“You’re strong.” His dark gaze lingered on her features. “He’ll want you—or he’ll want to break you.”
The man standing before her was strong, too. But she wouldn’t ask now how Barin had tried to break him. They’d meet again, and perhaps Kavik would tell her. “He can want all he likes. Only I choose who will have me. But I thank you for the warning.”
He nodded and, after a final look at her face, turned away.
Curse it all. She called after him, “Are there markings to guide me through the maze?”
It didn’t matter if there were. Shim could follow the path. But she wanted the warrior to look at her like that again, with that strange combination of hunger and bleak torment—because she might understand why he looked at her that way if she could hold onto his image a little longer.
“You don’t need markings.” He bent to his saddle and slung the bloodied tack over his broad shoulder. “Just follow the bones.”
CHAPTER 3
Mala could follow the bones all the way to Lord Barin’s citadel.
Beyond the maze, the bones no longer littered the ground, but they stood in the people on the road to Perca who watched her with wary eyes. They stood in the fallow fields and the sagging walls of the crofters’ huts. They stood in the thousands of bowls and vases set out to catch the rain, and in the desperate faces of the children who quickly backed into the shadows and alleys as Shim carried her into the city.
This was a land stripped bare, with hope carved away. Mala’s mother had once told her that Krimathe was the same in those months after the Destroyer had passed through their lands. But Mala’s home had recovered. Blackmoor had not, though it had obviously once been strong. Mala could see those bones once she reached Perca, too—in the high walls surrounding the city, the wide roads, and the heavy stone of the city’s fortress. They had all been built to last, by careful planning and knowledgeable hands. Now the flesh was gone, and the skin stretched over those durable bones was thin.
Guards were lighting torches at the citadel’s gate when Mala rode through. None attempted to stop her or to question her presence there, as if Barin did not fear anyone who might enter his fortress.
She dismounted in the courtyard. Beside her, Shim raised his head, sniffing out the horses tied in front of the garrison on the eastern wall. Saddled, they stood with their backs to the rain and heads down. Two of the mounts responded to his whinny, but all moved uneasily against their tethers, as if they’d caught wind of the revenant blood still staining his legs and Mala’s cloak.
The musty scent of peat smoke hung in the air. Two servants crossed the yard, heading for the garrison and carrying a heavy soup cauldron between them. She had apparently come during the guards’ supper. Mala pulled up her hood, marking the remaining guards’ positions. The courtyard was large—too large for the scarce number standing watch. Most of those who weren’t eating waited near the keep’s entrance, and a few others walked the battlements.
No vessels stood atop the walls to catch the rain. The people within the citadel must have no trouble procuring water. That couldn’t be true for everyone within the city. How desperate must that make them?
Her gaze fell upon the pillories standing in the courtyard’s northwestern corner. A dozen of the devices stood silhouetted in the torchlight. She’d never known any city to need so many. Half were in use, the prisoners bent over with their heads and wrists trapped between slabs of darkwood, their pale faces and hands visible through the gloom. Two more guards watched over them, and—
Mala’s step faltered. It could not be. Yet she could hear the pained cries from one of the prisoners now.
Her blood seemed to thicken. Pulse pounding in her ears, she turned toward the pillories. Shim kept pace beside her, yet she barely heard the clop of his hooves. One guard watched as the other rutted behind an imprisoned man. He spared her a glance as she approached, but must have thought that she was there to pelt the prisoners with offal or to stand as another spectator. His gaze returned to the rutting pig. It was the last thing he saw.
The scrape of her blade across the bottom of his helm went unnoticed by the grunting pig, but the pilloried woman closest to Mala shrieked when the guard’s helmeted head dropped in front of her.
The other guard looked up. He stumbled back one step, brocs falling to his ankles before Mala reached him. She struck twice, and the pig only had a blink to realize that his cock had been separated from his balls before his head joined it on the muddied ground.
Shouts echoed across the courtyard. With rage boiling in her veins, Mala shattered the pillory lock with the butt of her axe. Whatever this man’s crime, he’d been punished as no one ever should be and had served sentence enough.
All of these prisoners had. Sick fury rose from her gut as her gaze raced over their soiled clothes, the bruises and stains. She stalked to the first pillory and kicked the guard’s head away from the imprisoned woman’s feet. Teeth clenched with every bone-jarring swing, she moved down the row, destroying each lock.
“Halt!”
A handful of guards marched toward her. Mala gave them no note beyond a glance. Like any other horse, Shim stood with his head down and his back against the rain, yet his hooves would bash in the guards’ helms if they came too close. She continued to the last pillory, where a slam of her boot sent the blackwood slab flying open on the hinge. As if the prisoner’s legs were too weak to hold her, the woman dropped into the mud.
Chest heaving, her heart like ice, Mala tossed back her hood and stood waiting in the torchlight, sword and axe in hand. A brute of a woman with greasy lips and a ragged scar over her pale left eye led the guards.
Mala punted the rutting pig’s head to her. “Are you captain of these men?”
The gore-stained helm landed at the woman’s boots. Shock and anger painted her cheeks red. She reached for her weapon.
“Stay your hand!” Mala snapped. “Are you captain of these men? Heed the cloak I wear and answer well, or I’ll spill your lump-weeded brain into the mud with them.”
Lips pinched, the woman gripped her sword. Mala grinned. So this guard wouldn’t heed the warning. Good. Near the pillories, a bowl of grease and a rod strapped to a belt had told Mala that not only the male guards had been raping the prisoners. By Vela’s moon-glazed blade, she would enjoy gutting every one of these bum-birthed scuts.
A guard behind the woman caught her forearm. “She is Vela’s,” he hissed.
Unease slipped over the woman’s anger and she hesitated. Curse it all. Mala would have preferred that these pigs were among those who didn’t fear the goddess and attempted to challenge her power, instead.
But if they defied her laws and forced themselves on these prisoners, they obviously didn’t fear her enough. Before Mala left this land, they would.
The guard’s hand fell away from her weapon. “The captain is at his supper.”
“His name?”
“Heddiq.”
“Then this will be Captain Heddiq’s last easy meal. You will announce me to Lord Barin, then you will visit the garrison and tell your captain to begin running as far from Blackmoor as he can, because if ever I see him, I will not stay my weapon. Perhaps your next captain will know better than to risk Vela’s wrath by allowing his guards to violate the prisoners under his charge.” She pointed her axe at the other guards. “You three will help these men and women to the citadel gates and release them. One more bruise on any of them and I come for your heads.”