there was silence, he pointed at Sire Neen. 'This one killed the Aklun? I don't believe it, but I don't like him.'
'He is an ant.' Calrach turned, studied Neen, and then spat at his feet. 'He is nothing. Squash him if you wish. His spirit will give you no strength, but if he offends you-' For a moment Rialus stopped translating, but then, as if more afraid of holding the words in than of releasing them, he spoke quickly. 'Kill him. We no longer need his kind. Kill him, and we will lead you to a land ready to be reaped. We will have a great hunt.'
Devoth did not confirm whether he agreed, but he did draw his sword from the stone. If draw was the right word for it. It was as if at one moment his hand was empty and the next it held the massive, curved blade out to his side. Only in the stillness after the action, as Devoth let the onlookers study him, did Dariel's mind register that he had, in fact, watched the entire movement. It was no magic trick. It was just the smoothest, quickest motion he had ever seen. No Marah was that fast. Not even Mena was that quick. No Numrek either.
Sire Neen found his voice again. He dropped his haughty tone and tried a different tack, calming Devoth. Dariel hardly needed the translation now, but Rialus kept at it. 'Neen is begging for a moment's patience so that they can communicate fully. They are misunderstanding one another. The Numrek are confusing matters. None of this is as it should be. There have been mistakes made. They should all sit and talk to their mutual benefit.'
When Devoth took a step toward him, the leagueman barked a quick command. The rank of bowmen behind him snapped their weapons up. Devoth paused. Though similar to the Numrek's in so many ways, his face was more expressive, which was why the grin that split it was so disconcerting. Either he did not understand the threat, or he welcomed it. He lifted his blade, held it out to the side, and stepped forward.
A bowman shot. Dariel had seen those arrows up close and knew they were weapons crafted to kill. The steel head of the missile was pronged in a viciously corkscrewed manner, so that the razor-sharp metal would carve a twisting, expanding course inside its target. The single shot fired was perfectly aimed. It slammed into Devoth's chest and buried the shaft to the fletching. It must surely have ripped apart his heart and punched right through his back as well. He took the impact standing, but his face contorted in pain. He dropped to one knee and then-as his shouting companions circled him-toppled to his side.
The masses in the shadows roared. The men around Devoth alternately bent to care for him or stood to shout what must have been obscenities at the leaguemen. Sire Neen spoke into the confusion. Ishtat swordsmen closed around him, but he would not let them drag him back. He seemed sure that he could contain this. The archers nocked their arrows, the entire company shifted into combat readiness. Several of the guards near Dariel and Rialus answered commands, ignoring the two prisoners. The Numrek watched it all without comment. Calrach crossed his arms and seemed content to wait.
What happened next sucked what little air Dariel had in his lungs right out of him. It seemed to have the same effect on Sire Neen, who clutched at the guards around him as if he were about to faint.
Devoth rose. He drew great gusts of air into his mouth. His companions helped him gain his feet. Once he had, he roared them away and stood swaying. The Ishtat archers, who had a perfect view of him, let their bows droop. Devoth, before the eyes of all, reached behind him, snapped off the arrowhead protruding from his back, and then tugged the shaft in his chest out with his other hand. He tossed both pieces away.
It was a casual motion, filled with disgust, but immediately afterward he went into convulsions. He managed to stay on his feet, but he shook and jerked and tossed his limbs around. He gibbered, cried, moaned. For a few moments his arms spasmed so frantically that he seemed to Dariel like more than one being, as if there were shadow versions of himself beneath his skin, trying to break free, angry and twisting him with pain as punishment. He seemed so completely driven with anguish that Dariel expected him to drop and die finally from the arrow shot that should have already killed him.
Instead, Devoth came out of the convulsions and moved with the same incredible speed he had shown earlier. Devoth closed the distance to the Ishtat soldiers, swung his mighty sword as if it had no weight to it at all, and cut down the three guards in front of Sire Neen. He dropped to the floor, avoiding the first volley of arrows sent at him; then he spun upward, sweeping his sword diagonally. The blade sliced through Sire Neen's head, starting above the lower jaw and angling up. When the steel cut free, the leagueman's half face twirled in the air above his crumpling body.
Dariel stood as the chamber erupted into chaos. The Ishtat rushed forward. The shadowed masses of Auldek poured into the lighted square, swords drawn. The prince had no idea what to do. His hands were bound. Rialus was no longer beside him. In front of him, the Ishtat and the Auldek fell on one another in a wild confusion of blood and gore.
A hand gripped his shoulder and yanked him around. He thought that it must be an Ishtat soldier or Rialus or a leagueman. It was none of these. He spun to see a person with a thin whitish-blue face and a long nose, a woman whose hair sprang from her head like the plumage of some bird. The next instant, someone wrapped an arm around his torso, lifted him off the ground, and began running. It was not the bird person who carried him, however, but rather a gray, muscled bulk of a being.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Kindred were to meet again at a village west of Danos. Before they did, however, Barad arrived on the Cape of Fallon with King Grae and his brother, Ganet. The trio traveled inland and together explored the region for several days. The area's loamy soil produced bountiful crops of sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and massive turnips the size of a man's head. Unlike the plantations of northern Talay or the state-run croplands of the Mainland, the region was too rocky to be sectioned off in a grid pattern. The land was irregular, broken by hills and stands of recalcitrant short pines, and not suited to mass labor forces. Instead, small family farmsteads patchworked the area, as they had for centuries. And, as had been the case for centuries, these farmers were forced to pay such a large portion of their crops into the empire's coffers that they little more than subsisted from their labor and their land's bounty.
That was what Barad had wanted the Aushenians to see for themselves. Was it not a crime, he asked as they toured the area on borrowed mules, that these farmers worked their hands into calloused claws? They woke before the sun each morning and labored as long as the orb traversed the sky and sometimes into the night. They were at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather, required to deliver their produce on good and bad years both.
Was it reasonable that after all that labor-over all the years these farming families had worked this land and helped feed the world-that these people's children were rail thin, that their elders died without the care physicians offered the wealthy of Alecia and Manil-not to mention Aos, with its school for training in the healing arts? These farmers shipped away great wagons of foodstuffs, but not one of them grew fat on it. Not one of them acquired any of the luxuries enjoyed by the merchants of Alyth or Bocoum.
Disguised in laborers' rags, the three men pitchforked a wagonload of turnips into a massive storage facility guarded by Acacian soldiers. They added to the mountain of vegetables already collected there. Sitting in the back of the wagon as they jolted away, Barad explained that those stores were for the empire. Such was the way it always had been; such was the way the queen wished it to continue. They walked among the rows of kale and greens, of sugar hearts and blood beets. They saw children thin as waifs, met young men strong about the shoulders, older men slowed with the weight of work, and even older ones stooped by a lifetime of carrying such burdens. As their group rode past the corner of one field, a small girl looked up at them from a muddy trench. Just what she was engaged in was unclear, but it was not play. She was coated in muck, her legs sunk up to the ankles in the stuff, a bucket in one hand and a hooked tool in the other. Barad thought to pause and question her, but changed his mind just before he spoke. She set large, lovely brown eyes on him, framed by a cascade of unkempt curls. She was a small beauty, and he deemed her message one best delivered through her eyes. How would the years treat her? Her eyes asked this silently, so he did not need to speak out loud. He kept the group moving.
None of these sights were unusual to farmhands, but it was not the world most royals ever looked upon. Both Grae and his younger brother took in the scenes with their blue eyes. The younger was nearly a twin of his brother. A little slimmer of build perhaps, but the real difference between them was in his acceptance of deference to his elder. Clearly, the time the two of them spent secluded in the far north of their country-as their older brother and father both died in battle-had made them close. As Grae had said at the last meeting of the Kindred, his brother did
