Free Warrior Blind by Calle J. Brookes Page B

to our land. The city of Thrun has been targeted twice. Many demon lives were lost. But this will not be the last against the Relaklonosian world. There are more. More are coming. Today or tomorrow, perhaps. But it will come. We will be outnumbered, many will be lost. But it is not just Lothicano we protect now. Nor is it only Relaklonos that is threatened.
    For there are more worlds than just ours. Long have we known this. And the threats are not just to our world any longer. The fate of everything rests upon this day. But there are among us those with mates, gamatas , and sons. So for you are my next words. Stay. Keep in service to my twin. For you will be needed.”
     

     

Chapter 18
     
    IT took Bronwen a while to get over the nausea portkeys brought her. Combine the nausea with the heat of the world around her and she wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball until the world stopped moving. But she could not do that.
    The mass of healers that were coming through the portkey behind her group—Eaudne, Thadd, Phaenna, plus others that she knew, had insisted on accompanying her—the Chief Healer of the new healer city. Phaenna kept insisting that it be called Dekimos City after the lost son of Eaudne who had been the first Dardaptoan healer. Bronwen thought that was a fitting tribute, now that that once unnamed healer was identified. He would be honored forever.
    “Come, Bronwen of Sebastos, you cannot stop there. We have a five mile hike this day.” Phaenna was at her side, tugging at her vestis. “Come, come, come.”
    “She walks as fast as she can.” Her brother Thadd was there, his voice rebuking. Bronwen wrapped her fingers around his sleeve.
    “I’m all right, Thadd. Just disoriented. This city we go to, Phaenna, what is the history?” She needed something to take her mind off what waited at the end of that five mile hike. “Tell me about it, please?”
    “It’s a beautiful place, Dekimos City. I have always thought so.”
    “Who built it?” Thadd asked, after taking one of Bronwen’s bags from her hands. She thought about protesting, but Thadd was a true Dardaptoan male, for all that he was a healer. It was a matter of his honor that he take care of her.
    Perhaps that was part of her problem? She had let the older—and somewhat archaic—members of her family, namely her brothers, take care of her for too long? Had she somehow lost her own ability to care for herself since Koios had taken her so many months ago?
    That had to change, didn’t it? And quickly. What was the human saying? ‘If you can’t make it, fake it?’
    Was that what she was going to have to do? Pretend to know what she was doing here?
    “No one knows who built this city. It’s been here for thousands of years. No one has lived in it for almost that long. Just there one day, gone the next. Some think it’s cursed.”
    “You’re teasing them, Phaenna. That is not well done of you.” Eaudne walked at Bronwen’s other side, but though she was obviously limping she was not slowing them down at all. “Bronwen, I came here while you slept those two days, though I saw it only from the top of the cliffs. It is a beautiful place. And will suit our needs well, I think.”
    It was to be a city for the injured and ill, wasn’t it? What would they need to make it fit that purpose? “How many people are coming today?”
    “We lead in three thousand four hundred and eighty-seven healers, their mates, and a few children.”
    “We have children?” She didn’t like that at all. What if this city was targeted somehow? How would they protect children? How was she supposed to care for them? The weight of her new responsibility threatened to choke her.
    “A few. Less than one hundred, too young to be away from their parents.”
    “Why did they come? They could have stayed behind in Relaklonos; wouldn’t have been safer there?”
    “Some are counting on the idea that this is in a protected world, that the healers will be able to