Fearless (Nameless #3)(80)
For once, Tess didn’t put up a fight about leaving with Millie while Zo and Joshua stayed behind. Being forced to watch the prizefights inside Ram’s Gate had cured her of wanting to be anywhere near the rivers for Gryphon’s execution.
Zo held Joshua’s hand as they waded through the icy river. Mist blanketed the morning, allowing them to get closer than they ever thought possible.
“This is enough,” said Zo. She blew warmth into her shaking hands, but it did little to abate the relentless cold. Gray outlines of Gryphon and Laden wandered through mist ahead, so blurred it became impossible to tell them apart. It didn’t matter. They didn’t actually want to see the execution in detail—she really didn’t want to see it at all—but needed to witness the moment his spirit passed from this life to the next. To soak in every last second of his mortality.
Joshua silently wept at her side, wiping tears and shaking every bit as much as she was as they climbed out of the river. Zo wrapped her arm around him as he crumpled into a ball and slumped to the ground with Zo to await the worst moment of their lives.
Blurred voices reached them, murmurs lost in the rushing river. The meeting must have begun.
Gryphon’s shouts cut through the mist and had both Zo and Joshua back on their feet, clinging to one another. Without Joshua as an anchor, Zo might have been tempted to run ahead, but for the boy’s sake, she stayed planted behind the tree.
“Father! No, Father, please!”
An unearthly wail rent the air.
And Zo was running …
Barnabas kicked aside Laden’s bloodied form lying next to the red-stained tree stump. “Bring Gryphon.” Barnabas gestured toward Gryphon, licking his lips, as though savoring the flavor of splattered blood.
The hands holding him froze in indecision, and Gryphon took advantage of the hesitation, rolling out of their grasp and jumping to his feet and sprinting ten yards away.
“Bring him here!” A purplish vein throbbed in Barnabas’ forehead.
The brothers of Gryphon’s mess looked to Ajax, their leader. “Sir, the debt. It’s paid.” Ajax’s voice held a desperate edge.
Barnabas’s face wrinkled in fury. “I said, bring him here!”
Gryphon slowed and turned to track their pursuit. He backed away toward the safety of the river where the Allies waited.
“Grab him! Now!”
Gryphon took a few more steps backward, his attention turned to Ajax, his battle brother and best friend. They stared at one another, communicating regret, sympathy, admiration. Ajax set his mouth in a firm line. His face twisted with rage as he gave Gryphon one final nod and turned back to Barnabas. “Did you plan to honor our agreement with the same cowardice as you did Laden’s?” he scowled at his chief. “Where is your honor, Barnabas?”
Before Gryphon could cry out a warning, Barnabas flung the knife. It flew end over end through the air, its blade flashing in the low light until it sunk to the hilt in Ajax’s neck.
A jolt of terror zinged through Gryphon’s body.
A small hand wrapped around his, yanking him back. Barnabas shouted, “Stop them!” but the rest of the men in Gryphon’s old mess stood frozen at the sight of the bloodied form of Ajax on the ground.
No.
Gryphon was running. He faintly registered the sun burning off some of the mist. Zo and Joshua pulled and pushed him away from Barnabas. They splashed through the river as Commander Laden’s guard raced to their aid, swords out, bows drawn.
But no Ram followed them.
“Should we pursue those men, sir?” the head guard asked Gryphon, gesturing to the sullen men heading north, away from both Barnabas and the Allies. Gryphon watched his brothers jog away in tight formation. Ajax’s place in the phalanx was painfully empty. “No, Captain. Let them go.”
Barnabas reached the bank on the opposite side of the river Iiná. Holding a head by the hair in his raised hand. A full mess of Ram soldiers stood at his back. “I’ll look for you on the field, Striker. You and your whore,” he called over the soft sounds of the rivers.
Zo’s hands tightened on Gryphon’s arm. Joshua held fast to his other. Numb with shock, Gryphon barely recognized their presence in this whole nightmare. “You shouldn’t be here. Either of you.”
“Whose … head?” Zo kissed his hand before threading her arms around his middle. With her touch his senses sharpened and the shock subsided, making way for raw pain.
Gryphon growled and gently pushed Zo and Joshua behind him. He yanked a spear from one of the Allied guards standing at his side and extended his arm back as he sprinted for momentum. In fury more animal than human, he hitched up his leg and launched the spear an impossible distance across both rivers. Barnabas caught the spear in his shield. The force nearly knocked him off his feet but even from this distance it was clear Barnabas’s sickly smile didn’t waver.
“I will kill that man,” said Gryphon. “I swear it.”
Gryphon’s brothers, the only family he’d known since his youth, disappeared into the trees. Broken men without a clan.
Gryphon towed Zo and Joshua away from the river. Ahead of them, not four hundred yards away, the battle-ready line of Wolves appeared through the thinning mist. “Retrieve the Commander’s body,” Gryphon ordered the guards at his side.