chapter Six
“Wait.” Frigid goose bumps erupted on Daroch’s shoulder as he grasped the grassy ledge, signaling that the Banshee had reached for his skin. “Someone’s up there.” Her warning killed the sensation reaching toward his loin-cloth.
“Who?” he asked. And why didn’t he have his f*cking shamrock amulet? The years had made him reckless.
“I don’t know.” She sounded worried. “But he looks like death incarnate.”
“So it’s true. The Druid slave still lives after all these centuries.” The wind whipped the mocking words over the cliff.
Daroch grited his teeth as hatred impaled him with all the force of Dagda’s spear. They would send him.
“Ly Erg.” Daroch kept his voice cold to hide the inferno raging through him. He used it to surge to the ground and roll to his feet. “Ye still kneel at the foot of her throne and jump to do her bidding, while I answer to no one. I ask ye this. Which of us is still a slave?”
“Centuries?” Kylah breathed.
“Stay out of this Banshee. Your Queen commands it.” The militant Fae pointed a permanently blood-stained finger at Kylah and she shrank back.
“W-why?”
Daroch couldn’t smother an ironic smirk at her favorite question. Apparently, the Banshee Queen’s executioner found it as irritating as he did.
Ly Erg’s imperious voice had the distinct unhurried pacing of an immortal and the cruel anticipation of someone who loved to kill. “Because it’s none of your concern. Now be gone.”
Daroch grunted. “Good bloody luck with that command,” he muttered. He divested himself of his satchel of fish and bladder of air. He may not live long enough to eat.
Calculating odds, his mind flew through a series of observations as he tested his muscles. His body was moderately fatigued from swimming, fishing, and climbing, running at about seventy percent maximum strength and, due to the extra adrenaline dump from almost dying, sixty five percent of maximum agility without extra stores of energy.
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” The desperate note in the Banshee’s voice thrummed something soft in the center of Daroch’s chest that he thrust aside with cold estimations.
“I’ve already hurt him.” Ly Erg bragged, drawing the curved, long-handled sword from a scabbard decorated with intricate Fae Symbols. “I’m here to finish him.”
Ly Erg’s Fae strength amounted to roughly four hundred percent of Daroch’s own maximum. But since the hubristic nancy bastard insisted upon appearing the part of soldier, his constant armor of Faerie mail did slow him down to comparable speed.
What the Banshee Queen’s sometimes consort didn’t realize, was the magic runes on Daroch’s sword allowed it to slice through Fae mail like hot iron through flesh. He just needed to get to it, and because of the angle he’d climbed up the rocks, his possessions were on the other side of Ly Erg.
F*cking Faeries.
“Why must you finish him? He’s not threatening anyone.” The Banshee drifted into the space between them.
She may or may not know it, but her incessant curiosity was helping him, for once, giving him the time to work on a stratagem. Daroch reached his Druid sense out to the surrounding moors, calling for help. A stag lingered nearby and answered his call. A mother fox hunted by a loch, but she declined for obvious reasons. As did the flock of ravens feasting on a kill left by a pack of wolves that’d unfortunately moved out of his range. Sheep grazed on a nearby hill. Useless. Though a serpent or two slithered through the grasses to his aid.
Strength and cunning. He would need both.
“Is that what he’s convinced you of, that he’s no threat?” The Fae soldier’s silver eyes lit with mild amusement, contrasting with the shimmering gold of his braided hair. “That makes you twice the fool. Think about what you risk. In three more months you’ll no longer be a dead woman, but a lower caste of the Fae.” His sneer turned lecherous. “I’ve had untold millennia to think of ways to punish unruly girls like you.” Ly Erg ineffectually slashed through the Banshee with his curved blade, drawing a dark growl from Daroch’s throat that surprised none more than himself.
Where had that come from?
The Banshee trembled, but held her ground. “The Fae can’t just go around killing innocent humans,” she argued. “The Queen, Cliodnah, told me there was a pact struck with the Gods.”
“All pacts are not ironclad,” Ly Erg sneered. “And this human is no innocent. He spends his time trying to work a way to slaughter all of our kind, and our seers have told us he is close.”
The Banshee gasped, turning to him with those lovely, wounded eyes. “Is that true?”
Daroch could feel his animal guardians drawing near, power and strength surged through his veins until he nearly burst with male aggression as the stag bounded toward them. Clarity and cunning sharpened his senses as the snakes wove sacred, ancient knots into the grasses.
“Aye,” he snarled. “Every last one of ye.”
The Faerie attacked. Though he was stronger and faster, Ly Erg telegraphed every move he was about to make before he followed through. By not focusing on any one part of his opponent, Daroch was able to see all of him and use the acumen lent by the snakes to predict his attacks.
Ly Erg slashed and sliced, mostly carving the air as Daroch dodged and lunged around him. Taking a calculated risk, he curled and dove past the enraged Faerie, paying for it with a shallow slice to the thigh, but unfolding from the roll with his sword brandished in front of him.
“You think that will make a difference to the outcome of this battle?” The Fae soldier scoffed. “Since finding out it cuts us, all your human weapons have become iron.” He hacked at Daroch with bone-jarring force. “Still doesn’t kill us,” he mocked. “Just stings a little.”
Daroch recovered, twisting away from Ly Erg, and sliced upward, slashing the Faerie’s torso through the armor. He reveled in the momentary look of shock as the Fae inspected his precious armor and the blood pouring from the deep wound. “That mail might protect ye from Fae blades, but not mine.” The runes on his blade pulsed with power and light, even in the midday sun.
Ly Erg’s skin made terrible, wet sounds as it knit together. “Fortunate, then, that I require no protection from you.” His offensive was swift and brutal, yet methodical enough to be learned from centuries of bloodshed. Daroch had to adjust his style to deflect and avoid his devastating blows to conserve strength. For he fought Ly Erg, the most lethal Fae in the history of mankind. One who had slaughtered so many ancients that his hands were forever stained with blood so as to alert an unsuspecting human to not be fooled by his beauty or artifice.
This Faerie lived for the kill. And hated all humanity.
Daroch most of all.
Thrusting when Ly Erg sliced, Daroch made him pay for every offensive. But the wounds he inflicted instantly healed, while the few nicks and cuts Daroch received remained open and bleeding. His strength was failing, his limited magic waning. The angles he used to his advantage were slower to manifest themselves. His calculated odds for survival fell lower and lower out of his favor.
As it was wont to do during mortal combat, time slowed and sound only reached his ears as though he were still submerged in the sea. He couldn’t go on like this, and Ly Erg was likely only toying with him. Perhaps the time had come. He could roll over and submit. All of this would be over, one way or the other.
Only one other time in her memory had Kylah felt so helpless. This was all her fault. She wrung her hands and pulsed with terrified light. Though he may desire her death, she didn’t want the Druid to die. Not because of her. If she were to scream now, she might distract him. Her impotence infuriated her and the feeling was fed by the hatred pulsating from the two warriors in front of her.
Daroch was magnificent, his every movement fluid and dynamic. She could see the sinew of each muscle respond to his commands, directing superhuman power into each blow.
The battle lasted for hours, or only minutes, the flurry of parries and blows eliciting gasps and strangled sounds from her.
Until the moment all the keen intelligence went out of Daroch’s eyes. All skill and method seemed to drain out of him as he leapt at the Faerie with a shout of pure madness.
With a victorious smile, Ly Erg easily deflected the blow that would have flayed open any man and heaved the Druid to the ground.
Daroch landed heavily and was still for a few moments, his sword fell to the soft earth just out of reach. With a cough and a groan, he pushed himself up from the moss, his arms straining and causing the tattoos on his shoulder to ripple.
“Daroch,” she whispered before she could stop herself. He froze at the sound of his name leaving her lips and turned his head toward her. The shells at his temple ran across his cheek with the movement until his eyes finally found hers.
“This is fitting, is it not?” Ly Erg stood over him. “You dying on your hands and knees where you always belonged. Too bad she’s not here to watch. You remember, Druid, how she loved to watch before joining in?” The Fae used two hands to raise his lethal sword above his head.
Kylah saw it then. Daroch had kept it from his eyes until this very moment. All the humiliation, rage, anger, misery, and loss she’d detected inside of him shone hotter than the sun above them. The emotion lashed out at her, reaching into her soul and amalgamating with her own memories until she trembled from the force of it.
Her mouth dropped open. Her eyes darted toward the sword and back to him. If he lunged for it. If he only had a moment. A distraction.
He nodded to her and she let it loose, a keen so powerful the serpents died and the Stag retreated in astounding leaps. His pain fed her wail until the sea raged with it, the sky darkened with it, and the Fae froze for the moment they needed.
Daroch lunged for his sword, surged upward, and in a powerful arc, sent Ly Erg’s beautiful head soaring over the cliff into the depths of the Sea.