Page 8 of Vow of the Undead
Cold sweat trickled down my forehead, slipping between my brows. Salt stung my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut for as long as I dared. Peeling them open again, I saw only darkness and the vague shapes of tree trunks.
The bushes rustled with a wild animal startled by my presence. A thin stream of moonlight broke through patchy branches, and the dim light illuminated a black bird flying in front of me. The raven cawed and I took the sound as a cheer, as if Odin himself had sent his precious Huginn or Muninn to watch over me.
Icy air crackled in my chest. Every breath left my throat raw as my body slowly failed, my throat squeezing tighter and tighter.
Help me.
Soon I would collapse, but that didn’t always guarantee a connection with the Gods. I’d need days of recovery before I could push myself again in hopes of another vision.
I didn’t have days.
Survival in the forest, alone, at the dawn of autumn wasn’t an option. Especially not after I ran myself ragged.
The black clouds at the edges of my vision grew. Heat flamed over my neck and into my spinning head. Collapse was imminent, and I prayed it was enough for them to reach me.
I blinked again, and when I opened my eyes I didn’t see the raven, the trees, or the shadowed forest. My world shifted into an all-consuming vision. Before me stood a grand castle with stone turrets. Rose bushes twined and tangled over the walls, their thorns as sharp as the look on the king’s face.
King Drakkar stood at the top of the steps in front of towering double doors. His lips shaped around words I could not hear yet somehow understood.
“Come to me. I have what you seek.”
My foot caught a root or rock and my body was thrown forward. The vision vanished and night filled in around me. I expected to slam into the ground, but hands gripped my arms and wrenched me backward, forcing me upright again. The water I’d gulped before the race sloshed in my stomach with the sudden recoil.
A man and a woman’s voice floated, disembodied around me. My head spun because I couldn’t draw enough breath into my lungs. Through the haze of pain and confusion and desperation, a single thought struck me.
The executioners had caught up to me, and I was collapsing in their arms.
Heat and darkness encased me.
When I came to only moments later, nobody was there. I was alone, suspended by the grip of something I couldn’t see. I narrowed my focus, gazing into the darkness until my eyes adjusted and I could make out the shapes that melted from the shadows like black clouds forming into a human.
It wasn't a boar’s mask and a lynx looking at me. In the pale light stood a man and woman dressed in fine clothing. They each held one of my arms to keep me upright. Like a doll, they propped me up with what seemed to be unusual strength.
These people dressed in royal finery were not only an oddity this far north and away from Mara, they were the last thing I expected to see in the forest.
Mara was the largest and most powerful village in Vylheim, nearly a kingdom of its own, though the king who sat on the only throne in the entire continent ruled over us all, every single villager from Skaldir, to Torsholt and Einnland, as well the other towns.
What would bring courtiershere?
I stared, my mouth gaping, waiting to see if thisvision would dissipate as easily as the mist crawling across the forest floor.
After a moment, I determined that not only were they real, they were a threat. They gripped my arms so tightly they could snap the bone beneath my reddened flesh with a mere flick of the wrist.
Without a word, they stepped forward and yanked me along beside them. My numb feet padded heavily as they forced me to walk with them.
Slowly, they picked through the forest, cutting a new trail to the south of where I’d run. With my throat still dry and my head spinning, I couldn’t conjure words. I merely wrenched my neck to scan the woman.
Had the executioners taken off their masks? Her eyes were a pale gold, not that of the deep brown I’d seen beneath both the boar’s mask and the lynx’s mask. Executioners also didn’t dress in finery with detailed embroidery.
My mind had been right the first time, these people truly were courtiers.
A shiver cut through me as the woman’s eyes flashed with a spark of red, like blood, before it vanished just as quickly. Her gaze raked over me as she dragged me alongside her.
“What do you want with me?” I asked. Shudders rippled through my breathless words.
This wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed shadows lurking alongside me, but they’d never come this close.
“You’ll know soon enough.” Her voice cracked like a frozen lake, the tone sending my heart into my stomach as if I were falling through the ice.
