And Airie, who was half demon and half goddess, was hardly a monster. Filled with compassion, she had healed his crippled leg and given him his life back. He owed her a debt he could never repay.
“She bewitched my son,” the first man complained, defending his stance. “If not for Creed’s interference, he’d be her slave now. But with Creed gone, I don’t know what will happen to him. He has started to follow her again.”
“Creed thrashed your son to within an inch of his life for following her around like a pup in the first place,” a third man said. “He claimed your son tried to touch her against her will.”
“Creed spread that lie because he is already bewitched by her.”
“If he is bewitched, how could he leave her for training?”
“Who says no to assassin trainers when they are recruiting?”
No one could deny the truth of that observation, Blade thought. Most of those who declined recruitment as a Godseeker assassin ended up dead.
The second man spoke up again. “I’m not certain luring a man for pleasure warrants burning a woman at the stake.”
The third man murmured an uneasy agreement.
“It’s not the pleasure part that warrants it,” the first one insisted. “It’s the bewitching. Raven enslaves men. You’ve seen how the young ones look at her, how she pretends not to notice. People always said her mother slept with a demon,” he added. “But when it was a girl that was born and the birth didn’t kill her, everyone thought they were wrong.” A note of worry crept into his tone. “Who knows how many more spawn there might be, born in mortal form instead of as monsters? What if there are more like her?”
Blade, from his hiding place in the shadows, propped his broad shoulders against the wooden wall of a building and tipped his head back to stare at the emerging stars, lost in thought.
Women had only the protection of men in this world. Some men were better protectors than others. Many were no protection at all. But who was he to judge? He had once been an assassin himself, although he had never worked in the service of the Godseekers. He had been strictly for hire, killing men, women, and children alike, without the luxury and freedom of choice. Once he had reached a level of skill that let him name his own price, he had become more selective in the work he accepted.
Even at his lowest and most desperate, however, he had never deliberately made anyone suffer. Whether the woman named Raven was spawn or not, he wanted no part of this.
What was happening here was not his problem.
But to burn a woman at the stake over something so natural as sex?
Blade thought of Ruby and the other two women who had worked independently as whores in the saloon he’d once owned, and his gut knotted. Ruby’s face in particular haunted him. In his own way, he had loved her. He did still, and a part of him most likely always would.
He rubbed at his thigh, where a demon in its monster form had once torn and eaten his flesh, then left him in the desert for dead. He hated demons. He had not yet made up his mind about spawn, if more of them did exist, because while he was grateful to Ruby and his friend Hunter for saving his life, it was Hunter’s wife Airie who had given it back to him.
The men’s voices drifted off, and Blade mentally ran through the position and feel of his pocketed knives before pushing away from the wall and moving silently through the shadows. He followed the crowd, knowing that he could not let this unknown woman suffer when he had the means to end it quickly for her.
He was careful not to hurry or look overly interested in what was going on around him. Strangers came and went in places like this, seeking work in the newer mines when the old ones tapped out, but he did not want to be memorable to the locals. He particularly did not want to draw the attention of the Godseeker responsible for this judgment. His relationship with the Godseekers as a whole was precarious. Some of them would consider him a deserter.
He should mind his own business and be on his way.
The night air blowing off the ice-tipped mountains carried the first hints of winter, and Blade was grateful he had purchased the warm leather coat. At least he had money and his knives on him because he doubted if he’d be able to collect the remainder of his belongings after what he was planning to do tonight. While the knives were his weapon of choice, he would feel the loss of his rifle and crossbow equally as much, perhaps more.
The town’s single, very long main street followed the gentle curve of the land. As the crowd surged toward what passed for a jail—at least according to the creaking sign swinging by cast-iron hooks from a roof extension over the steps—a slight figure stepped lightly through its open door. She held her shackled hands at her neat waist, keeping them partially hidden in the folds of her dress. Short, tousled black ringlets streaked with red glinted in the torchlight, the curls framing high cheekbones and a delicate face. Her gaze scanned the top of the crowd. Blade, near the back, felt a sharp jolt of awareness as her eyes drifted over him, then came back for a second before moving on again when she did not recognize him.
He could scarcely believe that this tiny, lost waif of a woman-child, trying so hard to hide her fright from the crowd, had been labeled an evil, demon seductress.
Her ankle turned over on the first step and she wobbled, unable to maintain her balance with her hands bound. Her shoulder struck one of the sturdy beams supporting the roof extension as someone in the small crowd thrust out a hand to steady her. Blade, too, took an involuntary step forward.
“Don’t touch her! If you do, she’ll own you,” barked a man as he emerged from the doorway behind her. He had a slight stiffness in his stance and the trace of a limp. His hard eyes sparked with arrogance and authority.
This, Blade decided, was the Godseeker responsible for judgment in this town. He remembered the type well and despised them to this day.
A taller, thinner man followed the Godseeker, ducking his head as he, too, passed through the door. Both men dwarfed the woman, making her appear even smaller and more fragile in comparison.
The crowd swarmed onward, leaving a small amount of open space where the trio could walk. People fell silent as the enormity of what was about to happen finally settled in. Yet still, no one protested.
Blade studied the scattered rooftops, fewer now and too far apart for his purpose, then the surrounding area for some sort of shelter that might hide what he was about to do. He needed to be close to her but not too close. He intended to escape afterward.
The woman made no sound as she was led to the carefully constructed weave of shredded kindling and splits of knotted pine. Crude stairs ran to a platform built on top of the weave. From the platform rose a thick stake of sturdy desert ironwood. The platform was too high for him to have a good target. He would need to stand too far back in order to gain enough throwing leverage. He might be able to manage it, but he couldn’t guarantee his aim from such a great distance.
Blade looked around. Crumbled rocks and crushed boulders had been piled near the side of a road that was little more than a trail, as if a site were being cleared for new construction. Blade inched his way around the back of the crowd, sliding into the shadows to reemerge near the rock pile. It was far from stable, and as he clambered to the top bits of loose gravel and dirt trickled in tiny landslides behind him, but the larger stones held firm beneath his weight.