remaining downwind, flanking the predators until they could get the shot. Time stretched out. The jungle was silent. Isabel started to wonder. She would be watching through Slyder were it not for the cursed bone hanging around her neck.
Her anxiety started to build, worry transforming into fear and nearly spiking into panic when the three men finally returned and Trajan motioned for everyone to proceed quietly.
Isabel’s sudden panic faded away as quickly as it had assailed her. She pondered it while she walked. She’d never experienced anything like it in her life, debilitating fear in the face of … nothing. It was unnerving.
All three raptors were down and unconscious, felled by poisoned darts delivering venom powerful enough to overcome even them. They moved past them and reached the edge of the swamp by late afternoon. Trajan cursed when they arrived at the spot where they’d left their rafts. All of them were gone, simply vanished.
“I have a boat farther south,” Isabel offered.
“How many will it hold?”
“Probably seven, plus I have a raft that can hold the other four.”
It didn’t take long to reach Isabel’s hiding place, load everybody into the boats and cast off. Isabel was more than happy to be leaving the mountain. She had what she’d come for … and the place had been less than welcoming.
Trajan set a grueling pace for his men, rowing the boat and poling the raft as fast as they could go, without interruption, one team of rowers taking over for the previous team, ensuring that forward motion never stopped. They reached the inner band of high ground late the following day with just enough time before dark to build a fire.
Trajan sat in front of the fire, the Goiri bone heavy end down between his feet, his hands resting on the pommel. “With this, I could rid Karth of magic once and for all.”
His men nodded, murmuring their agreement.
“I could eliminate it from all the Seven Isles.”
His men stopped nodding and started looking at each other.
“Magic is not evil, Trajan,” Ayela said. She’d been very quiet since Hazel had been sacrificed. “It can be used for good as well.”
“It’s too much power to be entrusted to any one person,” Trajan said. “Magic can do terrible things. Look what it did to our family—even to the Regency command staff.”
“Bad people did those things,” Ayela said. “They just used magic to make them happen.”
“My point exactly,” Trajan said. “If they didn’t have magic in the first place, they wouldn’t be able to do such things. Eliminate magic and preserve the world.”
“And how do you plan to eliminate magic?” Ayela asked. “Are you going to start murdering people just because they have magic?”
Trajan frowned, his state of mind suddenly shifted by the slap-in-the-face tone of his sister’s rebuke. He shook his head slightly as if facing his own statements for the first time and finding them abhorrent. “I’m not sure why I said that,” he muttered, still shaking his head.
Isabel absentmindedly played with the Goiri bone hanging around her neck while she watched the exchange. She needed Trajan, both in the short term to get where she was going and in the long term as an ally, but his behavior was starting to worry her.
He quietly excused himself and slipped off into the mist. Not a minute later, he cried out for help.
Everyone came to their feet, drawing weapons and moving toward his voice. He wasn’t forty steps outside the camp, just beyond the range of sight, and he was completely wrapped up by a giant snake, lying on his side, one arm free, struggling to breathe. The black-scaled monster was easily forty feet long and it had a good eight feet of itself wavering threateningly over Trajan’s head, six coils wrapped around his body and the rest trailing out behind him into the mist.
Trajan’s men spread out, surrounding the snake, but it hissed and struck, driving them back a step or two. Isabel tossed Trajan her dagger. He clawed around in the dirt blindly until his hand found steel, then came up with the blade and plunged it into the first coil of the snake. The snake flinched, loosening its grip, giving Trajan a precious gulp of air, before tightening around him again.
He stabbed again, and again. Each time, the snake recoiled but not enough for him to get free. One of his men got too close, jabbing at the snake with a spear. It dodged right and struck, four-inch fangs piercing into the