Leoht (BloodRunes: Book 3) (9 page)

Forcibly putting the issue out of her mind,
she concentrated on the task at hand. Once she bartered for the
supplies she guessed she would need to begin her long journey since
the townspeople were no help in that regard, she set out for the
border to the north. She followed the stars and Gryffon’s loose
directions how to avoid the harshest passages to come to an area
that should lead her over the mountains and into the Ferryn
Plains.

It turned out to be fairly easy to find the
trail that he had advised her to use, as most of the mountainous
border was impassible. She followed its edge for some time before
coming to the area that he had mentioned. It had been cleared of
foliage at one point, though it seemed to be neglected and misused
these days. Very few, if any, travelers had any need to go into the
Ferryn Plains. There were those who braved its dangers to collect a
few of the rare plants that grew there, or to use the sand, but
mostly it was a forgotten place. No one wanted to think of the
dangers that lived there. In Gelendan and Treymayne alike it
seemed, they agreed that the Ferryn Plains were not a place to go
to.

Katya set up camp at the bottom of the far
side of the mountain, just within the forested area of the pass,
before venturing out cautiously into the plains. The vegetation
slowly tapered off, leaving only sandy grasses and sunshine.
Strange insects scuttled around at her feet, their menacing stance
making her avoid their dangerous looking stinger tails. Katya
marveled at the abrupt change in climate. There were few animals
present, mostly snakes and lizards, but Katya sensed more than
these lurking somewhere. Where these beings were was a mystery, and
one that gave Katya pause.

The sand whipped across her face and the hot
sun beat down on her, making her yearn for water before she was
more than a few hours into her search. The plains were more a
mixture of plain and desert, with a spattering of outcroppings of
rock here and there. She came across a rather large cave in one of
the outcroppings that gave her some clue as to where her sense of
large animals may be coming from. She wisely decided not to venture
inside there.

Days into her journey, she was still no
closer to determining which direction might bring her to Nuko’s
prison and she was getting rather discouraged. She had expected
that once she was here, she would get some sort of feeling of what
to do, or that Layna and Gryffon would have contacted her with more
information. She went to sleep that night no closer to a decision,
and found herself tossing and turning before finally settling into
an uneasy sleep.

Almost instantly it seemed she entered into a
dream. There were eyes on her, eyes that she recognized, and she
found herself smiling.

“
Who are you?” she asked, her voice
tinkling in the emptiness.

“
The King, and the dragon.” His voice
seemed to boom and bounce off unseen walls.

“
I know what you are, but who are
you?”

The eyes closed for a moment, taking more
than that to focus back on her again, before answering, “Just
Nathair.”

“
I like that.”

There was a silence for a time, and Katya
reveled in it. The space between them felt nonexistent and she felt
content with the world. No problems could intrude on this
moment.

“
What are you doing?” the musical voice
asked.

Katya told him everything.

CHAPTER 5

Ranis approached the inn and stepped inside,
drawing back the hood to her cloak. She had been careful to mask
herself with an illusion and therefore was not concerned about
being seen. Her eyes searched the patrons and spotted the two she
was looking for at a table in the back, talking quietly to one
another.

Ranis smiled as she neared, she could hear
Jezebel’s high-pitched whining over having not been able to open
any of the books. They had been allowed to access three of them so
far, but their locks remained sealed, and would remain that way
until Ranis decided otherwise. As Jezebel was no doubt realizing,
they were impenetrable without the correct keys.

“May I sit with you a moment?” she asked,
stopping at the end of their table.

“We’re in the middle of a private
conversation,” Jezebel told her rudely.

Ranis sat down.

The woman scowled at her, “Did you not hear
what I just said?”

“I heard it,” Ranis replied smoothly, not in
the least bit ruffled by the woman’s superior and huffy tone, “I
also heard much of the rest of the ‘private conversation’ you were
practically shouting across the room.”

Jezebel’s mouth opened and shut and she
glared at the woman. “What do you want?”

“I can help you with the little ‘issue’
you’re having.”

“Oh? And what will this help cost me?”

“Only your sworn word that you will use the
knowledge to track down and kill the girl Layna Nyx.”

Jezebel choked on the wine she was
practically inhaling at that moment. “What?”

Ranis smiled. “You know who I mean. I want
her dead. Yesterday. If you will give me your word that the
knowledge contained in these books will be solely used for her
extermination and that you will do so immediately without getting
side-tracked onto revenge on the King or anything else,” Ranis
pulled out a small key from her cloak and held it tantalizingly in
front of the woman, “I will give you this.” Ranis’s eyes flicked
over to Devon who was looking much more suspicious than was
Jezebel. Her eyes were glued to the key with greedy determination,
and she reached out her hand towards it.

It disappeared back into Ranis’s robe as
quickly as it had appeared. “Do we have a deal?” Devon started to
open his mouth to caution the woman and Ranis sent a silent command
for his silence. He opened and shut his mouth a few times but no
sound came out and he looked over at her with wide eyes. Ranis slid
her gaze back to Jezebel.

“I give you my word,” Jezebel said the words
though it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that she didn’t
mean it for a second. Ranis ‘tossed’ the binding spell around her,
it wouldn’t matter what her original intentions had been regarding
breaking her promise, the spell would hold her to it.

“Good, that’s settled,” Ranis rose from the
table and set the key down in front of Jezebel who grabbed it
up.

The rest of the books would be moved from
their current locations. Though the compulsion should keep Jezebel
busy trying to find the girl, Ranis wasn’t one to take any chances.
She wasn’t overly confident in Jezebel’s abilities, but her hatred
of the girl would fuel her search, and Ranis hoped that given the
past that the two had shared that Jezebel might be able to find
some clue as to her whereabouts that Ranis’s own people had
overlooked.

Their belated realization that the heir was
none other than Layna, the maid who Jezebel had decided she had a
vendetta against, had made their search into Treymayne for her
difficult. If only they had found out a few weeks earlier, she
would have been in Endlyfta and easy to dispose of. Unfortunately,
Layna had been involved in a poisoning attempt that through some
stroke of bad luck had not left her dead as would have been
extremely convenient, and was now somewhere traipsing around the
countryside. Damn that Gerald and Evelyn. As soon as the girl had
left them, they had moved to a whole new town, lying about where
they came from and telling those townspeople that they had no
children.

She put her hood back up around her face and
ducked through the throng of people. As she exited, she passed her
hand over the room. No one, not even Jezebel or Devon, would
remember she had ever been there.

*

Jezebel held the key in her hand with glee.
What luck to have found it here! She looked over at Devon who wore
a slightly glazed expression, probably overwhelmed by the amount of
power that the key she held in her hand would unlock. Forgetting
their dinner, Jezebel rose abruptly and practically ran back to her
room and dug out the books from their hiding spot. She took out the
first book they had found and inserted the key into the lock. It
slid in easily and clicked as she turned it, her hands nearly
shaking with excitement.

Devon entered the room behind her and she
waved for him to shut the door. She cracked open the tome and
started reading. She didn’t know how long she sat there staring
into the wealth of knowledge before her, but her subconscious
noticed Devon replace the candles several times as he sat patiently
watching her. Her eyes were beginning to blur from exhaustion.

As she flipped the page, she came across a
peculiar rune that tugged at a memory. She read the description out
loud, “Life-sucker.” She held it up for Devon to see, “Does this
mean anything to you?”

He seemed to shake himself awake from the
chair he had been dozing on and squinted at the page. After a
moment, he shook his head, “It doesn’t, but memorizing runes was
never my forte.” He gave her a roughish grin that made the edges of
her mouth want to stretch into a smile of their own, but she
repressed it.

“Hmm, it seems so familiar, but I can’t quite
place where I’ve seen it before.”

“Perhaps it was one of the runes that
appeared on the backs of the hounds? They were not always ones you
had meant to place on them were they?”

Jezebel pondered this. It was true, she had
been sadly misinformed when she had begun her adventure with the
hellhounds. Just from what she had read tonight, she felt as though
she could do it a hundred times better. It was possible that the
rune was just one that she’d seen appear on them. She shuddered and
decided she didn’t care enough to think about them to remember
where she’d seen it before.

She went back to her reading, but could not
hold her eyes open for much longer. Devon had already passed back
out on the chair, his head lolling sideways. She debated over
whether to wake him and send him back to his room or not, but
finally decided she was too tired to care and flopped into her bed
without even bothering to undress.

The next morning, Jezebel opened her eyes to
find Devon sitting up straight in the chair and staring at her.

“That’s very creepy,” she told him and rubbed
her tired eyes. “Fetch me that water basin.” He obliged, but didn’t
lose his odd look. She splashed her face with water and waved him
away. After a moment she asked irritably, “Well, what is it? Spit
it out.”

“Where exactly did we find the key?” he asked
her.

“What are you talking about?”

“The key to the books,” he repeated, “where
did we get it?”

Jezebel rubbed her back where it was sore
from having been hunched over the tomes for so long last night. “We
found it,” she wracked her brain for an exact location, but her
muddled thoughts couldn’t quite come up with it. Probably due to
the late night and the wine before doing all that reading. “Who
cares where, we have it now and that’s all that matters. And now,
we can use it to find that whore,” she smiled evilly, “and kill
her.”

“What about the King and taking back your
rightful place?”

He was starting to irritate her. “Why are you
still in my room? I need to clean up and get dressed so that I can
try out some of my new tricks.” When he didn’t move immediately,
she followed it up with a more direct order, “Get out.”

Once he and his nagging questions were gone,
Jezebel quickly bathed and dressed, moving the book she was
currently working on onto the table by the window where she could
read it in the sunlight. She dug out a bit of parchment and a pen
and jotted down notes here and there when she came across a
particularly useful passage. With all these nasty ways to kill
someone, she didn’t know how she was going to choose to end the
little whore.

First things first, though, she reminded
herself. Can’t kill her when I don’t know where she is. Last she’d
known, Gryffon and some other slut who had had the nerve to heal
the whore before she’d just died the first time were bringing her
to the source of the river to be ‘cured’. Jezebel laughed out loud.
Stupid peasants. Perhaps she should look for something to bring her
out of the coma first, the satisfaction of killing her wouldn’t be
nearly as good if she wasn’t aware of it.

A knock sounded at her door and Devon
identified himself. She called for him to enter. “Ah Devon, I’m
glad you’re here. I have an assignment for you.” He waited. “I want
you to go make contact with anyone you can get information out of
back at the palace and find out what they know about where the girl
and Gryffon are.”

“Anything else?”

“That will be all.” He nodded to her and
left.

She flipped back to the picture of the rune
that had been bothering her, and was suddenly drawn back into a
memory. She saw the rune being shaped slowly, growing darker and
darker while burning itself onto…Gryffon’s chest! Jezebel’s heart
raced with excitement. She had unknowingly put a life-sucker on
Gryffon? She laughed out loud. From what she had read, she could
drain every last drop of his life force through it! She had to find
out how. She paused, her finger ready above the first line in the
passage. But if she killed him, she wouldn’t be able to connect to
him anymore. And most likely he was still traveling with her
target, so maybe there was a way to use it to track them instead. A
little draining and pain here and there would be an added bonus,
and once she used him to find his whore, she’d drain him dry. Her
finger dipped the last inch onto the page and she started
reading.

What a lovely turn of events!

CHAPTER 6

“How do you know all this?” Layna asked
Aileen who had just filled them in on the details regarding the
sword, Leoht. Apparently forged specifically for killing the Dark
King, it also had many other magical properties that would help
them in ridding the world of the Bloodstone itself and Nuko’s body
- the source.