Chapter 18 Rasha #2
Before I could reach them, he thrust out a clawed hand. The glow of the gem in Khatuya’s dagger lit the crags of her face, her bark-like skin slack with fear. She tried to slash his palm with her blade, but he caught her wrist instead. His other hand took her by the throat.
He lifted her as I ran screaming toward him, launching myself at his wings. I seized his feathers.
Pain seared my leg. I gasped, unable to breathe past the sensation.
I felt my body falling, my grip on my dagger loosening.
It was happening to someone else, only I could feel the hard ground beneath my back, another jolt of fire to my thigh, the softness of the silt at my cheek strangely incongruous.
A blade flashed, resting against my neck. The sounds of fighting died. The man with the curved sword was standing over me, his lips firm and brows low over his eyes.
“Don’t, Dashu.” Hakara, breathless; hurried footsteps. “Please.”
Dashu didn’t look away from me. “She will keep following us. Her god sent her to kill Thassir. She is a fanatic – they do not quit.”
My sister knelt at my side and pushed the blade gently away. For a moment, I thought she would brush the hair from my forehead, the way she’d done every morning in our shared tent, her expression soft. But she reached instead for my hand, prying my godkilling dagger free.
“Take theirs as well,” she said, nodding to Naatar and Khatuya. They’d both stood down when that curved sword had touched my throat, their hands raised. My heartbeat raced. We’d all be punished for this.
“Well. No way to kill a god without a godkilling dagger. And seems like something we could use. Now hold still,” Hakara said. In one smooth movement, she’d gripped the bolt in my thigh and yanked it out.
A fresh wave of pain washed through me.
She pressed a hand to the wound, then called to Naatar. “Come here. Hold that until it stops bleeding.” He obeyed, replacing her hand with his.
I gritted my teeth. “You should kill me. Your friend is right.”
Hakara squeezed my shoulder, leaving a bloody handprint on my robe. “When have I ever done what you told me to?” She tucked my godkilling dagger into her belt – the blade I’d bled and killed for. “Thassir?”
He shook his head, ruffling the feathers of his wings as though casting off the touch I’d laid upon him. “No. She’s gone. She changed.” He picked up the basket on the ground, tucked it beneath his arm, and pointed. “South.”
I tried to memorize the exact place he was pointing to.
Hakara lifted her hand, dusting her palms against her pants as she rose, leaving a single smear of red. Then she looked at her palm as though she’d spotted something unusual there.
“Hm. Got an idea.”
She pulled the dagger free again.
“Hakara,” Thassir said, his voice a warning. But when did my sister ever listen to warnings? She nicked her palm and then took my hand too. I tried to pull away, but she’d caught me by surprise. The movement only drew the edge against my skin.
And then she was holding her hand against mine, our blood mingling. “Do it.” She didn’t look away from me, but I saw the black-winged god let out a soft little sigh, the slight shake of his head.
A lingering moment with our hands clasped, during which nothing happened. Her eyes looked so much like mine – the same shape, the same color. A scent swirled into the air. Aether, slightly warm, surrounded our hands. Something tickled at the back of my mind.
“Now she’ll know exactly where we are.” Dashu still hadn’t sheathed his blade. “You never asked us. One of the things that made Lisha the Orator such a great leader was that she took the time to listen to her subordinates.”
Hakara beckoned to the russet-haired woman. “And was Lisha in the middle of chasing down an elder god when she asked for all these opinions?”
“Can you do that?” the russet-haired woman asked. “Hold two bonds at once?”
Hakara shrugged. “No one told me I couldn’t.
” She gave me one last look. “And I’ll know exactly where she is at all times too.
This goes both ways. You’ve two choices now, Rasha.
You can follow me. But I’d sooner toss all three of your blades into the Sanguine Sea before I let you have them again.
And if you get too close, I’ll make sure to drop them into a place you’ll never recover them.
Or you can run back to Kluehnn. Tell him what happened here.
Beg another blade from him. I don’t care. Just don’t bother us again.”
She put a hand to her bloody shoulder, winced a little, but walked into the darkness, the dagger at her side winking as if to mock me.
The russet-haired woman dipped by me, picking up the bolt Hakara had yanked from my leg.
They faded into the night as quickly as they’d appeared.
A stretching sensation formed in my mind, a piece of dough being pulled from either end.
I could feel her moving south, away from Bian.
Naatar still knelt at my side, his hand on the wound in my thigh.
His tail twitched behind him, a nervous gesture.
I knew he was thinking about the loss of our blades.
We couldn’t hide that. We weren’t godkillers without them.
Yet if we set off after them, we’d still lose the blades and we’d have no way to complete our mission.
“I spoke to other godkillers about the battle that killed our den’s aspect.
That winged god was there, a force like a hurricane wind.
But he was not the only one. There were others.
Unanointed mortals. It wasn’t the god that killed the aspect.
It was a mortal. A woman with dark brown hair, who looked mixed.
Like you.” Khatuya turned her gaze to me on these last words, and I did my best not to flinch.
“Khatuya, leave it.” Naatar’s voice was strained.
“It needs to be said, and we are here alone with no one to overhear us. We cannot follow you blindly. There can be no lies between us, or even half-truths. We are a cohort, but the only reason we made it through was because we relied on each other. The bond we have is unique, it is strong, but that doesn’t mean it can’t break.
” She held my gaze. “I know she is your sister. She is also the one who killed an aspect of Kluehnn.”
I worked to tear a strip of my robe free so I could bind my wound. “That doesn’t compromise me.”
“Doesn’t it? You let her go free back in the den and she went on to kill Kluehnn’s aspect. I saw – she only enhanced her arms. You should have been able to defeat her. And if you’d defeated her, we could have found a way to kill her two companions and then take on the black-winged god.”
Khatuya always liked to bite off more than she could chew when it came to a fight. “It was too much. He’s too strong.” I gently lifted Naatar’s hand from the wound. The blood had congealed, leaving a reddened pit on my leg.
I touched the front of my armor, where there was a hole, a streak of blood across it. As far as I could tell, the wound in my thigh was the only one I’d sustained. Strange.
Naatar wiped his hand clean on his robe. “Are you trying to say that Kluehnn gave us more than we could handle? That he set us up to fail?”
“I… No. That’s not what I’m trying to say at all.” Wasn’t it, though? My mind was a traitor to itself, digging into all the weak explanations I’d been fed over the years, the ones I’d willingly swallowed. “He might have made a mistake. Maybe he didn’t know the others would be with him.”
“Then what should we do?”
I wanted to run away, to follow Hakara and her friends south, to avoid facing Kluehnn.
My chest tightened. “We should go to Kluehnn. We should warn him of what we saw, of the lies they told us about him.” I took a deep breath as I tied the bandage.
It did nothing to ease the fear creeping up the back of my neck, the dread that wormed its way into my bones.
“We should face our punishment, whatever that may be.”