Page 46 of Flamesworn

“Maybe they’ll kill more children for you,” the Beast said, “or teach you how not to drive your horses into a death trap—” He grit his teeth as they pulled hard on his collar, and Ares moved closer, watching the blood drip down the Beast’s chest.

“Can you do that?” Kataida whispered. “Possess someone?”

“Oh, no. They’re bleeding him for nothing.” Ares moved in front of the Beast, ignoring the man who worked a knife into the Beast’s flesh. They lay a hand on his jaw, and for a second, his gaze passed over theirs.

“Gods,” Kataida whispered. “His face.”

Ares examined the Beast’s face. It was scarred, like the rest of him, weathered and a bit too wan for an Arkoudai, as though he’d spent most of his time indoors. But therewassomething odd about his face—something familiar.

“I can feel his spirit,” they said to Kataida. “He doesn’t want me. He would reject me even if I could possess him.” They dropped their hand, and some of the tension left the kneeling man before them, as though he could sense their presence.

“Ares.” Kataida’s voice was tight with panic, a tone Ares had never heard before. They turned just as the Beast let out a sharp sound of pain, and the hooded figures around them started to chant. Kataida grabbed both their hands. “We need to go back. We need to go back now.”

Ares thought of their bodies, still safe and warm in Kataida’s tent, and willed them both back over the sands of Arktos’ desert. They appeared in their body again with a gasp, and fellto the side in the tent as Kataida stood, no longer wearing her borrowed robes.

“What is it?” Ares asked. “If you’re worried that the Beast isn’t loyal, I don’t think that’ll be an issue for long. They’ll probably kill him when the ritual goes wr?—”

“We can’t let them,” Kataida said. She was moving quickly, throwing on her uniform with shaking hands. “You can’t physically take me back there?”

“I don’t think I can without killing you.”

Kataida cursed under her breath. “Ares, I know why the Beast turned away when he found out who I was, why he said that about honoring Arktos.To honor Arktos in word and action.Those are the words the Strategos says when they come to power.”

Ares blinked at her, not understanding. “And?”

“Why do you think he wore a mask in battle?” Kataida asked. She buttoned up her shirt and lunged for her boots. “To hide his face.”

“Well, yes.”

“His face that looks like myfather’s,” Kataida snapped. “I knew the moment I saw him. They said he’d been with them for thirty-one years, Ares. Thirty-one years ago, my father’s older brother fell in a ruin and never came back. Except he did come back.” She gestured toward the Needle, the battleground where pyres still burned for the dead. “The Beast is Damian Akti, my uncle. If what we saw just now was real, then we need to do something about it before we’re too late.”

Chapter

Eleven

Kataida could feelAres behind her as she walked quickly toward the Strategos’ tent, her mind racing, her heart beating so fast that it felt like it would burst from her chest. She couldn’t get the Beast’s face out of her mind–the fact that looked so much like her own, but so much more like herfather’s, his big brother thought lost for three decades and instead, he’d been alive as Evander has ruled as Strategos in his place, completely unaware.

She pushed the thought from her head as best she could, needed to stay in control and not lose herself to the panic threatening to drag her under. A civil war, a returned long-lost uncle forced to fight for the enemy, not to mentionElena,fuck, someone had been–

The panic came again, and this time, it took considerably more of an effort to push it down. She turned to look at Ares over her shoulder. They were walking quickly, eyes burning and unblinking, fixed on her as usual. She was overcome with a sudden desire to dig her nails into Ares’ skin, their arm, their back, anywhere she could make thembleed. They would let her, she knew, kneel at her feet and stare adoringly while she hurtthem. But then she remembered Ares in her bed, the look on their face as they were summoned, being pulled to and fro like some wandering, unmoored ghost with no ability to agree or disagree. Ares liked it when she hurt them, she knew that, but they weren’t a scratching post, and she wasn’t a cat.

Later, after she’d told her father, she’d indulge her sadism. For now, she needed to clear her head and get ready for what was going to be the single most difficult conversation she’d ever had with her father, and that was saying something for a woman who’d showed up for dinner with agod.

Ares was quiet as they walked, at her side now, and their presence was reassuring even without her hurting them. There was too much at stake here to think about how she loved them, but the knowledge was there, a soft glow that surprised her with its gentle warmth, given how her love for Ares was so tied up in pain. “Will he want to go and get him back, do you think?”

She startled at the question as they ducked around the mess tent. “Of course he will. Why wouldn’t he?” She stopped, momentarily distracted by the question. “He didn’t want to be there, you saw that. He refused to hurt me or Theron just because we looked like my father, and he didn’t even know my name.”

Ares leaned in, a curtain of white, flame-tipped hair falling between them. “It does something to you, being kept like that, chained and left in the dark, waiting for nothing but the battle to come. Soldiers go mad with it.”

She remembered Ares sleeping in the tomb, and touched their shoulder. “And you’re better, aren’t you, because you’re not there anymore? Because you found your family?”And me?

Ares nodded, and Kataida touched their jaw, felt the too-warm skin on her fingertips. “But I didn’t mean just me. I’ve seen it before. Long ago, even before the empire that spawned my brother Azaiah’s lover, there were older armies, older ways ofmaking soldiers fight their wars. Those armies thought that the best way to win was to fight with soldiers who were more beast than human.”

She forgot, sometimes, how Ares had been around for so very, very long, even longer than Azaiah. They seemed to be so much of the present, which she supposed made sense for a deity who came into being out of immediate necessity. She remembered Theron asking Stavros if he could smoke, the way his hands had shaken. That was one battle for a soldier raised his entire life to take up arms and defend Arktos. What would being unwillingly chained in a cave for three decades do to someone’s mind?

“You’re saying he might not be–mentally sound,” she said, carefully. “He might have gone insane from the captivity, like a dog you keep in a kennel and never let outside, so it bites you the minute you do.”

Ares nodded. “Yes. Like that.”

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