Run, my child, run.
He moved with extreme care through the terrain, sandy and soft with the river so close. His muscles—his witchery—screamed to ignite. With speed. With power. But blood lived in the air here, saturating the floodplain like the stink on a mosquito-infested pond. Aeduan forced his feet to creep onward with agonizing slowness.
He reached the river and stopped beside a peeling silver birch. The scents Aeduan followed—the child and the Red Sails leader—trailed off to the north, away from the river. Aeduan followed, his witchery coursing through his muscles. Creatures cleared from his path. The earth shook, a distant distraction.
All Aeduan felt was the cold in his fists, the murder in his veins.
Then he was there, at a campsite beside a trickling creek. It was so familiar. So similar to that day fourteen years ago.
Seven men lingered here, most waiting within a well-made tent with golden stripes circling the edges. The sort of tent Aeduan had seen wealthy families take on picnics.
These were the men Aeduan had encountered the day before. The men who had hunted the Threadwitch.
Aeduan stepped into the clearing, distantly pleased when the earth chose to tremble not two breaths later. The lone guard outside spotted Aeduan. His beard was greasy, while his fine, oiled cloak had clearly been claimed off the back of a traveler. He threw anxious glances at the sky before advancing on Aeduan.
But the idiot didn’t draw his weapon. Then again, neither did Aeduan.
The man stomped forward, silicate gravel crunching underfoot as his gaze swept over Aeduan. Whatever he saw, it didn’t impress him.
Which was good. The closer he came to Aeduan, and the farther he stepped from that tent, the easier this fight would be.
“You should not be here.” The guard was close enough now to be heard over the earth’s quaking, the forest’s creaking. His beard was trimmed to a long point like men in the northlands favored. “Turn around and leave.”
Again, a sharp look at the sky. Then a shadow hurtled over, swooping up winds and drawing Aeduan’s gaze too.
A mountain bat soared overhead. Distantly, it occurred to Aeduan that he’d never seen such a creature before. It was both larger and leaner than he’d expected, and with a long tail whipping behind. Otherwise, though, the monstrous bat looked exactly like the smaller fruit bats in the jungles to the south.
Aeduan supposed he ought to be afraid.
He wasn’t. The cold in his blood needed release, and the child trapped inside that tent needed help. That was all that mattered now.
He twisted back to the slaver, who was clearly at a loss for who posed more of a threat: Aeduan or the mountain bat. To Aeduan, the answer was obvious. “You should run now,” he warned the man. “Or I will kill you.”
The man’s lips curled back. “Seven of us and only one of you.” He grabbed Aeduan’s shirt.
“Exactly,” Aeduan said. “Which is why you should be running.” Then, with a speed that no man could match, he clutched the man’s hand to his chest, and punched up. His fist connected just above the elbow, breaking the joint and snapping the humerus in two.
Bone tore through flesh; the man screamed.
This was only the beginning. With the man’s arm angled in a way it was never meant to be, Aeduan thrust the limp elbow toward the man’s neck. The jagged tip of bone that had erupted outward now pierced soft throat.
The man’s beard was instantly red, and with a soft flick of his wrists, Aeduan pushed the body over.
After that, everything was a blur of shaking earth and screams and blood. Of terror that expanded in men’s pupils when they realized that they were going to die.
Six more men. Aeduan killed each one in less time than it took him to tie his boots. But the last man, the leader who stank of broken knuckles, Aeduan took his time with that one.
Or that was the plan, but as Aeduan pinned his knee in the man’s back, the creek lapping over the gravel around his face, as he grabbed the man’s hair and snapped back his head to expose a pocked chin speckled with open sores, the human filth began to speak.
“The king,” he rasped, “is waiting for us.”
“I doubt that.” Aeduan unbuckled a knife. The first weapon in this fight, and he rested it against a pressure point just behind the ear.
The man shivered, though not with fear. A monster like this had no capacity for fear, and Aeduan could smell pleasure pulsing in the man’s veins. He seemed to relish how the knife tip slowly pierced the skin, how it buried into a cluster of nerves that sent pain shrieking through his entire body. “The king … in the north. Ragnor.”
At that name, Aeduan’s blade stilled.
“Ragnor,” the man repeated. “He’s … the Raider King, and he’s waiting for us. For our cargo.”
A long moment passed. The mountain bat was coming this way, kicking up wind and leaves and branches.