The Ippos King (Wraith Kings #3) - Grace Draven Page 0,128

bloodied and pinned with a vision of Death looming over him, he still glared at her. While she couldn't always read emotion in the bizarre movement and coloration of human eyes, she recognized hatred when she saw it. “Figures you'd manage to survive, you yellow-eyed hedge whore,” he spat.

If he thought to offend her with vulgar disparagement, he was sadly mistaken. She'd played drinking games with her fellow Kai soldiers that centered around the exchange of creative insults that would set his ears on fire. “Worse luck for you, isn't it, maggot?” she said. “What did you do with the bodies of the men you killed?” She didn't bother asking if he killed the other three Serovek sent with him. She knew he did. She struck him across one cheek. “Weson?” A second strike on the opposite cheek as he spewed even more invectives. “Ardwin?” A third strike. “Jannir?” She raised her hand, threatening a forth.

“Enough!” he shouted, cheeks stained scarlet from her blows. “I'll take you to them if you promise not to kill me and get off me.”

Liar, she thought.

She stood up, stepping out of the range of a swinging fist or kick. He scrambled to his feet, and she waited to see if he'd try to run. He didn't, and that told her what she needed to know. “Who's the closest and where did you leave him?” she asked. The question simply bought time. She was saddened and angered to have her supposition about the fate of the three men verified, but she couldn't recover their bodies, not now, even if Ogran had actually told her the truth.

His lip curled into a sneer. “Weson,” he said. “We teamed up together.” He pointed down the road where his horse had bolted. “Another two leagues that way. I left him in the trees.”

After all this time there probably wasn't much left of Weson thanks to the elements and scavengers, but Anhuset pretended to consider. “My horse isn't far,” she said. “I ride there; you walk ahead of me.” She deliberately turned her back to him, ears perked as she put four steps between them and quietly pulled one of her knives from its sheath. Ogran was right-handed, like everyone in their earlier party except Erostis. She'd noted those details for each man, knowledge that always came in handy whether or not you fought with a comrade-in-arms or an adversary.

The warning sound came as she expected, the soft hiss of steel sliding against leather, the shift of dirt under a boot with a step forward. She twisted fast to the side, caught the twinkle of a blade as it flew past her and flung her own weapon in an underhanded throw that took Ogran in the belly hard enough to knock him off his feet. He lay on his back, hand gripped around the knife's pommel, the blade sunk to the hilt. Blood trickled out of his mouth as he stared first at the knife and then at her in disbelief.

Anhuset felt no pity for him. No doubt he'd dispatched his trusting companions in just this way. She crouched beside him and stared into his rattish face, his once-ruddy complexion turning pale. “It takes a long time to die from a gut wound,” she told him. His eyes widened. “And I want my knife back.” She wrapped her hand around the pommel and yanked hard. The blade slid free with a jerk and a gout of blood. Ogran tried to scream, but Anhuset cut off the attempt with a quick swipe of the bloodied knife across his throat. He was dead before his head hit the dirt.

She dragged his body off the road and out of sight, wedging it against a pair of young saplings so it wouldn't roll. The forest scavengers would pick his bones clean in no time. In her opinion, he didn't deserve a burial any more than the men he'd killed deserved their deaths. She stripped him of the money he carried. If any of the three he'd murdered had families, they could use the coin, and if fate were kind, she'd have a chance to return it to Serovek to give to them. She also recovered the knife Ogran had thrown where it lay in the road and returned to Magas waiting patiently where she'd tied him.

A more peaceful person might say her killing Ogran wouldn't bring back the men he killed or save Serovek from an execution, but in her mind, it was justice,