To overthrow the cruel King who brutally slaughtered her foremothers, the last surviving water witch Elara Consuli must team up with novice warrior Juda Vikaris from the Serpent Order and realise an ancient prophecy, before the blood-thirsty ruler d...
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Elara Consuli, spat blood onto the floor in front of the altar, wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand, and prepared to die.
Ridding her brow of the sweat seemed a pointless gesture. Soon, her body would be expelling more than just sweat and a bloody globule of saliva, but she wanted to be able to see death clearly as it came for her, rather than view it through a blurry haze.
The novice raised his fist to his mouth and slicked a tongue across his raw knuckles, the same knuckles that Elara could still feel against her jaw and left eye socket. Her injured face throbbed, the swollen flesh already taut as if it sought to pull away from her skull.
'You should have just fulfilled your duty, narrag,' the novice said, his thick lips curling into a cruel smile, clearly expecting the insult to sting. Elara didn't care. She'd been called worse than a whore in her time. 'I would have killed you anyway, but at least your death would have been quick,' he continued. 'Now, I have to make an example of you.' He deftly spun the double-bladed scimitars he carried and advanced towards her slowly, each step forward like a torturous slice to her heart.
She'd mistaken his lack of speed for a disadvantage, but what he lacked in pace and agility, he made up with strength and vigour, and unfortunately for Elara, a particularly sinister desire for inflicting pain. He'd enjoyed beating her. She'd seen it up close, a dark light in his eyes that seemed to pulse almost incandescently as his hands had wrapped around her throat, his fingers pinching into her skin as he'd squeezed. How odd to enjoy murder so, she'd thought, as blackness had crept into the edges of her vision, what type of creature lives for death? Only a last-second grasp of the altar pot - once used as a vessel for the blessed waters of the Setelah River and now used to bleed dry the near-empty pockets of the people of Grimefall – gave Elara a momentary reprieve from her inevitable end.
Now, the blood ran from the wound she'd inflicted upon his forehead, streaking in rivulets down over the black slash of oil from the batak tree that all novices smeared across their eyes like a mask. They said the oil burned for seven days and seven nights when applied to the skin – a ritual required when joining the Serpent Order. A sign of a novice's commitment to the King and to duty. Elara was just sorry it hadn't taken this one's eyes. Some would-be novices were not so lucky to come out of it with their sight intact.
This novice's eyes had gone from containing an undisguised lust that had turned Elara's stomach into a mass of writhing kreeworms, to pure searing hatred that seeped from his pores.
'My duty?' she said, edging to her right, feeling her way with her feet because she dared not drop her gaze from his. 'I owe you nothing, droukza!'
The insult wrenched the gasp from his ugly mouth, which hardened instantly into a grimace worthy of a corpse. While Elara was used to being called narrag, the novice clearly wasn't familiar with such slurs being aimed at him and his eyes ignited with a fury that looked almost wild with intent. Droukza – the tusked boar that plagued the dead fields - wasn't far from the truth, especially when he looked more animal than anything, but Elara often thought that to be true about the Order. They were more beast than man. They had to be to do what they did.
