He’d had everything. She’d told him that, too. Her kiss. Her warmth at his side. Her heart. Now he had nothing.
Except he could make certain she wasn’t hurt again. “What of your quest? You have my trust. I will ride at your side.”
Or behind her. Anywhere she went. Even if she never spoke to him again, he would follow her until the end.
“You no longer have my trust, warrior. I’m not traveling that path anymore. So I pray that I was wrong, and that was not what Vela meant, because you are not worth the pain you would do to me.” Her eyes were dull as she turned away. Sheathing her sword, she picked up Shim’s saddle and moved out to the stable yard. “And there is another kind of tamed, one I didn’t begin to consider until I learned you were Karn’s son. It simply means to bring something wild into a home, and that wild thing takes a place within the household. Perhaps my task is to return you to your place in the citadel. I would need to kill Barin—and I have already made a vow to see him dead, so I was on that path. Or perhaps I am meant to tame the demon. That was what I first believed when I came to Blackmoor. Perhaps that was the road I was supposed to take.”
Both roads so dangerous that they’d already taken too many people Kavik had known. New determination filled him. “I will help you.”
She set the saddle upon Shim’s back. “You will not be able to keep up with me.”
Maybe not. His mount couldn’t match the stallion’s speed. But he could follow. Blood pounding, he raced back into the stables for the black gelding.
He was cinching the saddle when Selaq came into the stables. “I’m leaving these other horses with you.” They would slow him down, too, and he’d survived for most of his life with nothing more than a horse and his sword. “Do whatever you like with them.”
“Mala is leaving?” The innkeeper whispered the goddess’s name on a long sigh as Kavik led the gelding past her. “Then this is the moment you’ve lost everything.”
Ice seized Kavik’s gut. That had not been his friend’s voice. Those were not Selaq’s eyes, orbs pale as a milk moon against a blue sky.
Her frigid hand closed over Kavik’s arm and iron seemed to fill his legs, locking them in place. “Stand firm, beast. Stand firm while I twist the knife.”
He had already stood firm for too long. “There is nothing to twist it into,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve destroyed my own heart. You cannot do worse than I have already done.”
“No?” Her smile was a scythe. With rigid forefinger, she tapped the armor over his chest. Abruptly his lungs constricted, cutting off his breath. “But Mala was right. She did understand what the taming meant. It was never a collar. And you had her heart, warrior.”
So she could twist the knife. There could be more agony. It joined the desolating emptiness as the last of his air escaped his lips.
“Oh, that is not the knife, beast,” she answered as if his thoughts had been spoken. Her icy finger slid down his throat. “This is the knife. Because she abandoned the path that I’d chosen for her.”
No. Understanding cut through him. His gaze shot to the stable doors, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t call out. Wildly he fought the heaviness of his legs, the choking airless grip on his voice.
But his strength was nothing, and Kavik was nothing when Mala’s scream ripped through the air, followed by a cry of limitless pain and despair. His empty lungs convulsed on her name. His body stood rigid. Blinded by agony, he looked to Vela. She had to let him go to her.
“Go to her? You want to see what is happening? I will show you, as I’ve shown her to you so many times before.”
Mala sobbing on her knees amid swirling feathers. Still wearing her cloak, but it was black now, as if all the red had bled into her face, into the ragged disfiguring scars that raked from jaw to hairline as if slashed by a dragon’s claws. Blood and her tears rained into her cupped hands.
Shim nudged her shoulder. All at once she scrambled away from the stallion, her hand fisted against her chest as if holding closed a wound that threatened to spill her innards onto the ground.
“The path is ended for us, my friend. I will not see you forsaken, too.”
The stallion shook his head.
“You must shun me!” she cried. “You must!”
Snorting, the stallion pranced an uneasy circle.
“Please, Shim,” she added brokenly. “Please. Return to your herd. I cannot see you hurt, too.”
The horse blew a long breath and pushed his muzzle into her shoulder again. She stroked his nose once before letting her hand fall to her side.
“Be safe, my friend,” she said. Her tears ran a jagged path over the ruined lines of her face as he continued past her. Head hanging, she slipped to her knees again, and her sobs were silent.
Vela’s voice filled Kavik’s ears. “Look at you, honorable warrior. Look how firmly you stand when she needs kindness more than she ever has.”
He would go to her. He would hold her. But his chest convulsed again, wracking spasms that ripped down into his gut, up through his head. Darkness filled his vision of Mala, then brightened on a pair of milk moon eyes. Vela studied him for a long moment.
“I don’t know why you cry, beast,” she finally told him. “Her mouth is still hot and you said her cunt is the same as any other.”
No. Mala was unlike any other.
“Of course she is. She is my chosen.” Cold fingers pried his hand open. “I will have this coin. It is not worth as much as the one you stole from my temple, but I will consider it a proper offering—and perhaps I will piss in your mouth while you sleep. Happy dreams, beast.”
She tapped his head and all was gone.
SELAQ’S eyes were her own again when Kavik opened his, and found her looking down at him in concern. The dirt floor of the stable was hard beneath his back. The sky was dark.
Mala would be far ahead of him.
His body a solid ache, he rose to his feet and stumbled toward the gelding. Someone had removed his tack.
“Do you know which gate Mala used?” His voice was hoarse with grit, but he could speak again.
“East,” Selaq said softly. “But she turned north after she was outside the city.”
Kavik nodded, then stilled. He looked to her again.
A watery smile touched the innkeeper’s lips. “She left something in me.”
Something that let her see beyond the walls of the city. “Are you all right?”
“I am.” Her gaze narrowed. “You’re a fool.”
He picked up the gelding’s saddle. “I don’t need a goddess’s vision to know that.”
CHAPTER 7
Hood shadowing her face, Mala rode across the empty moors. Unlike Shim, the dun mare would not be punished by Vela. The mare had no understanding of what it meant to be forsaken. The Hanani stallion did.
The mark burned. Her face didn’t feel like her own, but a heavy and swollen mask. But that was only skin and flesh. It was nothing compared to the shattered wound in her heart—and Vela must have been her breath. Because now that she’d been forsaken, Mala seemed to have none left, and every time she tried to draw a new one it never eased the drowning ache in her chest.
She had failed Krimathe. Mala would make no alliances now. No warriors would answer the call of a woman who wore Vela’s Mark. And two years would pass before the House of Krima would know of her failure and attempt to send someone else.
If ever she returned to Krimathe at all. She had failed her quest, but she would not abandon her vows—and before she left this cursed land of Blackmoor, she would see Barin dead.