Phoenix Unbound Page 2

  Boot heels scraped across the dirt, and the Gladius Prime made his appearance. He bent to avoid hitting the lintel and entered the chamber. Stifled gasps from the women and bows from the men greeted him—this slave who commanded the deference reserved for kings.

  He’d changed little since she’d seen him the previous year. A tall, solidly built man with wide shoulders and long, muscled arms, he exuded a presence that diminished the men around him. He was disarmed now, but she had no doubt he could kill as easily with his bare hands as he did with the weapons he carried into the arena.

  His dark hair was shorter than she remembered, resting on his shoulders in sweat-dampened tendrils. She refused to look at him directly, choosing instead to watch him from the corner of her eye. She’d met his gaze before and regretted it.

  He was handsome, with the high cheekbones and light eyes characteristic of the nomadic clans that roamed the Stara Dragana. The cold expression he leveled on the room’s occupants turned his green eyes flinty. Gilene hunched her shoulders and tucked herself as far back from the line as her chains allowed.

  One of the gladiators broke the expectant silence. “Was it a good fight, Azarion?”

  Azarion glanced at him before returning his attention to the women. “Aye. Damiano fought well and died honorably.”

  Gilene shuddered. She’d forgotten his voice. Low and gruff, it carried to all corners, challenging, as if he dared anyone to make light of his victory or the death of the man he’d fought.

  Hanimus tapped him on the arm. “We’ve been waiting for you. Best make your choice quick before Herself calls for you.”

  Azarion slowly moved down the line, and Gilene’s heart joined her stomach in trying to squeeze itself into a corner of her rib cage. He paused before each woman, staring at her with a prolonged gaze. Beside Gilene, chains clanked as Pell patted down the snarled mess of her hair and adopted a pose to show off her attributes.

  Gilene clenched her hands in her skirts, trying not to panic. Surely, he couldn’t recognize her. She’d returned to the capital time and again with a different face. Her skills with illusion were as refined as they were with fire. The slavers never knew they brought the same woman from Beroe to Kraelag year after year. No slave fighter from the Stara Dragana should have the talent to see past her veil of enchantment.

  Fear coated her tongue at a memory from the previous year. Azarion’s green gaze had locked on her and narrowed. Neither lustful nor leering, he’d stared at her for several moments as if seeing not a freckled redhead with wild, frizzy hair, but her true self: a plain, dark-eyed brunette.

  “Do not know me,” she muttered under her breath. It wasn’t a prayer. She’d ceased believing in gods long ago. Still, she chanted the plea silently. Her heart slammed against her breastbone when he halted in front of her.

  Do not know me.

  This year she was round-faced and cross-eyed, with lank brown hair and sunburned skin. She’d bound her breasts and wore layers of sweltering wool to mask her shape.

  Do not know me.

  The prayer that was not a prayer pounded in her head, and she swallowed a whimper when he lifted her chin with one finger. Her gaze slid past his face to a dent on the pauldron protecting his shoulder.

  “Look at me.” His deep voice, so quiet, carried the resonant command of a general.

  She refused to take her eyes off the dent.

  “Look at me,” he repeated in the same tone. His fingers curled around her jaw and pressed. She dragged her gaze to his, the drumming of her heartbeat making her chest hurt. He leaned closer, gripping her chin even harder to keep her still, eyes blazing in triumph.

  “I know you,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Azarion peered through the small barred window of his cell door and waited impatiently for the guards to deliver his companion for the evening. A decade of slavery, of fighting, killing, and biding his time had finally paid off. Skilled though he was, Damiano hadn’t stood a chance against him in the Pit, not when the prospect of freedom awaited him in the dank catacombs below the arena. The emperor and empress had been disappointed by the speed with which he dispatched his opponent, but the crowd roared its approval and chanted his name to thunderous applause.

  He’d offered up a silent prayer to the goddesses for the fallen gladiator before striding from the Pit to the catacombs. The familiar pungency of manure and animals, of mold and stagnant water, was nearly overwhelmed by the stench of the unwashed guards who followed him to the common room where Hanimus waited with the unfortunate women chosen as this year’s Flowers of Spring.

  Not until he spotted the tall, plain creature among the dejected row of victims did he realize how hard his heart pounded in both anticipation and the fear she might not return this year. He shouldn’t have worried. She returned to Kraelag every year to face the fires. A different face, a different body, the same dogged perseverance.

  Azarion didn’t know why she subjected herself to the Rites time and again, or why he saw through her spells when others didn’t. At this moment, he didn’t care. She was the key to his escape.

  Footsteps sounded from the main corridor leading to the barracks, one heavy-footed, the other light and hesitant. A voice bellowed its presence. “I’ve brought Azarion’s bit o’ cunt. Unlock his door.”

  The guard stationed near Azarion’s cell answered, scorn dripping from his words. “This is her? Not much to look at. Slim pickings from this year’s crop of kindling?”

  “Nay, plenty of fine pieces to choose from. You never know with these savages. I hear they fuck their own mares, even when their women aren’t scarce.”

  “The mares probably aren’t as ugly.”

  The two men shared a round of smirking laughter. Azarion waited, ignoring their insults, his gaze trained on the flickering shades of torchlight in the corridor.

  During the first years of his captivity, he would have charged the door, determined to rip the guts out of the men who insulted him and his people. Now, their words were nothing more than a fly’s annoying buzz. The slight shadow that glided along the curving wall and finally solidified into the mousy woman who’d first refused to look at him, and then gaped at him in horror, interested him far more than they did.

  She stood next to her escort, hands clasped in front of her, shoulders slumped and head bowed. He wondered how long she’d maintain such a demeanor once he revealed his knowledge of her deception and how he intended to use it. He stepped away from the door and leaned against the far wall, arms crossed. The guard’s warning to move back was unnecessary. They’d done this many times. Keys jangled on their metal ring, and the lock ground until it released on a snap. The door opened, revealing the two guards, one holding a loaded crossbow aimed at Azarion’s chest, the other gripping the woman’s arm.

  The second guard leered at Azarion. “Best make it a quick tup, bull. Rumor has it Herself will be wanting you tonight and soon.”

  He shoved the woman into the cell and slammed the door behind him. The guard with the crossbow flashed him a grin through the bars and turned the lock before disappearing from view.

  Azarion contemplated his new cellmate, seeing what the guards didn’t—an unsteady shimmer surrounding her, like rain spilling over the surface of a polished shield. It blurred and wavered, finally fading under his continued scrutiny until her true self was unmasked.

  She wasted no time assuming her role. Nimble fingers worked the ties at her high collar, loosening them so that the outer tunic gaped to expose more layers of cloth, and below those, a threadbare shift. The single candle in the cell flickered over waxen skin and the slight curve of her breasts above her binding as she lowered the garment from her shoulders.

  He came away from the wall, darkly amused at her stoic manner. She might be selling him chicken feed for all the eagerness and interest she showed in bedding him. He expected nothing different. She
wasn’t here of her own accord, and she’d done this before. He recognized the behavior, had acted in the same manner in similar circumstances. When the struggle only pleased the torturer and made the torture worse, you stopped fighting and learned to endure. To endure was to survive.

  He halted her before the shift drooped lower. “Don’t bother,” he said softly. “You heard the guard. The empress will send for me soon, and I want you for something other than fucking.”

  Her gaze flashed up to his, and he was struck by the guarded hostility in her eyes. Ah, it was as he thought. She was suspicious and feared him for far more than the threat of physical abuse.

  “How many years have you burned at the Rites of Spring?”

  It was the nature of people to look away when they lied, but this woman’s eyes remained steadfast. “I don’t understand.”

  She possessed a lyrical voice, her accent almost aristocratic.

  He closed the space between them. Her breath hitched, and she went rigid, though she didn’t give ground at his approach. Despite its lank appearance, her hair drifted thick and soft through his fingers as he lifted it away from her neck. “Your hair is black, your eyes are brown, and you aren’t as well-fed as these clothes make you look.”

  He stood close enough to feel her limbs quake. Before she could escape, he imprisoned her wrist and raised her hand. Under the illusion, her palm was smooth and pudgy, the hand of a merchant’s pampered daughter perhaps. To his eyes, it was slim and work-roughened, and bore a telltale color. “You have green hands, woman. Stained by the sap of the long nettle. I’d wager a herd of breeding mares you’re a Beroe dyer.”

  He’d never seen the village of Beroe itself, but it was common knowledge the popular green dye used to color the rugs and clothing of wealthy Kraelians was made there.

  A whimper escaped his companion. She closed her eyes, her arm suddenly limp in his grip. He released her and stepped back. He had her. It was time to bargain. An uncomfortable twinge settled under his ribs when she opened her eyes once more and gave him a bleak stare.

  “How can you see this?” Her voice had flattened to a dull monotone.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I only see it with you. I’ve watched you for five years. Each year the same woman with many faces walks to the pyre, is burned in the arena, and walks away untouched by the flame, with none the wiser. My people would call you an agacin, spirit of the goddess Agna made flesh.”

  Desolation turned to desperation. She clutched his arm. “Please, I beg you. Have mercy. Say nothing. Other lives depend on this deception.” He stared at her, then at the hand gripping his arm, letting his silence play out. It unnerved her as he had hoped. She dropped her hand in favor of curling it into a fist. “I have nothing to offer for your silence.” She admitted this failure between clenched teeth.

  “You can give me my freedom.”

  Her jaw sagged, disbelief lifting her eyebrows. “What?”

  Again, he’d shocked her. “You can change faces.”

  “Yes.” The guarded look masked her features once more.

  “Tomorrow, after the burning, you’ll come back to the catacombs as Hanimus and unlock my cell door.”

  She gave a croak of laughter. “You are mad. We’ll be discovered. They’ll kill us both before you can step outside this cell.”

  He hadn’t survived ten years and the savagery of the arena to die in the dark at the hands of guards no more intelligent than their own shit. Death wasn’t an option. Not now. But she didn’t need to know that. “Better dead than held here any longer.”

  “Good for you,” she snapped before lowering her voice. “I don’t have that choice. I can’t die. Not yet. Beroe depends on me, on this lie. Find another to help you. I help enough already.” Bitterness poisoned each word.

  “There is no other. You’ll do this.” He’d expected her resistance and planned for it.

  Her face hardened. Finely cut cheekbones stood out, and though shorter than he was, she managed to stare down her nose at him as if he were one of the filthy puddles dotting the floors.

  A subtle shift in the air lifted the hairs on his nape, and he straightened, arms hanging loose at his sides. This woman was no match for his prowess. Still, that inner alarm put him on guard, growing louder when she lifted her hands, palms cupped. Within the cages of her fingers, a blue-tinged flame burned brightly.

  She was indeed an agacin—a fire priestess—and watched him with an imperious disdain worthy of the goddess who bequeathed her such power. “I’m not only safe from fire, gladiator,” she said, her fury as hot as the fire she held. “I can burn you to ash where you stand.”

  Azarion laughed aloud. No helpless martyr here. She was as fierce and stubborn as any Savatar woman. Her initial passivity was no more real than the illusion of her crossed eyes or plump body. His admiration for her grew, as did his sense of purpose. She’d help him or he’d kill her.

  Undeterred by her threat and the flames leaping in her hands, he stalked her until he backed her against the wall near his pallet. Her shallow breaths warmed his neck as he braced an arm on either side of her head and leaned closer to nuzzle her ear. Heat glazed his sides, warning that her fingers still blazed.

  She might be as fierce as a Savatar, but she lacked the honed instinct that signaled danger. This close and he could snap her neck before a single hot ember touched his skin.

  His mouth drifted lower until he reached her neck. She flinched when he grazed his teeth across the long vein below the skin and felt the heavy pulse of her blood surge under his lips. “Another knows your secret and will only keep it as long as I’m alive. Burn me,” he murmured, “and you seal your fate and the fate of Beroe.”

  His heart beat as hard as hers did as he waited to see whether she’d sniff out his lie and call his bluff.

  Rage bubbled in her voice, deepened it until she was almost growling. “It would be worth it.”

  She didn’t break easily. A woman who willingly suffered through the Rites of Spring each year for half a decade wouldn’t. Strands of her hair, fine as silk threads, tickled his nose. “Would it?” He drove the point home. “Do you want Beroe to become another Midrigar?”

  Midrigar. The township that once refused to tithe its women and grain to the Krael Empire and paid a terrible price. Even for those who thrived on watching the violence and bloodshed of the arena, the destruction of Midrigar was an abomination, its name spoken only in whispers.

  For a moment, the heat strengthened, searing his sides before disappearing altogether. A soft sob broke the tense silence as gladiator and witch stood together. To other eyes, it might seem as if they embraced, his face hidden in her neck, her hands now resting against his ribs.

  “You bastard,” she said in a defeated whisper.

  Azarion kept her trapped, determined to gain her cooperation and content to taste her skin. “What say you, Agacin? Help me and none will ever know the village of Beroe has made a fool of the Empire.”

  She leaned away from him so that her gaze met his, and in the dark depths of her eyes a calculating hatred settled. “What do I have to do?”

  Triumph nearly made his knees give way. The plan he had strategized for the last three years, with this agacin at its heart, had only a slim chance of working, but it was at least a chance. Without her consent, extorted via threat, it had no chance at all.

  He had only moments before the guards came for him, and he kept her trapped against the wall as he spoke, the wandering caress of his hand over her shoulder and breast in sharp contrast to his pragmatic instructions. Anyone watching might think the Gladius Prime wooed his plain companion to his bed.

  She listened with a close ear and barely checked anger. “It won’t work,” she muttered when he finished, and swatted his hand away from her hip.

  “It will.” He cupped her buttock to pull her into him and buried his nose in her hair
. “It must.”

  The clatter of keys and a thump on the cell door signaled visitors. He kept his back to the door, but the girl’s face had gone a sickly pale shade as she stared past his shoulder at the barred window. Azarion casually turned to find a face leering at them.

  “Time’s up, bull. If you haven’t tupped the bitch yet, it’ll have to wait. Herself is wanting you. Now.”

  The agacin retreated to a corner as far from him and the guards as she could get. She busied herself with righting her tunic and retying the laces.

  The guard gave Azarion a puzzled look. “I saw this year’s offerings. You could have done much better than her.”

  Azarion didn’t reply. He almost never spoke to the guards, and they had learned long ago he was far too dangerous to tease without risk. He kept his attention on the second guard, who trained the crossbow on him and held the hated shackles.

  That first guard motioned him forward. Azarion held still as the iron collar encircled his neck, growing heavier—tighter—when the guard snapped it closed. A length of chain hung from the iron ring bolted at its center, the links kept short so that he was forced to hunch when the guard attached it to the chain connecting the shackles that bound his wrists and the ones that gripped his ankles. Trussed in irons, he shuffled after his escort as they led him through the door and into the corridor—a broken beast of burden. It was how the empress liked to see him when he first entered her apartments.

  He sighed inwardly when no cup of drugged wine was forthcoming. It seemed the empress hadn’t yet had her bloodlust appeased, even after witnessing a full day of slaughter in the arena. He wondered whom he’d be forced to fight and kill for her pleasure before she bedded him.

  And kill he would. Again and again. With his freedom at the tips of his fingers, he’d do whatever it took to stay alive and fulfill that dream. He glanced at the agacin huddled against the wall. She stared at him, eyes wide. Frightened. Hostile.