She chuckled. The first time Hamod had introduced himself to someone as the Imposing within her earshot, Halani had cried with laughter. At twelve years old, she hadn’t yet mastered the art of discretion. That slip had earned her a cuff to the side of the head and three weeks of laundry duty for the entire camp. Never again did she mock her uncle’s self-christened appellation. “Himself,” she said. “And he often lives up to the title.”
“He sounds charming.” Malachus shivered again. “My horse.”
“Safe in the camp and tended by a boy who’d rather spend time with animals than people. He’ll take good care of her. And Grecajin didn’t put you completely in penury with his late fees. You still have belshas. I’ve put them with your clothes.”
The tension eased in his shivering frame. “You have my deepest gratitude. I would have dealt with the loss of all my belshas much easier than losing Batraza. She and I have traveled far together.”
Halani paused with her hand over the nearly dry water bowl. She had learned a little about this man since discovering him half dead not far from their camp—the strength in his body, the flow of his blood on her hands, the timbre of his magic in her soul. But she could only assume what might have landed him here under her care. “Why are people trying to kill you, Malachus?”
Silence greeted her. He’d succumbed to sleep, and Halani was pleased to note that while fever still raged through him, he was no longer as hot as the bread oven Kursak compared him to.
She left him then, switching places with Talen and taking the bowl with her. There was still more willow-bark tea to brew for the stubborn fever, more poultices to mix and bandages to prepare. She and Talen could take shifts watching over Malachus. Someone that badly injured required constant vigilance.
Marata visited her while she brewed another pot of tea and offered a plate piled high with food. “Thought I’d have to fight off those jackals tonight with a club just to save you a crust of bread.”
Her stomach rumbled at the delectable smells wafting from the plate. She took it eagerly, inviting him to sit by her. “Outdid yourself tonight, eh?” she said before eagerly tucking into the supper. He preened at her praise.
They sat together without conversing until Halani had cleared most of her plate, and Marata watched the wagon door as if waiting for his wife to appear. “He still alive in there?”
Halani sopped up a pool of gravy with her hunk of bread. “So far.” She popped the bread into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed before heaping additional praise on Marata’s head. “I could eat a barrel of just your bread and gravy. Did you use some of the spices you bought at the market when we first got here?”
“Aye. The good stuff the Guild was hoarding until now. I can make a horse blanket taste good if I cooked it in some of those spices.” He took over stirring the contents of the pot in front of them, testing the flavor with a quick sip. He shuddered. “Not enough spice in the world to make this swill taste less bitter.”
“I don’t need it to taste good. I just need it to work.” She handed him her empty plate. “He’s swallowed it down so far without complaint. Stay a little longer and you can walk back with Talen. I’ll trade places with her.”
“I’ll bring extra supper for your mother when she comes back from the Savatar camp.” He waved away her thanks, his expression dark. “You know Hamod will blister your ears for bringing another stranger into the camp. He’ll say we don’t need that kind of trouble again.”
And he’d be a hypocrite for saying it. Halani kept the thought to herself. Considering how he’d insisted on obtaining the bone artifact despite her warnings, he was the last person to admonish her about not borrowing trouble. “Uncle Imposing wasn’t with us at the time, and when he arrives I’ll suggest he learn the value of a little kindness and compassion.”
“You always were a softer spirit than your uncle,” Marata said.
Halani snorted. “If you’re implying that softness is a weakness or is the curse of women, I will drown you in this tea.”
He laughed. “You know better. If I believed either of those things, I would never have survived marriage to Talen.”
Talen’s shrill “Halani, come quick! Malachus is on fire!” interrupted their conversation.
“What in the gods . . .” Marata said, hard on Halani’s heels as she raced for the wagon. She leapt up the steps, shoved past Talen, now standing on the threshold, and stumbled to a halt at the scene before her. Malachus wasn’t on fire, but tendrils of smoke rose from him and the bedding. His flesh didn’t burn, not like the cauterization he’d endured under her care, but a charred smell still permeated the interior.
A powerful vibration purled under Halani’s skin, the feeling familiar but much, much stronger than any she’d ever felt when barrow raiding with Hamod. Alarm bells sounded in her skull. She bent to touch Malachus, yanking her hand back with a yelp when her fingers met skin hotter than the surface of the cauldron in which she brewed his tea.
His eyes opened. No longer muddled from sleep or the effects of poison, his gaze once more hinted at something not quite human in its dark depths.
“Get out,” he snarled in a voice made demonic by its sheer malice. Smoke poured from his lips and streamed out his flared nostrils. He jackknifed to a sitting position, unencumbered by his bandaged wounds. The edges of the bandages themselves were charred brown in some spots, and flaking away as black ash in others. Scorch marks striped the blankets he’d lain on.
Halani stumbled back and fell on her backside. She scrambled for distance, scuttling toward the threshold on hands and heels, not daring to look away from the terrifying sight before her.
“Get out!” he bellowed again, sweeping his arm toward her. She was out of range, but Halani still flinched, then screamed when an invisible force punched her backward through the wagon’s doorway. The world tumbled for a moment before she struck the edge of one of the steps and rolled to a stop on the muddy ground.
Chaos erupted around her. Shouts of her name, calls for spears and bows, and one clear, unwavering command that sent panic surging so hard through her, she clawed her way up the two people trying to help her.
“Kill that fucking bastard!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Malachus clutched the frame poles supporting the wagon’s sides and drew himself up to his knees, then to his feet. Smoke swirled off him as the draga thrashed inside its human prison and fought to be let out. He’d awakened it when he tapped into its magic to overpower the poison coursing through his body and save himself from bleeding to death. Halani was wrong in assuming the arrow in his side hadn’t pierced a vital organ. He’d been drowning in his own blood by the time she found him, saved only by the draga’s power and its extraordinary ability to withstand such catastrophic damage. But that power came with a price, and what he was battled to break free from what he pretended to be.
Obligation propelled him toward the wagon’s entrance, despite instinct screeching that outside another kind of death awaited him. These traders had tried to help him. He’d repaid their kindness with a perceived attack on their healer. He didn’t need to burn down their wagon as well.
He careened to the edge, blinded by a red haze that descended over his vision. Halani’s angry command acted as his guide to the wagon’s doorway.
“Put your weapons down, gods damn it! I’m not hurt. Put them down!”
Malachus teetered on the topmost step, staring at a world dyed scarlet and populated by a battalion of angry fighters armed with weapons—all pointed at him.
Halani, splattered in mud, raced toward him. He held up a hand to ward her off. The small motion unbalanced him. He pitched out of the wagon just as the warning thunk of a fired crossbow bolt sounded in his ear. He landed in the mud on his injured side, too weak to cry out when the fall sent spikes of agony through his wounds and made the draga inside him writhe even harder. He welcomed the earth’s cool, wet embrace. It hummed beneath him, a sweet song that quieted the draga by slow degrees. Its song intensified when Halani’s mud-caked shoes filled his vision as she crouched in front of him.
She didn’t touch him, but her eyes held worry instead of fear as she stared at him. “What’s happening to you?”
Malachus closed his eyes. “Cursed,” he lied.
Not so much a curse but a blessing with thorns. A draga mother’s way of protecting her offspring from the predation of humans until they were old enough and powerful enough to do so themselves. But right now, with his insides boiling like lava pools and the draga trying to explode from every pore of his body, it felt like a curse.
“Dear gods,” she breathed in horrified tones. “Who hates you so?”
You do, he thought. Every one of you standing here, ready to kill me now, and I still look like you.
“I told you he was trouble, Halani. You shouldn’t have stopped us.”
“We’re not murderers, Marata. If we killed every person who knocked one of us down, the Empire would be strewn with the bodies we left behind.”
Malachus recognized Marata’s voice. Kill the bastard still echoed inside his head. A man not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The draga within coiled tightly, becoming more torpid with the earth’s continuous hymn beguiling it to sleep. “Can you hear her?” he asked.
Halani drew a little closer, still not touching him. It didn’t matter. She smelled of lavender, wet ground, and camp smoke. “Hear who?” Her voice had lost its earlier sharpness.
“The earth,” he murmured, exhausted, hurting. “She’s singing to me. To you.”
Her withdrawal was instant, a cold-water splash against his spirit. Darkness closed in on him, swallowing the veil of sunlight penetrating his shuttered eyelids.
Quiet followed the darkness, with only the wordless tune of the ground beneath him still serenading him and the trader woman.
He awakened hours later, once more reclined on layers of blankets in the provender wagon. Still alive, still whole, and with no additional arrows sticking out of him. The blood in his body no longer simmered and bubbled in his veins, nor did smoke waft off his skin. He shivered under the fresh blankets piled atop him.