Free The Old Ways by David Dalglish Page B

possible, using a life and form granted by his hands. She was nothing without her deity, and despite the hatred and agony, her confrontation with Jerico had helped her remember that. She tried to be thankful. It was better than crying out her fury against Karak. She worshipped him, loved him, accepted his authority over her, but never before had she hated him so. Not like this.
    It was no longer a matter of pride, revenge, or faith. She needed to kill Darius for her freedom. The fires of the Abyss surely would not burn her so. She was a child of Karak.
    Valessa focused her prayers, begging for forgiveness, begging for his touch. Day and night swirled over her, but she was aware of it only distantly. She did not sleep. She did not eat. She did not live. With each minute, each prayer, she felt herself growing whole. Her skin regained its color, and her naked form assumed the clothes she once wore. Her daggers, having never left her hands, started to glow once more. The pain in the center of her being faded, becoming only the constant ache she had learned to accept. Looking to the sky, she hoped Karak had not yet abandoned her, had forgiven her for her weaknesses.
    Seeing the red star, she smiled. An even greater surprise, she felt liquid running down the sides of her face. Valessa touched her cheek, and when she pulled her fingers away, she saw them stained red. Tears of blood. Perhaps grief was not yet lost to her.
    “Thank you,” she whispered to the night. “I will make you proud.”
    It had been several days, though how many she did not know. But darkness was about her, the red star above her, and with a single-minded purpose she ran.

 
     
     
7

     
    T he days had not gotten any easier, despite Sandra’s hope otherwise. The flesh around the wound in her stomach had tightened and scarred. After mere minutes of walking it would start to ache. Teeth grinding together, she’d fought on, and it wasn’t until the second day that Jerico noticed how badly it hurt her.
    “You should have told me,” he berated her as she lay down on a soft patch of grass. His hands pressed against her waist, and she shivered.
    “I didn’t want to worry you.”
    “Worry?” said Jerico as his hands began to shine white. “I could have helped you, Sandra. Besides, worry’s what I do.”
    His healing prayers subdued the pain, but when he finished, she saw the look on his face, the trepidation. Something was wrong, but he wasn’t telling her what. Night after night he had to pray over her so she could sleep without sobbing from the pain. The scar continually flared red, as if trying to reopen. She’d seen Jerico close the most brutal of wounds. This shouldn’t have been beyond him, yet, somehow, she sensed it was.
    She tried to not let him see her fingers brush the scar from time to time, each touch always more painful than the last.
    “Enough,” she told him as the sun dipped beneath the horizon on the third day after leaving her brother’s hideout. “I can’t...my legs can’t take any more.”
    Jerico nodded, and as she sat, he began preparing a fire. She rubbed her calves and watched him. It hadn’t been a lie. The constant walking was murder on her body, something she was far from accustomed to. Again, she’d hoped it’d improve with time, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Jerico looked spry as ever as he gathered kindling for a fire, and that was with him wearing armor and carrying their supplies on his back. Whatever the paladin was, Sandra was starting to believe he wasn’t human. He unwrapped a small strip of dried, heavily salted meat he’d bought from a town they’d passed through. Stabbing it with a stick, he held it over the fire, and its smell awakened Sandra’s hunger.
    “Kaide must not be tracking us if he hasn’t found us by now,” she said, staring into the fire. “We don’t need to use such haste, nor avoid every village we encounter.”
    “The northern folk are loyal to your brother,” Jerico