Page 28 of Tomb of Ancients
“How is your hand?” he asked. “Do you need more of the draft?”
I showed him my palm, now almost completely healed, a few curls of dry black skin flaking off and falling to the floor. At the safe house, he had mixed me a concoction I had sampled before, when Giles St. Giles and Mary had tried to calm me after I’d been attacked on the road to Derridon. It was a magical tea, deliciously sweet, and it soothed the mind and encouraged healing.
“It only itches now,” I told him. As it had before, the illegible markings on my hand seemed to shift. “What does it look like to you?”
The more he practiced his English, the more he used it withme, though frequently he slipped in and out of languages, often reverting to his native tongue when he was at a loss for the word in English. “Eyou-ra.”
The language of hounds.
“But I know that is not possible,” Khent added with a twist of a smirk. “There is no written way to communicate such things.”
“So... like a howl? It looks like a howl to you?” I asked, matching his smile.
His lavender eyes, however, lost a bit of their sparkle. “Not... No. No, it looks like the sound of a wounded animal.”
“Fitting,” I muttered. “It looks like gibberish to me.”
“You will forgive me for saying so,eyteht, but it unnerves me to see it. I wish I could forget the words you screamed that day, and the helplessness I felt while that woman poked and prodded you. Well I know that sting, but I asked for it—you did not.” Then he gasped and covered his mouth with both hands, snorting. “Oh. But that pet name is irksome. I’ll do better.”
Sleepy, I leaned my head against my arm and the window, watching the rain-soaked countryside fly by. “Maybe it’s growing on me.”
His thick brows lifted at that, his head tilting in an indelibly hound-like manner. It was a question and a look of interest in one.
“When this is all over, I will take you to a party. A real party. With scorpions and music that does not put you to sleep. Just the two of us, mm?”
“No, Khent. My heart is as fractured as my mind. Who would want that?” I sighed.
He shrugged, apparently unoffended, snuggling down into his plaid woolens. “Someone who sees that even scars can be beautiful.”
“Aren’t we just maudlin,” I teased, bracing as the carriage rocked sharply, something going hard under the wheel. No, not something on the road, the road itself. It wasshaking. “What on earth...”
We had escaped London by night, unseen, and we had made four stops on the journey without event. But the thunder shaking the ground was nothing natural; it had the rhythmic, four-part cadence of a beast running at a gallop. The carriage jerked hard to the left, waking Mary, who tumbled against me with a shriek.
“What the hell is that!?” I heard Fathom scream through the window.
Khent reacted the quickest, shooting out of his seat and slamming down the window. Sticking his head outside, he twisted, then pulled himself back inside. Mother lifted her veil, her eight eyes blinking rapidly with sleep, before she peered outside, mildly, as if this were no surprise at all. Her lips tightened with disdain, the first time I had seen her look anything but contented.
“The shepherd does not want us to reach him,” Motherobserved through clenched teeth. “And he has sent a terror to do his work.”
The other carriage dropped back alongside us, and a rock hit the window next to Mother. Mary quickly lowered the window, just enough to hear Dalton as he shouted across at us, his hair wet with rain as we sped down the road, the carriages shaking and jumping.
“It’s a Tarasque,” he cried. “We might outrun it. Coldthistle is but six miles down the lane!”
“And then what?” Mary wailed, stricken. “We’re leading that thing to our friends!”
“Mother! Can you not do something? Appeal to its... its...”
“It’s coming closer!” Khent kicked open the carriage door. The horses up front whickered and bucked, gravel and rain spraying our feet. “I want to get a better look.”
And with that, he climbed out and onto the roof, the heavy tread of his boots thumping above our heads an instant later. Mother shook her head, opening her hands to me with a soft sound of regret.
“I cannot harm this creature, child. It cannot hear reason as a human might, and bloodshed is not my way,” she said.
“I can try to lead it away,” Dalton screamed from the other carriage, banging on the door to get Niles’s attention up front. “We’re lighter and faster, perhaps we can be a distraction!”
“And then what!?” I heard Fathom shoot back from the driver’s box.
She was right. Simply outrunning it was not enough. Eventually—soon, in fact—we would reach Coldthistle House, and with no word from Wings, we had no guarantee that its inhabitants were in a state to be of any use. My heart raced. I hadn’t yet even seen the thing, but I could hear it shaking the ground as if a herd of giants pursued us across the moors.
