Free Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 by Terah Edun Page A

she snarled. “Because if you do, I’ll cut your throat right now and make your dreams come true. Don’t tempt me, Ezekiel. Now stop your babbling and keep walking.”
    Privately, she knew she was just lashing out. A promise was a promise. If he had made her swear to cut his throat, she would have done so long ago as well. But he had made her swear to save his life, so she was doing that. The light-hearted attempts at banter—or dark melancholia, she couldn’t decide what his constant muttering about time said about his mental state—came from the hallucinatory properties of the venom that were setting in. So she didn’t blame him for babbling.
    Too much.
    Other stricken victims had asked for their children, for their wives, for their damned dogs and for a good pint of ale before they died. Only this idiot curator babbled about death.

Chapter 8
    “T his march has to end,” Sara muttered five minutes later as she saw another soldier drop—dead on his feet.
    As she watched rain patter down on his leather jerkin to slide in rivulets to the muddy swamp, she almost sighed. She didn’t have to kick him for a response to know he no longer inhabited the plane of the living. His still flesh, and the fact that no one would voluntarily lay face-deep in mud only to choke to death on it, told her that.
    “We can’t keep going on like this,” admitted Ezekiel slowly through the right side of his mouth.
    “Not enough food, not enough water, and over half the division dead,” agreed Sara with a weary sigh. For once in her life, she wasn’t sure what was next. Would they make it out alive, or die here in this swamp like some forgotten troop out of legend?
    Sara said, “I honestly thought I’d at least make it to the battlefield before I died.”
    Ezekiel chuckled. “We don’t always get what we want, do we?”
    Sara raised a tired hand to bat away some of the mosquitoes swarming near her face, to no effect. “Cheeky buggers. I’ll be dead soon, anyway,” she told them. “Can’t you wait until then?”
    A new man appeared beside her slogging through the mud. As he passed her by, he turned and laughed as he said, “Nah. They want the blood while it’s fresh and still running in your veins. Can’t get hot blood if you’re dead.”
    She chuckled as she glanced over....and up. He was at least a foot and half taller than her with long legs to match, but his pace was as slow as her own. She could see why, with the weight he carried more than doubling his own. He had a man slung over his shoulders like a sack of grain. He was carrying a full-grown mercenary, and the man was barely moving. The only time his legs flopped was when the man carrying him stumbled around a particularly thick mud pool.
    “Is he dead?” she asked quietly.
    “No,” grunted the man carrying his fallen comrade.
    She frowned. He looked dead. You didn’t pass out in this swamp like dead weight. You died.
    “Are you sure?” she asked gently. Gently for her, that was. Pretty insistently for total stranger.
    “No,” he replied.
    “Do you want me to check?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?” coughed Ezekiel.
    The man hesitated before his next step. “Because he’s my brother, and as long as I don’t check, I know he’s alive. I’d rather he be alive and on my shoulders than dead and rotting.”
    Sara was quiet for a moment. There was nothing she could say. It made perfect and imperfect sense. As long as the man believed his brother was alive, then to him, he was alive. The moment he checked and confirmed, he could be dead.
    She sighed. Logic kicked in. The man had a greater chance of staying alive and defending himself if he wasn’t using both hands to hold his brother’s immobile form atop his shoulders.
    As she turned to do something she was really bad at—coax him to check his brother’s pulse anyway and deal with the emotional consequences—she heard something approaching from above. Like the whirl of wings more numerous than anything