Gilded Serpent Danielle Jensen (i can read with my eyes shut .TXT) 📖

get away. Except as Lydia watched, another group of soldiers with a white-robed healer in their midst stepped out from a side street, cutting her off.

The woman slipped and fell, then scrambled to her feet, screaming, “Help! Help me!”

She was a blighter. A walking corpse. But that wasn’t what the civilians teeming from buildings and side streets saw. In their eyes, she was an unarmed woman about to be slaughtered by her own countrymen for no other reason than that a healer had pointed a finger in her direction.

A healer who just happened to be Cyntha.

The older woman had a sword strapped to her waist, and as the soldiers she was with moved to fend off the encroaching civilians, she drew the blade, striding toward the blighter. The woman fell to her knees at Cyntha’s approach, holding up her arms in defense, begging and pleading for mercy.

But Cyntha only lifted her blade, the wind blowing her hair in silvery swirls around her face, half-moon tattoo stark black against the pale skin of her forehead as she shouted, “In the name of the Six!”

Lydia tried to lunge in their direction, but one of her escort caught her arm, hauling her back.

It was too late, anyway. Cyntha’s blade flashed, slicing through the blighter’s arm and then her neck, blood spraying as the body slowly fell backward. Taking the torch from one of her soldiers, Cyntha held it to the woman’s ragged clothing until it ignited, the awful smell of burned flesh filling the air.

More Royal Army soldiers raced onto the scene, their blades clashing against the cudgels and planks of wood the civilians carried, more blood spraying. More bodies falling. And Cyntha was in the thick of it, cutting people down with vigor that belied her age. Using the strength given to her by her mark to do the exact opposite of what it was intended to. Marked or not, how anyone could see her as a healer, Lydia didn’t know.

“We need to be gone.” One of the soldiers dragged on Lydia’s arm. “If you’re noticed, they’ll come for you.”

She allowed him to pull her up the street, the group breaking into a run until they reached the barricades at the palace walls. The soldiers there allowed her to pass but asked her escort to remain. “They aren’t infected,” she protested. “Let them through.”

“King’s orders,” the soldier in charge said, the expression on his face telling her that he wouldn’t be swayed.

Gritting her teeth, Lydia entered alone, making her way through the Royal Army camp. She scanned the soldiers within to see if any had been turned, but every man she saw was very much alive.

A servant met her at the entrance and escorted her directly to the council chambers. Inside, she found the King sitting on his throne, his eyes closed. His face was drawn and shadowed with exhaustion, his blond braid unkempt and his clothing wrinkled and marked with sweat stains at the armpits.

“You made promises you are clearly incapable of keeping, Marked One,” he said without opening his eyes.

“I made no promises,” she answered, slowly approaching the dais and wishing they were not alone. “I only offered hope.”

He sighed. “Hope, when proven false, is a bitter thing.”

Silence that she didn’t dare break stretched between them. She’d spent all of her arguments, voiced her pleas that the infected be brought to her rather than killed, but it had done no good.

“There is a ship soon to arrive,” he finally said. “It holds all the young healers Quindor had ordered be trained in Serlania instead of adding mouths to feed in Mudaire during the war.”

Her chest tightened, apprehension prickling across her skin.

“Unless you are able to provide me an alternative,” he continued, “once they arrive, we will begin the process of purging the city and forcing those left onto ships. And then Mudaire will be razed, the gates closed, and what remains abandoned as we retreat to the south out of range of the blight.”

Nearly a quarter of Mudamora would be deadland belonging to the Corrupter, the North entirely cut off from the South except by way of ship. “What if the blight begins to spread again?”

“Then we’ll know for certain that the Six have turned their backs on Mudamora.”

They hadn’t. She knew in their heart that they hadn’t, it was only that the Corrupter had somehow grown so very strong.

“You have until the ship arrives, Lydia,” he said. Then he opened his eyes, and the unflinching determination in them made her stomach twist. “I pray it will be enough time for you to prove that Hegeria still walks with us.”

 35TERIANA

“You should be doing this,” Marcus said, shifting where he sat next to her. His armor was in a pile in front of him, and he’d spent the past hour rubbing oil into the leather straps and sharpening blades while the rest of them gambled.

“I’m busy.” She held up her cards. “But while you’re at it, this could use a sharpen.” Pulling her knife from her belt, she tossed it on the ground in front of him.

The men laughed, and after casting his eyes up at the tarp above them, Marcus picked up her knife and began sharpening it. He was relaxed, but rather than tempering her own anxieties, his calmness made her nervous.

Glancing at the faces of the other players, she tossed a gold coin into the pile between them, watching as the others met her bet. Scouts made the best gambling companions, because they always seemed to have more coin to wager. Less opportunity to spend it, she supposed, though Gibzen had told her it was because they were risk takers.

“I’m out.” Quintus stretched his arms upward. “And to bed.”

“Same,” two of the others said, one giving Marcus a sly smile. “I don’t suppose we get to spend tomorrow swimming, do we, sir?”

“You suppose right.”

There were mock groans, but no one argued.

“Ready to call it quits?” Teriana’s remaining opponent asked, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.

“And surrender such a