The Amulet Of Nicmir (The Scripts Of Neptune, Book 1)

Chapter 31

Even stuck in his drunken, delirious distortion of reality, Nyle felt a pang of cold warning when he saw Silas's face emerge from beneath the hood. He felt Lillian's fear in the way she stiffened against him, her shoulders tensing and the arm wound around his waist going rigid.

Having her pressed so close was blessedly distracting. She was all soft curves and warmth fitting against his shivering coldness. He could smell the cinnamon from whatever soap she'd used in her hair whenever he moved his head, and the warmth of her body was a shield against the feverish chill that crept through him from the inside out.

She was warm. She smelled like home. This whole flogging business wasn't so bad if it resulted in this, was it?

Lillian's arm shifted as she took a step back, and he bit his tongue and cursed his hazy state of mind at the jolt of clarity the pain brought. "Don't do that again," he rasped out.

The only response he got was silence. A really awfully long bout of silence, too. Lillian stood and stared at Silas, frozen in her tracks, and Silas stood and stared at her, his eyes dancing with a cruel light.

And then his face rippled strangely. Nyle was grudgingly ready to admit to himself that he was indeed delirious enough to hallucinate when Lillian's eyes widened as it happened again.

Silas's features warped unnaturally, his whole face changing, his leather armor turning to long grey robes. White-blond hair twisted back in a topknot shone pale and ghostly in the moonlight, and cold, light eyes twinkled like ice under starlight above sharp cheekbones and a straight nose.

That face. That face was terribly, terribly familiar. But the name and the place slipped out of Nyle's mental grasp as a wave of chilling tremors ran down his spine.

"Who are you?" Lillian managed, her voice choked in fear. "What are you?"

The man who had been Silas let his slender lips curve up in a scimitar smirk. "Perhaps you should ask your friend. He should aptly remember me. I certainly remember him."

When those cold eyes lighted on him, Nyle went rigid. Old memories, painful recollections, flooded his mind so quickly it nearly left him gasping for air.

And suddenly, he wasn't an injured, drunken boy fighting for his life anymore. He was seven, standing in a stilted house overlooking the fields of seagrass and the ocean, scared silent because his parents wouldn't wake up. There was a man there, a man with cold, pale eyes and long robes. A man who'd watched him thoughtfully for a moment, indecision warring in the depths of his gaze. And then he'd vanished. And Nyle had run.

"Naru," he whispered, his throat strangling the name.

There was that scimitar smirk again, and the twinkle of twisted amusement in those glacial eyes. "Indeed." His slender hands disappeared into his robes, reemerging with knives that caught the moonlight and sent reflections fleeing the way Nyle wanted to. "I wondered if we might meet again."

"What happened to Silas?" Lillian asked. Her voice was far more measured and calm than it had been a moment ago. "Not that I'd prefer a tradeoff," she added under her breath.

"If you knew this man as I do, you would," Nyle murmured as best he could as another wave of needle-like agony washed through his wounds.

"Oh, Silas died many years ago," Naru stated with a dismissing flick of his dagger, "but the king never knew of his illness. I was sent by Agnir to infiltrate the castle as best I could at the time." He shrugged. "I saw an opportunity, and I took it."

Lillian narrowed her eyes. "Why are you telling us so much? We're your enemies."

Naru's head tilted to one side. "Are you? Or are you Agnir's? In any case, I have been assigned a task by our beloved Serpentine ruler. And that," he purred dangerously, taking a step forward, like a tiger stalking its prey, "is to eliminate the future queen of the Nemaru. And I can't say your dear blond companion will be with us much longer either, by the look of him, so really, I've been talking to corpses about insignificant things. You see? There is no damage done."