He was as good as that word. No one accosted her for the rest of the day and through the night. Only once was she moved, and then by Karulin himself who untied her enough so she could heed nature's insistent call and also ease the painful kink in her back.
Dawn came with a thin frost glazing everything exposed to the open air. Anhuset's hair crackled as she curled in on herself for any scrap of warmth. Her ears were numb as was the tip of her nose and her hands. The blanket she huddled under offered little in the way of a barrier between her still damp body and the morning cold. As a Kai, she actively avoided the sun. Now she eagerly looked forward to its rise and the heat it offered.
A flurry of activity at one end of camp near the tent made her peek out from the blanket's cover. She forgot about the cold and discomfort, the bruises and backache. Chamtivos emerged from the tent, followed by two of his men carrying a limp, bloodied Serovek between them. His feet plowed shallow furrows in the dirt as they dragged him to a waiting horse. Dark hair, matted with what looked like blood partially obscured his features, but not enough that she didn't see the swelling misshaping his features or the way both of his eyes were blackened and scabbed shut. A thread of crimson drool stretched from his mouth before breaking to splash on the ground.
Her emotions spun in a whirlwind. Relief that he was alive, rage at his mistreatment. In her mind, she cried out his name, a wailing that would have carried for leagues had she given voice to it.
As if he heard her, he slowly lifted his head, turning it in her direction. She growled long and low behind the gag. Her guards tensed and drop their hands to their knives at their belts. There was no way he saw her, not with those eyes. His face, once handsome by human standards, was a horror of welts, cuts and purple bruises. He looked like Magas had danced on his face with all four hooves.
Anhuset glared at Chamtivos as he gave instructions to the pair holding the margrave. The warlord left them to heave their burden onto the horse and approached her. “Stand up, princess,” he said. “We're going for a ride.” He waited impatiently for her guards to release the bonds that kept her hunched before shoving her toward a second horse. Instead of freeing her legs so she walked instead of shuffled and could mount the horse on her own, they lifted her, tossing her across the saddle like a sack of grain, feet hanging off one side of the animal, her head and shoulders off the other. The position caused pressure to build behind her eyes.
Chamtivos squatted so they were eye level with each other. “Remove her gag,” he ordered an unseen lackey. Karulin joined him, and it was his hands that carefully untied the gag and tossed it aside. Anhuset thought the warlord's unexpected consideration strange until he told her “Riding a horse like this will make you sick, and I don't want you choking on your own vomit before I've had a little fun with you.”
You'll be choking on your own blood when I'm finished with you,she wanted to say. Instead she asked questions she doubted he'd answer in any meaningful way, but she had to try. “Where are you taking us? Why did you beat the margrave?”
He chuckled, rubbing his hands together like a child anticipating a treat. “You'll see. As to your second question, the margrave refused to tell us how to break the enchantment protecting the monk. We used a little persuasion. He's much more stubborn than he is intelligent.”
He couldn't have been more wrong in his assumption. Serovek's intelligence far outstripped his obstinacy. “He won't tell you because he can't. He doesn't know how to break it. Only the Khaskem does. If you'd asked me instead, I could have told you and saved your men the trouble of trying to beat it out of Lord Pangion.”
Chamtivos gave a blithe shrug. “A few lessons in humility either builds character or breaks it. We'll see which it is for his lordship once he wakes.”
Talking while draped across a horse made her stomach roil. Her skull began to throb. She tried another tack. “He'd make just as valuable a hostage as the monk. The Beladine king will pay generously to have one of his military governors returned to him alive and mostly unharmed.”
“Maybe. But someone else has already paid me a king's ransom to capture him, and I'll gain something even better—power—if I dispose of him. A certain steward rises in the world if the margrave doesn't make it back to High Salure. Pangion isn't nearly as valuable alive as he is dead.”
The shock of his words left her almost as speechless as the ice water dousing she'd endured the day before. Bryzant had planned all this? Serovek's steward who'd stood on a kitchen prep table holding a skillet like a shield while she chased an angry scarpatine around the scullery? Her thoughts reeled. Why? And what did Ogran hope to gain from the alliance and the betrayal?
A cascade of grim possibilities made her scowl. He was one of the four sent back to High Salure and Saggara with messages. Had only Ogran made the journey back alive, and if so, what message did he deliver?
Her neck hurt from keeping it arched so she could look into Chamtivos's deceptively innocent features. “Why haven't you killed him already? And me as well?”
“As I told you before, you're entertainment.” He smiled. “I like a challenge and am fond of the hunt. The Kai have a reputation for being strong, fierce fighters. I'm told you're equal to three men in a fight. You'll make for challenging prey.”
There it was again, the comparison between her and specifically three humans—an echo of what Serovek had told Ogran while they decided how to split up their party and who would return and who would continue to the monastery. Karulin had referenced it first, and even had he not mentioned Ogran's name, she would have known it was him.
Chamtivos's revelation of his plans for them was anticlimactic, at least for her. Anhuset had imagined something far worse than being hunted by him and his minions, though she wouldn't make the mistake of underestimating their prowess, especially with Karulin in their party. Every instinct she possessed told her that despite his kindness toward her, he was likely the most dangerous adversary in this group.
Done with conversation, Chamtivos left her to issue more orders and soon a party of twelve, along with her and a now unconscious Serovek rode out of the camp. Her sense of time told her they hadn't traveled more than an hour before they halted again, but her balking stomach and pounding head protested it was a lifetime. The smell of water teased her nose, and she heard the sound of gently lapping waves tumbling against a shore.
She was afforded a better view of her surroundings once they hauled her off the horse and dropped her in a heap onto a pebbled beach. She struggled to her knees before managing to stand. A lake, with an opposite shore in the far distance and an island rising from its center lay before her. She recalled Serovek's map. There'd been a body of water marked on the map whose location was parallel to the path they'd planned to take to the monastery. If her sense of direction was correct, this lake was that body of water.
Were Chamtivos and his men planning to drown her and Serovek? She discarded the idea. The warlord had stated he planned to hunt them. She eyed the island in the lake's center, noting its shape like a hump with a significant incline that rounded off to a gentle summit. The land itself was covered in a conifer forest, nearly black against the gray sky and matching the lake's serenely dark surface.
Two boats sat beached nearby, just large enough to transport their entire party to the island. Chamtivos took no chances and ordered Karulin to muzzle her again. The grim expression Karulin had worn was now black with disapproval. He tied the gag snugly, but not so tight that it cut into her cheeks. She swore a flicker of apology danced across his features before he guided her to one of the boats.
They split into three groups. Two men stayed behind to set up an overnight camp on the shore, while the others divided their numbers between the boats. “Put his lordship in the boat with me and the Kai bitch in the other with Karulin,” Chamtivos ordered.
The slap of the oars on the water as they skimmed across the lake was the only sound. The water itself was dark, with the vague outline of a drop-off that began not far from the shore and plunged into depths no sunlight reached. This was a deep, deep lake. Surface waves lifted and dipped them gently, and more than once Anhuset spotted undulating shapes cresting above the water in scaly, serpentine arches. The creatures moved counter to the waves, leaving broad, flat wakes behind them as they glided parallel to the boats. She was a good swimmer and didn't fear drowning should some accident occur and she fell in the water. But whatever patrolled just below the surface promised a death more savage than a drowning.
They reached the island's leeward side without incident. A man from each boat hopped into waist-deep water with bow lines and towed the boats, always watching the deeper water for any sign of the water creatures that had followed them. Once they turned the boats so that the bows faced out toward the lake and set both anchors and spikes, the rest of the group piled out. Anhuset muttered under her breath as she plunged knee-deep into the water. She'd just started drying out and warming up.
Karulin kept a steady hand on her arm as she shuffle-waded to shore. Two others dragged Serovek to where she stood, dropping him at her feet. A faint groan escaped his lips.
Chamtivos faced her, gesturing for Karulin to remove her gag. “You've the rest of the day and night to prepare. Tomorrow morning, we return for the hunt. I'm much looking forward to pitting my skills against you, Kai woman.”
This was a petty man driven by childish malice and an overblown sense of his own importance and entitlement. How he managed to gain and keep a fighting force willing to die for him in a war with the Nazim monks puzzled her greatly.
Karulin moved from behind her to scowl at Chamtivos. “This is wrong. All of it. When did our purpose drift from fighting for our lands to chasing defenseless captives through the forests for fun?”