The Offering (22 page)

Until Xander felt strong enough to move on his own.

She set up camp and used the few supplies she'd managed
to strip from the horses before she'd had to set them free. A blanket and a tarp, some bandages and antiseptic, half a loaf of bread, a special blend of tea she'd had the apothecary mix before she'd kidnapped Xander, and a compact hunting bow that had been easier to carry than the Blaster rifle she would've liked to make room for.

By the time she'd returned with dinner—a rabbit she'd shot on her first attempt—Xander was sitting up in front of the fire she'd started, looking mostly alive.

“Feeling better?” she asked, glancing knowingly at the tea she'd instructed him to drink. It smelled like piss, but the apothecary had insisted it would ease—at least temporarily—the discomfort of whomever consumed it.

Xander shrugged, but Sage noted the way his eyes were glossed over now. The tea was doing its job.

She dropped to the ground and began the work of skinning the animal. “You had me scared,” she told him, not looking up to see if he was listening or not. She was glad he was improved, even if it meant he was drugged out of his mind. At least he wasn't delirious.

She was relieved when Xander managed to eat and actually keep it down. He needed to rebuild his strength. When they were finished and she'd cleared away the carcass so as not to attract predators during the night, she took great care changing his dressing.

The wound was septic, she was certain, and she worried how much longer Xander would last on tea and good intentions.

When the infusion of narcotics wore off, and the shivering began, Sage crept closer to where Xander slept.

She stroked his face and wiped away the sheen of sweat. She patted his back and caressed his cheek. She watched his face as it twisted with torment and agony, and she longed to see it lying dormant. To watch him sleep in peace.

She guarded him and prayed the fever would pass.

And when it didn't, she curled up close to him and pressed her body to his, hoping that at least some of her strength—and her heat—would transfer to him.

Would keep him safe throughout the night.

xiv

“You've lost your mind,” I whispered, hoping to draw as little attention as possible to the fact that I was still awake. “Was I not clear? I don't want to see you.”

The tent I'd been escorted to was lavish. I had a bed that wasn't on the ground, as beds in tents tended to be, and it had real bedding that was clean and soft and smelled of lavender. The food too was hot and fresh, and I'd dined on braised pork smothered in carrots and leeks and some sort of stewed plums. The combination should have been revolting, but somehow, after days of eating from jars, it had been delectable.

I wondered if it was the same fare the soldiers dined on, or if I was simply being treated to the queen's leftovers.

Either way, despite my accommodations and the spread I'd been offered, I'd not once been uncuffed. Even now, with only the soft glow radiating from my skin to illuminate the pitch black of the tent's interior, my wrists ached from being bound.

“Hear me out,” Niko said, slipping into the tent and letting
the flaps whisper closed behind him. He made it seem as if his actions were covert, but I knew better. There was no way he'd snuck past any of the guards who'd been posted around the entire perimeter of my provisional prison.

I felt as if I were truly seeing him for the first time now, and wondered how I hadn't noticed his duplicitous nature earlier. How I'd fallen under the charm of his golden eyes and his inviting smiles.

But I knew why, of course. Sabara.

When it came to her, there was nothing double-dealing about him. He meant every sugar-coated word he spoke to her, every silver-tongued compliment, every overblown promise.

He would kill for her. He would die for her.

And everything in between.

She was his everything.

I knew because she told me so with every ounce of energy she possessed as she fought to take me over, even now.

My head ached from trying to contain her. It would have been so much easier to just give in.

And so much more deadly.

“Charlaina, please. Hear me out. I have the answer. I've found the perfect solution for all of us.” I didn't flinch when he climbed onto the side of my bed, and I somehow managed to keep my breathing steady when his fingers grazed over the exposed flesh of my arm.

In the darkness my skin sparked, the only indication he had any effect whatsoever on me—or rather, on Sabara.

The smile on his lips meant my reaction hadn't gone unnoticed. “You see? You can pretend all you want, but I know she's
in there, listening to everything we say.” His grin widened, his teeth flashing white. “Or was that you? It's all right if it was, Charlaina. You're allowed to enjoy yourself. You are queen, after all.”

I flinched from him. “And is this how you treat a queen?” I cocked an eyebrow at him, hoping Sabara was paying attention now. I wanted to prod her, prod both of them, the way he was prodding me. To make her question him, even just the scantest bit. To make her look at Niko the way he really was, a two-faced scoundrel. “Because that's not how I saw it. It looked to me like you and Queen Elena were pretty chummy. From what I could see, you've
enjoyed
yourselves quite a lot. Am I wrong?”

I waited for the explosion my taunts would cause, but my words didn't have quite the effect I'd hoped on Sabara, who remained silent.

Niko, on the other hand, had plenty to say. “It's all for the greater good, Charlaina,” he explained. “Queen Elena is exactly who I'm talking about. She's the solution I mean.”

“Solution? What possible solution could you expect me to accept?” I bristled. “Is that the ‘cure' Elena wrote to me about?” But I already knew the answer. “That's no
cure
.”

Enemy or not, I wasn't sure I could do that. In fact, I was certain I could not. How could I live with myself if I were to force Sabara's Essence onto—
into
—Elena? Besides, even if I were willing to allow it, there was nothing to stop Sabara from killing me the moment she had a new host. She would have control of her powers once more, and she could easily turn them against me.

I wouldn't
, she insisted, her words echoing hollowly inside my head.

I didn't believe her, and she knew as much.

“I won't do it. How can you expect me to just . . . to . . .” I lowered my voice, not even able to say these words aloud as my eyes searched Niko's. “To . . . ask her to die?” I finally breathed into the darkness between us.

Niko's hands captured mine, which were still bound in front of me. He lifted them to his lips. “That's what I'm telling you. That's what I'm saying. You don't have to ask her. She
wants
this. She wants to say the words. She wants to become part of the Essence and live forever.
She wants immortality
.” He said the last words in the ancient tongue that only he and Sabara understood, the language they'd spoken when they'd first met, all those many, many years ago. When they'd forged their eternal bond.

If only I hadn't understood it too. Because I knew the truth. Elena wouldn't survive the way I had.

“She won't be immortal,” I hissed. “You're lying to her. She'll die just like the rest of them. Fade into . . . nothing. Vanish. Then it'll be just you and Sabara, or Layla, or whatever it is that you call her, together again until people start asking questions about you, wanting to know why you don't age the way she does. The way they all do. And then what, Niko?” I jerked my hands from his, unable to stand the feel of his skin on mine. “Then you'll kill another queen, and another?”

“Or a princess,” he answered dispassionately. “Makes no difference to me, as long as she has royal blood in her veins, and as long as she's willing to say the words.”

“You're as evil as she is,” I asserted, not caring that I was insulting Sabara, the one person I could never escape.

“What did you think you were coming for? Did you really believe Elena would perform some sort of . . . exorcism? That there would be no consequences?”

I couldn't admit the truth, that I had hoped more than anything for that.

The silence was long and raw. I couldn't let them get away with this—their plan to murder Elena to satisfy their own selfish desires. I detested the queen for what she she'd done to Xander and for what she was doing to my country, yes. But I couldn't stand by and let them just . . . eliminate her.

I closed my eyes, refusing to speak of it any longer. Refusing to listen to Niko's assurances that this was the key to all our troubles. Refusing to give in to his promises that once the transfer was complete, he and Sabara would have what they wanted—each other—and would leave me, and Ludania, in peace.

But I couldn't shut out that other voice, the one that continued to haunt me far into my sleep. Sabara, who refused to let it go. Who begged and pleaded and cajoled, trying everything in her arsenal to persuade me to give her Essence over to Elena.

sage

The whispers were maddening.

They intruded on her dreams . . . out-of-place and fragmented snippets of a conversation she was never meant to hear. They didn't belong in the hazy depths of her sleep, and seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere intangible and far away. Like clouds or raindrops, or birds that skittered first in and then out of range again, making them hard to distinguish from one another. Hard to catch and hold on to.

They came from somewhere outside of her.

But the jab—the sharp poke that stabbed her cheek—was real. Tangible enough to wake her.

She came up sputtering, her hand reflexively reaching for the knife she always kept hidden in her boot. She never made it that far. The spear—crude as it was, and fashioned from nothing more than a stick that had been whittled to a fine yet lethal point—stabbed her even harder in the face. Jerking back from it, she reached up to feel the faint prick of blood.

Her eyes focused and traveled the length of the makeshift
spear, following the smooth bark that covered it, all the way to the unusual creature who wielded it.

She'd never seen anyone—or anything—quite like it. Small, like a child. Yet armed and smeared from head to toe in the very earth itself. Beyond her diminutive abductor Sage saw twenty more of them just like him or her, all equally undersize. And all similarly coated in mud.

She glanced sideways to Xander, who still slept.

Dropping a hand to his shoulder, she attempted to rouse him with a quick shake while she asked the stranger holding her hostage, “Who are you?” When there was no response, she tried again, this time in Astonian. She couldn't help wondering if, somehow, she and Xander had wandered back over to the wrong side of the border. If they'd somehow slipped back onto her country's soil. “
What do you want from us?”

The mud-covered face shattered, crackling into fragments that fell in places and revealed bits of skin beneath. A giggle erupted from the creature's mouth.

It's a girl,
Sage thought, hearing the lyrical tones that bubbled forth. Only a little girl.

But she knew well enough that even little girls could be deadly. She'd been used as a weapon to seek out her sister's enemies since she'd hit her twelfth year. She'd killed by the time she was thirteen.

Being young meant only that they were smaller. Not harmless.

Xander stirred. He'd had a restless night. She knew because her sleep had been sporadic, and she'd wakened again and again to his fits of malaise.

“They're not Astonian,” he managed, trying to sit before the coughing fit seized him.

The coughing had started last night too. It was new, that symptom, and didn't seem to fit with the fevers.

She had no idea what that meant.

“Where's your leader?” he asked in Englaise. No matter their class of birth, if they were Ludanian, they should understand him.

The girl kept her spear pointed at Sage's cheek, and Sage didn't try to swat it away, despite the fact that she could. There were twenty other spears at the ready, and she worried about how many of these children she'd have to kill before one of them managed to get to Xander.

If only he were strong enough to defend himself.

Beside her he hacked again, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she waited for the paroxysm to pass.

“Please,” she intoned as gently as she could. “Let me make him some tea. I promise not to try anything. I just want to . . . to make him better.”

The response was the sharpened point of the stick jabbing her already bleeding wound.

She raised her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. No tea.” She shot a questioning glance to Xander again when she saw him still struggling to sit upright.

Not one of the filthy children bothered to raise their harpoons at him. They recognized a wounded animal when they saw one. Xander was no threat to them.

“Your leader?” he repeated, this time managing not to cough.

From the back of the gathering there was a commotion. Sage watched as bodies parted and someone slipped between them. Whoever he was—and it was definitely a he, all caked in mud—was at least a head taller than any of the rest of them. He was lean and tall and older than the others, and he was coming right toward the front of the small gathering.

When he stopped, the girl took a deferential step backward. It was like watching those in the presence of her sister—the queen of Astonia. Like he was a king among his disciples.

A king?
Sage wanted to laugh at the notion of a king in a position of power, but with Xander beside her, the situation seemed less than humorous.

“What do you want from us?” she demanded. “We weren't causing any trouble.”