Obsidian: Retribution (Book 2)

Sixteen: In the Arms of the Beast

The young woman had blood on her hair, on her left cheek, on her dress. She looked seventeen or eighteen, innocent for the most part, roughened by labor for the rest. She brought to imagination a story of a village girl who grew up in a farm somewhere, raised normal by poor loving parents with rough hands, promised to the boy next door to be married young, to live out her unadventurous life living on her ordinary farm with an average husband and three laughing children. Maybe a dog or two.

She was about to be raped by ten bandits and taken along for the same purpose for the remaining duration of her life. It happened. The world made room for these things however well one's life had been planned. 'Life pities no one, Zahara,' her father had said. 'A deformed goat is eaten first because it should not breed, or else there will be only sick goats and none of them will survive. We cannot ask the world to favor the weak any more than we can ask the desert to produce water when we need it, but we can make the weak stronger to save them. If you want to save someone, my child, then first you must never break, under any circumstance, or you will save none.'

Under any circumstance. Zahara repeated those words in her mind, wrapping the cloak around her tighter as she watched the girl being dragged into the campground. The men tossed her in front of Qasim with the supplies they'd looted from the nearby farm. There was also a boy with her, maybe twelve or eleven. A younger brother, if she had to guess. The mother wasn't there and therefore was likely dead. But dead long ago or dead just now, she wasn't sure. Judging from how relaxed the men who returned appeared, Zahara thought it might be the latter.

They hadn't used the girl, not yet. She was considered tribute, a show of respect for the leader, a gift saved for Qasim to use first before turning over to his men to be distributed in equal shares. The brother they'd use for something else, labor perhaps, at least until the girl could no longer be used.

Next to her, Muradi was leaning against a rock near the fire, watching it all with the flat expression of a man who had seen and done it all and could no longer be stirred out of his elements. He was also exhausted, she could tell from the slumped shoulders and the faint, painful breathing. Qasim had moved them out of the cave and into the forest closer to the border villages of Samarra days ago, too early and a week too soon for Muradi's injuries. They needed supplies, Qasim had said. 'Yes, and we need a woman,' the men had agreed, eyeing her as they spoke.

And she could feel it––anyone could––the tightly knitted tension that accumulated day by day in that cave into something she knew would soon rip at the seams. She was the only woman among bandits who raped and pillaged as a profession, and together with Ranveer Borkhan receiving special treatments and being declared off limits after killing one of their comrades, the need for release of some kind could be read on their faces, in the twitch of their muscles, in the way they fidget every time she or Muradi was in sight.

Qasim knew it, so did Muradi who, in the past two days had refused to sleep, having sensed the breaking point nipping at their heels. He had been watching them all anxiously from a dark corner, studying the way they moved, counting their weapons, memorizing their habits like a chained up beast pacing behind bars making preparation for the day it got out of the cage. You wouldn't know it, not unless you were married to him for almost two decades, or if you were Ghaul or Jarem who had been by his side for longer. Muradi was a master performer. He could be the hero men needed to die fighting for, the cheater at dice and card games who never got caught, the irresponsible prince who drank one shot too many, all depending on what he needed at the time and by whom said need was to be fulfilled.

Here and now, he was Ranveer Borkhan, an unruly bandit so used to seeing rape and pillage that he seemed almost bored. But for all the reasons that told Zahara he must have gotten used to it by now, behind those hooded eyes of utter disinterest, she could sense a cold, cold anger rumbling inside of him. This was, lest one forgot, his territory, his people––people he had lived and killed to protect. However big a monster he was, however cruel he may seem, no one who had spent enough time with him could miss the love he harbored for his land.