Page 45 of Bloodguard

With a warrior’s cry, I lurch upward and manage to catch the ledge.

At first, I can do little more than hang, my body elongating from the unintentional stretch. I barely stay in place, my torn hands begging me to let go.

Chaos has unleashed below.

The eels issue their painful currents in rapid succession. They sweep along the water in an assortment of spurts, engulfing the expanse with flashes of bright-green light. Two sharks are already dead, partially burned and floating belly-up. The one I stabbed is bleeding heavily but alive. Many more eels are shredded to mangled strings of meat.

It’s smart to let them fight it out. My best guess is that each gladiator was scheduled to fight a series of sharks or eels, or hell, a school of rabid fucking jellyfish for all I know. If defeated or satiated, the other sets of predators would challenge any gladiator who remained.

Cute. But feeding the audience to the sharks had the lords scrambling for other ways to kill me. They didn’t consider that their chosen instruments of torture would turn on one another, and it likely has enraged them further.

In the wild, river sharks, eels, and alike avoid each other unless there’s a shortage of food. Here, they are exactly like us—gladiators fighting to the death, each one battling to emerge the victor.

An eel leaves the melee and leaps out of the water to attack me. I instinctively curl inward, shrinking myself out of reach, but not soon enough. It catches my calf and sinks its fangs to the bone. The puncture is so agonizing—so inconceivably excruciating—that I honestly consider letting go. At least the sharks would kill me.

The monster writhes, using its weight to try to drag me back into the water and damn close to succeeding. I stab it through the head with the point of my mighty driftwood blade.

It retaliates with a shock to my leg that rattles my teeth, locking every muscle in my body into place. My hold on the ledge tightens involuntarily. Finally a fucking break. I hang tight, wailing in torment and stabbing at it until it falls dead into a shark’s maw. The water practically sizzles beneath me, steam rising up from the deadly waters below. Every droplet singes my skin. I reckon there’s enough charge built up in there to stun a giant.

The shark goes belly-up, joining my own victim to bob lifelessly in the waves.

Another eel. I swat it aside with my sword before it can sink its needle-sharp fangs into me. It lands in the remaining shark’s path and dies soon after. I am certain I will be next. Only the shark—the largest among them—doesn’t jump for me. It thrashes and writhes and chomps, and it is only when the shark breaches the surface that I realize my good fortune. The creature’s rough skin is riddled with puncture wounds, nose to tail, and its movements grow weaker by the second.

Good. I can only imagine the pain it’s in.

The eels keep coming. Or at least I think they do. I keep stabbing. There’s no strategy. It’s me against them, and we all want to live.

I manage to stab several more times in a last-ditch effort to survive before my cramping, damaged hand releases my only weapon at last—and Maeve screams.

chapter 18

Leith

The moments that follow are like patches on an old man’s coat, barely held together by a common thread and not enough to protect him.

There are jolts of that burning, numb feeling. They start and stop, scattered for a time or coming all at once. My body bounces in an erratic cadence.

I am in the water until I’m not.

I am choking and desperate for air until I am breathing and clearing my lungs.

Rancid water in my throat and stomach causes me to spew in surges. I’m cold, I think.

It’s dark, late. Hours, maybe days since I first entered the arena. I should be dead. It’s a miracle I’m not.

Well, mostly.

I think I won. I think I saved Dahlia.

Voices trail in and out, or maybe I fade in and out. The words don’t make sense right away. Eventually, I start understanding the conversation.

It’s about me.

“He won,” Jakeb says.

“He killed Count Nathanial and his new bride. He doesn’t deserve honor. I should feed him to my dogs!”

It’s Soro’s voice. He’s a few feet from me. This is the closest I’ve ever been to him, and it’s too bad I don’t have the energy to kill him where he stands.

---