Outlaw: A Dark Fantasy Novel (On the Bones of Gods Book 2) Read online

  ALSO BY K. EASON

  On the Bones of Gods Series

  Enemy

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Kathryn F. Eason

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503935907

  ISBN-10: 1503935906

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  To my parents

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  The stolen sword hissed past Snowdenaelikk’s head, smashing through branches instead of her skull, scattering pine needles and shards of bark. Fair enough. That big-boned toadfucker was swinging like he had an axe, not a legion blade. Broad strokes, graceless, with all his weight behind them. All a woman had to do was get out of his way.

  Which she had, except the once; and then he’d damn near sliced off her arm. Blood all over, tingling fingers, lucky she still had all five. At least it wasn’t her sword arm. Thank luck for that. Thank whatever spirits

  not the God, never again the God

  watched over half-blood conjuring heretics. She struck back at him, left-handed. Put a deep cut above his right knee, crossways and up, into the meat of his thigh. He staggered back. Snow showed her teeth, more grimace than grin, and came in again. Moving rough, but still fast. Still hard.

  She folded sideways, made him pivot after her on his wounded leg. Felt the hiss and whistle as his blade cleaved past her. Angled herself and gave ground, step by slow step, and tried to remember the motherless terrain. Spring-melt mud underfoot, mixed with slush. The rotted half log one, two, there to step over it. The trio of saplings. She found the big evergreen with its head-high scatter of branches, turned so that it wasn’t quite at her back.

  The Talir came at her again, an ugly backstroke that would open her up like a fish. She ducked and twisted at the last moment. He tried to correct, couldn’t. Snagged his blade on the big evergreen, a shallow slice through the bark that scrubbed all the force off his strike and slowed him down.

  She jagged in close, aiming for the spaces in his stolen armor. The Dvergiri weren’t a large people, even the women; the Talir was four kinds of idiot not to have patched the gaps. She drove the seax—not a stabbing weapon, not meant for this—into his ribs. Worked the blade into the space between bones, hoping to catch a lung. And then she pulled the blade out, dragging on skin and muscle, a hitch at the end when the seax caught suction before wrenching free. She spun away. Focused on keeping hold of her blade and her last meal and staying upright.

  The Talir’s shout ended in a gurgle. She’d got the lung, then. Meant this toadfucker’d die without a chirurgeon’s help. And the nearest chirurgeon wasn’t interested in helping him. The nearest chirurgeon had her own wounds to occupy her attention.

  Snow took herself a safe distance before she looked down at her right arm. The fingers were cold, numb, locked into claws. The forearm bone wasn’t bent. Wasn’t grinding. Might be nerve damage, yeah, or cut tendons. The chill on her skin had nothing to do with shock. Please, she could make the fingers move, even if she couldn’t feel them, please—

  And there, yes, she could. Snow clenched her teeth hard on a backsurge of nausea. Not enough air for her lungs. High-pitched whine in both ears. Her vision hazed soft on the edges. She blinked. Still hazy, and a headache lancing in behind. And that meant—

  Briel.

  She had time to brace her whole left arm against a friendly tree before Briel’s sending caught her, taking over eyes and ears and everything. Spinning trees, spinning forest, a svartjagr’s aerial impression that did not help Snow’s balance at all. Briel was worried because Snow was somewhere under those trees, where Briel could not find her. And there was guilt on the tail of that worry, because Briel had been somewhere else when Snow had got hurt, with Veiko, up near the ridgeline, where a svartjagr’s wings could stretch without worrying about inconvenient branches.

  Briel sent a jumbled report, sound and image overlaid and not necessarily connected: a Talir woman gone down screaming, a man staggering backward with Veiko’s axe in his skull. Another thrashing body down with Logi on top. So Veiko was fine, having help from the dog and the svartjagr.

  She still felt a splash of relief when Briel sent another impression, pure Veiko this time. Grim satisfaction. Fine and unhurt. Of course he was.

  Out, Snow told Briel, before Briel relayed her condition to Veiko. She came back to a new headache to keep her arm company. Came back to the dying Talir. Down to breathless little moans now, wheezing pink froth. White-ringed eyes as he drowned in his own blood. Pity said help him or kill him, don’t let him die slow. There were scavengers in the Wild who might not wait their dinner for his death.

  Fuck pity, Snow. Pity’s for the weak.

  Tsabrak’s sentiment. Tsabrak’s whisper, blowing cold along her neck. Tsabrak’s pointed smile, crooked and sharp as a broken blade.

  Let that toadfucker drown in his own blood.

  Not a lot of mercy in Tsabrak. But good advice, sometimes, like: never trust a downed enemy as helpless. Tsabrak had made that mistake exactly once, and caught metal in his back as a lesson. Had gone crawling through Illharek’s Suburban alleys until he collapsed at a certain half-blood, half-trained chirurgeon’s feet.

  And found her pity, fuck and damn. She could’ve let him die in that alley. If she’d just stepped over him, her life would’ve gone some other direction and she wouldn’t be here, fighting with a Talir raider in the fucking forest and risking her arm and her conjuring.

  You sorry for saving me, then?

  No. Sometimes.

  Fuck and damn. Tsabrak’s voice in her head, that was bad enough. She could dismiss it as memory. But Tsabrak’s shadow beside her—look sideways and there he was, no matter how hard she blinked: Tsabrak as she’d last seen him, rain-soaked, his sleeves plastered against his arms, hair clinging in strands to his cheeks. That wasn’t memory. That was . . . something else. Ghost-trouble.

  She didn’t look straight at him. Didn’t want to see through him, fuck and damn. Shouldn’t talk to him, either, but—

  “That why you broke my finger, then, before you gave me to Ehkla? Remind me of your toadshit lessons?”

  You did manage.

  “I’ll manage now, too. Shut up and go away.”

  Left to her own, she would let the ravens eat the Talir in strips, skin to bone
. But the last thing they needed, any of them, was some angry ghost rising at sunset. She rearranged her grip on the seax. Skirted wide and yeah, there—gasping or not, frothing or not—he had enough strength left to swipe at her. Determined toadfucker. He should be past moving. Should be past speaking, too, but there he was, muttering the same drowned syllables over and over, which made her head spin a little faster and her ears buzz like wasps.

  She could blame blood loss for that buzzing, or shock. She had half a dozen good physiological reasons to go dizzy and close her eyes and look for balance in the dark. But memory played on the back side of her eyelids: violet fire on the cracked plaster walls, blood running in channels as the godmagic took hold. Gut-tangled, itchy-skinned nausea, then and now.

  She could imagine sense in the Talir’s syllables. Could imagine a name rising up through the foam and blood. Tal’Shik.

  Godmagic.

  She stomped hard on the Talir’s wrist. Bones broke. The maybe-prayer dissolved into sobbing fragments. The sword hilt slid into the mud as his hand spasmed open, baring his palm and the tattoo on it. Tal’Shik’s godmark. Fuck and damn. Taliri raiders in winter were nothing unusual, even this far south, even this late in the season. But Taliri godsworn were real trouble. And here this toadshit was, trying to kill her. Not an accident.

  Snow chopped hard at the Talir’s neck. Ugly cut, awkward, that glanced off his jaw and stuck in his spine and did not, by any measure, remove his head. But the praying stopped. So did the gurgling, and the foaming. His fingers flexed once, then relaxed.

  Death had a particular smell. A particular shape. A chirurgeon knew all of death’s faces, if she’d earned an Academy master’s ring. And a chirurgeon might imagine that death was the end of things. She had, until she’d been dead herself. There was dead, and then there was staying that way. And the angry dead, they were a problem.

  Snow braced a foot on the dead man’s shoulder. Her arm was hurting now, all the battleshock numb running out with her blood. She’d be on her ass soon enough, she didn’t get her own bleeding stopped.

  But the Talir might get back up after dark if she left the job unfinished. So she wrestled with the blade until her vision fogged and her chest hurt. Only way she knew to keep dead dead was take the head off. That was Veiko’s advice. And Veiko’s damn axe would be useful about now, yeah, all of Veiko would be.

  “Snow! Snow, you all right?”

  More of her luck, that the first person to find her would be Dekklis. Szanys Dekklis, First Scout, Second Legion, Sixth Cohort, currently absent without leave and leagues from her garrison, and blaming Snow for every step of that journey. Dek wouldn’t have a mark on her, bet on that, she’d have more than one corpse to her count, and she’d’ve done it without any help.

  Hell if Snow meant to lose a fight with her own motherless blade with Dekklis watching. She straightened as much as she could without letting go of the hilt. Shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Fine,” Dekklis repeated in the tone that meant toadshit. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Noticed that.”

  “Badly.”

  “Noticed that, too.” Snow eyed her. Dekklis had long, bright stains on trousers and tunic, was red to her wrists. “And you?”

  “None of this is mine.” Dekklis picked her way through the trees. Not even breathing hard, rot her anyway. “Looks like he surprised you.”

  “Came out of nowhere. Damn near took my head off before I even got my blade out.”

  “Big man.” Dekklis squinted upslope. “Broken branches up there. Lot of loose gravel. Seems he should’ve made noise. Where’s Briel?”

  Which was Dekklis’s way of asking what the hell happened? Dek knew very well that no amount of good fortune would have let the Talir get that close to Snow. Implied: Snow must’ve fucked up.

  Which she hadn’t, yeah, but she wouldn’t own what had happened, either. She would not say, out loud, yeah, Dek, listen, I’ve been seeing Tsabrak since we left Cardik, and sometimes he talks to me.

  Dek might believe her. Dekklis, too, had learned that the dead didn’t always stay that way.

  “Briel’s with Veiko, playing scout. Besides.” Snow rolled her eyes upward. “Lot of low branches in here. She’d do me no good. Get herself tangled, yeah?”

  Dek’s eyebrows said toadshit. Dek’s mouth said only, “All kinds of bad luck for you, then. No Briel. No Veiko. Sneaky Talir.”

  “Looks like.” Snow tried again to get her blade loose, hard pull and twist. Damn near fell, yeah, but she got it. She thanked a flash of good luck for the tree at her back. Rested against it and waited for the world to resettle. Maybe one more strike, if she hit it clean.

  She didn’t. Glanced off the collarbone this time and started a new cut in the Talir’s neck. The seax stuck again. Snow swore.

  Dekklis grunted. “He’s dead, Snow. You noticed?”

  Szanys Dekklis was Illhari highborn, had a mother in the Senate. It wasn’t proper to believe in ghosts or gods or heretical superstition. Dek might know better, but she wasn’t friends with that knowing.

  “You think that means anything? Look at his hand, Dek.”

  “Hell and damn. Tal’Shik.”

  “Did your corpses have the mark?”

  “Not that I saw. Either of them.”

  “Then I got lucky with this one. Figures I’d get the godsworn. A man, though. That’s different.”

  “Maybe he came for you deliberately. Maybe that’s how he got close with you not hearing. Tal’Shik’s not in love with you, Snow.”

  “Not in love with Veiko, either, and he’s all right.”

  “Briel says?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figures.” Dekklis made a face. Came around the corpse and wrapped her hand over Snow’s on the hilt. Squeezed hard and pulled and got the blade out. Kept her hand on Snow’s wrist after, hard and steady. Kept Snow upright. And scowled hard at her right arm. “We need to get that bleeding stopped.”

  “After we’re done here.”

  “Now.”

  “What, you’re a chirurgeon now? Don’t tell me my business.”

  “Saying you can’t slow us down, that’s all.”

  “Or what, you’ll leave me here?”

  “Or we’ll have to do all this again, with another ambush. They’ll track your blood.”

  “They’ve been tracking us, maybe since we ran from Cardik. Look at him. No supplies. No bow. He’s getting fed somewhere at nights, and they have to be close. Best chance we have is to hurry.”

  It was Dek’s habit to argue with her. Snow watched her jaw set just so, watched her suck a mouthful of air and hold it. And then Dekklis let it out, in a gust. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need his axe. Neither of us has a weapon that takes heads.”

  “He’s coming.” Fast enough she could hear him, crashing downslope like an angry bear. Briel had reported her injury, bet on that. Veiko was worried.

  Veiko had reason. That cut was deep, bleeding harder than she could stop with a little pressure and a fistful of cobwebs.

  You need to get that stopped. Tsabrak squatted beside her, arms on his knees. You don’t want to lose that arm. You’re my right hand, yeah? That means you need yours.

  “Fuck off,” she whispered. “Not your anything, yeah?”

  But Tsabrak was right, and Dek, too, rot her anyway. Snow needed to deal with the wound now. She might not be much of a conjuror, but she’d be none at all if she lost a hand.

  Then Logi was there, kicking up pine needles in his haste to reach her. Behind him, Veiko, whose eyes bounced from dead Talir to Snow and then to Dekklis, who moved into his path.

  “Where’s Istel?”

  “Scouting. He thinks there may be others nearby. Briel is with him.” Veiko was only a little out of breath. He came and squatted beside Snow. Frowned at her arm. Didn’t ask are you all right? because he had both eyes and wits enough to know the answer.

  Snow shrugged a
way his concern. “Godsworn over there needs your axe. Don’t want him getting up later.”

  “Give it to me. Let me do it,” said Dekklis. “You help her.”

  Snow picked the wound clear of shredded sleeve and debris. “I need a needle. Thread. Silk, Veiko, in my pack. You know where. Dek, when you’re done—I need you to hold the wound shut for him.”

  “You’re the chirurgeon,” Dekklis snapped.

  “Not asking you to sew, am I? Asking Veiko. I’ve seen his needlework.”

  Veiko blinked. He was on the edge of arguing with her, yeah, see the protests gathering up in his eyes.

  “I know,” she said. “You’ve never stitched skin. So pretend I’m a shirt.”

  There was more than needle and thread in her pack. She debated, while Veiko rummaged through her kit, asking him to get the mossflower for her. It would scrub the edge off the pain. Dull her wits.

  You don’t need it. Tsabrak’s ghost was careful to keep her between himself and Veiko. Cold, cold breath on her cheek. Need all your wits, yeah? There’s more Taliri. They’re close.

  Veiko threaded the needle with steady hands as Dekklis beheaded the dead man with two efficient whacks.

  “Roll his face into the dirt,” Veiko murmured. He came back to Snow. Looked at the wound and shook his head.

  “Start at the top, where it’s shallowest.” She pinched the flaps of skin together. “Don’t get too close to the edges, yeah? You’ll rip through. Little stitches, that’s right.”

  “Move, Snow, let me do that.” Dekklis was steady, pitiless, lips clamped tight as her hands.

  Which hurt, fuck and damn. But it slowed the bleeding. No one told Veiko to hurry. No one had to.

  By the time Istel came pelting back, they were ready.

  “Got trouble,” Istel said in his quiet voice. “Found the rest of the party. Less than ten, more than two. Too many for us. We need to run.”

  The mist rose off a river three times as wide as Cardik’s, shrouding everything in a prickling damp. Veiko could wonder if he’d slipped somehow. Stepped into the ghost roads by accident. Except that was an Illhari stone road underfoot, and a downwind stink that said too many people. A sudden sense of openness that meant fields, maybe, and farmsteads. There had been both around Cardik. That they were back on the roads now meant they had to be close to Illharek.