Bricrui (The Forgotten: Book 2) (5 page)

Only Katya’s years of training allowed her to
maintain a neutral expression. “What makes you think I care about
him?” she bluffed.

The woman just gave her a smug smile.
Did
I say something in my delirious state?
She had no idea, but the
confidence of the woman unnerved her. Katya was certain that she
would fulfill her threat if provoked, and she abandoned any
thoughts of bluffing.

“If I bring you this item, you will release
us?”

“Yes.”

Katya did not believe the conniving woman for
an instant, but letting her think she was cowed into going along
with what they wanted was important. Once she was out of their
clutches she could come up with a plan.

“What is it that you want?”

“A stone,” the woman informed her. “It will
be in a most sacred place, heavily guarded. Made from moonstone, it
shines a different color from every angle. This is how you will
know when you have found it. Retrieve it, and bring it back to us,
and we’ll let you go.” She waved a hand nonchalantly as though it
didn’t really matter to her what happened to them after that. In
reality, Katya was sure she’d order them killed anyway just because
they knew too much.

“Very well,” she nodded. She caught Hunter
staring at her. His eyes were blazing with frustration at not being
able to speak. She ignored his look. “When shall I go?”

“Immediately.”

The woman waved the healer forward and Katya
eyed him warily as he held out his hand to her. He held something
small in his palm and as he pressed it against her arm, she felt a
sudden burst of pain.

“Ow!” she exclaimed, more out of annoyance
than actual pain. She was well-accustomed to discomfort, thanks to
her time as an assassin with Karl, and the tiny prick was hardly
anything. But what had he done? She stared down at the flesh of her
forearm and was alarmed to see a miniscule bump where he had
pressed the contraption.

“It is a tracking stone,” the woman informed
her smugly. “If you try to remove it, the experience will not be
pleasant.” She smiled evilly. “If you try and enchant it to make it
seem like you are somewhere you are not, it will not be pleasant.”
Another obnoxious pause. “And if you betray us in any manner-”

Katya cut her off. “I know, I know. It won’t
be pleasant.” She scowled down at the unwanted accessory.

“We will check in with you periodically
through the stone – it will become warm when we wish to speak with
you at which time you must find a reflective surface through which
to communicate with us. If we find that you are not making
progress, your friend here will be killed.” She glanced back at
Hunter, who simply glared back at her defiantly. “And if you take
more than one month to complete this task, he will be killed.”

“I haven’t been back to the Dena’ina in some
time,” Katya lied, “I’m not sure I’d be able to find it easily from
here.”

“It is to the north, through the Barren
Lands. This map will lead you to the territories.” She stepped
forward and handed her the map.

Katya took it and pocketed it without opening
it. “Let’s get to it then,” she stated.

Another man stepped forward and took Katya
roughly by the arm. Hunter moved towards them to interfere, but the
two burly men standing on either side of him still held him
tightly. She gave him a wry smile. It appeared fate was determined
to thwart her efforts to live in simple happiness. She had finally
found her past, only to have the only person from it be torn from
her, and the lives around her endangered yet again.

She glared at Slade as she passed him on the
way out. All that worrying about him for nothing. She should have
known.
Poor Gareth
. She tried to ask about his fate as she
was led down the long winding stairs to the lower levels, but her
guard remained stoically silent.

At the bottom, she was shoved violently out,
and the door was slammed behind her. She supposed there was only
one thing to do: She set out towards the Barren Lands. A few steps
into the forest, however, and she had a thought. She smiled to
herself.

Steeling quietly back towards the village,
she focused her magesight on the buildings above. Searching through
them, she found what she was looking for. Her unique bond with the
Bloodstone allowed her to recognize it easily, and she zoned in on
it. While the tribe’s attention was still focused in the Chamber at
her exit, she sent a transport spell into the building which held
it. Her spell snuck past the wards around it and moments later, she
felt a weight in her hand. For good measure, she did the same for
her knives and the few other possessions they had confiscated from
her and tucked these away.

Laughing to herself, she hefted the
Bloodstone into the air and caught it again neatly.
So
there
, she thought smugly.

*

Lorcan watched the proceedings through a tiny
crack in the Chamber wall. He had shimmied his way up the steep
slope to the spot he had discovered some time ago while hiding from
Slade’s wrath. Ever since their parents had died, his older brother
had acted as though he was the boss of him.

The girl, Katya, he had found out on the
Plains and brought to the tribe was currently on trial - if that
was what you could call the quick punishment that the Elders had
just inflicted upon her - and was being sent out on a mission to
gather some artifact. Lorcan scrunched up his face as his brother
Slade made a comment. Lorcan had lost track of how many times Slade
had pointed out to him that it was his fault that Katya had been
brought up to the city, ‘and without going through the Chamber
first!’ As if he hadn’t fallen for her himself. Lorcan knew they
had been spending time together and had even kissed before he found
out that she had the Bloodstone. Lorcan wasn’t supposed to know
about that, but when Gareth had approached him about helping get
Katya out of the prison cell, he’d been filled in on quite a bit he
hadn’t realized had been going on.

He didn’t understand what the Elders were up
to, and he didn’t believe that Katya deserved to die. He couldn’t
even begin to guess what sort of ‘crimes’ the Elders had determined
she’d committed to justify such a fate. The Elders had only told
the tribe that she had been caught betraying them, not the specific
deed, which had supposedly warranted her being thrown into the
cell. She definitely was a loner and did not share much information
about herself, but she hadn’t come here for malicious reasons, he
was sure of it.

When she was led down below, he tried to
intercept their path seemingly by accident so that he could speak
with her, but the guard’s bee-line towards the stairs made it
impossible. He watched her from above as she hesitated only a
second, staring towards the door that had just been slammed in her
face, before moving into the forest.

When he could no longer see her retreating
form, he climbed back up to his perch atop the Chamber and pressed
his ear against the hole.

“They were able to break free,” Maliki was
saying, “if they can do that, they can undo our enchantment.”

“They haven’t even detected it yet,” another
voice chimed in; one of the Elders Lorcan didn’t know. “We have
time.”

“But how much time is the question,” Kali,
the leader of the Elders, said. Lorcan could picture her pressing
her lips together tightly, an expression she wore often, while
twirling her braid. Her eyes seemed to narrow every time she looked
at him, though he couldn’t remember ever doing anything to her.
“And the answer could make all the difference. We will have to hope
that her feelings for the man are strong enough that it will cause
her to make haste.”

“The bond between them is strong,” the healer
informed her and Lorcan felt a strange twinge. He had been spending
time with Raina which had helped to dull the pain of Katya’s
flirtation with his brother. Her newfound hatred of Slade had given
him something in common with her, however, and he felt the familiar
attraction. She was a mysterious woman.

He found his interest in the meeting suddenly
diminished and Lorcan shimmied down to the landing below. Seconds
after his feet found the ground, he heard a voice.

“Lorcan,” Slade admonished, “What are you
doing here?”

Lorcan turned around slowly, pasting on an
innocent expression. “Nothing,” he lied, “just taking a walk.”

“You’re not sneaking out to see that Raina
girl again are you?” his brother questioned sternly. Lorcan hated
it when he used his fatherly tone.

“I wasn’t-” he started, but then realized
that this would be the perfect excuse. He tried to look contrite.
“Well…maybe I was hoping I would run into her,” he seemingly
reluctantly agreed. He sold the lie by quickly adding, “but I
wasn’t doing anything bad!”

Slade gave him his ‘I’m disappointed in you’
look; an expression that Lorcan was sure his brother stood in front
of a mirror and practiced. Lorcan looked at his feet and bit his
lip, though seething inside.

“I’ll just head home now,” he said in a
downtrodden voice.

“That’s a good idea.”

Once out of sight, Lorcan made a rude gesture
at his brother. He couldn’t believe that Slade blindly lapped up
everything that the Elders said. Or actually, he
could
believe it since his brother was a meat-headed idiot. He cared more
about perfecting his Forest Guard and being Mr. Perfect than he did
about Lorcan.

As he passed through the section where the
prisoners were housed, he heard the man with whom Katya had been
captured being led back into the cellblock. He backtracked and hid
behind a corner of the building.

Instead of being led back to the same cell
that he had been taken from when they had the two of them drugged,
however, he was led into one of the infirmary cells.
How
odd
. Lorcan knew that Gareth was also being kept there. He had
seen them drag his bleeding body up the night he had helped Katya
escape. He had tried to get in to talk to the man, but he had not
yet regained consciousness, so there was little he could do. He was
also a little worried that they might figure out his own
involvement. Gareth had been shot because of it…

He wondered why they would be putting this
stranger in with one of the tribesmen. Surely they weren’t so angry
with Gareth that they had cast him out? Exile was the tribe’s worst
form of punishment, and even if they were spending the time to heal
him out of respect for what he used to be, if he had been exiled
when he woke he would be told to leave.

Lorcan hadn’t witnessed any exiling, but he
had heard the tales of the evil ones being thrown out so they
couldn’t pass on their traits in order to cleanse the world of
them. The Dark King of the Lost Lands had marked those of his blood
and the tribes used this mark to eradicate his presence from the
world. It was said that once his evil taint was gone from the world
and the tribes reunited, the blessed one would unveil their eyes.
The child of the Arrival was believed to possibly be the blessed
one who would do this. That was why the Elders had taken her to
ensure that she was healthy and could fulfill this if it was indeed
her destiny.

Or so they said. Lorcan was beginning to
doubt the wisdom of trusting their words. If the enchantment was a
good thing, why were they worried about the Lost Ones detecting
it?

He pondered this a moment, chewing his
fingernail, while he waited for the guards escorting the stranger
to leave. He supposed they
could
just be worried that if
they detected it, they might also guess its source. One of the
tribe’s most important rules was that they never made any contact
with the Lost Ones which could reveal that the tribes existed.

The tribes had been driven out of the Lost
Lands by the Dark King’s evil, many of them dying before they made
their escape. The Dark King was frightened of their power and he
had tried to send them all to their deaths at his experiment camps.
He had done atrocious things to them, testing the effectiveness of
blood-magic with torture and pain. He experimented changing their
appearances, twisting their looks to mimic those of animals and
hideous beasts. Though most of these changes had been reversed and
over time any that they had been unable to change had slowly faded.
There were a few people whose eyes were still slit like cats, or
whose teeth were more pointed than any humans should be. Lorcan had
noticed that the envoys from the Kanza tribe seemed less human than
the rest, and had heard stories that the worst cases had followed
their founder to the Plains beyond. To the best of Lorcan’s
knowledge, all the tribes had succeeded in erasing most traces of
the Dark King, but the hatred for him was still prevalent all these
years later.

Stories of his horrors were the high point of
festivities, with the young ones clapping and enjoying the wild
tales with exuberance while the elders tsked them for their lack of
respect for the seriousness of the history. Lorcan and most of the
children his age were becoming bored with the Elders single-minded
obsession with everything that had to do with the Dark King and
plans to finally getting rid of the last of his influence. In
Lorcan’s opinion, the only influence that the Dark King still had
was what the Elders were keeping alive by holding on to his
memory.

He peeked around the corner and saw that the
guards were leaving the man’s cell. Unfortunately, two more had
just arrived and had positioned themselves outside the door.

Lorcan snuck around the side of the building
and scampered off towards home. There was no point in making Slade
more suspicious.

CHAPTER 3

Layna hugged Phoenix to her and walked
through the gardens contentedly. She had needed the relief that
being with her little girl gave her. No matter how much stress
being the Queen she had, as Phoenix’s mother she could be nothing
but proud and happy.