Destiny Unbonded

Chapter 5

He huffed. "I have no regard for what the Gods consider 'for our own good'. They hide something. I am sure of it!"

My gut reflexively twisted with his words, which went against everything I believed, or once did. But what if they were true?

Pointing ahead past his extended shadow, Cyril said, "Soon it will be dark. Let us make camp among those trees ahead."

I helped Kit prepare a simple meal of corncakes and salted meat over a fire while Cyril set snares along a sandstone bluff, hoping to catch rabbit for future meals. The tasks seemed second nature to them, as if they often traveled the Lands.

After supper, I rested on my bedroll with a pleasantly full stomach, lulled by the flickering fire and nearby trickling stream. I watched as Cyril laid two arrows on a blanket and removed the metal projectile points. Kit also watched, sitting upright while petting a contented burro who laid at her side. From a burlap bundle, Cyril took out two knapped obsidian points and attached one to a shaft, using sinew and melted pitch to bind it. The mirrored surfaces glimmered with reflected firelight.

"If I may ask," I said, "Why do you change metal to stone arrowheads?"

Before he formulated a response, I reached over and grasped a black point from his blanket. Pain! It felt like fire! A jolt shot up my arm, shaking my entire body, and I dropped the point in a clump of grass. But nothing else, not the grass, the blanket before, nor Cyril's hand when he retrieved the point, showed any distress from contact. Just as strange, it seemed to more injure the Moirai part of me than the human part.

I examined the burn mark on my palm, gritting my teeth at the continuing pain. My other hand touched my throat to a similar earlier injury, where Cyril had pressed the edge of an obsidian knife. Seeing my distress, he poured cool water on the burn, quenching the heat. Taking up my hand, he smeared on an ointment retrieved from the leather bag beside him. As a blacksmith, he knew how to treat a burn. Several marked his arms and hands.

"Thank you," I said, looking up into those deep eyes. The pain subsided, as much from the medicine as his closeness and gentle touch. "What are those stones that they would burn me?"

Cyril let go of my hand. "I was told they were infused with the Chaos."

My eyes widened. "But you touched them without injury. Why?"

Turning away, he sighed. "So am I."

I held my breath. He was the evil they taught me to fear, the enemy of men and Gods. But nothing about him seemed evil at all.

My Moirai senses tingled, interrupting the questions forming in my mind. I touched Cyril's arm and whispered. "Four men approach from upstream with dark hearts. I feel their threads."

In a flash of motion, Cyril grabbed two metal knives with triangular blades from his bag and jumped up. He signed something to his sister, causing her eyes to widen.

"Watch over Kit," he commanded me with an urgent whisper, then dashed out into the darkness. I extracted the glass long-knife from my shoulder bag, the one Athena had given me to slay Cyril, and crouched at her side. Having had no formal combat training, I hoped I would not have to use the weapon.

"Well, look here what the Gods provided," a voice cackled as four figures emerged from the darkness. "These two will be a suitable offering to Ares."

Another chuckled. "And to our purses."

I shuddered. An offering to Ares, the God of war, usually meant enslavement or death. I held up my knife in weak trembling defiance. That brought more snickers.