Five Lands Saga Box Set 1 (Five Lands Saga Box Sets), page 129
It was Perchaya who reached forward violently, wrinkling the edge of the paper as she grabbed it.
And then, looking down at the sketch in his hand, Kenton realized why.
It was a drawing of him, that much was clear. A good one at that, rendered in great detail.
He was also completely naked.
His face grew hot, and he released the page, trying to pretend that he hadn’t seen. He remembered—more often than he ought—that time in Foroclae when Perchaya had happened upon him immediately after he’d finished bathing. She’d turned away quickly, but apparently the memory of that meeting hadn’t left her any more quickly than it had him.
Kenton stuttered something unintelligible as Perchaya grabbed her sketchbook and stowed the sheaf of paper between its pages again.
Gods, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would make this less awkward. Everything in his head was far too dangerous.
It’s okay.
I think of you, too.
I want you more than anything.
Please, convince me there’s a way we can do this.
She might convince him; that was the problem.
Instead, Kenton returned to her pack, finding the flint where it had slipped beneath her bedroll at last. Perchaya returned to her fire hole, still clutching the sketchbook to her chest. Even in the darkening woods, Kenton could see that her face was as red as his, though probably at least partly from embarrassment.
There wasn’t any reason for her to feel embarrassed. But Kenton couldn’t think of a way to tell her that without putting everything they’d worked for at risk.
One advantage of the dense, darkened woods was that there were myriad areas to hide away, letting the landscape and thick foliage cover them. It was a comfort to Kenton, as he left the others in their shelter beneath the overhang of earth, that it was unlikely anyone would find them in the time he’d be gone.
It was much less of an advantage when it forced him to travel slowly, watchful for attacks that might come from any hidden warren.
He needed to remain alert at every moment, yet his mind kept returning to that sketch of Perchaya’s. When had she drawn it? Had she carried it with her since Foroclae, soon after they’d first met the chosen in Bothran? Had she forgotten about it or kept it purposefully?
Gods, he needed to focus. This was the last thing he ought to be thinking about. He couldn’t afford to be distracted ever, and least of all now, as he was becoming more and more sure based on the landmarks on the map that he was nearing the right place. He’d just passed the large circle of trees, all grown together, with an opening at the center where their parent tree had long ago fallen and left a gap where it had deteriorated and become one with the forest floor. The original tree must have been quite the giant, and its children were each wide enough around that he didn’t think all of his companions together could have stretched their arms around even one of the trunks. It was quite a sight, and Kenton understood why it was on the map.
The opening faced the conclave, supposedly. Just a mile or so more in the forest, then—
Voices filtered from up ahead and Kenton froze, listening. A male voice, though he couldn’t make out the words, followed by another man’s laugh.
Kenton crept closer. The men were resting from their walk, sitting on some exposed roots. From the looks of them, they could have been townsfolk from any small, Sevairnese hamlet. They wore plain linen tunics and pants, with short hunting bows hung at their backs, along with quivers. Their catch—squirrels and a couple of quail—dangled from twine tied to notches in a walking staff. A sack of goods, likely whatever supplies they’d traded for, rested at their feet. One of the men was bigger, broader—the build of someone used to smithing, or perhaps hauling lumber. He was younger, too, his red hair and short beard unmarked with gray. The other was slimmer, his thinning hair graying, his face lined with more wrinkles.
Kenton only needed one to talk. And it was clear which one that should be. He kept low as he crept through the trees to get to the other side of them. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to be the type to smoke in silence. Their catch having been made, they weren’t worried about scaring off animals, and they definitely weren’t worried about being attacked this close to their home. They chatted amiably, relaying some story about a friend of theirs who’d gotten caught in his own hunting trap. Their words and laughter covered any snap of a twig or unnatural rustling of leaves.
Which made it easy to take them by surprise and plant a knife into the neck of the bigger fellow, just to the side of his spine. He made a wheezing sound and collapsed, and Kenton could imagine the look of surprise on his face, the gaping mouth that blood would escape from.
He didn’t need to see that; the look of horror on the older fellow’s face was proof enough.
The older man scrambled back quicker than Kenton had expected, his hand in and then half out of the pouch at his side before Kenton managed to knock the vials away and throw him back against a tree. The man’s knees buckled, and he gasped for air, struggling weakly as Kenton bound his hands behind his back and kicked his legs out from under him.
The man collapsed onto the grass, groaning. He blinked up at Kenton, his faced lined in pain.
Kenton crouched beside him, retrieving the vials of blood and putting them in his own belt pouch.
“Terribly sorry to interrupt your hunting trip,” Kenton said. “But I have a question and a rather short amount of time to find the answer.”
The man wet his lips. “Who are you?” he gasped. “Why—” His words choked off as his eyes moved back over to the body of the man lying dead mere feet away. Kenton was surprised to see his eyes shine with tears. At closer look, the two men had similar features. A father and son, perhaps, or uncle and nephew.
Kenton didn’t like thinking of blood mages possessing even the smallest shred of humanity, but any twinge of guilt he might have felt was quickly banished by the thought of all the blood puppets hidden away in these conclaves, harvested and enslaved. Their blood in the very vials Kenton now had in his pouch.
“My questions first,” Kenton said, and the man dragged his gaze back to him. “A man named Lukos recruited several members of your group a few weeks back. How many and where did they go?”
The older man faltered. “You might as well kill me. I’m not answering—anything.”
Kenton nodded. “Your brave resistance is noted.” He took another knife from his boot, and made a quick, shallow cut along his captive’s exposed collarbone, which caused the mage to cry out in pain. Then Kenton swiped the blood with his finger and sat back, looking at it with consideration. “But I doubt those in your conclave will see it that way when I send you back as a puppet to get the information from them. And kill them after.” He looked back at the body. “How many more family members do you have in there, anyway?”
Panic stretched across his face, even though the man tried to hide it.
Kenton rubbed his thumb and finger together the way he’d seen other blood mages do, circling one way and then the other. The gesture itself, how quickly it came to Kenton, seemed to be enough for the mage to believe.
“Lukos recruited seven,” he gasped out. “They went toward Peldenar.”
“You’ve got to do better than that. Peldenar’s a big city, and there’s lots of places to hide.”
“They didn’t say where,” the man growled, his breath hitching with another back spasm.
Kenton believed this, at least. Lukos wasn’t foolish enough to broadcast exact locations to every mage he tried to recruit. This had been a concern, of course—how many mages to bribe or kill before he found one that did know more. Because surely someone did. These conclaves were too closely knit to be effective at keeping secrets from each other.
He saw a flicker of something in the man’s expression, though. He might be telling the truth, but he did know more.
Kenton pursed his lips. “I suppose I’ll have to ask around, then. Or, really, you will.” He took one of the empty vials the man had been carrying and raised it to the cut he’d already made, digging the point of his blade in to open the cut wider.
The man gritted his teeth and let out a short whine. “No,” he managed. “There is—there’s more.” Kenton pulled away the blade and the partially filled vial, motioning for him to continue.
“A message was sent back, to one of the men’s mother,” the mage said, gritting his teeth again. If he hoped the mention of one of these monsters having a mother would yield any mercy, that hope would have been dashed quickly by Kenton’s unwavering expression. “Caves on the coast, he said. North of the city. Sea caves. But I don’t know—” Now there were tears again in his eyes, probably of desperation. “I don’t know anything about them. I’ve never been, and that’s all he said. I don’t think anyone in our village has, and you’d waste your time searching—”
Caves on the coast. Sea caves. Gods, Kenton should have known that’s where Diamis would hide them.
Kenton cut the man’s rambling off by slitting his throat. There was a gurgle and then silence. Kenton stood and took the blood vials out of his pouch, dropping them on the ground and crunching them underfoot. The blood drained out into the grass and Kenton dumped half his water skin over it, so no one would be able to use it. He dragged the bodies to where they could be hidden better in the foliage. Not that mages would never stumble upon them, but Kenton wasn’t worried about that. By the time they went searching, he and his people would be long gone.
He raided their supplies for anything useful—coin, rope, cooking utensils, weapons, the freshly killed meat. Then he stood and started heading back, the man’s words ringing in his ears.
Caves off the coast, north of the city. It didn’t matter if no one else in the conclave knew of their exact location, because Kenton already did. Many miles north of Peldenar, in fact, at the mouth of the Beldac river. The place where Diamis had once drained the blood of a hundred orphan children, stolen from the streets of the cities of Sevairn. Children no one would miss, children he could collect and leach the blood from to make his most supreme creation.
The children he’d harvested to create Daniella, his bloodborn. Those caves had worked for Diamis once, to work his dark magics in secret.
It made sense he’d seen fit to put them to use once again.
Forty-three
While they waited for Kenton to return, they each took turns keeping watch, sitting hidden in the brush, with an old food sack—brown as the dirt—stretched over them. For Perchaya, these stints atop the high ground, looking out over the still and silent forest, gave her nothing but time to stew in her own petty embarrassment.
Gods, why had she kept that sketch all this time? Had it never occurred to her that Kenton might find it?
It had, of course. She had passed many late nights beneath the stars thinking about exactly how he might react if he did. Not a single one of those fantasies had ended with him stammering something unintelligible and turning away.
After all this time traveling together, it seemed that Perchaya should have grown immune to the sting of rejection whenever he was confronted with her feelings for him. But, sadly, this appeared to be the kind of affliction that never stopped hurting, no matter how many times she suffered it.
Perhaps it was the hours spent in silence atop the berm, but this time, Perchaya searched through her long history of near misses with Kenton and saw them in a new light. She’d always been desperate to see what she wanted to see—in their kiss back in Grisham, in Kenton’s relief that she’d rejected Hugh. But it had been unfair of her to read anything into Kenton’s jealousy. He’d been afraid that she was becoming distracted, that was all, and she knew very well how much Kenton loathed it when any of them were distracted. He’d probably been trying to win her back to his cause, and he’d done so in the clumsiest way possible, which was typical for Kenton when it came to personal matters.
She remembered the look on Kenton’s face when she’d found him in that copse of trees after Drepaine. Anguished, like he’d lost something he’d never be able to retrieve. On the walk here, Perchaya hadn’t been able to reconcile that—the uncanny similarities between the reactions of Kenton and Jaeme. Kenton held his pain close, much more than Jaeme, but that seemed like a difference in personality more than one of degree. She knew why Jaeme felt the way he did—he’d lost the woman he loved most in the world, for whom he’d expressed many times he would give his own life. The woman who was carrying his child. They had no way of knowing what Daniella would do to her own child now that her heart had been turned, whatever that meant.
Jaeme had lost the most, but none of them were unscathed. Nikaenor seemed to amble forward, unseeing, and Perchaya shuddered to think what horrors were playing inside his mind. Sayvil and Quinn had each other to cling to, and that was something.
But Kenton seemed to be drawing away every bit as much as Jaeme—off in his own world, not seeking her out to talk about the next steps—and something that had been niggling at Perchaya for a long time finally pushed its way to the surface.
She was beginning to wonder if Kenton was in love with Daniella, if he had been in love with Daniella for quite some time.
Kenton was the one who’d insisted he go after Daniella personally when she was kidnapped in Grisham. He’d left his bearers—people of whom he was fiercely protective, if also frequently annoyed with—to make sure she was safe.
To keep her out of the hands of Diamis, he’d insisted. But now Perchaya thought there might be more to it than that. Kenton had worried about Daniella every moment she was gone. He’d been personally invested.
Perchaya shifted her legs beneath the brown cloth, stretching her knees.
She’d known a long while that she needed to let her feelings for Kenton go. She’d simply never been able to convince her heart to fully agree.
A glimpse of movement caught her eye, and Perchaya squinted into the dim woods. There, on the other side of a large, fallen tree, a dark shape slipped around a rock.
Kenton. Perchaya could see the outline of his profile in the dim light. He slipped through the woods as if searching for their hiding place, and Perchaya stood atop the berm, then slipped down through the brush to meet him.
Kenton startled when he saw her, then smiled. He rested back against the fallen tree. Perchaya shouldn’t have been happy to have a moment alone with him before they returned to the others—she had just been chastising herself for that very impulse. But she couldn’t help it. She’d been worried about him, slinking off through the forest alone.
She didn’t miss the stain of blood on his sleeve as she approached him.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.
Kenton nodded. “The mages are working in the sea caves to the north of Peldenar. I think it’s the ones along the Beldac, where Diamis kept the children whose blood he used to make Daniella.”
Perchaya shivered. That made a dark kind of sense. “That’s closer to where we’re supposed to meet Saara. So at least it’s in the right direction.”
“It’s a long way from here, though. I was hoping we’d be able to reach them sooner, to get Daniella away from Diamis.”
There it was again. That look of agony on his face, like he’d fallen into the lowest of all hells.
Perchaya spoke softly. “You didn’t fail her, you know.”
Kenton’s lip wobbled, and he bit down hard on it, regaining his composure. “I did. We all did.”
Perchaya looked down to find a small purple flower growing out of the moss near her foot. Flowers were uncommon here in Remalia, and this one looked so cheerful and hopeful, a spot of brightness in the forests of death and rot.
Perchaya felt a strange urge to stomp it under her boot.
Instead, she stayed still. The flower had done nothing wrong. It didn’t need to suffer simply because she did.
“I’ve been thinking about that, lately,” she said. “About your feelings for Daniella.”
A confused look crossed Kenton’s face. “What?”
The woods seemed to grow dimmer. Perchaya wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, or if Kenton had been gone for most of the day and night was now approaching. It was so easy to lose track of time here. Kenton’s face was a shadow in the dim light, his rugged features, his tired eyes. And while the ache and the longing would probably never leave her, Perchaya made a choice, the same one she’d made over and over again.
She wasn’t going to listen to her own good sense and protect her heart from him. She wanted to be by his side, even if it could never mean to him what it did to her.
“Daniella,” she said. “You care for her.”
Kenton’s face crinkled, like he didn’t quite understand the words. “Of course.” Then a light of understanding dawned on him. “Gods, do you think I’m . . . infatuated with her?”
That wasn’t the exact word that she would have used, but she supposed it would take a far sight more pressure for Kenton Del Moro to admit to love.
Perchaya opened her mouth to respond, but closed it again when Kenton laughed, his voice loud enough that she wondered if it would reach the others.
“Gods,” Kenton said. “I thought you knew.” He reached for her hand with such a quick movement that she startled. But once her hand was in his, she couldn’t bring herself to withdraw it. And then his other hand was on her shoulder, and he looked into her eyes with an expression so intense and hungry that she felt as though she’d slipped into some dream world with him, some height in which all the horrors of the world had fallen away, and they floated, just the two of them.
