Page 10 of The Crimson Throne (Spy and Guardian #1)

Alyth

I’m bone weary by the time I reach a village near the border. The little cluster of homes stands a few miles to the west, but my eyes are on the south. The magic is stronger here, at the edge, and I can see the barrier, golden light encapsulating my homeland.

I sag in relief as the horse plods forward.

Despite the bean-nighe’s prophecy, the wall is still strong.

For now.

My heart drops as my gaze settles on the nearby village. My horse stamps nervously, throwing his head back. I wonder if the animal can see what I see:

The souls of the dead swarm over the buildings.

“Sluagh.” The word escapes my lips unbidden as I kick the horse, spurring him on toward the danger.

Most people think the Sluagh are the spirits of people who were not buried properly.

If that were the case, this part of Scotland would have plenty of such monsters; the border is rife with fallen warriors over the centuries who were left to rot on bloody battlefields.

But I know it’s not enough to just let the corpse molder on the ground for a Sluagh to rise.

The Sluagh are malevolent souls who have been corrupted by Red Caps who desecrate their deaths.

And they cannot be raised without…

A scream interrupts my thoughts as I draw the horse up on the main street. I throw myself out of the saddle, tossing the reins through an iron ring in front of an inn—loosely though; if the horse needs to escape, he can jerk free.

Most of the townspeople have rushed for cover. I don’t know what they see. Birds, probably, a flock of ravens swarming. But even if they cannot see the Sluagh as I do, their primal instincts have them cowering. I spot fearful faces pressed against windows or peering out from behind hiding spots.

One woman stands alone in front of a small house with a stone wall around the yard.

“My baby!” she screams, waving her arms as she runs toward the Sluagh settling on the wall and floating over her house.

The Sluagh aren’t one single dark soul but a horde of fragmented, bitter remnants of what was once life.

They look like shards of glass made of smoke, sharp-edged but shapeless.

They’re scattered and broken and violent.

And the very essence of their being is rooted in the same bloodlust that drives the Red Caps: insatiable longing for death.

More than a dozen of these evil spirits snatch and rip at a baby crying in the yard near the woman.

It’s only because they’re newly raised and weak that they’ve not been able to organize enough to do what they want to do—lift the baby into the sky and drop it, breaking both the body and the soul and adding this innocent life to their horde.

I throw my arm up, grabbing for the wind and hurling it toward the Sluagh, scattering them long enough for the woman to scoop up her baby and race for shelter inside the house.

As if a building could protect them.

Nothing will stop the Sluagh. They’re already dead; they can’t be killed a second time. Pain doesn’t exist without a body. The fragmented souls of the dead claw against the walls, hurtle down the chimney, and scrape at the door, desperate to kill.

The Sluagh are unstoppable death machines.

But the ones who dropped down the chimney rise again, like smoke, abandoning the woman and her baby.

The Sluagh may only be capable of killing, but they can be controlled. Directed.

That is who I need to stop, whoever is ordering these monsters to attack this innocent border village.

I watch the Sluagh soar up, up, up into the sky, swirling like a dark cloud. Everyone else in the town remains in hiding, and that’s for the best. They would only get in my way.

I stride down the center of the dirt street, hidden by the shadow of the Sluagh above me.

Power laces through my fingers, but it has no direction. The Sluagh are too many and too powerful to attack on my own. Even if I had the ability to call the entire fae court, I doubt all their combined forces would be enough to stop this many Sluagh.

There has to be a cauldron, I think, desperately clinging to the old legends I’ve had memorized since I was a child.

Red Caps invented weapons of war that could control others—there’s no point in having an army of the undead or possessed if they cannot be directed.

The Sluagh are summoned and controlled with an iron cauldron made by Red Caps.

Find the cauldron, and I’ll find whoever’s controlling the monsters.

Above me, the Sluagh shift, a speckled black cloud above that must look like a murmuration of starlings to the humans. I follow the shadows, and when I hear anguished shouts of pain, I start running.

A person is hunched behind the butcher’s shop, arms thrown up in an attempt to stave off the Sluagh’s claws.

The smell of days-old meat is cut through with the fresh, coppery scent of hot blood.

With a roar, the man throws his cloak back, scattering the Sluagh long enough for him to brandish a small knife in his hand.

He’s brave, I’ll give him that, but that tiny weapon won’t stop the monsters.

For a moment, I watch in awe. He’s just a man, young like me, yet even in the face of such horror, he doesn’t hesitate to fight back with ferocity, as if he doesn’t even care about his own well-being; he’s just intent on taking down as many of the Sluagh as he can.

Is he Leth? Can he tell what these beings are?

If so, he doesn’t seem to have even a flicker of fear.

I try to send wind again, but it barely disturbs the attack of the dead souls.

I have to find—

I whirl around. Whoever is controlling the Sluagh could be anywhere. But for this attack to be so pointed and directed at this one person, the cauldron and its owner must be near…

There.

Inside the butcher’s shop, I see a man watching through the doorway as the Sluagh shred their victim’s doublet, talons tangling in vivid red hair. The man in the butcher shop is entirely impassive, unafraid.

No…he’s gleeful, eyes eagerly shining as blood spills.

And in the crook of his arms is a small cauldron.

I slam the wind into the man controlling the Sluagh, and he goes flying, crashing into the butcher’s bloodstained countertop.

The Sluagh falter long enough for their victim to scramble a few yards away before they refocus on him. The man controlling them hasn’t dropped the cauldron.

When he straightens, his eyes go right to me.

He’s human—maybe just a drop of fae blood in him. But men can be just as cruel as fae, and the snarl of his lip tells me that he welcomes my intrusion. Welcomes the chance to hurt me.

I won’t let him.

The cauldron is full of dirt—a bit of earth where each corpse of the Sluagh fell. Spilling the contents out isn’t enough to release the Sluagh from this man’s control.

Only killing the man will do that.

“You’re next, fae bitch,” the man growls.

His aura sparks with rage and power. He strides outside, toward me, slinging his fist like a hammer.

It connects with my jaw, and my teeth clack over my tongue, a burst of metallic blood filling my mouth as I’m sent spinning.

My body crashes into the wall of the butcher shop, the back of my head cracking against timber.

Dazed, I struggle to keep my eyes focused as the man points at the red-haired victim who managed to make it to the butcher’s gate. The Sluagh converge on him, and the victim shouts, his voice choking and horrible but his words full of defiant, angry curses at the monsters.

“Turn, damn you, turn!” the man with the cauldron shouts as he strides away from me, closer to the man he’s tormenting.

Turn? Is he trying to get the red-haired man to become a Sluagh and join the horde? It doesn’t work like that.

A curse on the Red Caps and their weapons and the way men use them without knowing how to control them.

I shake my head, using the wall behind me for support as I struggle to stand.

It’s the attacker’s shirt that grabs my focus.

The same shirt the bean-nighe was washing, rough-woven and pale brown.

The shirt of the man I have to kill.

And I know exactly how I’m going to do it.

My hands go to my bodice, where I tucked the needle Mary found. It too is a Red Cap weapon.

Before this moment, I never thought I’d use something made by those monsters.

But I don’t hesitate as I cross the butcher’s yard. The man’s back is to me, his arm clutching the cauldron close.

Right there—I see the exact spot on the man’s tunic where the bean-nighe was washing away a tiny bloodstain.

I drive the needle straight into his shoulder, pushing with my palm and using my sleeve as a protective cushion as the iron pierces his skin and digs into his muscle.

He jerks at the pain, but it’s just a needle jab, not a slash with a sword or a cut with an ax. He sneers at me, his free hand already rising in a fist.

And then he staggers.

The cauldron drops, spilling dirt and rolling away as the man’s face goes slack.

The arm attached to the shoulder I stabbed withers, the skin wrinkling inward and sagging off his bone.

The man starts screaming. His neck tendons stand out, his veins shrinking, his cheeks sinking in, the bags under his eyes stretching so much that I wonder if his eyes will fall from his skull.

He drops to his knees and throws out his bony arms to catch the fall. Both his wrists snap. The man smashes face-first into the ground, broken teeth skittering across a stone paver. His body convulses as the needle jammed into his shoulder saps away every ounce of blood in his body.

This is the fate someone intended for Mary.

Instead, I watch dispassionately as the man’s shaking body shrinks, the skin clinging to bones, the muscles going flaccidly dry.

It takes only moments.

I bend down and carefully extract the needle from the man’s ragged corpse. The body turns to gray, crumbling dust. I should have found a way to keep him alive, I suppose, to question him about where he got the cauldron, how he’s working with the Red Caps.

But there is a tiny dot of blood on his tunic.

And I know the bean-nighe has washed her copy of the shirt entirely clean. Right now, she’s pulling out the other shirt, the one made of finely woven white linen and covered with soot stains.

The one currently owned by a man who is going to be killed by a Red Cap after the wall falls.

I let out a stuttering breath as I tuck the needle back into my bodice, careful that the sharp point won’t prick my skin. I don’t want to look at the body. I don’t want to let my mind wrap around what I just did.

Murder.

The Sluagh are gone, back to the empty fields and windswept moors where their human lives ended. I pick up the cauldron, dumping the remains of dirt from it. I must ensure no one else gains control of this weapon.

“Hello?”

My eyes meet the red-haired man’s.

I was so focused on the cauldron, I nearly forgot him.

“Hello,” I say, matching his English. “Are you…” I don’t know how to finish that. He was just attacked by a swarm of Sluagh that he must have thought were nothing but birds. He’s obviously confused and hurt.

“I’m fine,” he lies.

His doublet is ruined, the back ripped apart. Scratches mar his face, arms, and back, but none of them are too deep, mostly because he was smart enough to use his cloak as something of a shield. He was lucky.

Was it luck that brought me here? I think as I stare into his vivid green eyes. Or was it the bean-nighe? I wouldn’t be at the border if she hadn’t warned me about the wall. I wouldn’t have used the needle if I hadn’t seen her washing the brown tunic.

And I wouldn’t have found the cauldron. My being here was by design.

I hate this. I hate the strings the fae know how to pull. I hate the way they wrap around my wrists like manacles.

But I also know that I needed to be here. The Red Cap threat is real. It’s more than just a few weapons crossing the barrier.

Much more.

The red-haired man rips off his ruined doublet, settling for the plain undershirt beneath. It’s torn as well, but not as badly.

Finely woven white linen.

I shake my head.

Most nobles have similar shirts. The bean-nighe might not have been washing one of his.

Or maybe that shirt was his, I think, and my intervention now averted his future murder at the hands of a Red Cap?

I shake my head, wincing at the pain from being hit. I can’t let myself descend into questions about fae and fate. It’ll drive me mad for sure.

“Er, I don’t mean to be rude,” the man says, drawing my attention back to him. “But what the hell is going on?”