Then her wits caught up with her senses. If he was a hallucination, he was a convincing one. She unfurled like a coiled spring, a roar ripping itself loose from her throat and startling the scholars a few dozen feet behind her—but she wasn’t thinking about them. She was thinking about the man standing a few feet away, half-obscured by gray mist, his hands raised in surrender. The staff, her instincts said. The staff had to go. She lashed out, half-tempted to allow the deadly sharp side of her talons to slice off the hand with which he was holding the staff too, for good measure, but it was the blunt of her claw that knocked the weapon flying in the end, which made Cato yelp in pain and clutch his hand to his chest. The momentum carried her forward and she knocked him flat on his back on the forest floor, pinning him there with one great clawed foot. He was real, she realized, shock mingling with her satisfaction at the fear on his face. He was actually here.
She roared again for good measure, letting her jaws gape wide enough for him to count every single one of her razor-sharp teeth, and she continued to hold him down with her talons, shifting them in place just enough to remind him who was in charge here. Did a little damage to the robes he was wearing, too. Morgan and the scholars caught up to them quickly, and it didn’t take her sister long to realize what was going on.
Acantha didn’t shift back until they’d secured Cato’s hands with an improvised cloth binding, which gave her time to settle her nerves and gather her composure for the confrontation. Closer to eye level now, she sized him up, noting the scrapes and bruises that he’d sustained when she’d pounced on him. Served him right. He deserved a lot worse than that after what he’d done.
“You have some nerve coming back here,” she said coldly.
“I wanted to—”
“No,” she said sharply, and she struck him across the face as she said it to really hammer the point home. He absorbed the blow without comment. “You don’t speak.” Carefully, she checked over his body for magical artifacts. The armor he’d been wearing last time was gone, though she found half a dozen odd leather bands buckled up and down his arms, some of them embedded with crystals, others still decorated with odd runes and sigils. Beneath them, the tattoos he’d been so evasive about, that curious, looping script.
Beside her, one of the scholars made a curious sound in his throat. “What language is that?”
Cato opened his mouth to answer—then closed it at the look in Acantha’s eyes. Wise, she thought, shooting a sidelong glance at Arric, who coughed. “Apologies, Captain Acantha. I’ll leave the prisoner in your capable hands.”
“Thank you, Arric,” she said coolly. “I apologize for cutting your day of research short, but I’ll need to bring this prisoner before the Queen immediately.”
“Of course, of course,” the archivist said cheerfully. “We’ll pack up and wing home presently.”
“Go on ahead if you need to,” Morgan said, reaching out to touch her elbow. There was a meaningful look in her green eyes when Acantha met her gaze. “We’ll talk later?” It was framed as a question, and would seem that way to anyone listening, but Acantha knew an order when she heard one from her sister. She nodded agreement, already dreading what Morgan might have to say. What had her aura given away? Because as furious as she was with Cato, an undeniable part of her had felt nothing but delight when she’d seen him walking out of the Fog. It was the same part of her that had dreamed about him every night since he’d left.
So where the hell did that leave her?
She hauled him back to the Palace as quickly as she could, talons wrapped around his all-too fragile human body as she winged her way from the outskirts of the forest back to the great mountain that stood proudly in the middle of what she’d begun, against her will, to think of as the insula. Should she have blindfolded Cato, she wondered? He was an enemy combatant, and she was effectively giving him a tour of their territory, but it would have felt ridiculous to land and shift just to blindfold him, so she continued on her way, hoping that the deliberate choppiness of her flight would serve to disorient him.
The entrance to the cavern was a wide opening on the mountain’s peak, and the pillar of sunlight it let through was sometimes bright enough to reach all the way down to the Palace at the base of the vast hollow mountain. Today the sun wasn’t quite that bright, and by the time she’d circled her way down to land before the Palace, the gloom mostly obscured Cato’s expression as she set him carefully down. Angry as she was with him, she didn’t want to cut his fragile flesh body to ribbons. Fascinating, the thought that he was stuck like that. As she shifted into her own two-legged form, she tried to imagine what it would be like if she could never return. It sent a shudder down her spine. Was she feeling sorry for him? Really? After everything he’d done?
Cato seemed to be about to speak, and she cut him a sharp look, more than willing to strike him again if he needed a reminder of the rules. He pressed his lips together and shook his head obediently, and something told her that he’d be raising his hands in surrender if they weren’t bound tightly behind his back. Satisfied for now, she pushed him along in front of her towards the Palace steps. It occurred to her, as he stared up at the facade, that he hadn’t actually seen the Palace from the outside before. He’d explained that his magic had allowed him to materialize inside the Archives, something she’d added to the long list of potential lies. But it would explain why her usually diligent guards hadn’t seen him go through the doorway.
That was what was so maddening about all of this. He’d lied to her nonstop, but he’d mixed just enough truth into the lies that she couldn’t simply throw it all out.
By the time they’d reached the Throne Room, Acantha knew that gossip had probably reached halfway around the community. Everybody who saw the white-haired man being marched down the hallways of the Palace knew they were looking at the thief who’d escaped the Captain of the Palace Guard, and there would be no use trying to stop the word from spreading. She only hoped that it would go some way to rehabilitating her reputation. Sure, she’d lost him, but here she was, finding him again.
Not that he’d made it difficult. She frowned as she prodded him again in the small of the back at the Throne Room door, urging him into the room in front of her. She could hear a hushed silence in the room beyond, and she took a deep breath, trying to ready herself for what was coming. She hadn’t expected to have an audience before the Queen today, and she was acutely aware that she was in her civilian clothes, but this couldn’t wait another moment.
“Captain Acantha,” Queen Lana’s voice rang out across the hall, surprised and curious. “What have you brought us?”
She took a deep breath as she and Cato reached the front of the room, the murmuring of the assembled audience growing louder behind them. They dropped into an obedient silence when the Prince at Lana’s side raised a hand for quiet.
“Queen Lana,” Acantha said, grateful to find the professional shield that had kept her safe her whole life. “I have recaptured our escaped prisoner. I bring him to you for judgment.”
She’d dreamed about a moment like this, indulging in countless harmless little fantasies in which she tracked him down somehow and hauled him in for justice. All of those dreams had ended with Cato being sentenced to a horrible, lingering death, and she’d woken up burning with vicious satisfaction from each one.
But now the moment had somehow actually arrived. And to her surprise, Acantha felt sick to her stomach that the man beside her might soon breathe his last.
Chapter 10 - Cato
Cato had anticipated that the journey from the Fog to the Palace would be rough this time around, and Acantha hadn’t let him down. It was an odd coincidence that she was the dragon he’d happened to stumble upon the moment he’d walked out of the Fog. Weren’t there a few hundred of them living in that mountain? He’d assumed it would be a little while before he saw Acantha, if she even deigned to visit him at all, but there she was, in the flesh, and somehow her human form seemed to contain more potent rage than even the dragon who’d roared in his face with her rows and rows of serrated teeth on proud display.
That was the first time he’d ever seen a dragon in its true form. He didn’t much look forward to the second.
She was dragging him straight to the Queen, just as he and the rest of his coven had anticipated. Terrifying as the journey into the mountain was, suspended by an angry dragon’s razor-sharp talons thousands of feet above the unforgiving ground below, Cato took solace in the knowledge that things were proceeding exactly as planned. The weeks they’d spent planning this had been downright harrowing. Haspar was still furious with him for failing the first time around, and it was anyone’s guess whether he’d snap at the slightest provocation and find some exciting new way to nearly strike him dead. As far as anyone in the coven was aware, Haspar had never actually ended the life of one of his subordinates… but he was very, very good at making it seem like he was about to. Some leaders governed with wisdom, some with brute force, and others with fear. Haspar chose all three.
It was the only way, he’d explained once, on a night when everyone had had a little more to drink than they’d intended. There had been bands of mages like them for as long as anyone could remember. They called themselves Hunters, generally speaking, an antiquated term that belonged to a time when the goals of the little groups had been less disparate. What were they hunting? Power, was Haspar’s answer. Magical artifacts, whatever they could use to keep themselves safe (usually from other magic users). According to Inota, the true goal was an end to the Fog. But that didn’t make sense to Cato. Their power came from the Fog, was inextricably bound up with it. Putting an end to the Fog would put an end to their power, and he couldn’t imagine Haspar wanting something like that.
Still, he knew better than to argue with Inota when she got that particular look on whatever face she was wearing. They all did—all of Haspar’s subjects, powerful magic users in their own right. He tended to discourage too much friendliness between them. It was rare to even see the group all in one place, coming and going as they regularly did on their own private errands… it had felt strange to see all twelve of them together the previous night, when the final details of the plan had been put in place. A dozen powerful mages, any one of them strong enough to take a life with the snap of their fingers.
That was why Haspar ruled with fear, he told him. When you had that kind of power in your hands, you needed to be held in check by an even bigger power, or you’d run wild. That was the service Haspar provided. As for what kept Haspar from running wild with his own power… well, Cato hadn’t asked. Part of him wasn’t willing to hear the answer, truth be told.