathed in at least as long.
The Bloodmage, from what the Prince could see, looked gaunt, almost starving, which meant he had gone some time, perhaps weeks, without metaphysical sustenance.
The Defenders all had caked layers of mud and grime on their boots and halfway up their thighs.
Several also had large, angry boils on their necks and cheeks. Bug bites?
They’ve been in the swamps east of Lake Chartain, he realized. They’ve been looking for Exiles, like Leah and Tomaz, who use that way to get around the usual patrols.
Tomaz gave a small groan, and the Prince realized that he needed to do something—anything—to break the Bloodmage’s trance. If he didn’t, the big man would soon be beyond saving.
But what could he do? He couldn’t move, the Defender with the sword was staring very intently at his neck to discourage any such thoughts. Leah wasn’t anywhere around….
As the thought crossed his mind, he heard, almost at the edge of hearing, the sharp whistling sound that signaled one of her daggers flying through the air. The Defenders heard it as well, and they all turned to look into the forest, but they were too late.
The long, wicked length of steel flew through the clearing and pierced the Bloodmage in the back, where his heart would be. The black-robed man gave a small cry and fell to the ground.
For a long moment, no one moved, not the Defenders, not the Prince, not Tomaz as he came out of his trance. All of them simply stared, uncomprehending, at the fallen figure of Shulmun the Bloodmage.
And then all seven hells broke lose.
The Prince threw himself backward, away from the sword at his neck, as the Defender holding it drew back the deadly metal and sliced it clean through where the Prince’s head had been.
The Prince struck out with both hands and both feet, whipping around in a circular motion.
He connected with two pairs of ankles and swept both men to the ground.
The remaining men, three all told still standing, drew their swords and stabbed at him.
An enormous figure came up behind them, casting a shadow over them as it blocked out the rising sun, and they turned to find a thoroughly enraged giant.
Seizing his chance, the Prince reached into his belt and pulled out the dagger Leah had given him. He flipped over, rolled into a crouch, and slammed the dagger’s hilt into the temples of the men he’d knocked to the ground. They stopped trying to regain their feet and went limp.
Three muffled cries followed by three heavy thumps signaled that Tomaz had dealt with the other Defenders in similar fashion.
The Prince spun to his feet, surveying the scene, pulse pounding in his ears.
The Bloodmage still lay on the ground, unconscious, but, as the Prince knew, not yet dead.
He hurried over and grabbed the blood-red crystal that had been used to hypnotize Tomaz, breaking the leather cord that held it strung around the mage’s neck.
He threw it on a nearby rock and scrabbled around for another.
His hand closed over one and he pulled, prying it from the earth, as the Bloodmage began to stir.
He raised the second rock high in the air and brought it crashing down on the Soul Catcher.
As rock met crystal, there was a terrifying moment where it felt as though the rock would be repulsed and the crystal would remain whole, but then came the sound of breaking glass, a sharp shattering as if a piece of reality had been fractured, and the crystal broke.
The Bloodmage screamed, so loudly that the Prince flinched away, his ears ringing.
The black-robed figure rose like a corpse marionette on tangled strings, twitched in the direction of the Prince, and then fell to the floor and moved no more.
The Prince whirled back around and saw that Tomaz had thrown all of the Defenders into a line against two adjacent oak trunks and was binding them with lengths of their own red-and-brown uniforms.
“How did they find us?” the giant asked. “What happened?”
“They must have scouting the swamps for Exiles—their clothes, their hair, they’re filthy, and see those bug bites? From what that one said, they were returning to the roads when the Bloodmage sensed us, and they set an ambush as we slept.”
“Why didn’t you sense them?” he asked, looking at the Prince with an unnerving intensity.
“I… I haven’t been using the Talisman,” he said.
If he had listened to the girl and continued using it, he could have prevented this. But he’d let his pride and anger blind him.
“How did they take me? The Bloodmage?”
“Yes,” the Prince said. “He hypnotized you. Tried to feed off of you.”
“How did you break the trance?”
“I didn’t, Leah did.”
“What? Where is she?”
“I don’t know. They said they were taking her north to Formaux, but she must have escaped and come back—”
“Is that her dagger?”
“Yes, it’s how she broke the trance, she threw it and struck the Bloodmage.”
Tomaz was suddenly in the Prince’s face.
“From where? Did you see her throw it?”
“N-no, it just came flying in from the forest, but she can’t be far—”
“She’s a Spellblade, princeling,” Tomaz hissed at him.
His anger and fear were palpable, and barely controlled.
“She can throw a dagger from wherever she wants and make it go wherever she wants. She could be miles away! She threw the dagger hoping the Bloodmage would be where he was when she last saw him, and she got lucky. But she only would have thrown it as a last resort—only would have thrown it if there was no way she could use it to help her own situation and come back to help us.”
The Prince looked into the giant’s face and saw that Leah was lost to them.
”No,” he said. “No, you’re wrong. She can’t be that far.”
“Far enough that you’ll never catch her.”
Both the Prince and Tomaz whipped around and saw that one of the Defenders had regained consciousness. There was blood dripping down his face, and it made him look like a grisly reanimated corpse. He was smiling at them with an expression of zealous triumph.
“Explain yourself,” Tomaz said, towering over him and radiating danger.
“She is on her way to Formaux with a squad of two-dozen fully armed Defenders of the Realm. They left almost an hour ago, before you or this scrawny little runt even woke up!”
“Liar!” the Prince shouted.
“I speak the truth,” he said, grinning his bloody grin.
“We have to go after her,” the Prince said to Tomaz.