Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(30)

“An … alliance.”

He laughed. A raw sound that rumbled from his stomach and clashed with the distant thunder overhead. He and the Threadwitch were, if anything, enemies. After all, he had been hired to deliver her to Corlant.

Aeduan was intrigued, though. It wasn’t often people surprised him, and it was even less often that people challenged him. The Threadwitch did more than that.

She perplexed him. He had no idea what she might say next. What she might do next.

Aeduan sniffed the air once. No blood-scents hit his witchery, yet something did prickle his nose …

The damp smoke. Run, my child, run.

“Dinner,” the Threadwitch explained, stalking past Aeduan. She moved as if nothing had happened between them. As if the rain wasn’t falling and she hadn’t stolen his Carawen blades.

And as if turning her back on a Bloodwitch wasn’t a fool’s move.

Aeduan took his time walking. A few test steps with his newly healed leg. A stiff scooping motion to retrieve the abandoned coins. Then, when no traps sprang up to hold him and no pain burst forth, Aeduan shifted into a jog, following the Threadwitch wherever she might lead.

*

Safi’s boots were far too large. They rubbed sores onto her heels—yet that was nothing compared to the raw skin at her wrists, where the Hell-Bard rope scraped and dug. Meanwhile, the rope at her ankles had sunk into the loose tops of her new boots and sloughed off the skin.

Each step burned.

Safi reveled in the pain. A distraction from the fire that gathered in her gut.

Hell-Bard Commander Fitz Grieg.

Caden.

The Chiseled Cheater.

There was that scar on his chin—it peeked out from his helmet. She remembered it from Ve?aza City. Just as she remembered the confidence in his smile, and the manner he had of regarding a person dead on, no blinking. No looking away.

All those lifetimes ago in Ve?aza City, Safi had thought that smile and the intensity of his stare were … interesting. Appealing, even.

Now, she wanted nothing more than to rip them off his face.

Safi’s boot snagged on a root. She tumbled forward. Rope fibers sliced into already bloodied flesh, and against her pride’s greatest desire, she sucked in sharply.

“Stop, Heretic.” The commander released her ropes before moving in front of her and helping her to rise. Then, from a satchel on his belt, he withdrew two strips of beige linen like the sort used for binding wounds.

“Give me your hands.”

Safi complied, and to her shock, he wound the cloths around her wrists, blocking the harsh ropes from her open flesh. “I should have done this at the start,” he said. His tone was neither apologetic nor accusatory. Merely observational.

It was then, while staring at the top of his dirty helmet, that a realization hit Safi. One that made her lungs hitch a second time.

What if Caden had told the Cartorran Emperor about Safi’s magic? What if the reason Emperor Henrick knew Safi was a Truthwitch—the reason he’d wanted her as his betrothed—was because of this Hell-Bard before her?

The Chiseled Cheater had tricked her. Then the Hell-Bard commander had trapped her.

Safi was beyond anger. Beyond temper. This was her life now—forever running, forever changing hands from one enemy to the next until eventually the enemy severed her neck. It had been inevitable, really. Her magic had cursed her from the day she was born.

But Iseult …

Iseult was out there somewhere, forced on the run as well. Forced to give up the life she’d built in Ve?aza City all because of Safi. All because of the Chiseled Cheater.

Cold hate spread through Safi’s body. Throbbed against the ropes, pulsed in the tips of her blistered fingers and toes.

The hatred grew when they resumed marching. Hours of agony until at last the Hell-Bards halted for a break. Zander tied Safi to a lichen-veiled beech, and she let him. Even when the knobs of old branches poked into her back, she didn’t fight him. Nor when he pulled up her arms, straining them behind her and forcing her back to arch. Then he tied off the rope high—so uncomfortably high—and her feet low. She was trussed up like the duck Mathew always roasted on her birthday.

Though Safi couldn’t see the empress being tied to a tree behind her, she heard the same twanging stretch of ropes. The same crackling pop of shoulders stretched too far. There would be no running, no fighting any time soon.

She also heard the empress asking, with such sweet politeness, “May I have some water, please?”

The giant grunted Lev’s way, and as Lev marched toward Safi, water bag in hand, Safi realized the Hell-Bard commander was nowhere in sight. Her gaze cut left, right … But he was gone. Vanished into the forest.

“Where is the commander?” Safi asked after gulping back four glorious mouthfuls of stale water. “He was hurt. You should check on him.”

A metallic laugh echoed out from Lev’s helmet. “I don’t think so.” More laughter, and after tying the water bag at her hip, Lev eased off her helmet.

The carmine light through the leaves showed a young face. Safi’s age, at most. Short brown hair, a wide jaw that sloped down to a soft point. Pretty, actually, even with the puckered scars that slashed across her cheeks and behind her ear, as if someone had taken a razor to her face.

Lev grinned slightly to reveal crooked canines, and the scars stretched painfully tight. Shiny.