“Let me go! I’m going to kill the bitch!” he yelled.
“You worthless, vile bastards!” I screamed. I wasn’t sure what words flew from my mouth, one threat piling on another, battling with the threats Malich hurled back at me, Kaden screaming for everyone to shut up, until I finally choked and had to stop. I swallowed, tasting the warm blood pooling inside my cheek where I had bit it. My chest shuddered, and I lowered my voice, my next words deadly even.
“You murdered my brother’s wife. She was only nineteen. She was going to have a baby, and you miserable cowards put an arrow through her throat.” I glared, my head throbbing, watching them put the picture together in their own minds. I felt as much revulsion for myself as I did for them. I had been dining and telling stories with Greta’s murderers.
Whoever had gone to bed in their carvachis or tents had come back out. They gathered silently in their nightclothes, trying to understand the furor. Finch had bloody lines across his jaw too, and Kaden had them on his neck. Eben stood back, his eyes wide, as if he were looking at a demon gone mad.
“Ved mika ara te carvachi!” Griz bellowed.
Finch and one of the vagabond men grabbed Malich, who still strained to get at me, and Kaden came and took me brusquely by the arm, dragging me to the carvachi. He opened the door and all but threw me in, slamming the door behind him.
“What’s the matter with you?” he yelled.
I stared at him in disbelief. “Do you expect me to congratulate them for murdering her?”
His chest heaved, but he forced a slow deep breath. His hands were fists at his sides. He lowered his voice. “It wasn’t their intention, Lia.”
“Do you think it matters what they intended? She’s dead.”
“War is ugly, Lia.”
“War? What war, Kaden? The imaginary one you’re waging? The one Greta didn’t sign up for? She wasn’t a soldier. She was an innocent.”
“Lots of innocents die in war. Most are Vendans. Countless numbers have died trying to settle in the Cam Lanteux.”
How dare he compare Greta to lawbreakers. “There’s a treaty hundreds of years old forbidding it!”
His jaw hardened. “Why don’t you tell that to Eben? He was only five when he watched both his parents die trying to defend their home from soldiers setting fire to it. His mother died with an ax to her chest, and his father was torched along with their house.”
Rage still pounded in my head. “It wasn’t Morrighese soldiers who did it!”
Kaden stepped closer, a sneer smearing his face. “Really? He was too young to know what kind of soldiers they were, but he does remember a lot of red—the banner colors of Morrighan.”
“It must be very convenient to blame Morrighan’s soldiers when there are no witnesses and only a child’s remembrance of red. Look to your own bloody savages and the blood they spill for the guilty.”
“Innocents die, Lia. On all sides,” he yelled. “Pull your royal head out of your ass and get used to it!”
I looked at him, unable to speak.
He swallowed, shaking his head, then swiped his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.” His eyes focused on the floor, then on me again, his anger now subdued by his infuriating practiced calm. “But you’ve made things more difficult. It will be harder to keep you safe from Malich now.”
I drew in a false breath of shock. “A thousand pardons! I wouldn’t want to make anything harder for you, because everything is so stinking easy for me! This is a holiday, right?”
My last words wobbled, and my vision blurred.
He sighed and stepped toward me. “Let me see your hands.”
I looked down at them. They were covered in blood and still shaking. My fingertips throbbed where three nails had been torn past the quick, and two fingers on my left hand were already swollen and blue—they felt broken. I had attacked Malich and the others as if my fingers were made of tempered steel. They were the only weapons I had.
I looked back at Kaden. He had known all along that they had killed Greta.
“How much blood do you have on your hands, Kaden? How many people have you killed?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked the question before. He was an assassin. His job was killing, but he hid it far too well.
He didn’t answer, but I saw his jaw tighten.
“How many?” I asked again.
“Too many.”