She shook her head. “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”
He had to get her into the water. “Come here, Elara.”
She ignored him. Vapor rose from the water. There was something witchy about her, arcane and female. He would peel that dress from her.
“Tell me about the boy?”
“What boy?”
“The shapeshifter boy you tortured.” Elara walked along the pool to the left.
“Come closer and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and I’ll think about it.”
Hugh rose and began striding through the water to her. The three women hung onto him and he dragged them forward.
Elara leaned forward, her hazel eyes bright. “Are you going to chase me?”
“Do you want me to?”
She dipped her foot into the water. “You used the kids as bait today.”
“They weren’t in danger.”
“Tell me about Ascanio.”
Hugh was walking through the water but not making any progress. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Did you really torture a child?”
“Yes. He was sixteen at the time. I was chasing Kate through the city and she didn’t want to be caught.”
He drew closer. As long as he kept talking, the distance between them shrank.
“I used a wendigo to herd her, because I knew she was smart enough to stay out of its way. The kid was with her and he tried to fight it. It tore him up.”
If he could grab her ankle, he would yank her into the pool.
“What happened next?”
“Kate ran for the Order of Merciful Aid, and then knights stuck her into a loup cage. I killed them all.”
“You killed off the knights of the Order of Merciful Aid?”
“Yes.” Elara was almost within reach. “Kate was angry. The last one was her friend. She watched me kill him.”
“Why would you do that in front of her?”
“He didn’t give me a choice. It was a hard kill. Roland wanted his daughter. Nothing mattered except getting her to him. Nothing else existed.”
Hugh struggled to explain the relentless pressure and the finality in Roland’s eyes when he had given the order. He’d gone into it with a kind of grim determination that now seemed desperate. He couldn’t find the words.
“I had to get her out of the cage, she was pissed, and they left Ascanio on the table. His stomach was in ribbons. The wendigo crushed his ribs and bones stuck out through the skin. The shapeshifter virus kept him alive up to that point, but he was dying. The knights didn’t treat him, because he was a bouda.”
Her ankle was within his reach. Two more steps and he was there. There were things he needed to do to her.
“So what did you do?”
“I healed him.”
“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.