“I think you must let me go, Dar Leah,” she said abruptly. “You must do for me what I did for you. You must set me free.”
He shook his head. “That would be a very bad idea, Princess.”
“Ajin.”
“Ajin,” he corrected. “I would very quickly go from being your captor to being your captive, and I already told you how I feel about that.”
Then be captive to my heart, she thought suddenly, impulsively—the thought exciting and forbidden. She could not deny how real and present her attraction to him was, how much it was a true measure of feelings she did not yet fully understand. But it had no place in what was happening now, so she shrugged it away.
“I don’t want to be your captive,” she said. “But I would have you be mine, once you realize there is no hope for you in the coming struggle. I have already saved your life once and would do so again. At some point, you will accept this and come to me. When you do, I will be waiting.”
He stared at her in bemusement, and she reached up and gently pushed the sword blade away from her throat. “You don’t intend to use this, so why threaten me with it? I am standing before you because I want to. Because I want you to understand my cause and to understand me. We are alike, you and I. I respect you and I think you respect me, too. We fight for what we believe in, but we do so with as much honor as we can manage. We share a code of conduct and a mutual admiration for loyalty and courage. We are not so different as it might seem.”
“Different enough, when you keep advancing your plans for conquest. I would never do what you are doing!”
“Wouldn’t you?” She cocked an eyebrow and took a step toward him. She was standing so close, they were almost touching again. She felt the urge to reach out for him. “If your land was dying and your people with it, would you not do whatever it took to save them? Even if it meant fighting to secure a place for them in another inhabitable land?”
She could see the uncertainty in his eyes. “You cannot know until you are faced with the situation. One day, you might be.” She reached out and put her hands on his shoulders. It was a bold gesture, and she could see confusion mirrored in his expression. “You may continue to think us different, if you wish. But we are not, Dar Leah—and never will be. I don’t know how this conflict will end. I don’t know that either of us will survive it. But I do believe that, in ways neither of us yet understand, our fates are joined.”
She reached up from his shoulders to his face and brought it down to hers. On impulse, she kissed him on the lips—a slow brushing followed by a hard press. She felt him resist, but only for a moment.
“You owe me my freedom,” she said, releasing him and stepping back, “so I am taking it. I will not tell any of my people that I saw you. I will not reveal that you are here. Only you and I will know we shared this meeting.”
She stepped past him, and he turned to watch as she walked away. A handful of steps farther on, she looked back. “I will miss you, Blade of Paranor, but we will meet again. Another time, another place. And very soon, I think. Look for me.”
He shook his head, almost as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was allowing to happen. “We are even now, Ajin d’Amphere. If I catch you again, I will not be so quick to let you go.”
Her smile was dazzling. “Nor I you.”
And then, as if to taunt him, she vanished.
TWO
Kol’Dre lay in a crumpled heap just beyond the space where Paranor had stood not an hour earlier, oblivious to his surroundings. A heavy chunk of stone, broken free in the cataclysmic destruction of the Skaar advance force, had struck him on the head and left him in the path of the swiftly spreading green mist and the creature that it shrouded. He realized it was coming for him and knew he should bolt for safety. He could hear the screams intensifying behind him. He could see the wicked glow spreading through the hallways and into the rooms of the Keep, killing everyone it touched.
He remembered seeing some of his fellow Skaar turn back nevertheless, reacting instinctively to the shrieks and cries of their fellow soldiers, intending to help friends and comrades. But their efforts had been futile, and they had paid the price for their foolish bravery: Every last one of them was savaged by the horror that hunted them down. There was no standing against such monstrous magic, no device or weapon the Skaar possessed that could stop it. Courage for a reason was one thing, but blind, reckless bravery was another. Kol’Dre had his faults and occasional lack of good judgment, but throwing away his life had never been among them.
Yet his memories of what he had witnessed before the stone felled him remained hazy. He had no idea how he had gotten clear of the Keep, or even why he was still alive. Nor did it matter. Not so long as he slept, careless and unknowing.
But then, suddenly, he was awake, shocked back to consciousness by the memory of lying next to a young girl in her bed beneath coverings turning red with her blood. The knife was in his hand, and he kept stabbing her, over and over again. And all the while she watched him, smiling with trust and love, attaching no blame to him even though it was his hand that killed her.
Kassen, she whispered.
He sat up with a gasp. The sudden movement made his head spin, and he lowered it between his legs and retched. The dream fragmented and the night closed about him. He was outside in the cool air, beyond the walls of Paranor, sitting in a patch of grass with trees to his left and empty space to his right. He turned his head to view the latter, sensing something wrong with it, and then he remembered that this was where the Keep had been. It was gone now. He blinked in disbelief, closed his eyes tightly, and looked again.
Still gone. Everything was gone.
Figures surrounded him, voices speaking urgently to him in the Skaar tongue, asking how he was, if he had suffered any injuries besides the one to his head, if he could see properly. He shook his head automatically, brushing them off, not even sure exactly what they were talking about.
Then he became aware of the hammering pain that ratcheted through his skull, spearing downward through his neck to his shoulders in steady waves. He reached up to touch the source of the injury and found a compress tied in place. Something had struck him hard enough to open a wound that had bled down the side of his face and onto his shoulder. He could feel the stickiness of freshly crusted blood and smell its coppery scent. He glanced down and found his Druid robes stained red. But the rest of his body seemed intact.
“Help me up,” he ordered, and arms reached down to take hold of him and lift him to his feet.
A wave of dizziness and fresh pain nearly felled him a second time, but he managed to keep his feet, waiting for it to pass. He glanced again at the vast open space where Paranor had stood, just to be sure. “What happened to it?” he asked the men about him.