Chapter Text
Meylen crouched in moonlight, boots planted on a sturdy oak branch ten feet above the forest floor. A pair of men patrolled the undergrowth, drawing closer to her position with every step. The fetid reek of their corruption—of blood magic and rotted meat—came with them.
In the near distance, a shriek pierced the quiet. She had tracked that sound for nearly a mile, moving silently through the untamed woods, wishing she had waited for her brother. Too late for regrets. As the men passed beneath her, she stepped off the branch.
Her boots hit the spongy carpet of leaves. Knees flexing, she dropped into a low crouch.
The first man turned toward her, hands raised, voice shrill around the words to focus his power.
She sprang up, all the momentum of her fall reversed into the thrust. Her dagger shattered the shield of energy he summoned into brilliant sparks. Hot blood sprayed her face. Blinded by the flash, she closed her eyes and spun, blade-first, toward the second man’s gasp. White magelight flared against her eyelids as her dagger ripped through magic and mage alike.
Then the only sound was the rasp of her own hard breathing. She twisted until her back was to the oak tree and watched the afterimages of broken magic trace patterns on the insides of her eyelids. She waited, listening for breathing, for footsteps, for that pained wail to come again. The shriek, when it came, was so much weaker than it had been. Whoever made it was fading fast.
Still, she waited while the images faded, while her breathing steadied and quieted. Dread weighed heavy on her as the cry came again. She knew that sound too well, had no doubt what she would find at its source. For one long moment, she wished she were capable of walking away from it.
When she opened her eyes, the witches lay as they had fallen. No breath of life stirred their bodies. She cut their throats anyway, to be sure.
By the time she resumed her hunt, the blood on her face had grown cold, but she did not try to wipe it away. In the deep shadow and dappled moonlight, it would serve only to break the pale expanse of her face and hide her more deeply.
The screams she had tracked through the night dwindled away to choked sobs as she approached, barely audible even to her enhanced hearing. She stalked forward, circling her destination, watching for signs of other witches in the wood. Without backup, she had one chance at this.
The stench of decay and of tainted magic grew stronger as she slid between shadows. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to keep from gagging as she circled the ridge, quiet as a whisper of wind. A ring of evergreens formed a dark wall around the clearing, and Meylen crouched behind one to steady her racing heart.
A nude woman knelt in moonlight, clothed only in streaks and whorls of blood. Her long, dark hair lay twisted into a dozen intricate braids, knotted at her back in a style Meylen had never seen before. Her voice droned on in a low chant, invoking the goddess Dami to witness as moonlight flashed along the edge of her bloody blade. Before her, the flayed man gasped and twitched against the bonds of magic that held him immobile, no longer able even to scream as she peeled another strip of flesh from his thigh. The ritual was near its end, and so was he.
Meylen closed the distance on silent feet, though the woman was too engrossed in her ritual to notice. They always were, as insensate to the world around them as the regulars at an opium den, though the only drug they consumed in the ritual was power. Meylen knotted a fist in the long braids and yanked the woman’s head back. Her dagger opened the woman’s throat, ear to ear, even as the flayed man’s dark, lidless eyes met Meylen’s.
He writhed against the ground, released from the magic that had pinned him, that had held him on the cusp of life far beyond what a normal person could endure. Blood ran over bared muscle and sinew and bone to soak into the corrupted earth.
Still, his eyes watched Meylen. They pleaded silently, but she was not a creature built for mercy, and the touch of her blade would be no comfort to one such as he. She shoved the witch aside, sank to her knees beside him, and drew a breath to offer him the scant comfort of a thin lie. The rich, earthy scent of his magic, left unclaimed by the ritual’s premature end, beckoned her. The taste of it flooded her tongue, warm and oaken, like an aged wine. There was nothing in it of the corruption that shrouded the dead witches.
Gods weep, she thought, closing her eyes and fighting the lure of it. Revulsion churned her stomach, but there was hunger there, too. The power, the potential of the ritual, throbbed in the air, demanding that she wield the witch’s knife, that she finish it and take what was hers by right and by blood.
Or that she simply wait, let him bleed his life away. Let the power that charged the air fill her body—the only vessel left to hold it now that the braided woman was a cooling corpse.
He coughed. Choked, really, blood welling in his throat. His eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible.
“No,” she whispered as the unsteady patter of his heartbeat slowed.
It was too much. She’d seen this too many times when she was powerless to stop it. She had sworn to herself it was over. That she would never again watch an innocent bleed his life and magic away in this perverted, obscene ritual.
“No,” she said again, stronger now, as she reached for him with hands already covered in blood.
The Night Garden was Jaim’s favorite place to practice. Night-flowering shrubs and pale moon lilies scented the air. After sunset, it became a place for lovers’ trysts and soft night sounds. Rings of combed white sand waited at either end of the courtyard, illuminated by bright cones of light. He was not the only Hunter to use this place, and people often came to observe, but the interplay of light and darkness allowed him a form of solitude he cherished.
Still, he felt the brush of one particular pair of eyes as if it were a physical thing, almost an intimacy. Like most nights he practiced here, the scribe watched him from just beyond the light, pale clothing and bright golden hair framed against the deep shadows of the greenery at his back. Jaim’s muscles shivered beneath the weight of that blue-eyed gaze, but he made no move to acknowledge the man, whose name he had been careful not to know. Instead, he kept the long figure in his peripheral vision as he flowed from one form to the next.
He alternated between excruciating slowness and blurring speed. Sweat trickled, itching its way down his bare chest, but he ignored it as he bent forward and placed his left hand on the smooth sand. His legs rose languidly into a split position, and then further, until his body straightened into a handstand. The fingers of his right hand rested against the hilt of the dagger on his hip. He closed his eyes, stretched his other senses to listen to the crunch of footsteps on gravel as couples strolled along the garden paths.
He waited, motionless, as his thoughts stilled and centered, just as his body had centered with his weight balanced on the palm of a single hand. The martial forms he had known since before his earliest memory still had the power to ease his mind. He would need that calm center in the days to come more than ever.
The hairs bristled on the back of his neck as the near-silent sound of the scribe’s breathing quickened.
Jaim opened his eyes to see his cousin Lialu step into his ring. She stayed at the edge, the toes of her black boots just nudging the illuminated sand. Her face and long, blond hair were visible, but her black leathers blended her lean body with the shadows.
He ground his teeth at the intrusion. Of course she would turn up tonight; she had a vicious streak and a gift for showing up when he least wanted to deal with her.
He braced a second hand on the sand, bent his elbows, and pushed off with his arms. Swinging his legs, he flipped backwards into a crouched landing, facing away from her as if she were no threat at all. He continued with his forms, though he had intended to stop after the jackknife stand. A few long moments passed as he pretended to ignore her, and then she stepped forward into his path.
Jaim simply changed his pattern, slipping past her reaching fingers. He dove forward, rolled and came back to standing in a single motion. Sand sprayed into the air, clung to his back and shoulders. He turned on his heel to face her. “What do you want, Lialu?”
She pouted, full lower lip stuck out for effect. “You’re the only one who never calls me Lia. Why is that?”
He rolled his shoulders but kept the irritation out of his voice. “Because it’s a term of affection.”
Her pout deepened, but laughter danced around her eyes.
“What do you want?”
“To offer you my support.” Her lips quirked into a half-smirk.
In a couple of hours, the elders of his family would convene to elect the next Lord Hunter. The wrangling would take a day or two at least. More, given Jaim’s rather unconventional demands. Most everyone believed him to be the only candidate, but he knew better. So did she.
“I thought you’d thrown your lot in with Sett.” His brother would indulge her fouler tastes lavishly, as she damned well knew Jaim would not.
Her perfect lips curved up in a naughty grin. “Maybe you could persuade me to change my mind.”
He kept his face emotionless. He’d expected as much from her—games of cat and mouse with no substance behind them. She had no intention of changing sides at this late hour.
She sauntered forward, hips swaying.
He stood his ground as she leaned over and licked the sweat from his chest. Revulsion made his hands into fists again, but he dared not strike, not tonight, and she knew it.
She looked up at him coyly.
“We could have so much fun together, you and me.” Her low murmur was full of sex or violence. Maybe both.
“I don’t think so.” Keeping his annoyance off his face and out of his voice was easy enough, with all his years of practice, but the calm he’d spent the last two hours working towards had shattered like glass. He moved past her toward the stone bench where he’d left his thin towel, careful as always not to look at the scribe who sat nearby, pretending not to watch. The rest of the onlookers made no such attempt to hide their interest. Jaim wiped the sand, sweat, and saliva off before shrugging into his vest.
Before he closed it, Lialu’s hands came around him from behind and slid down over his chest. He grabbed her hands and twisted, bending the wrists back at painful angles.
She hissed.
The scribe stopped pretending to look elsewhere. His wide, sky-blue eyes met Jaim’s and caught as he stood and back-pedaled.
“I could be good for you, Jaim,” she growled into his ear, pressing her body against his back. “That’s what you want, right? A good girl?” Her voice deepened to a bedroom whisper. “Like your sister?”
He ducked, turned, and shoved her back a stumbling step. His warning came out rough and brittle. “Touch me again, and it will be the last thing you do.”
He side-stepped her and strode toward the palace without a glance behind.
Her throaty laughter followed him.
Red ribbons of blood caught in the current, dancing along the eddies of the shallow stream. Meylen knelt, head bowed over the water in an attitude of prayer, but she had no gods to call upon and only the water to wash away her sins.
She drew her pale, wrinkled hands from the stream, surprised as always that they came so clean. Looking down at them, she could almost forget the scene at her back. But the undeniable stench of dark magic and death lingered, clogging her throat with every breath. She needed all her remaining strength to rise and turn back to it.
Time moved in ragged fits and starts. As she skirted the graying body of the dead witch, she blinked and found herself on her knees again, beside the man who lay sleeping in the clearing’s polluted center. She studied him in the faint, false-dawn light.
His skin was unmarred but pale and strangely translucent everywhere the blade had bitten him. He was fit, with broad shoulders and a large frame. His scalp was as pale and smooth as the rest of him. Aside from the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, he lay motionless, arms open to the dawn. Beneath him, the black earth was caked with blood.
She touched his face with fingers too cold to feel the texture of his new-made skin. She’d been clumsy, unused to tapping that wellspring of forbidden power within her, and the healing had been an agony for them both, though she’d done her best to take the brunt of it. Beneath the supple, well-fit leather of her uniform, her skin still felt as if every nerve were exposed.
Shaking her head, she tried to clear the wool from her mind. He needed cover, warmth. A pile of gear and discarded clothes lay nearby, none of them suitable for a man of his size. She found two blankets in the disarray, and a fine, gray cloak made of a shimmering material like nothing she had ever seen. As strange as the intricate, dark braids of the witch.
Meylen spread the blankets and cloak over his sleeping form and dropped to sit beside him again. He breathed in his healing-enforced slumber. That was enough for now. She tried not to think about what came next.
After a time that seemed to stretch endlessly, he moaned and curled into a tight ball on his side, beneath the blankets. His whole body shook with his ragged gasps.
She sat there, frozen and useless while he wept, too unsure of herself to touch him, to speak.
After he quieted, she swallowed her discomfort and spoke in a soft voice she hardly recognized as her own. “What’s your name?”
He made no reply, and she thought perhaps he had drifted back to sleep. Or that his mind had shattered under the witch’s knife. She hadn’t thought about how he would cope with what had been done to him. In truth, she hadn’t thought at all beyond the pity for what he had suffered. She cast her gaze around the clearing again, and at the bright blue sky above. Hours had passed since the sunrise and even in a place as remote as this, they could not remain undiscovered forever.
He shuddered. His long, blood-crusted fingers rose to explore his face, as if to reassure himself that it was there. After a long moment, he levered himself up to sitting but kept his eyes turned away from her.
“You should have let me die.” His voice was a dry rasp, scraped as raw as his hide had been.
She’d had the same thought herself more than once since stumbling back from the stream. If she had an inkling of sense now, she would draw her dagger, correct her mistake, and be done with it. “Well, I didn’t. You’re just going to have to live with that.” *And so am I*, she thought. “Your name?”
He cast the briefest of glances at her, then away again. “Reys.”
She rose to her feet, congratulated herself on only wobbling a little, and held out a hand to help him up. “We need to get moving, Reys.”
“You should go,” he said, still not looking at her. “There are others. They’ll come for her.” He nodded toward the fallen witch. “And for me.”
“How many?” she asked, thinking of the two men she’d killed last night.
Instead of answering, he stared into the distance. “We can’t hide. The stink of what she did is all over me.” He swallowed hard. “They’ll be able to track us by it, and I can’t fight them. Not now.”
“I can.” Meylen touched a fingertip to the carved pommel of her Hunter’s dagger. The curved blade rested along her right thigh, in the sheath built into her leathers. She wore it as both weapon and badge of office, though she doubted that offered him much comfort, considering.
He frowned at it but said nothing more.
“I hitched my horse a ways south of here,” she said. “We can be across the Rhoan by nightfall, if we move quick. They won’t follow us across the river. They wouldn’t dare.”
He continued to stare off into the distance as if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Meylen nudged him with her boot, and he startled, turning to look at her with wide eyes.
“Unless you want to get skinned again.”
He blanched, but he climbed to his feet, staggering a bit and juggling the blankets to keep himself covered.
She turned toward the edge of the clearing to the south. Her muscles felt rubbery and hard used. Everything ached. But he was right. They dared not rest here.
As she neared the edge of the clearing, she heard a low whispering, barely audible even to her heightened senses. The words were oddly shaped and unfamiliar to her, but their intonation sounded ritualistic, like a prayer. She turned back.
He had tied the blankets into a loose robe that gathered around him where he squatted beside the witch. His fingers were gentle as he closed her sightless eyes.
Meylen stared at his back, brow furrowed. When his voice fell silent, she spoke. “Why?”
“Why what?” he asked without looking up. He picked up the cloak and spread it over the corpse.
“Why show her such care after what she did to you?”
He rose to his feet and set off toward the south without meeting Meylen’s gaze. His steps were ginger, his feet bare. When he answered, his voice was as emotionless as a Hunter’s. “Because she was my sister.”