Free North Star Guide Me Home by Jo Spurrier Page B

kicked it onwards.
    At first no one reacted — they must have assumed he was one of the party sent out to track the runaways. It was only once he grew close enough for them to realise that his colouring and the horse were unfamiliar that some riders pushed forward to meet him.
    ‘Ho there!’ the nearest of them called. ‘Who in the hells are you? What do you want?’ He slowed his horse as Rasten drew near, leaning forward to peer through the rising dust. When he made out Rasten’s northern features, the man’s face turned hard and he reached for his sword.
    He never had a chance to draw it. Rasten caught him around the neck with a lash of power and broke his spine with a wrench. As he slid limp from the saddle, his horse shied beneath him, but Rasten had already turned to the milling riders. One of them leant over to talk to the dead man, unaware he was beyond all hearing.
    Rasten hurled them all aside with a blast of power, sending men and horses tumbling like leaves. He knew this sort and what they did with prisoners. When he’d had them in the cells, he’d made them speak of what they’d done, while Rasten inflicted the same punishment on them. Kell had enjoyed that, it had earned Rasten one of the few rewards he’d ever received from his master’s hands.
    Recalling it made his lip curl, and Rasten shoved the memory aside as he sought the next knot of riders. Behind him, the slaves started to break out of their lines, and one rank, bound by a long chain, veered across to the tangle of men and horses struggling to their feet. Rasten paid them no mind — around him, shrouded in dust, men shouted in confusion and alarm, whips cracking in the still air as the guards tried to force the slaves back into line.
    At first it was a simple game to hunt men through the shifting dust, but as more fell and the slaves broke loose, swarming over the fallen men, his prey realised the situation had slipped out of their hands. A few tried to hide amid the milling crowd, but the slaves turned on them tearing the men apart before Rasten’s eyes. Others tried to flee and many of them managed it, because unless he was at the edge of the obscuring cloud Rasten saw nothing else of them except for a fleeing shape swiftly vanishing in the dust cloud.
    In the end, he had to give up the game and let his horse stand and pant, its coat muddy with sweat. Rasten was breathing hard himself — power thundered in his ears, though he’d made no effort to draw it from those he killed. He must have taken it from Sierra, he thought. They were so used to feeding power back and forth that neither thought it anything out of the ordinary. Rasten clenched his fists, savouring the ache of his knuckles. His wounded shoulder ached, but it was a healing kind of throb. The power pulsing within him wanted more — more blood, more pain, more destruction. Rasten drew a deep breath, acknowledging the desire but regarding it passively, waiting for it to burn itself out like flames starved of fuel. The power was his tool, and not the other way around.
    While he rested, settling his roiling power to a simmer, silhouettes loomed out of the dust, coalescing into filthy, ragged figures that halted at a respectful distance.
    Rasten just watched them. He ought to say something, he supposed, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what .
    One figure stepped out from the others, and approached him with hands raised in surrender. Rasten went tense at once, and his horse tossed its head and pawed at the rocky ground.
    ‘Sir, you have my deepest thanks — by the Bright Sun herself, all our thanks. But who are you? What’s a man of Ricalan doing out here? And what … what do we do now?’
    But who are you? Rasten held his tongue. They’d figure it out. At that moment, surrounded by hundreds of pairs of eyes watching him with a mix of fear and awe, he wanted nothing more than to kick his weary horse into a gallop and charge through them, fleeing back to the