Page 76 of The Stolen Throne
Returned
Losing sight of the others, I dash into the clearing farther into the woods only to stumble to a halt. Bene skids to a stop beside me, his head now at the same level as mine, vicious teeth bared in a fearsome snarl.
A white-blue glow lights up the clearing. Horus deliberately steps in front of me, arms out, but I lean around him to see. A man stands at the center of a…a… I frown. The only way to describe it is a storm of lightning. Like a thousand different bolts came together and then time was stopped in the same instant.
Reven, Vos, and Tziah stand with their hands up. “Hakan,” Vos says slowly, carefully—very un-Vos-like. Nervous. “It’s us. It’s us.”
Hakan? I stumble over the name until it hits me—the leader of the Vanished from Savanah. He’d been away from the Shadowood when I was brought here on some kind of mission. I wasn’t given details.
He must have returned to the Shadowood, unaware of what had happened in his absence. Has he been here all this time? Months alone.
That odd crackling noise sounds again, and I can feel the sound as it buzzes across my skin.
The man himself would be attention-getting already, even if he wasn’t standing in an oval of raw power. His head is shaved on either side, leaving a single braided strip of tight blond curls down the center of his scalp. Tattoos of glowing white-blue lines, like he’s lit up from the inside, fill the bare, rose-gold skin where it’s shaved—swirling and yet precise. The design on one side is a bird of prey, talons extended, almost cruel in the depiction.
“Hakan,” Vos says. “We’ve come back. It’s us.”
The man raises his hands as though he’s about to send those bolts of instant death right at us, and Horus pushes me back behind him even as Reven walks forward, though the shadows around us remain unmoving.
He’s not using them. Yet.
I don’t see what happens next, but the glowing light douses suddenly.
My friends all seem to take a collective breath, and I know it’s going to be okay when they all straighten and lower their hands. I risk another peek. Hakan is no longer lit up. Now he stands in a field where the ice under his feet melted all the way down to the grasses, which are charred, smoke rising around him in curling tendrils. His tattoos have faded to a normal bluish-black ink.
Tziah, I can see now, is standing not a foot from the edge of the smoking grass, smiling.
Hakan leans over, putting his hands on his knees and breathing in and out. “I thought I was seeing things again—”
On a grunt that sounds a lot like relief, Vos crosses the scorched grass toward their friend, though the two men don’t touch. “Have you been waiting for us?”
Hakan straightens. “I returned to find the Shadowood destroyed. I stayed, hoping one of you might try to come back.” He speaks in a slow, deliberate cadence, very guttural and Savanahan.
“I should have returned for you,” Reven says in a low punch of a voice.
His guilt sneaks past whatever he does to cut me off and stirs the shadows inside me like a witch stirring a cauldron. I put my hand over that scar in my side, trying to will him to forgive himself. He couldn’t do everything, especially while he was still healing. Otherwise, he would have come for me sooner, too.
“I never doubted that you would have if you could,” Hakan says before I can.
After a beat, Reven nods.
“We’ll tell you everything,” Vos assures Hakan.
The Savanahan says nothing, like he’s not surprised or angry that he got left behind. Which makes him a better person than I am. I’d have been angry and betrayed and probably left ages ago.
Then Hakan raises his gaze to where I stand farther back, half hidden by Reven. “Who do we have here?”
Only he’s not looking at me. He’s looking behind me, beyond Horus to the edge of the clearing.
I look over my shoulder to find Pella there, glowering back at him.
The look on her face was worth the risk of coming here alone.
On our way back to the village, Vos gives him an extremely fast, overly simplified overview of who I am and what he’s missed, with a promise to elaborate later. Hakan says nothing. A man of few words, I guess.
Reven stops us when we reach the edge of the village. “No one should go anywhere alone.”
Hakan frowns. “Why?”
