Vow of Thieves (Dance of Thieves 2) - Page 83

JASE

I landed on top of him and then we were both rolling, slugging, and wrestling for control over each other.

“Dammit!” he yelled. “Get off me, you stupid Kbaaki!”

Almost as fast as I had leapt, I heard Wren cursing and Synové ordering me back. “I have him! Back off!” She was ready to shoot an arrow between his weasel eyes.

And then I pinned him, my knee on his chest, my hands wrapped around his throat.

“Stop!” he rasped, pulling at my fingers.

“I should have done this a long time ago.”

His eyes widened, not because I was choking him but because he recognized my voice.

He stared at me like I was the mythical beast of the Moro mountains. “Jase? You stupid bastard! Let me go!”

“Get some answers first,” Wren said. “Then kill him.”

But before I could ask him anything, he started giving me answers to questions I hadn’t even asked.

“It was me, you idiot! I was the one who took you to the settlement! I’m the one who took your ring!”

My grip on him loosened. I didn’t know who took me to the settlement, but I was certain it wasn’t him. He was up to something. “What game are you playing now, Paxton?”

I let him push me off. He rolled away, crouched on his knees, and grabbed his bleeding mouth. “Devil’s hell! That’s the second time you’ve done this to me! If I lose this tooth—” I saw his tongue fishing around in his mouth. He spit out blood.

“You think I care about your teeth? All I care about—”

His head turned sharply, his eyes blazing like a demon. “Shut up! Do you hear me? Shut up and listen! I don’t have time to explain! Kazi’s here, somewhere on this blasted mountain, running like me! Trying to get to the vault. But she’s hurt, and I don’t know how bad. Things went wrong. We stole Lydia and Nash!”

* * *

In this steep terrain, two riders were too much for one horse, so I walked next to Paxton, leading Mije behind us while he told me everything he knew. He dabbed his split lip from time to time with one of those ridiculous monogrammed handkerchiefs of his. For the first hour I couldn’t shake my distrust of him. It was ingrained in me. But I forced myself to listen. He knew secrets no one else knew—things Kazi had told him about us. She had told him about Sylvey’s empty crypt. She trusted him, so I tried to trust him too, but it didn’t come easy. He told me he was strong-armed by the king to work the arena, but he didn’t do it just to save his own skin. He confirmed that the king was behind the attacks and invasion. Paxton wanted to find a way to break his stranglehold on the town—working from the inside instead of the outside.

Why? I thought. Why did he want to help us?

“Isn’t the arena what you’ve always wanted?” I asked, still skeptical.

He looked sideways at me, his eyes angry slits again. “The arena? Sure, I wanted it. But not so much that I would steal it from my—” He stopped short, avoiding the word. The word didn’t fit between us. Family. We might be blood cousins, but we were more like comfortable adversaries. I had grown used to him as an annoying thorn in my side.

“You don’t know anything about me, Jase,” he continued. “There’s lots of things I want. Right now I just want to make sure Kazi’s safe and get those power-hungry devils out of Hell’s Mouth. The rest I’ll figure out later.” Protect. Sometimes I forgot he was a Ballenger too.

It seemed impossible that we had a mutual goal now.

He told me he used my ring to fake my death. That was why they stopped looking for me. “Kazi took it hard, but it was the only way I could get them to call off the search. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I could trust her. She turned on me one day and held a blade to my throat, sobbing that I had hunted you down like an animal. I’m pretty sure she intended to kill me. When I confessed that you were alive, she collapsed in my arms. That’s when I knew for sure, that nothing between you two had been a farce.”

His voice changed when he talked about her. He liked her, respected her maybe. It was a side to him I had never seen. “She told me you were what had kept her going when she wanted to give up. Something about promises you had made to each other and hearing your voice telling her to keep going—just a little farther. And that’s what she did.”

I swallowed. Cleared my throat. I remembered shouting those words out in anger and desperation as I held her chin up and we floated wildly down the river. I had shouted them to an enemy because my survival had been completely entwined with hers by a chain. Now I couldn’t survive without her for a different reason.

As Paxton and I climbed the mountain on foot, Wren and Synové spread out, trying to cover as much ground as we could, Synové riding ten lengths to one side, Wren ten on the other when the terrain allowed it, all of us looking for any signs that Kazi had passed this way.

 

; Paxton said both he and Kazi knew there was another entrance to the vault but didn’t know exactly where it was. All Paxton’s grandfather had passed on was that it was in a cave, which left a lot of mountain to cover. Kazi was going to question the children for more specifics before she left them in the tomb, but he didn’t know what she had found out.

I wasn’t sure how much they remembered anyway. My mother and I took them there about a year ago. Nash had been fascinated with the bats. He would remember that much, I was sure. And I remembered Lydia reciting, left, left, right, left, determined not to forget the paths in the caves.

Tags: Mary E. Pearson Dance of Thieves Fantasy
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