Page 48 of Tusk Love

—and he was consumed by a ball of fire.

At first, Guinevere thought that she’d surmounted Teinidh’s shackles. Then she thought that perhapshisspell had gone awry. Then she turned and saw Zugri, advancing through the undergrowth.

A strange triangular mark had appeared on the goblin’s forehead. It glowed in the same crimson light that now filled her eyes.

Zugri was a runechild. Beneath that domestic, motherly exterior lurked a natural font of arcane energy. Her eyes narrowed, and the fire intensified until there was nothing left of the purple gnome, only a pile of soot and the odor of charred flesh. The bright flames licked through the bushes, spreading fast, and Guinevere was no stranger tothis.She braced herself for inferno. For the fire to sweep out of control and obliterate everything in its path. But it didn’t. Zugri banished every single smoke-laden tendril with one wave of her hand.

All her life, Guinevere had known fire magic only as the great destroyer. She hadn’t realized that it could be manipulated so artfully, that one could choose what to burn and what to save.

I wish I could learn.

The desire gripped Guinevere as she watched the rune melt back into Zugri’s skin. As she listened to a cry of victory rising up from the Bonecrushers, and Oskar shouting for her amidst the clamor. As she smelled the lingering remnants of smoke and felt only the coolness of autumn.

I want to learn.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Oskar

Bharash and Selene had managed to escape, but not before injuring several of the Bonecrushers. This particular area of the woods had turned into an infirmary, with Iaz, the clan’s lone healer, rushing to and fro among the wounded—the stabbed, the spiked, and, in the case of those who were unfortunate enough to have been in the way of the dragonblood’s breath attack, the frostbitten.

Oskar felt absolutely terrible, in a way that had nothing to do with his own ailments. Iaz had cleaned and bandaged the dagger wound in his shoulder before leaving Guinevere to take care of the claw marks across his ribs, and he spoke gravely to her as he sat shirtless on the forest floor, the upper half of his body slightly reclined against a large slab of rock.

“We can’t stay with them, Guinevere.”

“I know,” she replied in a soft voice.

The day before, the Bonecrushers had insisted that Oskar andGuinevere join their caravan, as they were all headed in the same direction anyway. But that was no longer feasible. With two of the mercenaries dead, there was every possibility that the surviving ones would call for reinforcements and grow increasingly more desperate and ruthless as the Menagerie Coast drew nearer. All the members of Clan Bonecrusher were packed into the two wagons, their children included. The worst-case scenario was untenable, its cost too dear. This wasn’t their fight.

Guinevere uncorked the fresh bottle of the homemade grog that Iaz had pressed into her hand earlier. She glanced at it and then at Oskar’s exposed torso, gnawing on her bottom lip with trepidation. “Are…are you ready?”

Oskar nodded, fighting back a tender grin. His poor darling. There was no reason for her to be so nervous. It was only going to be a temporary sting, and he’d experienced much worse.

She splashed the brew over the gouges along his ribs. “Fuck!” he yelped, the burning pain making him see double. “Just kill me!”

“Well, no one wants that,” she chided as she set the bottle down and prepared the bandages.

“This is only a wild guess, you understand, but Bharash and Selene might beg to differ.”

“I couldn’t give a fig about their opinions.”

“That might be the meanest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

Guinevere seemed oddly pleased by his remark. She was still a little flushed from adrenaline, her eyes the color of dusk. There were grass stains on her skirt and twigs in her silver hair, and the katari’s blood had dried in specks on her face. Her beauty had taken on a wilder aspect. It was as though she were in bloom, out here in the autumn woodlands.

It took a couple of tries for her to successfully wind the bandages around his rib cage, after which they headed back to the campsite, where a few Bonecrushers had stayed behind to watch over the clan’s belongings and had already been informed by a runner of what had transpired.

“You’d been gone quite a while,” Nan told Oskar and Guinevere,“so I sent a search party out. We thought you’d run afoul of a bear, maybe. We certainly weren’t expecting to tangle with the Spider’s Web this morn.”

“That’s their name?” Oskar struggled not to roll his eyes. “A little too on the nose for my tastes.”

“They’re a mid-level group,” said Nan. “The kind you hire if you can’t afford the Ceaseless Reach or the Order of Darkness.”

“Nowthose,” said Oskar, “are proper mercenary names.”

“We’re getting off topic,” Nan said firmly. “What I want to know iswhymy kinsmen ended up fighting them today.”

After silently listening to Oskar and Guinevere’s faltering confession, the Bonecrusher matriarch waved off their apologies for lying in the same manner she’d waved off their gratitude for the clan’s assistance the previous afternoon. “Travelers help one another,” she intoned. “Of course, if one of us dies, we will come after you and the Spider’s Web with the vengeance of a thousand axes, but I don’t think we need to worry about that. Us Bonecrushers are as tough as nails.”

---