Free Vengeance of the Hunter by Angela Highland Page B

it, though, not until he held his hand near her face and felt no exhalation of breath against his palm. Only then did the truth of it take hold, and his fingers abruptly quivered as he moved them to close the old woman’s eyes.
    “May she rest in the arms of the gods.” Abbot Grenham said, resignation and sorrow weighing heavily in his voice.
    “ Ani a bhota —” The words were a reflex, but even as he spoke them Kestar froze, conscious of the trembling spreading from his fingers to other parts of him, of the quickening of his pulse deep within his chest, where Faanshi’s light had shone. Heat flushed his cheeks, and only with a dogged effort did he make himself finish hoarsely, “ Arach shae. ”
    Abbot Grenham echoed the benediction, or at least Kestar thought he did; the abbot’s voice seemed strangely distant in his hearing. But they worshipped the gods of Nirrivy here, not the gods of Adalonia, no matter what trappings were on display in the place—surely Abbot Grenham would have invoked one of those older deities?
    Kestar spun away from the bed, unable to look any longer at the shell of the old woman, blood of his blood and yet a stranger. Nor could he look at Abbot Grenham. He could only mumble a shaken request to be excused as he strode past him as fast as he dared, as fast as he could move without seeming to flee outright. This time the abbot made no move to halt him, and for that Kestar was grateful. He didn’t want to speak of what he’d just witnessed, what Darlana Araeldes had told him, or why he hadn’t been able to speak the name of the Voice of the Gods. Shame and panic and a niggling furtive relief all churned within him, blending together until he couldn’t discern one from the other, or say from where any of them might have sprung.
    And it frightened him to the core that he couldn’t tell the difference.

Chapter Five
    House Nemea , Dareli , AC 1864
    It was all her fault.
    She’d wanted only to take care of her family—to give her mother and sisters a chance to avoid starvation and the ignominy of the workhouse. Or worse, for the unforgiving eye of the Church never strayed long from those it deemed heretical. For the sake of her family Dulcinea had been willing to make herself over with a name that wasn’t hers and marry a man she didn’t love, all in the name of keeping a roof over her mother’s and sisters’ heads and food upon their table.
    For the sake of her family, she had to betray the man she had come to love. To watch as Cleon maimed him, and to turn away from the desperate pleas Julian called out to her in the grip of pain and panic and the drug he’d been slipped—by her own hand.
    She hadn’t had to feign her shame, though. Cleon and the rest of the household could think her abashed by the assault they thought she’d undergone; Erasmus could crow over her in his contempt. None of it mattered in the wake of what Julian had suffered because of her.
    Where Cleon’s men took him, Dulcinea had no way of knowing. Her husband ordered her bustled off to their chambers, under the care of her maid and the family’s senior housekeeper, to await examination by the first doctor they could summon from town. Keeping from screaming, even as she submitted to those ministrations, took every scrap of resolve she had. The housekeeper’s motherly concern was trial enough to bear, but worse yet was the wariness from her maid, just short of open hostility. Young Moirae had been her ally in trysting with Julian, and Dulcinea suspected the girl of nursing an infatuation with him.
    “I know you don’t like what’s happened,” she said, taking the maid’s hands even as Moirae reached up to arrange her hair. “I know you must hate me now.”
    Her eyes brimming with unshed tears, Moirae stood clutching the pearl-handled brush she’d picked up, and made no move to break out of her mistress’s grasp. “How could you do it, miss? How could you set Mister Julian up like that, when he loves