Page 20 of Tethered Thrones

Horror haunted their once-shining eyes. Unlike me, they had not forgotten the torture they’d endured by their overlords. Nor forced themselves to like I had. Even as they sat, civil, even smiling at my nocs who shot them venomous looks, I could tell those scars would remain for a long time. Possibly forever.

This was another testament to my failure of leadership. I was too ashamed to meet their eyes after that.

“Master, I have so much to tell you,” Atlan began, and I shook my head sharply.

“Sun. Just call me Sun. Both of you,” I demanded.

He beamed, and so did Jia, though confusion colored their faces along with the ruby red of their flushed cheeks.

I wanted them to drop the formalities since I felt unworthy of the title. Master? What master was I?

The god stones glowed in my pocket, and I reached for them without a second thought. Hadi or Kiar, or maybe both, hissed in warning, but I showed them to my friends. I needed to regain their trust fully. I expected shock, I expected to have to explain everything and how my world had collapsed on the mountaintop.

But their eyes were dead, lips pressed in thin, hard lines even as a trickle of wonder sparked from beholding the moonstone we fought so hard to recover and the sunstone we’d fought so hard to protect. I flinched because they knew.

Somehow, they knew of Gaulu’s betrayal. The secret of the noc creation. Everything. They didn’t have to say anything for me to realize they knew.

How?

My silent question went unanswered as Atlan burst, pressing his forehead to mine and then his lip to my ear. Growls, hisses, clicking, and the screech of claws on bark filled the air, followed by Zihan’s warning growl. But I ignored them all.

Atlan wasn’t flirting, the jealous fools. He was speaking in rushed whispers, too fast, too many, like a torrent turning into a tidal wave and finally transforming into a tsunami of information about everything that had happened to them until now.

Of escaping and confronting a pack of pantheras. Of waking in a strange mountainous village, they had mistaken as Jade Moon. Of capture, reimprisonment, and finally, freedom among nocs who lived with humans! And finally he spoke of a name that I hadn’t heard since my imprisonment. One I hadn’t given any serious consideration.

“You have to speak to General Hideyoshi. He will help you!” Atlan finished.

“General Hideyoshi will help me?” I repeated incredulously as Atlan nodded his head so hard he knocked his top knot out of its crude tie, his hair tumbling down to his mid-back.

My eyes widened in shock. How had their hair grown so long while their bodies remained malnourished and frail under the heavy, downy fur they wore?

“Hewillhelp you! Here!” he offered me some food from his backpack and a spare pair of boots that would be pure bliss on my raw sandaled feet. I also spotted the beginnings of crude weapons needing more sharpening within the lifesaving bag.

“Food and weapons. We meant to take it north, to help Tao, and then free the others at Black Lantern Prison. We’d take Jiaas far as we could, then split off but… This changes everything. You need it more.”

“Hold on!” I grumbled. “Why would the general help me?”

“You hold the godstones! Even without seeing them, we forgave you once we learned the truth. I–” he choked, a fierce blush painting his face pink.

I’d nearly forgotten being caught in such a compromising position with Kiar, Bracken, and Clem and blushed profusely in return.

“He has always been your supporter, and anyway, even Jia came around. And there are whispers, rumors that made it up the mountain that you control the king of nocs!” Atlan said, and Hadi growled as he tried to tuck his large body against my other side possessively. “That alone deserves an audience with the general, don’t you think?”

“I supposed it does,” I said, my mind reeling with this glimmer of hope, a new way forward.

Then, in a soft voice, Jia spoke slowly.

“Atlan must’ve told you my former cellmate, Sai, is dead. He was killed during the escape. Tao… I need to get him to a doctor far away, or I’d join you all to slaughter Gaulu, the traitor! There is a woman in the noc village who has patched him up the best she could, that child’s mother—ahumanmother, Sun. There’s too much even to begin to explain the horror of that. How astonished I had been.”

She drifted off, leaning into me, and I instinctively threw an arm around her shoulders. We huddled together, Atlan wrapped in his leopard, and I barely grasped her referring to a child who wasn’t there.

No matter,I thought. Nothing else mattered but this moment, the haunting words flowing from her chapped lips stunted by hiccups.

“Either way, I need medicine, and we cannot find it up there. Atlan, Krish, and I decided to escape, and only Zihan followed to protect us. But then he heard something, something worse than the lion butchered on the ground. A mighty swarm, and he smelled you, Sun! We tried to teach him your scent so that if one day we reunited… Forgive me. I did not know; my eyes were closed and my heart hard when I rejected you, dear leader,” Jia finished, finally allowing her tears to flow.

“Who is Krish?” I asked, the onslaught of new names and faces dizzying.

As if on cue, a mountain of a man came barreling through the forest. I was too numb then to flinch, but my harem closed in on us even and Zihan growled, fur-raising, daring him to cross over to our side.

---