Warrior's Touch (Deadly Touch book 2)

Llew woke to the scent of roasting meat and toasted bread – and a frosty chill to the air that had her weighing up whether food was that important.

Hisham had a fire going and was skinning another rabbit for the spit. Braph, still not trusted with watch duty, remained wrapped up in his bedroll.

Before she could move, Jonas’s arm tightened around her and his breath tickled her neck before he planted a kiss under her hairline, sending shivers of a different kind down her spine.

“Relax,” he murmured. “It’s been a while. And this is nice.”

His arm relaxed its grip, his hand resting on her hip briefly before sliding down her thigh, then across above her knee and sliding back up the inside.

Llew shivered, his voice, his fingers, and the tickling of his breath firing all sorts of responses she wasn’t prepared to act on in the moment. The developing pressure on her tail bone told her Jonas shared her thoughts. Before Llew had to decide whether to stop his traveling fingers, he planted a sloppy kiss on her cheek and threw back the bedroll cover. Freezing air rushed in.

“Hey!” Llew’s exclamation had both Braph and Hisham looking their way. In an effort to remain a spectacle for the shortest time possible, she leaped up and pulled on her jacket. It was bitterly cold, but as least she’d folded it the night before, so it was only wet on the outside. She felt her cheeks coloring. Rather than facing their audience, she directed her embarrassment into an angry glare at Jonas.

“Ah.” He rolled on his back, linking his fingers behind his head. “Feels good to move like that again, right?”

“Yes, but—” She was taken aback a moment. It was good to be able to move like that again. But it was cold! “Arse!” She gave him a half-hearted kick in the guts.

“Oof!” He over-played his reaction, curling into a ball, a grin creasing his cheeks.

He clambered from the bedroll and stood, stretched one side of his body then the other, muscles rippling under his skin, making the gryphon tattoo appear alive, and making Llew wish they were alone. How he could stand to be topless in the morning air, she didn’t know, but she could hardly complain.

She fixed her scowl back in place. “You’re still an arse.”

He scooped up his shirt. “You sound like Alvaro.” He slid his arms into the sleeves, then leaned towards her as he started on his buttons, “But you look better naked.”

Llew felt her cheeks grow even hotter. She would have been as tempted as he clearly was to dash off and have a little fun together. But the fact remained they were in the heart of Turhmos and Braph was with them.

Gently gripping her head, he planted an unselfconscious kiss on her lips. “And I think this time you mean ass, like the animal.”

Llew poked her tongue out. “Arse sounds better.”

Jonas chuckled and turned towards the low campfire. “Rabbit?” He strolled over and crouched by Hisham, diving straight into friendly banter with his good friend.

Llew watched him go. Cocky bastard. She’d saved his life only the evening before and now here he was walking around like he was living his dreams. Maybe he was. Maybe all he needed was a heartbeat.

He was right about one thing, though. It did feel good to be able to jump up out of bed like that. It certainly had been too long. And she had her tree to thank for that.

With a hefty sigh, she turned to the fallen Ajnai. Jonas had distracted her from the reality the previous evening, but in the crisp light of a wintry morning, it hit full force. She walked to the tree, reached out to it, and walked along it, trailing her fingertips down its fine, lightly textured bark. Of course, it was silent now. Its soul, or whatever it had had, was gone. Somehow, that felt like a greater loss than a single human’s life. One person, one soul. But her tree had been something more. It had lived through so many lifetimes, touched the lives of so many. Not that she could feel that history anymore.

Jonas joined her when she reached the jagged foot of the trunk. He slipped a hand around her waist, and they stood surveying the wreckage side-by-side.

“I’m sorry for bein’ such an ass,” he murmured. “Or, what was it, an arse?”

Llew couldn’t help herself. She laughed. So strange to hear his mimic of her accent, and bizarre how wrong it sounded to her ears. Still, she could have some fun with it. “You know an ass is a donkey, right? This—” She stepped back a bit and spread the fingers of one hand over one cheek of his trousers. “This is an arse.” She stepped back up beside him, keeping her hand in place. “I like your arse,” she whispered.

Jonas smiled at her and his own hand came to rest on her trousers. “I like your ass, too.” He smirked and winked as his fingers gave a slight squeeze.

A rush of signals ran through Llew’s blood, making her warm all over and highly aware of certain parts of her body. Not long ago it would have physically ached. Now the only pang was the knowledge that they stood in a clearing in Turhmos with Hisham and, even worse, Braph nearby. And before them lay the Ajnai, lifeless.

Llew let her hand drop, growing solemn.

Jonas let his hand drop, too, though he let it fall right beside hers, so they touched; knuckle-to-knuckle.

After a time, she said, “It spoke to me, you know?”

He nodded like he understood. Or, at least, like he considered that the appropriate response.

Llew tried to think what she would have thought had someone said such a thing to her a few months earlier, back in Cheer, before all this. She would have called them crazy, no question.

Jonas’s hand went to the handle of his Syakaran knife. His eyes were narrowed.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m thinkin’ it’d be a shame for it to all go to waste.”

Her head was already shaking.

“Llew.” He turned to face her, looking her in the eye. “I get it. It was special.”

“That tree stood for over a thousand years. You can’t just go chopping it up for firewood or—”

“Weapons, Llew. The tree can lie here and rot, or it can be put to use, by us or someone else.”

“Us. Definitely us. You think it can still help in the fight against Aris?”

He shrugged. “The Syakaran knives have a core of Ajnai wood. We know they kill Aenuks, and Aris used one to get his powers back.”

“And it told me it could take his power,” she murmured. But that had been with the tree still whole, alive. The dead wood might do nothing. But it would do nothing if it was left here to rot. “Then do it. But please understand why I can’t be a part of it.”

“Sure. I reckon the horses all need a little extra care this mornin’, don’t you?”

Llew smiled, relieved to have a task not involved in dicing up her tree.

After breakfast, the men began cutting and roughly shaping the wood and throwing it into the cart for transportation. Braph wasn’t much help, but even he was put to use sorting through the smaller wood chips that flew off each time Aris’s discarded axe bit into the wood. Some chips were too flaky to be much good for anything, but some could become cores to pellets for his Gaard devices.

Hisham and Jonas took turns putting their strength and speed into hacking with the axe or whittling with their knives.

Pausing his chopping to wipe a dribble of sweat before it blinded him, Jonas noticed Llew picking her way through the strewn canopy.

“What’re you doin’?” he called over the scratching of Hisham’s busy knife.

She looked up, her face spreading in a beaming grin as she raised her hand. From the pinch of her fingers hung a bunch of seeds. “There are hundreds!” she called back, glowing in her triumph before turning back to her task, twisting off another bunch and dropping them into the breakfast pot. “We could plant a forest,” she said, her voice carrying easily over the silence that had settled. Jonas redirected Braph’s energies to helping Llew collect her bounty.

By lunchtime, well over half of the trunk had been roughly whittled into knife, sword, arrow, spear, or ball shapes, and the cart was overladen with their efforts. Jonas was reluctant to leave any behind. He wouldn’t be the last to admit he wasn’t revered for his wits and he couldn’t help the feeling that if he had thought to use the wood, someone else would likely do the same, and it wasn’t just Aris the wood had a deadly effect on. His gaze drifted to where Llew was eagerly claiming seed bunches, dropping them into the pot now carried by Braph. Part of her appeal was that she was hard to kill – the gods knew Jonas had lost enough people in his life – but hard to kill was not the same as immortal. Aris was closer, and even he wasn’t truly immortal. Difficult to kill, not impossible.

Thankfully, only they knew what the tree was. Just them, and Aris. That last was risk enough.

He swept his gaze over their surroundings. The forest at the edge of which the Ajnai had stood was deep, dark, and full of hiding places, but Aris would have to come close to see them and Jonas was certain they would have heard something. The meadow was wide and flat, providing little cover, but another forest began on the far side. The road ran alongside not far from where they worked, the other side of which was fenced-off farmland dotted with large rocks. There was as much chance of Aris watching from there as from the forest periphery.

Jonas found his hand unconsciously resting on the pommel of his Syakaran knife. If Aris was watching, he knew Jonas was ready. He bent to chopping the trunk again, only to hear something that had him turning again.

As if conjured from thought, Aris stood in the middle of the meadow, some twenty paces away. Not far enough for Jonas’s liking. He checked where Llew was with a brief glance that Aris shared. She was bent to the task of replanting Ajnais and hadn’t seen the Immortal yet. Did Aris realize what she was doing? Jonas drew his knife slowly.

“You think you got a shit-show of hitting me, boy?”

“I reckon you think so, or you wouldn’t be standin’ back there.” Jonas sensed Hisham come up beside him, though he didn’t dare take his eyes from Aris. Even blinking was risky at the speed the old man could move.

They stood like that, those three, eying each other. The occasional flicker of light on Aris’s eyeballs told Jonas the old man was checking on Llew, watching her progress, perhaps calculating whether he could get to her and make it count before Jonas caught up and drove his knife into him. Jonas was calculating the same and reckoned he could close the distance.

Aris’s hesitation told Jonas he feared the Syakaran blade. Good to know.

The air filled with a tick, tick, tick, and a deep, thrumming undercurrent.

“What in the—?” Jonas couldn’t tell from which direction the sound was coming, but Aris looked up, somewhere over the forest behind them and Jonas risked a glance, too. The cool blue was layered in broken drifts of white, but nothing to explain the noise. The tops of the trees wavered, but there was no earth tremor to accompany it, nor was there any wind.

He turned. A strange vehicle, like a cart but in the air; side projections, like birds’ wings, but rigid; a blur above it, and making a horrendous noise. Like thunder, cut up with a meteorological axe. Finally, the wind hit them, pushing them down, whipping hair into eyes, and robbing them of breath.

“Run!” Braph roared, as Jonas heard a shout that seemed to come from the flying machine.

Jonas checked the meadow. Empty. Llew? Running for the trees. No sign of Aris. He joined the dash.

They hunkered behind thick trunks. All except Braph. He stood, bent at the waist enough to see out from under the canopy. Jonas slunk up beside him.

“Someone has been sifting through my toy box.” Jonas pieced together Braph’s sentence from the bits and pieces he heard, the words sliced apart.

“What is it?” he yelled over the cacophony. The contraption became visible as it passed over the forest on the other side of the meadow. From this new angle, it looked no less odd; like a deep-sided cart with a pole sticking up from the center. It swung a little, allowing Jonas to catch glimpses of what looked like flour mill blades, but lying flat over the cart. There were two of them, one above the other, spinning fast enough to blur. And at each horizontal corner, smaller blades, spinning at various speeds.

“Seems Turhmos has managed to get my helioraptor going,” said Braph.

“Your what? Hold up. Your helio-what?”

“Helioraptor. My flying device. Please give me a moment while I mourn that others are experiencing it before me.”

“What’s it for?”

“For? Does it need a purpose? Look at it?”

But Jonas had stopped listening before Braph finished talking. The volume had stopped diminishing and was steadily increasing again. There was more shouting, too, though any meaning was drowned out by the machine.

Chino let out a piercing whistle from where he was hobbled in the meadow.

“The horses,” Jonas said breathlessly. In their panic, they’d left the horses tied in the open, the noise of the machine drowning out the animals’ cries. Of course, they’d been seen. The cart wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, either. “Bring the horses in!” The others were moving before he’d finished, snaking back through the trees, snatching up ropes and dashing back. Wild as the horses were, they were keen for the cover of the forest.

Arrows hit the ground, sinking harmlessly into the soil. Jonas breathed a sigh of relief none of the horses had been struck. Their equipment was still out there, but it would survive with a few holes. Jonas moved back to as close to the forest rim as he dared, hoping to see without being seen. The Turhmosians knew they were there. Didn’t mean they had to be sitting targets. Part of him wanted to run under the forest cover. He had little doubt he could outrun the contraption, as could Hisham and Braph. And with the forest to block sight of them, they could be well away before the fliers knew they’d gone. But Llew wasn’t Karan. And he wouldn’t leave the cart behind. They could replace, or even survive without their equipment, but that haul of Ajnai wood was more valuable than anything else right now.

Hisham came up beside him. “You want to do anything?” Jonas’s eardrum stung under the combination of closeness and volume Hisham employed to be heard over the flying machine.

“What can we do?” He didn’t make much effort to be heard, but Hisham must have read his lips as the Karan’s own drew out in a resigned grimace.

Movement caught his eye. A rope hung in midair. It swayed gently to-and-fro, then jiggled as something, someone, grappled with the other end. They were coming down.

A fireball hurtled down, landing in the cart.

“No!” He didn’t have to ask Hisham to cover him – he simply ran, grabbing up a bedroll from the camp to beat at the flames. Hisham came in behind, picked up a bow, strung it, and began firing arrows at the crew of the hovering machine. The first Turhmosian attempting to slide down the rope hit the ground. But more arrows rained down around them. As he flapped out the last flame, another flaming arrow dropped into the cart, right amongst the Ajnai wood. Within little more than a second, disbelief gave way to anger, followed by decisiveness. Jonas spun, whipping a knife from his vest, and flung it up, moving so fast the target had no chance to duck. The knife sunk through skull. The bow and already nocked arrow sailed down to the meadow below, while the bowman disappeared behind the side of the flying machine. Jonas turned back to the burning wood. The second arrow had settled deep, lighting the pile from within. Jonas jumped onto the cart, scraping at the contents to get to the source. Behind him, Hisham kept the arrows flying as fast as others rained down. While Jonas was busy smothering flames, he heard the heavy thuds of a couple more bodies hitting the ground nearby before the flying machine finally veered away, taking its drumfire racket with it.

Llew and Braph stepped out from the trees, rubbing at their ears.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to do,” Llew said after a while.

“Not much you could do but stay alive,” Jonas said as he bent to sift through the blackened wood, pinching out any sparks.

“We can’t stay here.” Hisham strode back to the cart. “I don’t know how long it’ll take for news to spread, but it’ll spread.”

“I know.” Jonas kept to his task, brushing away charcoal to reveal hidden embers. He didn’t need telling trouble would come finding them now. Problem was, unless they gave up their load of wood, they were limited to taking roads and traveling at the speed of a cart. Not fast. And certainly not hard to find, especially now the men in the flying machine knew exactly the size and make up of their group.

Finally satisfied their wood was safe, he stood, brushing his hands off on his thighs. “I ain’t about to give up on building an arsenal against Aris just ’cause Turhmos know we’re here. We gotta find somewhere to hole up. It just can’t be here.”

“Merrid.” Llew didn’t realize she’d said the name as she thought it at first, but everyone was looking at her, so she must have. Pulling herself up straight, she projected a confidence she didn’t have. “Merrid and Ard. They gave me shelter—”

“And us a meal,” Hisham interjected.

Llew was surprised, but the thought made her smile. Merrid had been so kind to Llew when she’d been running scared across Turhmos, desperate to somehow get to Brurun without leading Braph and Turhmos straight after her with the trail of destruction she couldn’t help leaving behind.

The couple had told her they’d met her friends – after making sure she had a good night’s sleep behind her – and directed her after them, all but guaranteeing she crossed their path. She should have guessed they would have invited the group in for a meal.

Jonas looked stern, but she waited while he appraised her suggestion.

“It could get them killed,” he said finally.

Llew goggled at him. But, of course, he was right. She should have thought of that.

“But it’s the best we have,” Jonas concluded.

Llew’s head shook of its own accord, but she couldn’t voice the words. Jonas looked on her with some sympathy.

“Don’t worry, Llew,” he said. “We’ll do our best not to bring them trouble.” He jumped down from the cart. “Alright. It’s gettin’ late, but we gotta get on the road. We travel at night, when I’m bettin’ those flyin’ machines don’t get out much, and we find shelter before first light.” He paused, hands on hips, looking up into the clear blue and the few tatty white puffs above. A crisp day, with a cool breeze that cut right through. “Luckily, this time of year the nights are long.” He peered around at his posse. “We can do this.”