*warning -- graphic nasty.
Iris rode alongside Hench and Kayde as they left the guardian sanctuary. Ever since they had gone to dinner a few nights ago, her mentor had been in a wonderful mood. She'd been smiling more than usual and showing a sense of camaraderie to Iris that seemed to strengthen the bond they already shared even further. It had been infectious joy. Until now. Now, Iris was sickened and awkward as she looked across the path at Kayde. He noticed, too, which only made it worse.
"Are you okay?" he mouthed to her as Hench trail-blazed about seven feet ahead of them on a stocky black stallion. Iris just looked hard at his face to find it full of concern.
"Fine," she answered. "I'm fine." She spoke the words aloud, but if Hench was listening, she didn't show it.
Kayde raised a brow. "Have I done something wrong, dear girl?" he asked.
"No," Iris answered, and it wasn't a lie. He'd done nothing wrong. He'd done everything right, and wasn't that some shit? Iris took in a sigh and turned her eyes ahead of her. She didn't see the path as she walked, but rather, seemed to look through everything. Instead, she saw that night in Wallfront. It played over in her head like a skit.
He loved you. That dangerous thought whispered through her mind. She shook her head, as if she could physically shake the memory from her mind. It hardly worked. What did work, was Hench. The woman finally looked back at the two of them for a minute and spoke. "There was a sighting of the baron's men in this area recently. We'll be meeting the rest of our small entourage in about an hour."
"The rest of our entourage?" Iris asked, completely pulled away from her previous thoughts. "More guardians?"
Hench sighed and stopped her horse completely. "No." She bucked it around. "Scouts. From the Eldian army. They're helping us, girl." She turned forward again, and gave that a second to sink in. "We'll need trackers. That's where we're getting them."
Iris took a second to swallow that information, while Kayde asked the questions. "Does the master know we're... collaborating?"
Hench sighed. "Why don't you ask him?" She turned a narrow eye over her shoulder, and there was a certain tartness to her voice that was hard to miss. "When we get back."
Kayde opened his mouth to say something else, but after a long moment of stunned silence , he closed it promptly and looked over at Iris. Iris just shrugged and gave him a sympathetic smile, almost as if to say I know how it feels. Hench was bristly no matter who spoke or how much she liked them. Kayde pursed his lips and grumbled something under his breath but otherwise offered no rebuttal.
There was nothing after that... just the heavy plodding of hooves against the ground. Iris hummed to herself to break up the monotony of the ride. Every so often, she'd exchange glances with Kayde, who offered up small gestures and smiles in her direction.
By the time they'd reached their destination, Iris was ready to get on with it.
Four lightly armored men waited at the meeting place. They stood in place watching the three approach. Iris felt a surge of some cloudy emotion seeing soldiers again --it brought something back in her mind's eye. They all appeared to be archers, which was expected. In her days as Rogue Captain, she'd learned working with all the factions that a lot of archers were trained trackers.
Maybe they'd find something today.
Hench was the first off her horse, and Iris and Kayde followed suit. For what felt like the first minute, all of the soldiers looked up to the towering Hench with a look of disbelief. She didn't dissuade the glances, nor did she try and shrink to their level. She stood there pridefully at a full height of six foot five, with her chin held high.
"Greetings," came her customary hello.
"Well met," one of the archers coughed after a second. "I assume you are the one in charge."
Hench nodded. "I am," she answered. "And you?"
"Originally, yes," the archer started. "I was heading these men. I'm not anymore --not for this mission, anyhow. That has been..." the bowman tasted something bitter in his mouth before finishing his sentence. "...overridden."
The conversation was interrupted by the sound of a galloping horse from the trees behind the archers. Everyone watched as a fifth soldier emerged, riding high on his mount.
In the next moment, all eyes were greeted with the lustrous shine of armor. The man that rode the horse was large and proud, with stark brown eyes and simply-styled dark hair. It was a sight all too familiar to Iris. Despite the tired purple circles around his eyes and the trimmed, thick beard that now jutted from his jawline, this man was unmistakable --he could have been no one else in Eldia but the last person Iris was prepared to confront.
Hench was taken back as the man dismounted his horse. "We meet again," she finally said, "General Rothstead."
Iris wanted to crawl right out of her skin. Oh gods.
"We do," Zayn answered. "Hello again." He shook Hench's hand, this time unfazed at the fact that he had to look up to meet her eyes.
"Forgive me." Hench crossed her arms, but kept a customary half smile. "I must ask, were you made aware that I specifically would be in charge of the guardians on this mission?" Her eyebrow rose high, denting her forehead.
Zayn gave a courteous nod. "But of course," he answered truthfully. "I am made aware of all details involving the situation with Baron Riasion. Precise information helps me calculate the risks among other things. This is much like your order, I presume." A rehearsed response, Iris could tell.
Hench snorted. "Then I assume your presence here is out of devotion and endless support of the Remorda Guardians." Sarcasm leaked from her voice, drowning them all with her satire. General Zayn seemed to not know what to say. Hench clicked her tongue, knowing the why he was here. She didn't break his gaze as she called back to her trainee. "Girl. Come to me."
Iris was jolted into action at her mentor's command. She wasn't fast enough. A second later, Hench's hand was at her back, ushering her forward to stand beside her. Somewhere in the background, Kayde let out a quiet snicker.
Iris looked up at Zayn's eyes for the first time in months. Then, Iris waited. She waited for the world to go still, for the birds to sing, for the butterflies to storm her belly. She waited for the moment where she wanted to just run to his arms and feel his warmth against her skin again. She held out for a storybook moment... and that moment never came.
Of course, it wasn't the complete emptiness that she feared either. Underneath the apprehension, she was happy to see him well. She realized she had indeed missed him; she realized she cared about him still, perhaps even loved him. She looked him up and down and realized she still found him attractive too --it would be far from the worst thing in the world to share a bed with him again. But there was something missing. Iris couldn't place what it was... but there was a hollowness somewhere that frightened her.
Had that always been there, or had it just come up? Iris didn't get the time to decide.
"Keep it short, girl, we've places to be." Hench clapped her on the back and motioned for everyone to move off. Even the soldiers followed.
Zayn dared take a step closer. "Iris." He looked her up and down. "You look... vibrant." And that part was true. Iris was in a much better place emotionally than she'd been the last time they'd spoken to one another.
"You're here," was all Iris could think of to say.
"I'm here," he assured her. Then, he smiled. It was a different kind of smile, one that was forced and genuine and pained all at the same time. It was like he hardly remembered how to smile anymore. It was like the muscles in his face had forgotten how to properly execute such an expression.
Iris stared hard at his face, and the next moment yielded her second thought. "You grew a beard."
He offered a small smile. This one was easier. "You didn't," he pointed out and grazed her cheek with his forefinger. He quickly moved it, though, once he remembered that they were being watched. Now was not the time for any type of romance.
Iris laughed softly. "Not for lack of trying," she replied. The joke came easy to her, which was comforting to a degree. "How have you been?"
"Busy," he answered and pulled a hand through his beard. "There's this whole situation with the baron and the trafficking that I've been dealing with, as I'm sure you can certainly relate. And then there's Renna," he paused to look in her eyes. "I've done all I can. She's better, Iris... but she needs to see you again. You're really all she has left. She's lost a lot. And then, well I've been trying to track down..." His words trailed off.
"My sister," Iris finished for him. "Kayde told me about Cricket."
"As it turns out, Cricket and the baron wrap up with each other," Zayn told her, and their conversation flowed as if they hadn't spent weeks on weeks away from each other. "She lived with him for a while. We just need to figure out where she went after that."
"Don't bother. She didn't go anywhere you or I will ever reach." Iris's voice dropped to a whisper. "She's dead, Zayn."
Zayn cocked his head to the side. "Dead?"
"Yes," Iris said with a heavy heart. "She died at the baron's keep."
"What do you mean she died at the baron's keep?" Zayn looked at Iris as if what she said hadn't made any sense. There was no sympathy, just confusion. What Iris had just said had completely conflicted with what Elizabeth Or'vail had told him. "Who told you Cricket died at the keep?"
"She did." Iris pointed at Hench, who sat astride her horse. "She was imprisoned at the keep. She knew Cricket. Cricket died there, Zayn."
Their conversation didn't go any further. They were interrupted by Hench's booming voice. "Girl! Hurry it along, or we'll all grow old here!"
Iris whipped to give her mentor a nod before whirling back to Zayn. "Duty calls."
"Is it duty?" Zayn quipped. "Or is it a substantial woman?"
"The line between the two blur when you get slammed around enough," Iris joked, but then sobered. "But really, be nice. Hench is sweet once you get to know her. I really do like her. She's helped me quite a lot." Iris lowered her voice. "She's so much more than what she appears if you give her a chance."
Zayn nodded. "I'll see for myself. Come on... we'll talk more later."
And so they went. Iris jumped back on Gretchen and moved to Hench's side. She exchanged a look with Kayde, but could hardly read the emotion on his face. They started at a point a half-mile away, a place that looked like the remnants of a camp. They went on from there, and every so often, the archers would leap off their horses to look at certain things on the ground.
It took a few hours to track the trails and they'd found another fresher camp not terribly long later.
Something grew discordant.
Iris couldn't help but recognize the area they were coming into somewhere inside her mind. She'd been this way before, but she couldn't place when. She turned to Hench, who was chewing on the inside on her cheek. Another moment of thought and a few more minutes of travel put Iris on track. This was the trail she and Hench had taken to get to dinner with Dane and Azabela.
For a while, both Iris and her mentor were almost praying that the tracks would yield a turn. But every time they'd get off course on the way to her mentor's cabin, the steps they'd trace still had them going in the general direction toward the humble home. Hench shifted uncomfortably in her saddle when they were less than two hundred paces away from her house.
Iris was about to comfort her mentor, to assure her everything was okay. A breeze blew past. It blew past, carrying a horrid scent that Iris couldn't identify right away. It smelled... rotten in every sense of the word. Iris could have vomited right there. The air was alive with what was comparable to meat and eggs that had gone rancid, yet with a musty, underlying sweetness that struck Iris as odd. It smelled like years' worth of shit had been left out in the sun to bake; it smelled like a sea of fermented urine.
Everyone seemed to catch the scent.
Hench took off toward her house at full speed now, leaving the rest of them behind for a moment. Iris was the second to spur her horse into motion followed by the rest of the group.
What the rogue found when she breached the clearing to Hench's house was something she wasn't ready for.
Hench stood beside a dead body in her yard, still as a statue.
Iris looked around, finding that to not be the only source of death here. Another man with holes for eyes lay mauled and what appeared to be chewed on at the base of a tree, and multiple decaying dogs laid about the area. Nearly all the dead seemed to have something in common, and that was the arrows sticking from all of them.
Azabela.
It took Iris a minute to recover from the shock of the scene, and when she did? She sputtered and staggered in place, all while praying to the gods that the huntress was simply inside her house, hiding with Dane.
The rest of the men were now taking in the horrible spectacle for themselves.
Kayde moved up beside Iris now, seemingly noticing how her face had grown pasty and white with horror. "Iris, what is this place? Why do you look like that?" Even through the haze of nausea, she was able to place his honest concern.
"This is Hench's house," she said, her voice almost a whisper. "This..."
Hench turned around to face all of them now, and she was frightening. Never in all Iris's life had she seen such a profound look of rage on anyone's face. What made it worse was that the anger that glistened in the guardian's eyes was mixed with undeniable agony. For a long moment, the world did indeed go still. Even the ones who didn't know Hench personally were afraid to make an advance in her direction.
Silently, everyone watched as the large woman squatted down and used an arm to lift the man's corpse from the ground by the throat.
With a sort of combustible calm, she walked over to the nearest tree, the dead still in hand. Iris watched as Hench finally exploded after a silent moment of contemplation, bashing the deceased's head into the trunk again and again and again. All in the vicinity could hear the skull popping, cracking, and then squishing against the surface. Blood exploded everywhere about the area, and Hench didn't stop thrashing the head until it was nothing but mushy pulp all over the grass.
Her face was tranquil when she turned around, but her eyes were unmistakably dangerous. Her hands and face were covered in thick red, and sodden tissue matter coated the toes of her shoes. Hench pointedly dropped the body to the ground for the group of now terrified onlookers.
The next words of hers were almost a growl. "Search. The. House."
A/N -- Hope you enjoyed!