Touch of Iron (The Living Blade #1) (13 page)

A few days ago, she had tiptoed into his room back home in the middle of the night. He had been reading by the light of a candle and looked up to berate her as the draft blew out the flame.

“Do you mind? I thought you were at the slaughter feast with Wolfe.” He groaned, reaching over for the tinderbox with one hand, trying to keep his finger between the pages.

He felt her move toward him in the dark. Her footsteps made no sound.

“Shhh!”

“What?”

She stood so close to him he smelled the scent of burned wood that always lingered in her hair, that charcoal scent, but also the honey-sweet fragrance of mead.

“Nora, are you drunk?”

“I’m still standing, aren’t I?” she whispered angrily, taking the tinderbox and lighting the candle for him.

The stairs creaked under the weight of their foster father coming upstairs. Nora’s head whipped toward the door and her hands shook slightly. Her eyes were wide and darted across the tiny bedroom. Bed, trunk, and desk. There was nothing else. She stepped behind Owen and bent over as though looking for something on the floor.

“Nora, what are you doing?” Her strange behavior was making his hair stand on end.

She pressed a finger against her lips and shook her head.

Owen heard Rannoch’s heavy steps scrape across the wooden planks in the small corridor. His foster father was drunk. He heard it in the way Rannoch’s left foot dragged over the floor. Either very tired—or very drunk. When he passed Owen’s door, Nora squeezed her brother’s forearm. Their eyes met as they heard their foster father pause before Nora’s bedroom door next to Owen’s. The other door opened. Owen strained to hear anything but the creak of wood. Nora’s fingernails were buried deep in his forearm. The door closed again and the heavy footfall carried on one door farther to Rannoch’s bedroom.

Nora’s eyes were brimming with tears.

“I have to leave,” she whispered. “I have to run away.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Owen nodded.

“All right.”

*     *     *

“She didn’t really…fuck your father,
did she?” Owen turned to the voice outside of his memory, turned his eyes away from the distant silhouette of his twin and met the gray eyes of the pale boy next to him.

“No.” He made no effort to conceal his frown.

The boy shrugged.

“Did you two ever…?”

“No!”

The blond boy shrugged again and scratched the back of his head.

“I’ve seen twins do it before. Only it was two red-haired girls. People paid a lot of money to watch them.”

Owen flushed a dark red and gave the boy another look. He was tall and wiry, with a clean-cut face and a hint of broadness in his shoulders that might someday make him a decent fighter. If he lived that long. If they both lived that long.

“What’s your name?” Owen asked.

“Shade Padarn.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“Mine.” The boy’s hand settled on his hilt.

Owen’s eyes flicked back to Shade’s.

“The name’s Owen, destroyer of maiden hearts.” He held out his hand.

Shade looked at the outstretched hand before he grasped it with a strength his lanky limbs belied.

“Yeah. I knew you’d be the evil twin.”

*     *     *

Owen woke the next day
with a bad taste in his mouth and a half-wight crouched next to him. He ran a hand through his unkempt hair and managed a smile.

“Master Diaz! You’re back!”

“Indeed.”

“That’s good. I was worried when you left that—”

“Your sister. Where is she?”

Owen’s smile died. He sat up, then squinted at Diaz’s pupilless black eyes to figure out where this conversation was going. It didn’t help much. Those wight eyes were unreadable. Owen cleared his throat.

“Ah. Nora. She’s gone back home.”

Another look at Diaz. The master didn’t say anything.

“So…we had a bit of a fight. And, well, see, Nora wanted to leave the company, and I wanted to stay.”

More nothing. Owen knew this tactic. Knew it and stepped right into it every time, trying to fill the silence, his words sounding more like excuses the more he spoke.

“Look, the best way of getting Nora to do what you want her to do is to make her angry enough to do it. If I tell her to do something, she’ll just flat-out refuse. She’s stubborn that way. If you tell her
not
to do something, challenge her, then she’ll go the extra mile to prove you wrong. I figured she didn’t want to stay, and let’s face it.” Owen lowered his voice and cast his gaze about the campfire, where Prince Bashan’s men were waking. “With this lot? It’s not really safe for her to stay, but she would never just leave me here on my own. So I had to make her leave. To keep her safe.”

“And you decided this without consulting me, your master, first?”

“Um. Yeah. That was probably wrong.”

“Owen, do you realize why we’re running across the Plains near winter?”

“Um…because you don’t want to be seen?”

Diaz sighed.

“Because all the roads are teeming with bandits and looters. The countryside is infested with roving bands of masterless men, some of them ambitious enough to prove themselves against the Hunted Company. Fighting them off would be tiresome and time-consuming, and the bodies we’d leave behind would show the direction the Hunted have taken. So we run the Plains.”

The hair on Owen’s forearms rose, but not because of the chilly morning breeze.

“You mean she’s not safe?”

“I mean you sent your sister alone into the wild, and there’s no safety of home left to go to, even if she arrives at Owen’s Ridge unharmed.”

“Oh. Oh crap!”

Owen felt sick. He stared into the flames and clasped his hands over his knees in an attempt to hide their shaking. Why hadn’t he thought of that? His head turned to the direction Nora had taken. It’d take days to reach the Ridge. He’d never catch up with her. And even if he did, what could he possibly say?
You shouldn’t have fucked our father.
There was no way to misunderstand that. No way he’d been joking. You couldn’t just apologize after that sentence. Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean it. He’d said it to get her to leave him, and it had worked. He groaned and hid his face in his palms.

“I need you to do something,” Diaz said.

Owen looked up through his fingers.

“Keep close to the prince. And to Shade. They’ll keep an eye out for you on the journey to the Temple of the Wind. But you must in turn keep an eye out for them. Understood?”

Owen nodded, although he wasn’t too sure he understood.

He watched Master Diaz move among the waking men, watched him pull the hood of his cloak farther down over his face as he strode westward.

T
he land crawled past them
as they continued farther east day by day. The Plains were a vast bowl of grassland surrounded by the Crest Mountains, dotted here and there with scraggly trees shaped by the northeast wind, boughs reaching out toward the south like outstretched hands. The Hunted Company had slowed down their pace from a run to a solid marching rhythm. Some of the company came and went whenever they broke camp, bringing felled game back with them. Owen watched despondently as Shade shot hare on the Plains with a frequency and aim that outclassed Owen’s mediocre attempts by far. The boy was younger than him, for the love of the gods, if only by a few months. They’d be talking about something, and then Shade would raise his hand, attention suddenly drawn away. He’d string his bow, aim, then follow the arrow’s flight to his prize. Every single time. It felt like having Nora back around him—except that Nora never talked about brothels or tits—and so Owen stuck close to Shade.

Every day that passed uneventfully was another day his sister lived, Owen told himself. The first few days after Master Diaz left, Owen had slept badly, straining for any sound of the half-wight’s return. That would surely mean Nora was dead. And it would be his fault. After the first week had gone by with no sign of Diaz, Owen pictured Nora having reached the Ridge in safety and Diaz checking in at the forge to see that she was all right. Then the master would return soon and tell Owen so, and he could sleep restfully again.

After the second week had gone by with no sign of Diaz’s return, Owen started to worry again. There were too many factors. Too much he didn’t know. Maybe Nora had thrown a fit at Diaz when he arrived at the Ridge. Maybe she hadn’t, and the master had stayed to perform the marriage at Solstice himself. There was always the need for a pilgrim in the villages along the coastline. Sometimes the young pilgrims from the shrines in Dernberia came by on pilgrimages to the larger temples. Once a year at least, Master Darren had made his rounds. But maybe Diaz had decided to do the rites himself. Who knew? Not Owen, and that was his problem. But he trusted the master and he knew his sister. And every day they weren’t by his side was a day that Nora lived longer. Maybe.

By the third week, they left the Plains and entered dense woodlands. The lonely groves of trees had joined forces to become a thick forest. A rutted dirt trail passed as a road under the close canopy of trees, even though the last people to come through had certainly been dead and gone for decades, if not a century. Camping in the woods off the trail was a slight improvement, Owen felt, as the trees protected against the constant blasting wind of the Plains. At night, he huddled as close to the fire as he dared and read by its light.

Owen was never without books. Nora said he carried them like a disease. Even in their great haste to run away from home, as Nora was packing food, Owen had grabbed two books from his desk. She had scoffed, of course. But he always had books, even when tending the charcoal clamps. He read until his vision blurred and his mind couldn’t focus on the words before him.

He awoke cold and sore. His book had tumbled out of his hands and lay dangerously close to the glowing embers of the fire. Weak moonlight filtered through the empty boughs above his head and flashed on metal near his feet as he reached for the book. He looked up and made out a dreamy, hazy silhouette standing over him.

“Nora?”

Nope, it wasn’t Nora. It was a man. A man with a sword. A man with a sword who was about to kill him. Owen rolled against the trunk of a tree, heart pounding. He held the retrieved book high over his head like a shield—as though that would help—and scrabbled back as the blade slashed down where he had been a second earlier. His other hand was on his paring knife. It wouldn’t be much good against a sword; neither would the book hinder the stroke. He readied himself for the pain that would come any second now. He was going to die. Now. Here. And the worst part was that he couldn’t even see his killer, so he’d never find out why that man wanted to kill him. Metal flashed and he closed his eyes, calling out in terror.

The killer grunted as Shade hurtled into him from the side. Owen watched them scuffle. What could he do? What should he do? If he stabbed randomly into the dark with his paring knife, he might hurt Shade instead of the other guy. He took a deep breath and yelled instead.

“Attack! We’re being attacked!”

On the other side of the fire, Prince Bashan, exiled heir to the throne of the Kandarin Empire, woke with a jolt as though he had been shot with an arrow. His eyes took in the situation and his hand was already drawing his sword out of its scabbard. All around the camp, torches lit up among the trees. The attackers started a wild howl that made Owen’s skin crawl with primal fear.

“All to me!” the prince yelled, voice still hoarse from sleep. “Shield wall! All to me!”

With a deft swoop Owen grabbed the man punching Shade and pressed his face down into the glowing embers of the fire. The man screamed and twisted violently, flailing with his arms and legs, but not for long. Shade sat up and stabbed him in the back three times. His young face was a snarl. Owen rolled to his feet and ran.

He ducked between the trees as chaos erupted around him. Cries rang out. He heard the clang of weapons, and arrows whirred unseen through the night. Beyond his speeding world of half-glimpsed faces and whipping branches, Owen knew running away was not a good idea. In fact, it was probably a stupid idea. He now found himself alone, surrounded by archers and men with swords somewhere in the woods before him, and he wasn’t sure in which direction he was running. Toward the dirt road? What if the main force of the enemy lay in wait there? Deeper into the forest? Then he’d be all alone without a weapon, and that was not a good situation to be in, either. His best chance of survival was going back to the prince and the Hunted Company. But his feet weren’t listening to his reason. He willed himself to stop and turned back toward the sounds of fighting.

The men around him were occupied with their bloody work, but he was in the middle of a nightmare. Shadowed fighters choked and blood gurgled in slit throats. Torch flames waved to and fro hellishly, distorting the men’s faces, their limbs, and their weapons. Fear gripped him hard and, in turn, he gripped the hilt of his paring knife. It was pathetic. Now that his feet had stopped, they just wouldn’t move again. Blind rage gleamed in the eyes of the men around him, killing and hacking and grunting and falling. They’d kill him in their battle rage. Kill now, mourn friendly fatalities later. Ha! As if any of them would give a damn about him.