“What else?”
“The virus had fused some of the broken bones. I had to rebreak him to fix his chest. I made her think I was alternating between killing and healing. She promised to come out of the cage if I healed him, but someone interfered.”
“Would you have killed the boy to get her?”
“Yes.”
“But he was a child.”
“Nothing mattered except getting Kate to Sharrum.”
“What does that word mean, Sharrum?”
“King. God. Everything. Everything that I am is shaped by Sharrum. He is wisdom and purpose. He is life.”
“Not everything.”
Hugh lunged forward but her foot slipped out of his reach. She vanished. Hugh spun around and saw her on the stairs.
“No more talking,” he told her. “Come here, Elara.”
She laughed softly.
“I said come here.” He sank steel into his voice.
“You have no power over me,” she told him. “I don’t obey your orders.”
The water boiled in front of him. A blunt white head surfaced, eyeless and noseless, a wide monster mouth gaped open, studded with razor-sharp teeth, and bit down at his groin, ripping through his flesh.
Agony tore through Hugh. He jerked upright and saw darkness. Cold sweat drenched his face. He was sitting in his bed. His body shuddered in pain. He yanked the sheet aside and grabbed himself. Everything was still there. He was intact.
A ghostly voice whispered in his ear. “The next time I want to talk to you, make the time.”
Damn that bitch. Hugh sprung out of his bed. His door flew open under the pressure of his hand, revealing the hallway lit with fey lanterns. He marched through it and hit her door and it banged open. He strode through her bedroom. The big wooden canopy bed stood empty, but a stone doorway in the wall opposite the entrance glowed with a buttery-yellow glow. Hugh tore through it and stopped.
A square room offered the square pool from his dream. She was in it, long white hair swirling, steam and water hiding all of her, except for her face. And she was smiling.
“Stay the fuck out of my dreams.”
“Aww. You didn’t like the girls? Should I have made them with Vanessa’s face?” The water around her glowed with a pale light as if something much larger and glowing moved underneath.
“I mean it, Elara.” Hugh didn’t want to go into the water. The pain was still too real. Every instinct in him screamed when he caught glimpses of the glowing thing. He would do almost anything to avoid the pool.
“Have you ever killed a child, Hugh?” Her voice was completely serious.
He felt a powerful compulsion to answer. “Not directly.”
Elara stared at him, her face worried.
“I’ve never run a child through with my sword. But I led an army. We fought. People died. You can’t control war, Elara. Nobody leaves it with their hands clean.”
She tilted her head, studying him.
The lights on the wall were electric. The illumination outside in the hallway came from fey lanterns, but here electric lamps glowed with golden light. He was still dreaming. She was still fucking with his head.
“You want to see inside my mind, Elara?” He strode into the water. Panic bit him, but he crushed it. Magic bathed his legs. “Go ahead and look.”
He remembered it all for her. The razor-edge flash of ending a life, one after another, the endless chain of deaths he caused, the blood, the pain, watching friends fall, the screams, the clamor of metal on metal, the staccato of guns, failing, breaking, burning, getting up again and again, and killing… Everything that he used to shrug off and that now haunted his nightmares, he let it all out. He owned all of it. He was ordered to do it, he was praised when he succeeded, and it didn’t matter, because every drop of blood, every last gasp, all of it was his fault.
Blood spread from him through the water, thick and red. She shrank from it, but it stained her skin and hair.
The pool vanished.
Hugh opened his eyes to the welcome darkness of his bedroom. He wished he weren’t alone, but he was. He lay in darkness, listening to his heart beating too fast and waiting until the memories faded enough for sleep to come.
9
Elara paced back and forth. The scent of fresh bread and roasted meat filled the great hall in front of her. Long wooden tables covered with white cloths had been set out to form a horseshoe with breaks between them for the guests and staff to walk through. In the center of the horseshoe stood a massive wooden barrel into which the staff of Honeymead Brewery busily poured beer out of large metal casks.
Rufus Fortner, the head of the Lexington Red Guard, was due in less than an hour. The original plan was for him to bring a couple of his “fellahs” with him. As of the last phone call, a couple ballooned to fifteen, including Rufus. It didn’t seem like much, but she had seen what Hugh could do with twenty Iron Dogs. The Red Guard was the best in private security. Five guardsmen felt like guests. Fifteen felt like a raid. It could be just that Fortner wanted to show off Roland’s Warlord. It could be something else. Either way, when he got here, they had to offer him the kind of feast he would remember.
Hugh’s Dogs were hanging weapons and banners on the walls. The place looked like some Viking hall or the chamber of some medieval king.
She turned to Hugh, who was standing next to her. “Is that a good idea?”
He glanced at her. His eyes were very blue and clear this evening. They hadn’t spoken for the last three days after the dream. It wasn’t that she made a conscious effort to avoid him. It was that she’d been busy with offering protection to the nearby towns and processing the harvested roots of Lady’s Seal, while he was supervising deliveries of the volcanic ash for the mortar to line the moat’s bottom. Both of them had limited success. Of the five settlements they reached so far, only one took them up on their offer of wards. They’d saved Aberdine for last, since it was the closest. The party they had sent was due back any minute.
On the flip side, Hugh’s sample mortar refused to set, and nobody knew why. Elara’d been going over the budget requests and she’d seen him through the window down in the trench, mixing the mortar over and over. She’d had breakfast, then lunch, then dinner, and he was still there. Hugh had finally come in, chased indoors by darkness. He’d spent sixteen hours in that trench, then went out with the salvage party first thing in the morning. The Iron Dogs had been raiding the forest ruins, dragging in every scrap of valuable salvage they could find to offset the costs of the moat and the new siege engines they assembled on the towers.
They’d both had their hands full and had no reason to interact. Until now.
“The weapons and the beer,” she explained. “Is that a good idea to have both available to Rufus’s people?”
“The weapons are welded together,” Hugh told her. “If they manage to pry them from the wall, it won’t do them any good. I’m not about to arm drunken idiots.”
Well, at least he was sensible.
Five women walked into the hall and lined up in front of them, all young and pretty, with flowers in their hair, and wearing floral print wrap dresses that hinted at cleavage and revealed just enough leg without suggesting anything. Kelly and Irene’s tattoos were showing, a skull with arcane script above Kelly’s left breast and a wolf ripping apart a human heart on Irene’s right shoulder, but there was no help for that.
“What are these?” Hugh asked.
“Serving wenches. For your beer.”
Hugh squinted. “Irene? Serana?”
The Iron Dogs snapped to attention. “Preceptor!”
“You stole my hand-to-hand experts,” Hugh said.
“Borrowed.”
He eyed the other women. “What do the rest of you do?”
Kelly pointed at herself then at the other two women in turn. “Witch, witch, pagan with a shichidan in judo. That’s a …”
“Seventh dan black belt,” Hugh said. “Okay, you will do.”
“Remember, we need their money,” Elara said. “Don’t maim anyone if you can help it.”