XXVIII. Cataract
AGAINST THE PRINCESS’S VEHEMENT WISH, MYKKAEL PROCEEDED TO SKIN THE DEAD HORSE. HE WORKED FAST, WATCHING THE SKY FOR scavenging kerries. His methodical speed suggested he had done such grisly tasks of necessity many times in his past.
Or so Anja thought, where she sat, shuddering with nausea, deep inside the shaded cleft. She could not bear to witness the finish, as the flies swarmed and sucked at the raw, exposed meat of Bryajne’s carcass.
Mykkael counted paces to ascertain the range of his wardings, then knelt at a rock spring to wash his befouled hands. Then, using field knowledge, he fashioned a bracing tea from the herbs he stocked in his scrip. He brewed the restorative in a cone of hard leather cut from his boot cuff, and heated the water by dropping in a hot pebble raked from his tiny fire.
At his urging, Anja sipped the concoction. If she was put off by the bitter taste, infused with the taint of boiled leather, the tincture soothed her stomach and eased the wrenching sobs she had stubbornly stifled to silence. She huddled, forlorn, in the shadow, while Mykkael scraped the fresh hide, and the inevitable hungry kerrie descended to devour the buckskin’s remains.
Senses blunted by the warmth of full sunlight, the creature did not scent the living animals jammed inside the cave, but circled, cat-nervous and bugling. It landed at length, all shimmering bronze muscle slung on the feathered vanes of its wings. It snuffled, blew fire in riffling snorts, then sank its black talons into the dead horse’s shoulder, and clamped the hindquarters in the murderous grip of rear claws. It took to the air, its prize clutched to its belly, to a gale wind of thunderous flapping.
It left behind the rank stink of sulphur, soon dispersed by the morning breeze. Where Bryajne had fallen, the stone showed a seared ring of slag, and dried blood snagged with circling flies.
By then, Anja’s revolted tears had burned dry. She was not ready to move, yet. Mykkael did not press her, but stood silent guard at the cleft, knife blade working over the green hide. He cleaned the fat, then the hair, then rolled his handiwork into a bundle, lashed tight with a peeled strip of sinew. After that, he sat with his marked fingers rested upon the burnished steel of his weapon. He did not reproach his royal charge, or attempt to console her sore grief. His tacit trust, that her feelings were genuine, and not under his right to question, allowed her bruised dignity the footing she needed to begin the first step towards recovery.
He had saved her life, at unimaginable risk. That her horse should be mourned, and her privacy respected, bespoke an unprepossessing resilience of character; or not. The warrior who had slaughtered her hapless buckskin had launched his shaft with steel nerves, and no heart. Anja measured his posture. From the place where she sat, she could number the lines that exhaustion had scored into his rapacious features. Mykkael was not untouched, she decided. He looked like a man who ached to the bone, glass cast in the purview of solitude.
Curiosity as always outstripped her good manners. In the end, she could not resist prodding. ‘Did you ever visit the Scoraign Wastes, or ride caravan through the desert?’
The captain turned his head, a dark shadow sliced into outline by the sunlit chasm outside. Against the harsh glare, she could not tell whether his expression showed offence, or contemptuous irritation. His soft-spoken reply stayed unruffled. ‘No, Princess. Never. For me, that land was unsafe to travel.’
Her surprise moved him to qualify. ‘The tribes adhere to an inflexible law. As an infant, exposed, I was outcast as a misfit. Given my self-evident breeding, but lacking the sanction of clan tattoos, I stand condemned in that country. A tribal warrior raised in tradition would be duty-bound to run his spear through my back.’
‘Yet you speak the language.’ Anja puffed a wisp of stuck hair from her lips. ‘At least, I heard your fluent cursing.’
He grinned. ‘Yes, but with a terrible accent. I learned the rough phrases a trader would use to drive bargains and share an oasis.’
The next question stabbed. ‘Why do you answer? Did you hope to win my civil forgiveness?’
Mykkael sighed. The sword flashed, cold blue in sky-caught reflection, as he moved in attempt to lessen the discomfort of his damaged knee. ‘I hope, first of all, to keep you alive to resent me or not, at your pleasure. And I answer your Grace because at heart, I have nothing to hide.’ His careful regard searched her face through the gloom. ‘Well enough to attack, well enough to ride on. Can you manage?’ He stood up. Self-assured to the point of enacting his assumption, he sheathed his sword, then limped towards the horses with intent to unfasten their hobbles. ‘I’d prefer not to linger where a sorcerer’s mark has disrupted the natural currents that flow through the earth.’
‘You talk like a shaman,’ Anja said, rising.
He gave her his honest, velvet-grained laughter. ‘Would you know, Princess? Have you ever met one?’
‘Have I?’ Her smile wobbled, which spoiled the humour, but not her steel-clad persistence. ‘You could tell me.’
Bent to release the knots restricting Covette’s dainty forelegs, Mykkael shook his head. ‘Then be disappointed. I was fostered and brought up by a northern-born merchant. His wife lived with the inconvenience of my witch thoughts. She didn’t like to encourage them. The wardings I carry were earned on campaign. Eishwin, who fashioned the first one, insisted he tapped into my desert heritage to bring the laid pattern to resonance. He talked like a vizier.’ The flash of a smile was offered her way. ‘I didn’t fathom a single word of his inexhaustible theories.’
Anja knelt, checked Fouzette’s bandage, which had grown disturbingly hot to the touch. She said a word, likely learned from a stablehand, that would have vexed the duchess who raised her. As the captain moved on to unfasten the hobbles on Vashni, she pressed her next question to divert her concern for her injured mare. ‘Why didn’t you stay with your family, trading?’
‘A chance slip of fate.’ His tone held no rancour, as if that bygone detail had long since grown distant and meaningless. ‘Because I couldn’t safely work the south passage, I was sent out with a close associate of the house to learn how to manage the exotic routes to the east. I was also expected to establish my own trading contacts. The customs of barter and exchange were complex enough to be interesting. On contacts, I fell shamefully short.’
Anja braced against Kasminna’s head butts, guardedly ready to fend off the inevitable mischievous nip. ‘You weren’t suited for life as a merchant?’
His shrug as he straightened strove to dismiss the scab-crusted state of his back. ‘At fourteen years of age, fast horses and huge, muscled nomads with swords posed the more riveting fascination.’
‘But you would have matured,’ the princess insisted. ‘What made you abandon your upbringing?’
Mykkael must have sensed the quiet desperation behind her chatterbox inquiries. His dark eyes met her open probe without flinching. ‘In the course of my absence, the near family was stricken by an outbreak of virulent fever. Did I say they weren’t young? The house fortune was inherited by a nephew, who had six grown children to carry the trade. By the time I returned, the presiding magistrate insisted there had been no written record. My claim was dismissed.’
‘The nephew refused to employ you?’
Mykkael grinned outright. ‘Actually, no. He made me a handsome offer. I declined.’
Her sandpaper edge progressed into bravery: her curiosity was not going to let up. ‘In fact, you were likely to be assigned to the next caravan bound through the Scoraign?’
He laughed. ‘Clever thought, but no. The truth is quite honestly boring.’ He had been offered the position of desk clerk for his gift at translating languages. ‘Which horse will carry your saddle, your Grace?’
‘Covette.’ Anja swallowed the pang, that the sensible choice should have been her buckskin gelding. ‘The poor girl’s not fresh, but with Bryajne gone, she’ll be desolate and badly distracted.’
Mykkael nodded, approving. Had she named Vashni, he would have been forced to countermand her free preference. The grey was too tightly teamed to Fouzette. If pending danger should drive them to flight, the mare’s lamed stride was too likely to cause her loyal companion to falter.
By logical default, he should ride Kasminna. Yet Mykkael made no move to claim the sorrel mare’s headstall. Instead, he checked the knots, one by one, as the hobbles were retied into lead lines. The princess was left to saddle Covette by herself. Such unassuming humility, fast followed by that deliberate lapse from an accustomed royal prerogative, showed his steadfast respect for her human right to autonomy. The impact almost destroyed her reserve. When Anja handed off the mare’s lead, throat tight with emotion, he accepted with a formal court bow that acknowledged the gift without speech.
‘Leave Stormfront free,’ she husked, turned away to preserve her strained dignity. ‘He’ll have to be trusted to follow his training.’
That risk made sound sense, since the black gelding was too powerfully strong to restrain in the heat of a crisis. If the horse lost his head to raw instinct and bolted, or if his footing gave way on a misstep, he would only drag his sorrel partner off balance, undermining the rider’s defence. Taskin’s sharp insight had taught Anja well, a point Captain Mykkael did not fail to appreciate as he fastened the unused lead into a crude surcingle, and lashed his rolled hide on to Fouzette’s broad back.
Last of all, he reclaimed his tattered surcoat. Near enough to assist, in case Anja requested what he judged an unneeded assistance to mount, he donned the stained garment and readjusted his scabbard and sword harness.
‘Please take the lead, Princess,’ he said, his neat vault astride an achievement that masked the crippling halt in his knee. First-hand, she saw why Stormfront had agreed with him. His grasp on the rein was nonexistent as thistledown, and his cues to Kasminna, made in steppelands style with guiding leg and a balanced seat.
‘You didn’t learn your horsemanship from a merchant,’ Anja said as the wily mare tested his measure, gave a startled snort, and stood fast.
‘No.’ Not smiling, Mykkael pressed Kasminna back on her haunches, then opened her stride from the shoulder to face daylight and finally move out. ‘Sessalie trains mounted men to be lancers, which suits your defence, well enough. They can shock through a line in a siege, or mow down and break an interlocked shield wall that might challenge the span at Stone Bridge. But the wars where I hired demanded close infighting. A swordsman who relied on the reins became ei’jien.’
Since the do’aa term could not help but perplex her, Mykkael tipped his head. The gesture of deference was immediately betrayed, as sunlight exposed his faint smile of scorching amusement. ‘That idiom roughly translates as “luckless, sitting target”.’
Anja raised her eyebrows, resilience restored by his combative humour. ‘We aren’t ei’jien right now?’
That awoke his spontaneous laugh. ‘No, Princess. I would have us be seit shan’jien, “the target with teeth that bites back”.’
By late morning, they encountered the ripped carcass where something uncanny had dined on a slaughtered kerrie. Whether the fire-breathing predator had been naturally slain in the course of a territorial rivalry, or whether the sorcerer’s shape-changer had dealt the huge creature its deathblow, the discovery sat ill with Mykkael. The grue chasing over his spraydampened skin bespoke unclean implications. Not liking necessity, he asked the provocative question.
The princess informed him that the opportunistic kerrie would always feed upon carrion. The predators did not balk at consuming the flesh of their own kind. Available meat would not be left to rot unless something unusual or threatening aroused their overriding suspicion.
‘You’re troubled by this?’ Anja had to shout over the deafening thrash of the flume, hurled up into fantails of whitewater against a crook in the narrowing channel.
‘I’ve seen happier news,’ Mykkael admitted, his reluctance to explain exacerbated by Kasminna’s restive distress. Her wise equine instinct agreed with his hackled nerves, that all wholesome life should keep a safe distance from that mangle of gnawed bones and spilled viscera. The captain dismounted anyway, and handed the mare’s reins off to Anja.
‘Stay close,’ he instructed, his dark face unreadable under the shadow of the ravine.
Still in full sunlight, and glad of the warmth streaming over her spray-damp shoulders, Anja caught his wrist in restraint.
The sinews she grasped leaped to instantaneous tension, then froze stone-still, unresisting. Mykkael tipped up his head. ‘Your Grace?’
‘You intend to investigate?’ Her wide, worried eyes searched his features. ‘Is that safe?’
His level regard seemed a cold reassurance. ‘I am going to cut and salvage the wing leather. Horrid necessity. We’re going to need something to braid into stout rope. A green hide will stretch. Wing leather won’t. I can’t imagine we’ll find a material more strong and reliable.’
Anja did not release him. ‘I asked, is it safe?’
‘Life is not safe, Princess.’ Mykkael gently unwound her choke hold on his wrist. ‘This is Hell’s Chasm, where use of a rope might mean your survival, or maybe that of your horses.’
Her green eyes held his, as fiercely relentless. ‘And do you also plan to investigate?’
Mykkael sighed. He glanced away, while the pounding waters leaped and crashed, and gusts snapped the wet hem of his surcoat. ‘What more could I find?’
His unexpected note of desolation chilled Anja down to the bone. She shifted a heel, sidled Covette, until once again, he must face her. ‘What have you seen, Captain?’
To answer at all ran against his clear preference. Still, he gave the bared truth. ‘My knowledge of lore is scant, at best, Princess. But this much I had from a dying vizier concerning the habits of shape-changers. The creatures do not slaughter wantonly. The captive essence they extract from devouring their kills is what allows the fell beings to shift form.’ Watching her expression with a falcon’s stripped focus, he added, most softly, ‘I’m sorry.’
A moment of blanked shock, then the hammering impact: Anja reeled, grabbing mane for support. ‘Oh, dear powers of daylight! Then Kailen, and also my high prince—’
His hand braced her rocked balance. Since he had no words for inconsolable horror, he gave a small tug to remind her of the lead lines that threatened to slip through her grasp. ‘Bear up, your Grace. Let me do my work.’ When the recovery he asked for escaped her response, he slapped the ends of Kasminna’s reins to her thigh with a reproving, light sting. ‘Anja! I won’t take your blood on my hands as my destiny, or the failure, that I allowed you to die the same way.’
She took charge of the mare.
‘Watch for kerries,’ he said.
Anja swallowed. ‘All right.’ Harsh reason resurged over deranging grief. ‘Will that sword hilt give warning if a marauding creature is shape-changed?’
Again, Mykkael chose the thorn prick of honesty. ‘I don’t know.’ The one time he had stood in the high prince’s close presence, the established court protocol for royal audience had seen him stripped of his weapon. ‘Princess,’ he added, ‘the sword doesn’t matter. You can give warning by sight.’
A role she must play, if his back was to stay halfway guarded; she rose to match his high courage. Her spine straightened. Slight fingers closed, firm, on the rein ends.
‘I apologize,’ Anja said with strained dignity. ‘Captain, you are no coward.’
He bowed. ‘Your Grace.’ Then he moved promptly off, the cat-fluid beauty of his warrior’s stride undone by his marring limp.
Mykkael came alive to her, in that moment. Not as a hero, not as the paid captain of Sessalie’s garrison, but as a man beset by a difficult quandary the less stout-hearted must name impossible. He stood guard for her fate, and his own, without arrogance. Even with scars and shortfalls in plain view, he was whole. The hands that wielded the skinning knife accomplished their revolting task, fast and sure. Anja saw his humility all too clearly. Dwarfed by the massive walls of the chasm, befouled by the corpse of a predator slain by an uncanny abomination, Mykkael should have seemed foolish and small. Instead, the will in him towered.
He lived as himself. Moment to moment, he surmounted his impaired strength through trained skill, and the unshakable self-trust of a man who had been put to the extreme test, and who had won triumph through the unflagging use of his wits.
Two kerries flew overhead. Uneasy within sight of the massacre, they circled, but did not alight. Anja minded the restive horses. She cajoled them steady until Mykkael returned, the unwieldy bundle of cut membrane draped over his shoulder, and tied with a length of scraped tendon.
‘Princess, I ask you to let Fouzette bear the burden,’ he said the moment he reached her. ‘The load isn’t nearly as heavy as it looks.’
When she did not argue, he looked at her straitly ‘Your Grace?’
Anja stirred out of suspended stillness. Why, before this, had she never noticed the deep sorrow ingrained in his face? Hoping her hesitation would be taken for grief, she gave her consent.
A fractional tension eased from his shoulders, that he need not contend with sentimental recalcitrance. His choice was not cruel, but strategic good sense. Fouzette had the stoic temperament to manage the unusual load without fuss. If flight became necessary, she was already slowed by her injured leg. By attempting to cosset one impaired horse, the risk of loss might shadow two. Mykkael would spare Anja the agony of losing her teams, in every way that he could. The hand that had pulled the bow for Bryajne had not been heartless, but driven to act out of inflexible expediency.
Anja used her voice to quiet Fouzette, while Mykkael strapped his horrific gleanings on to her back. He could not spare the time to be overly fastidious. Yet he did rinse his hands and clean off his knife before he remounted Kasminna.
His smile of encouragement remained sincere as he gestured downstream. ‘Onwards. I promise your Grace, if we find the right pool, I’ll try to spear trout for our dinner.’
They rode on, the horses picking their uncertain path between canted boulders, and through the drifts of back-fallen spray shot to gold by the shafts of noon sunbeams. The warm air seemed filled with the flitter of dragonflies, and the cheep of the black-and-white swallows nesting high in the cliffs. Then the sun passed the zenith. The chasm plunged into the chilly, premature twilight that extended through late afternoon. Only the crown of the rim rocks stayed sunlit, with the cloudless sky of high altitude an indigo ribbon between.
Anja rode, all her questions stunned silent, which raised more than one concerned inquiry from Mykkael. She noticed what had escaped her before: that the captain relied on her tone of voice more than words to measure her state of mind. He listened much the same way to the horses, and to the sword hilt strapped on his back. If the striking care behind such attentiveness might have begun as a trader’s boy, brought up amid foreign cultures, the formidable skills he had displayed on the tourney field framed too stark an extreme. To see him move with a weapon in hand exposed what he was: a killer honed to an edge that eclipsed the humanity of his birthright.
The dichotomy sparked Anja’s fascination, a puzzle that engaged her eclectic interest as never before.
Her observation underwent a rapt change in focus, while the daylight waned towards a sunset that must find them snugged down under cover. If the cavern walls had grown too narrow for the wingspan of diving kerries, the sorcerer’s shape-changer would not be tied to any one form. Each crevice with its pocket of shadow might harbour an enemy ambush.
Mykkael’s wary vigilance tightened to match the increased chance of threat. Kasminna reflected his mood in her high-set neck and lifted tail. As the last sunlight licked the top of the cliff wall, dipping the rock faces scarlet, the desert-bred rode with his sword unsheathed, the flat of the blade lightly rested across his opposite wrist.
His senses detected no untoward warning, which did nothing to settle the uneasy clamour of his more subtle instincts.
The rush of the water grew louder, then swelled to a shattering roar that foreclosed all attempt at conversation. Mykkael kept his mount close behind Covette, often signalling for the princess to pause as he scouted past leaning boulders. Then the cavern crooked, and the race of the flume hurled itself off the edge of the world.
‘Tie the horses.’ Mykkael dismounted to reconnoitre on foot. Unasked, the princess went with him. The animals would be safe enough in the narrows, as they could not be, exposed on the rim. Beyond the cataract, the open sky teemed with wheeling kerries. Below the falls, the chasm widened into a vast stone basin, sliced at the skyline with snow-clad peaks. Tier upon tier, the stepped ledges were riddled with the caverns that sheltered the Hell’s Chasm rookery.
‘The Widow’s Gauntlet,’ Anja said, referring to the name given the site by an unknown, past prospector who had wisely turned back from the folly of a doomed enterprise. ‘Unless the season has been lean, and the kerries are starving, we’re not likely to see a mobbing attack where we’re standing.’
Mykkael turned his head, his bared sword in hand. ‘There’s a reason?’
Anja nodded. ‘Fortune seekers who’ve attempted to mine in the caverns sometimes try poisoning animals as bait in an effort to clear out the rookeries. Kerries are intelligent enough not to be tempted by domesticated stock if bad experience has shown them it’s tainted. Provided they haven’t forgotten the last incident, they’ll watch, and hang back. With luck, they could leave us alone until they realize we don’t match the exact pattern they hold in memory.’
‘A strategic point,’ Mykkael allowed. One they might have to press for advantage through the difficult, open terrain in the valley lying ahead. Intent, he resumed his close-up review of the landscape.
The head of the falls was relentlessly exposed, a lip carved into water-worn bedrock, raked clean by the surge of the thaws. The cliff wall near at hand posed an impasse, since the bend in the gorge skewed the jet of the falls into a pummelling vortex. The cataract slammed across the right wall of the channel. Age upon age of its scouring force had rinsed the rock satin-smooth. The only accessible route for the horses must be launched from the opposite bank, where the tumbled faults in the cliff face offered a precarious, zigzag descent.
‘This is as far as we go before nightfall.’ The crossing they must backtrack upstream to try could not be launched until morning. Beset by the thundering might of the cataract, Mykkael had to shout to be heard. ‘There will likely be some form of hollow or cave under the ledge where the current spills over. Once I find the best way to get in, you must move your teams quickly. No looking back if they falter!’
Anja nodded. She swiped back the soaked hair plastered against her face by the barrage of wind-driven spray, then retreated to untie the horses. Until Mykkael signalled, she could but strive to meet his dauntless effort with courage.
The edge of the falls lay five paces distant, well inside the reach of his wardings. Anja was caught unprepared, all the same. A desolate feeling of emptiness half crushed her as the captain passed over the rocks out of sight. Alone as she had never been in her life, the princess was shocked to find herself shuddering through an onslaught of violent chills. Terror and cold could not fully explain this explosive storm of reaction. Such desperate, raw need lay outside her experience. The loss of her love for the High Prince of Devall had never touched her like this.
‘Merciful powers of daylight!’ she swore through her chattering teeth. ‘This cannot be happening.’ Her wretched denial brought no release. The worth she had come to attach to one man in the course of a single day outstripped every concept of decency.
The Princess of Sessalie railed at herself, stunned into dumbstruck fury. How could she have lapsed from the mores of state wisdom and due vigilance? Unconscionable, to realize she might fall prey to such an unguarded self-betrayal. Sessalie’s future rode on her power to bargain. Every subject under her sire’s crown relied on her honour to secure the protection of an alliance. Far wiser, to handle what must be done without wrenching the strings of her heart.
Anja tucked her crossed arms, aware she must find the strength from somewhere to blindside the captain’s relentless perception. During her moment of preoccupied thought, Kasminna’s boisterous head butt all but pitched her on to her knees.
Saved from a fall by Stormfront’s black shoulder, she realized, distressed, that Mykkael was shouting. He had found a safe access into the cavern under the jet of the falls. Anja reddened, shamed to the quick for missing his urgent summons.
Fast as she recovered her paralysed wits, Mykkael’s reaction outpaced her. He launched from the rocks. Not sparing his scarred leg, he reached her side with the seamless speed of unbound barqui’ino reaction. The lead ropes were snapped from her fingers. Then his hard, muscled shoulder slammed into her waist. Anja folded, draped over his back like a grain sack, with the back of her knees pinned under his iron forearm.
‘Hai! Stormfront, Kasminna, to me!’ He used his voice and the flat of his blade to prod the horses to moving flight. ‘Hai! Hai! Covette, Vashni, Fouzette! Haw now! To me!’
Across the rocks, towards the thundering waters, he drove them in bunched, herd-bound urgency. No chance did he give them to balk or shy back. He hammered them, clattering, to a notch in the brink, then called upon Stormfront’s inexhaustible nerve to lead the sliding plunge down the steep ledge. Swordsman and princess and five wild-eyed horses rammed through the roiling curtain of spray. They broke through, into fish-pungent air, whipped to windy turbulence by the rampaging spate of cold water. The noise deafened. Enclosed by the silvery shimmer of the falls, the shallow cavern was a mosaic of sheened puddles and gloom. Skin wet and shivering, Anja heaved in a taxed breath. Her indignant request to be set on her feet had no chance to be heard.
The shaman’s mark upon Mykkael’s bared sword came alive with a tingling buzz. Anja sensed the wasp hum of the warding as a stinging ache through her bones. In split-second response, the captain’s hold shifted. She found herself hurled with jarring force over Stormfront’s soaked back.
‘Hold him!’ Mykkael’s shout pealed through the tumbling waters. ‘Steady the others as best you can, or let them all go if they scramble! At all cost, bail off if the black gelding bolts.’
Anja scrambled, wormed, unhooked her hung ankle off Stormfront’s scrabbling hindquarters. She seized his mane, achieved her erect balance astride, all the while calling out to steady the horses’ jostling panic. ‘Whoa! Whoa now!’ Her cry sounded thin as a bird’s through the roar of the cataract. Frantic, she persisted. ‘Hold hard! Fouzette, Vashni, whoa now!’
The blessed bay mare answered her training. Eyes rolling white, her mane snagged with droplets, she flung up her blazed head and braced her planted legs, foursquare. Though Vashni battered into her shoulder, her broad-chested bulk blocked the narrow egress. The other horses jammed into milling turmoil, unable to shove past and take flight. Anja entrusted their fates to Fouzette’s obedience. She slapped Stormfront’s neck to get his attention, made him listen to her commands. She urged the trembling gelding with words, drubbed his flank with her heel, compelled him to wheel and face forward. She would see what lethal danger had roused the marked sword. Terrified as the horse underneath her, she refused the horror of being stalked from behind.
‘Captain?’ Hackled to gooseflesh, Anja sighted a flicker of movement past the soaked cloth of his surcoat. Patterned hide gleamed, pebbled with scales. The coiled viper that lurked in the gloom of a cranny launched a pre-emptive strike at Mykkael.
The eyes Anja glimpsed were no serpent’s, but lit from within by the ephemeral spark of a power drawn from the unseen. Like Devall’s heir apparent, like her brother, what moved inside the skin of the creature was not any natural snake. Nor had its vile awareness been born under the clean light of day.
‘Beware, Captain!’ she screamed, already knowing that words were too clumsy and slow.
The shape-changer must have laired in the cavern all day, waiting in cold-blooded ambush.