CHAPTER33
As expected,the guards who were on duty in the small passageway that leads to the inner courtyard of the fortress are leaving. They glance over their shoulders with tired, bored eyes and see two hunters, wet with marsh mist, mud up to their knees, with hung heads. One of the two night guards pauses but doesn’t ask anything. He, no doubt, just wants to go to bed.
I lower my hand and rub my thumb along my blade. A red droplet falls to the ground. Ventos does the same. The light is dim enough that his blood looks identical to mine.
Not one word is exchanged.
We emerge into the dusty courtyard of the fortress. The stink of blood and sweat has soaked into the hard-packed earth. I pause, thinking of the time Drew has spent here, the hours training with Davos. Is this where he bled and fought? Or were those special sessions spent elsewhere?
As much as I want to stop and muse, to take it all in, I don’t. I’m a hunter who has seen this place dozens—hundreds—of times. I follow the night shift guards into the main hall.
The room of tables and benches is more crowded than I expected for this late at night. Though Drew did mention once that many kept the hours of their prey, I had been hoping for quiet, dark halls to slink through. Some hunters sit in quiet reverence, praying to the old gods whose names have long been lost to time. Most eat and converse. Others polish their silver sickles, alone and silent. At least they take good care of the blades, I think.
At the far end of the hall is an altar lit by a hundred candles perched on narrow shelves, now made more from candle wax than stone. On the altar is a wooden cask, locked in a steel cage. The elixir. Drew said that only Davos holds the key to the cage and can administer the draught. He pours out just enough to fill the golden chalice—barely larger than a thimble—positioned under its tap.
I’m beginning to figure out how I might be able to procure a key when our plan suddenly goes sideways.
“M—Mardios?” someone stammers behind me. I glance over my shoulder. Ventos remains calm despite a hunter rushing over to him. Even though I didn’t recognize the hunter whose face Ventos stole, someone else clearly did. “Mardios, it is—” He draws his sickle. “Cut yourself, fiend.”
“I’m no fiend. Just a hunter who finally found his way back,” Ventos answers with an exhausted sigh for emphasis. More hunters are beginning to gather. I allow Ventos to have the focus, slipping off to the side. No one pays me any mind.
“Then prove it with a slice of your hand.”
“I already sliced my thumb to get in.” Ventos folds his arms. “Which would you like next? Me to chop an ear up?”
“Stop stalling.” The hunter thrusts forward his sickle. That silver is real. And if it nicks Ventos’s chin, the ruse is up.
Ventos slices the side of his wrist against the sickle still on his hip, immediately smearing the blood away. “There. Proof enough?”
To my relief, the other hunter lowers his sickle. Luckily, the hunters don’t pay attention to the shade of Ventos’s blood, or notice that his wounds have already closed underneath the smear of blood. All they looked for was the initial cut. “We can never be too careful and you didn’t quite sound like yourself.”
“It’s been a long month wandering the marshes.” Ventos remembers the stories I told him earlier today, just before we left.
“How did you survive?” another hunter asks.
Ventos spins a tale of head trauma combined with a memory thicker than the fogs. He’s far more clever and eloquent than I would’ve given him credit for. It’s a huge relief. I keep half an eye on him as I slowly edge around the perimeter of the room, trying not to look too suspicious.
If he can keep the attention on himself for long enough then maybe I can get the elixir. The cage certainly isn’t that strong, and it looks old. There must be a weak point in the forging that I can exploit. Then I’ll—
“What is this commotion?”
I freeze in place. My heart is in my throat. For the second time tonight, I’m strangling a noise of raw emotion. Of pain and relief.
“Mardios made it back,” the first hunter reports.
“Did he?”
I slowly turn to face the speaker. The voice is different. Deeper. Rougher. And yet I’d know it anywhere.
Standing at the base of the stairway that feeds into the hall from the upper levels is a man in full hunter’s attire. He has no sickles, but walks with a cane I’ve only ever seen Davos hold. His eyes are sunken and ringed with shadow. But his gaze is as sharp as that of the raven perched on his shoulder.
Drew. My brother.
He has been chosen as the master hunter.
I fight sickness. Something about seeing that infernal, unnatural bird perched on his shoulder makes me want to scream at it to get away from my brother. He is not for you, I wish I could say, you can’t have him.
The vampir have changed me more than I realized. Because I look at my brother being bestowed one of the highest honors of Hunter’s Hamlet with resentment and horror. The vestments he wears with pride are what will make him see me as his enemy now.
