The Danger of Destiny (5 page)

A cloud of ill will.

Don't ask me why my instincts attributed that to the rolling mist. It was actually a strangely beautiful thing. Almost alive, the color of bleached bone, rippling with movement and depth. The afternoon sun was strong and bright, and its rays caught the shimmering particles suspended inside its wavering shape, turning them pink, and purple, and plum.

Qae observed its progress with no visible emotion—a marked contrast to his companion, who followed the glimmering miasma's approach with the anticipation of a guy sitting in the third-base stands watching a strike turn into a fly ball.

Gonna-get-it, gonna-get-it
was written all over the cavalryman.

My Fae was a hard knot bothering my sternum. “Elemental magic,” I heard her say quite clearly. “You must flee, sister.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Qae caught up his horse's reins and threw himself up on the saddle. He tipped up his jaw to the other man, who nodded and put away his confection. In unison, they turned their mounts around and melted back into the forest from which they'd emerged.

“They're going?” I asked, confused.

“No,” Trowbridge said, his tone hard, “they're waiting.”

“For the other Fae?”

His face taut, he shook his head. His gaze flew from Qae's hiding place to the cloud now streaming at breakneck speed toward the river. He twisted on his hip, tilting back his head. His nostrils flared as he inhaled long through his nose, and then—I swear I didn't think it was possible—his body got harder and tighter.

His hand slid off my hip.

“Trowbridge?” I asked him as he started to rise to his knees.

I think for a moment he'd forgotten I was there beside him. But at the sound of my voice he froze, his arm braced.

His eyes turned toward mine. His face was drawn in stark lines. At that moment, I didn't understand his expression; there was too much mileage between us for me to comprehend. I understood only the most obvious—his anger and frustration—before he shoved his feelings into lockdown.

There were more emotions, balanced on top of each other like a shaky Jenga tower. But that is all that I understood at the time, for I was awash in my own responses. Mainly, shock and gut-wrenching disbelief as I watched the Son of Lukynae slowly sink back to his belly. He breathed out and parted the grass again.

“Trowbridge?”

I waited for him to turn to me. He didn't. When I reached a tentative hand toward him, he leaned away from my touch.

I withdrew. “Tell me what's going down.”

A muscle moved in his jaw; then he jerked a nod to the cloud. “It's a fucking ambush; that's what's going down.”

The thing in the sky had covered much ground in the short seconds it had taken for him to rise and sink back to his belly, and now the inherent malignancy I'd sensed on first sight of it was palpable. The haze was no longer milky; it was a dead bone gray fog, spitting sparks of purple and red. In gleeful pursuit, it frothed over the forest's canopy, boiling around the tall spires of the firs in its haste to bring down its quarry.

Horrible and frightening. “Why is it changing?” I asked myself.

“Don't know,” Trowbridge grunted. “But it's driving them right into the Fae's hands.”

I didn't have to ask whom he meant by “them.”

Who runs while others ride?

I lifted my nose to the catch the breeze, testing the sweet Merenwynian air for confirmation. I got woods, and Fae magic, and the pungent, fox-astringent scent of Trowbridge's stress, and then …

“Wolves,” I said.

“Not just wolves.” Dry despair in his whisper. “The Raha'ells.”

*   *   *

My breath caught when the Raha'ells came hurtling out of the woods. There were people—that's how I saw them at first. Not as feared warriors who might wish to kill my mate. Not even as wolves in human form. I just saw them as people.

Women, children, youths. Twenty or more people running for their lives.

I leaned forward, my fist going to my mouth.

The fastest runner of Trowbridge's old pack was very young, not a teen, but a boy. Ropes of hair streamed behind him as he burst through the trees at top speed. He was armed with a bow, and a quiver of arrows that bounced on the small of his back as he ran.

Merry tightened at my throat, her heat flaring.

Hot on his heels came a woman with hair the color of sunset. She sprinted with a bow gripped in one hand, the other tightly cupped under the round bottom of the child she balanced on her hip. The woman shot a hurried glance upward at the cloud spitting sparks, then sped up, tearing across that field for the shallow crossing, legs pumping.

“We have to warn them,” I said, starting to rise.

He shoved me down hard, his hand splayed on my back. “Stay low!”

“We can't just watch this! We have to do something.” I pushed his arm away and surged to my knees. “They're nothing but kids and women; we have—”

He threw himself on top of me.

“Let me go!” I bucked under him.

“Stop it!” he hissed in my ear. “These are Raha'ells! They'll smell the horses soon and they'll cut back into the forest. My warriors will be in the rear of the retreat. It's our way.” His thighs were weights on mine, his arms steel brackets, his jaw a hard pressure on my neck. “My pack knows these woods better than I know Creemore.”

My gut dropped at his use of the possessive pronoun.

It plunged further when a moment later the tail of the Raha'ells came crashing through the undergrowth. Contrary to Trowbridge's words, they were no brawny warriors bringing up the rear, and the pack did not as one veer off into the woods again. Instead, they ran for the river and certain ambush.

“Jesus, where are they?” Trowbridge's tone was raw as flayed skin. “Where are my warriors?”

Dead,
I thought in sudden instinct.

I huddled into myself, my lover's weight a stone upon my back.

*   *   *

Alone, unburdened by children or loyalties, I suspect most of the women could have easily outpaced the menaces behind them. But it was apparent that for Trowbridge's old pack there was no such thing as every woman for herself.

Nobody outran the kids.

Those little wolves who could sprint on their own were doing so. But on either side, they were flanked by mature female warriors. Behind them, more women, shouting encouragement and threats. Their words were spoken in a tongue foreign to me, but I understood them. “Don't look behind you. Don't look up at that cloud. Hurry. Run.”

Pinned beneath Trowbridge's taut body, I could taste the sour spike of his scent on my tongue and feel the suppressed violence cording his muscles. His growing anguish only added to my own swelling sense of claustrophobia.

I was deeply angry with him. For protecting me when he should have been protecting them. For not being the fearless, brave guy I'd thought he was. For proving himself to be a smart man instead of a heedless one.

I wanted a hero.

And I wanted him off of me.

Because I was going to be forced to watch and bear witness and doing so was going to be a very bad thing. It was going to push me across some threshold that up to that minute I hadn't known existed. And I knew in my guts that I wasn't ready for it. My life in Creemore had been piss-poor preparation for whatever I was going to see.

I could hear the drumming of their horses' hooves getting closer.

Any second now …

The Fae erupted from the forest.

*   *   *

The full visual impact of a cavalry charge can twist your bowels. Anyone in the path of that incoming of violence would have to be either an idiot or a very brave woman not to scatter in the face of it—it's a wave of death pouring toward you.

If I live to be ninety, I'll never forget the spine-chilling calls those riders made as they thundered across the field—mocking hoots that sharpened into high yips as they bore down on the pack.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Trowbridge, turning the swearword into an obscene prayer. A few of the mounted men carried spears, but most carried cavalry swords; the latter being long, thin, and slightly curved.

No one can be “born ready” for this world.

I need to go home.

The bulk of the Raha'ells running from the horsemen had reached the Penance before the horsemen had covered half the clearing. As the women waded across it, they held their children high and leaned forward against the current's pull. I scanned the trees on the opposite bank. I could see no sign of the archers who I knew waited on the other—the
safe
—side of the river.

I started silently praying,
Don't kill them. Please don't kill them.

For those on the run, it must have felt like a moment of false reprieve before the axe's fall, because just short of the water their pursuers reined in their mounts sharply and came to a wheeling stop.

The last to enter the river was an old man who ran with a jerking two-step that set his grizzled dreads dancing. As he splashed into River of Penance, he turned to look behind him.

I saw relief spread across his face.

He thought the horses weren't going to follow them across the river.

He was right.

*   *   *

He lived with the hope of freedom for another four or five staggering feet before the archers stepped out from the opposite bank's tree line.

“Don't kill them,” I repeated. My lips moved against clenched fist, and my breath bounced back to me. It was warm and scentless for we Fae have no scent.

Inside me, my wolf began moaning.

Down in the river, there was much wheeling in dismay and aborted dodges. Two women started splashing downstream, but a rider cut off their retreat, herding them back into the center of the shallow crossing. I had my own instant of false hope then: for a second, I let myself believe that it was going to be a bloodless capture, a comfort that was swiftly shattered when the fleet-footed youth who'd led the rush into the plain raised his weapon.

His bow was taunt, his arrow pinched between his fingers.

“There's too many of them, Varens,” I heard Trowbridge's despairing whisper.

Oh, Goddess, don't make me watch this. Don't make my mate see this.

The boy let loose his arrow.

His aim was off. His missile grazed the Royal Guardsman's horse high on the shoulder. As the animal reared, front hooves flashing, back legs dancing, Varens scrambled to pull another arrow from his quiver.

Not fast enough.

A javelin whistled through the air.

What followed—the boy wavering, then falling in slow motion to his knees, the cavalryman nosing his horse to his victim intent on spear retrieval, all of that—played out in a dreadful slow motion for me.

A woman let out a keening cry.

The youth fell sideways, the long spear still sticking out of his mid-section.

And with that, I stopped feeling. With a paid observer's detachment, I noted important details, which later I'd replay in an endless loop. Like how quickly the current pulled the ribbon of red down the river and the fact that Trowbridge's back had arched as if that spear had gone through his gut and spine, not the boy's.

This was the Fae?
I thought numbly.
These were my mother's people? Oh, sweet heavens …
my
people?

Suddenly the old man lurched sideways. He threw himself at the leg of a rider, grappling to unseat him. The Fae cut him down with two slashes of his blade.

The other riders surged inward, squeezing the people into a tighter knot. An arrow whizzed harmlessly through the air, blades flashed, and another body dropped facedown in the water.

It was going to be a massacre.

I pressed my fist so hard against my mouth I tasted copper.

*   *   *

The low cloud hovering over the scene let out an earth-shaking rumble. It was an unnatural noise, too deep for a thunder roll, too loud for a storm clap. One of those children let out a terrified shriek.

And damn me if that cloud didn't respond.

It let loose another hellish grumble.

The young ones started crying en masse then, and with each sob and terrified cry the murky nebula visibly swelled and darkened, seemingly gaining nourishment from the anguish within each terrified howl.

One of the Fae shouted something, at which a few of the Raha'ells dropped their weapons. But some held on to them, their gaze moving to the redheaded woman.

She stood tall, a toddler on her hip.

Her free hand held her bow.

The lead horseman shouted again. His meaning was clear, for he jerked his head at her weapon. She stared him down. Red-faced, he shouted another order, this time shorter and more compact. The redhead turned her hip slightly, so that the child who rode it wasn't in direct line of his fury.

“Drop it, Ophelia,” whispered Trowbridge. “Don't be stupid. Drop it.”

Then, a lone rider emerged from the dark woods.

“Fuck,” said Trowbridge.

I knew the man on the chestnut stallion, though I'd only seen him though borrowed dreams and nightmares of my own making. And each time he'd filled me with enough fear and rage to justify murder.

*   *   *

In real life, the Black Mage was all about discrete menace. His clothing was all shades of black, from deepest ebony to pearl gray. His boots were glossy, his jacket tight against his body. His hair was a long sheet of straight dark silk.

He rode well, sitting in the saddle as if born to it.

Arrogance set in the downward curl of his lip; the mage urged his mount into the water. His horse fussily picked its way through the pebbles, tail lifted.

“He'll kill them,” I murmured with awful certainty.

I felt Trowbridge's jaw flex. I didn't think he'd answer, but he did. “No,” he said flatly. “He'll want them for the Spectacle. We still have a chance to free them.”