Under The Water

The hand that reached beneath the carriage was enormous, and Scarlett knew whose it was before she saw the face.“Give him to me, miss.”Hobb knelt in the black water with the river streaming from his beard, big as a door, his sword gone and his hands open. He did not look like a man in the middle of a battle. He looked like a man who had walked into the wrong room and could not remember how to leave it.She jerked back until the axle struck her spine. “Get away from me.”“I don’t want to hurt you.” His voice was hoarse and very low. “I don’t want to hurt him. Please. Just give him to me.”He reached again. She kicked at his face with a numb foot and he took it on the shoulder without flinching, and she understood, in a flash of cold clarity, whose hand had signaled from the water. Not Pell, who had been shouting. Not Dacey. The silent one. The one who had carried Snow’s crate for four days and never once looked at the baby’s face.“It was you,” she whispered.“They’ve got my girl.” T

Black Arrows

River counted the dead the way Corin had taught him to count them, by name, before the numbers could take hold.Corin Vale, who had put him on his first horse at nine years old and told him not to be afraid of its teeth. Tam, who had never said a sentence in his life without a curse in it. Garrick, Nell, Osric, Bevan. Hobb.Seven. Of eleven. He had lived and Corin had not, and that was a thing he would have to carry, though he did not yet know where.They had dragged themselves up the far bank in the gray before dawn, the survivors, and now they sat in the frozen reeds in a ragged circle, dripping, shaking, silent. Pell with his face in his hands. Dacey, her shoulder bound with a strip of Isolt’s shirt, staring at nothing. Brannoch, who had been at the back of the column and had somehow come through without a scratch, looking like a man who did not believe it. Zoe, sitting on the carriage’s broken box seat, which she had dragged out of the river by herself, hugging her knees.The carr

Bleeding

The ground on the hill was frozen to the depth of a hand, and it took the survivors two hours to break it, using swords and the shovels of a farmer who took one look at their faces and handed them over without a word.They buried seven. Corin first, because Pell insisted, wrapped in his own cloak with his sword across his chest. Then Tam and Garrick and Nell and Osric and Bevan. Last, in the farthest corner, in a grave Dacey dug herself with her one good arm and would not let anyone help with, Hobb.Nobody spoke over him. Scarlett stepped to the edge of the pit and looked down at the big, plain, patient face, gray now, with river weed still tangled in the beard. She had known him four days. She had walked in front of him the whole way and never once thought of him as a danger.“Your daughter’s name is Ysa,” she said quietly. “I’ll find her. You have my word.”It was a promise she had no right to make. She made it anyway, and heard Zoe let out a breath behind her, and felt the whole we

Karris

Winter reached the ford on the third morning with six hundred riders at his back and ravens already working the water.He saw it from the ridge before he reached the bank: the carriage on its side in the current, one wheel still turning; the dead horses bloated and black along the shoals; the bodies caught in the reeds like driftwood, some in brown wool, some in black cloaks. The river had dropped in the night and left everything it had taken exposed to the sky.“Spread out,” he said. “Touch nothing until I’ve seen it.”He walked the bank alone, slowly, the way he would have walked a field after a battle, reading it. The carriage axle was snapped. The harness had been cut, not broken. A black cloak with a silver stag worked across the breast lay pinned under a rock at the waterline, and when he turned it over the hem was heavy with dried stains.He knew that stag. For four years it had flown from Oshea’s embassy banner in his own courtyard.“Alpha.” August’s voice, from downstream. “A

The Long Road

They stayed three days in Gunnar’s barn, and on the fourth morning Scarlett stood, laid a hand against her stomach, and found that nothing had changed.“Nothing?” River asked from the ladder.“Nothing.” She breathed out. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”He studied her face for a moment, nodded once, and went to saddle the horses. He did not say thank the Goddess. He did not say anything. But she heard him a minute later in the yard, speaking low to Brannoch, and the silence that followed was long enough that she knew he had said it somewhere she could not hear.It took nine days to reach the border of Hythe.There was no carriage now. Zoe rode double behind Isolt, grim and silent, and Scarlett carried Snow bound against her chest in a wool shawl the farmer’s wife had pressed on her at the gate. They traveled by night, slept by day, and ate what Brannoch could snare. When the dried bread ran out on the fourth day she sold Hedda’s silver oak leaf to a tinker at a crossroads for a wheel of

All Chapters of Blood And Desire: Chapter 111 - Chapter 115

Under The Water

Black Arrows

Bleeding

Karris

The Long Road