Page 1 of Tusk Love

Chapter One

Guinevere

The bandits had fallen upon them in the middle of the night, and all the guards were dead.

Guinevere crouched inside the wagon, watching through a hole in the side of the canvas bonnet as the bandits picked through the ruined camp. For some reason, this was the only thought running through her mind—that all the guards were dead. She had not learned any of their names since setting out from Rexxentrum, and now she never would.

There were five of them, which was the most her parents could afford to hire. She’d seen each guard fall to the onslaught of blades and arrows through the same canvas-edged hole, her screams stifled into the mound of her palm. According to her parents, it wasn’t proper to converse with the hired help, which was why she hadn’t. But she should have known the names of the men who’d died for her.

Didn’t they deserve that much, at least?

No point wondering what corpses deserve.The voice in her headwas the guttural hiss of newly lit coals crackling to life. Guinevere fought it as hard as she could, but it was like trying to hold back a sneeze. Her eyes watering, she left her bedroll and slowly retreated deeper into the wagon.

“Check inside!” someone barked, most likely the gigantic orc who had led the charge into the clearing and lopped one guard’s head clean off his shoulders with an equally gigantic greataxe. “Let’s see what we have!”

Guinevere scooted backward over the wooden boards until she could go no farther. She heard the panicked lowing of Bart and Wart and the restless stomping of their hooves on the forest floor as the bandits approached. Her parents’ oxen were tethered to the trees beside the wagon, and she hoped with all her heart that the bandits would leave the poor beasts alone. Most likely, though, Bart and Wart were as doomed as she was.

You aren’t doomed.Teinidh of the Wailing Embers raked her fiery claws through the scorched recesses of Guinevere’s soul.You have me. Set me free. Let me burn.

“No,” Guinevere whispered. She reached back, her hand resting on the lid of the pearwood trunk that had been so carefully transported over the Amber Road the last few days, along with the supplies for the journey and the wares that her parents would sell once she met them at the port city of Nicodranas.

Fire was uncontrollable; if Teinidh was unleashed, everything would be destroyed. The trunk—its contents—were too precious to risk.

Guinevere tried to calm herself with a series of slow, deep breaths. It was heightened emotion that called the wildfire spirit forth. If she could just tamp down on the fear…

The faint moonlight streaming into the wagon was blocked out by a host of figures peering inside. While the leader was an orc—Guinevere spied his hulking frame in the distance, trampling over the campfire that the guards had made to ward off the autumn chill—the rest of the bandits were human, garbed in pilfered, mismatched armor.One was wearing a helmet, still wet with blood, that Guinevere recognized as having belonged to her guard. She gave an involuntary shudder, and the slight movement drew the men’s attention.

“Well, well.” One bandit squinted at the flowing, lavishly embroidered hem of Guinevere’s white silk nightgown. “If it isn’t alady,done up so fine.”

“Let’s see if she’s got any jewelry on her,” another bandit eagerly suggested.

She let the men drag her out of the wagon. There were six of them, and their rough hands bruised her arms while she shook like a leaf and tried not to look at the dead guards strewn about the clearing. Teinidh scrabbled at the walls of her mind, insistent, hungry for the kill.

Now, now, now! Until there are only cinders, until the wind scatters them to Tal’Dorei and beyond.

No.Guinevere squeezed her eyes shut.Please.She didn’t want to destroy the trunk, didn’t want to hurt Bart and Wart, didn’t want her parents to blame her for making things worse.I must be braver. I will be braver.

Yet fear surged within her like the inferno that she was trying so hard to suppress.

The bandits hauled her farther away from the wagon and closer to their leader but stopped when the one wearing the bloodstained helmet noticed the thin silver chain around her neck, glowing in the moonlight.

“Bet this is real silver,” he mused as he and the other men surrounded her, flashing identical avaricious grins.

“What’s the holdup, Symes?” the orc standing in the remains of the campfire demanded. “Bring her to me!”

“In just a minute, Lashak.” Symes’s grimy fingers brushed against Guinevere’s neck as he gripped the chain. She bit her tongue so as not to cry out in fright. “Want to see what pretty trinket milady brought us.”

He gave a none-too-gentle tug, freeing the rest of the necklace from where it had slipped beneath her nightgown’s bodice. Thebandits had clearly been expecting a valuable gem of some sort; they blinked in consternation at what was dangling from Symes’s fist on the fine loops of metal.

It was a tiny sparrow skull, set in a bed of white-speckled brown feathers. Soil from the fire-razed forest where she’d been born had been packed into a hole drilled in the skull’s top, from which sprouted a lacy green fern, lashed securely to its miniature container by intricate silver knots.

“Doesn’t look like an aristocrat’s pendant to me,” remarked another bandit, scratching his bearded chin. “Looks more like one of ’em wild mage totems…”

They were going to figure out what she was, perhaps as soon as they drew their next breaths. And when they did, they would kill her, because she was too dangerous to keep alive. “Sometimes I think she’s better off dead,” her father had said once, when he didn’t realize Guinevere was within earshot.

Better off dead—but she didn’twantto die—

Panic combined with Guinevere’s fear, swirling and igniting, higher and higher. The dam burst. The bones and feathers of her totem shook. The ashen soil within fed her, fed the power she hadn’t asked for, her eyes flashing as the connection to another plane was wrenched open.

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