“Enough!” His rage is enough to give her pause, the heat of it sending a ripple through the ground, threatening to tear this dreamscape apart. “I never wanted any part of your insane plots. How could you imagine I would ever surrender myself to your ambition? What madness drives you? What twisted you into this? What happened on the other side of that door?”
Her face becomes utterly still, eyes locked on his, not in anger but naked terror.
“You dream, I dream,” he tells her. “A girl, lying in bed, weeping as she stares at her bedroom door. Do you even remember it when awake? Do you even know?”
She blinks and takes a slow, backward step. “There were times I thought of killing you. When we travelled, sometimes I would take my knife and lay it against your neck as you slept. I feared you, although I told myself it was only anger at your many cruelties, your practised hatred. Somehow I knew my love for you would kill me, and so it proved. But I have not a single regret.”
She reaches for him, and he doesn’t know why he lets her touch him, why he allows her hands to trace over his own, why he opens his arms and welcomes her into an embrace. She crushes herself against him, and he hears the restrained sob in her voice as she whispers in his ear, “It’s time you came to Volar, beloved. Bring your army if you like. It doesn’t matter. Just make sure the healer is among them. If I do not see both of you in the arena within thirty days, Reva Mustor dies.”
• • •
The leader of New Kethia’s former slaves named himself as Karavek, apparently the name of the master he had beaten to death during the first night of riots. “He stole freedom from me, I stole his name,” he said with a thin smile. “Seemed a fair exchange.”
He was a large man, somewhere in his fifties, with grey-black hair sprouting in an unkempt mass from his once-shaven head. However, despite his size and fierce appearance his voice told of an educated past and a mind keen enough to fully appreciate the reality of their circumstance, unalloyed by the glow of recent triumphs.
“Volar is not New Kethia,” Karavek said when the Meldenean made his formal request for alliance on behalf of Queen Lyrna. He had arrived at the governor’s mansion in company with a dozen fighters, all bristling with weaponry and regarding Fleet Lord Ell-Nurin with a naked suspicion that bordered on hostility. “This city is a village in comparison.”
“There are many still in bondage there,” Frentis said. “As you were.”
“True enough, but I don’t know them and neither do my people.”
“The queen has granted all in this province a place in the Unified Realm,” Ell-Nurin said. “You are now free subjects under her protection. But freedom carries a price . . .”
“Don’t lecture me on freedom, pirate,” Karavek growled. “Half the slaves in this city died paying that price.” He turned to Frentis, lowering his voice. “Brother, you know as well as I how precarious our position is. Any day now the southern garrisons will march to reclaim this city for the empire. We can’t fight them if our strength is off dying in Volar.”
Victory at Volar will end this empire, Frentis wanted to say but felt the words die on his tongue, knowing how hollow they would sound. “I know,” he said. “But myself and my people must sail to Volar, with any willing to join us.”
