Page 66 of Winds of Destiny

“I know,” he says, absolutely unmoved by the thread of irritation in my voice. He’s so even-tempered that sometimes I feel a little ridiculous for not being able to match his calm. “But he’s the god you grew up with, isn’t he? Who else would you pray to?”

“I don’t know.” I’m being perfectly honest—I have no memory of worshipping any god by name, and I’ve tried so hard not to remember my life from before the fire. All that brings is pain, and the little black cat has never summoned up any specific recollections of my past. I just know that I have a connection to her that goes deeper than my own memory. “I…” We have a few minutes here, so I might as well be honest. “Did you know that some of the larger villages develop their own gods?”

Kai shakes his head, but he looks fascinated. “Huridell is very isolated,” he says. “And I’ve never noticed other gods being worshipped in the smaller towns I’ve been to, but… That would make sense. Have you seen others?”

I nod. “There’s a town near Antasa that’s got over a thousand people living in it. They worship a god that looks like a gull—every post is topped with its image, and when they pray, they throw food into the air. If it’s caught by a gull, that’s considered a good sign.” So was being shit on by the birds, which I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it myself. “There’s another town, just north of the desert region, that has a lizard god. It’s red and black and scaly, and it lives right there in town with them—walks the streets, hisses at children, eats chickens…”

“No,” Kai says with a laugh.

“Oh yes. Its bite is just as poisonous as Kamor’s snake god, but the magic it passes on to its people is the ability to eat food that would probably kill someone else.” Rotten food, weeks-old carcasses crawling with maggots or worse—those villagers could eat it all without suffering. A useful skill for those who live in such a desolate region.

“And yours?” he asks.

“I don’t know her name. She’s a tiny black cat about this big.” I hold up my hands to indicate her diminutive size. “I’m not even sure she’s a god, but she keeps showing up when I least expect her.”

“Your body clearly remembers a bit of how you once worshipped her,” Kai points out, joining his fingers together the way mine had been a moment earlier.

“Maybe it does.” I like that idea. It would be nice to hold on tosomethingof my past, even when I don’t really know what that past is.

One of the rams snorts and bucks his head while the other paws at the ground. That’s clear enough. Our rest period is over. It’s time to go back on the hunt.

The low clouds are slowly lifting, but it’s still a shock to me when we see actual evidence of Embros’s passage. The chariot tracks are nearly gone, but only a few hundred feet farther along are a pair of corpses.

The second I see them, I cover my nose and mouth with the bottom of my shirt. “Don’t ride any closer,” I call out to Kai.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, slowing and stopping about ten feet ahead of me. “This is the way we need to go, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but we have to divert around the bodies.”

He looks at them, then squints. “What do you see that I don’t?” he asks at last.

Once more, I find myself appreciative of the fact that Kai is willing to listen to another person’s opinion instead of being a bullheaded, stubborn princeling about everything. If I was out here with Cam, he would already be in danger of infection from going too close. “They’ve been poisoned.”

“I… All right, it’s a fair assumption, but as long as we don’t touch them, what’s the harm?”

“Look at the grass beside them,” I press. We should be on the move already, but this is important for Kai to learn to recognize. “See how the stalks are wilting? Whatever Embros killed them with, it’s spreading to the land around the bodies, too. They’ve probably been dead for hours, and yet no flies have found them?” I shake my head. “They’re killing off whatever gets too close.”

“That’s…” Kai frowns. “That’s a dangerous trap to lay.”

“And without knowing how far it spreads, we have to give ourselves an excess of room. Come on.” I turn my ram from Cam’s cardinal direction and head south for another few hundred feet before turning back. “Keep your eyes open for more bodies.”

It’s not bodies we find over the next few miles, though—it’s damp. Not damp from the rain, but the telltale squish of mud under the rams’ hooves signals that we’re getting closer and closer to the inland sea. Soon, we won’t be able to ride them any farther. If we haven’t found Cam by then…

I’m worried enough by the potential of missing Cam that I miss out on another threat entirely. A huge lion, invisible one moment and there the next, lunges out of the tall grass at me. Its jaws are open wide, front paws extended and ready to swipe me off the ram’s back. I don’t even have a chance to draw my sword before it’s in striking distance.

My ram is smarter than I am. It leaps away before the lion makes contact, but the wet earth makes it hard for it to stay on its hooves. Its back feet slide out from under it, and a second later, we’re down on all fours with the lion stalking closer, ravenous and ready to kill.

Bow, bow, I need my bow!

Kai is there a second later, his own ram urged into a run that sends its heavy horns careening right into the lion’s side. There’s a hideouscrunchof bone against bone and the lion is tossed at least ten feet into the air before it lands some distance away. It gets up with a heavy limp, snarls at us, then vanishes back into the grass.

I stare at it, then at Kai, who looks vaguely satisfied by the incident, like using a godly ram to smash into huge, deadly lions is just the sort of thing that happens to him on a daily basis. I pride myself on being able to hide my emotions from others, but I’ve got nothing on the ridiculous amount of control Kai had.

The other option is that he really is just that calm in the face of danger, which…is unfairly attractive. I don’t have time to waste wanting to throw him on his back and ride him right now—we’ve got Cam to find. Still…

Kai must get some of my thoughts through the pearl because his satisfaction morphs into a smirk as he looks over at me. “If fighting lions is what it takes to get your interest, you know we have a special breed of them in the mountains, right?”

“If you think I want to watch you endanger your life just to make me needy, you’ve got another think coming.”

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