Vigilante: A Guard's Tale from Ana's Perspective (Guards of the Shadowlands) by Sarah Fine

Author:Sarah Fine [Fine, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-24T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Her eyes flew open. No. She was tied up again. How could she have been so—

She looked down at herself. She was lying on a neat pallet of fabric stuffed with something dry and grassy smelling. And she wasn’t tied up. She was bandaged. From elbows to wrists, her arms were wrapped in a coarse burlap material, and beneath that had been spread some sort of ointment.

The odor . . . ugh. She didn’t want to know the ingredients, but she couldn’t argue with the results. Her skin tingled, but the sharp, gnawing pain of the last several hours was gone. The same sensation enveloped her bandaged feet. Her boots were sitting next to the pallet. In front of her was a small fire, the smoke slithering up through an opening in the rock. Next to the fire sat Sascha.

He’d removed his cloak and his armor, so now he was just wearing faded fatigues that had definitely seen better days. His pale-gray eyes were riveted on the fire.

“Hey,” she said, “thanks.”

Without looking away from the fire, he smiled. “For not tying you up and selling your body to the nearest trader?”

“Something like that.” She slowly pushed herself up to sitting.

“Do you want something to eat?”

She shook her head. “Not hungry.”

His gaze slid over to hers. “Because you don’t belong in the Wasteland, Ana.”

“I have no plans to permanently settle down in a nice cliffside hovel, so don’t worry.”

He tossed a rock into the fire, sending up a little explosion of sparks. “I don’t understand why anyone would come here voluntarily, even for a short time.”

She watched him carefully, looking for any sign of anger, but all she saw was resignation, an intense sadness etched into every pore and wrinkle on his craggy face. “Do you work alone?”

His laughter was so bitter it made her look away. “For many years, I did. I was not fit to be around anyone, so it was better that way.”

“How did you become a Guard?”

“I saved someone. A young man who’d been set upon by the wolves. He stabbed me in the back and left me to die not ten minutes later, and the next thing I knew, I was in the Sanctum. The Judge said he was going to reward my compassion.” Sascha looked over at his leather breastplate, which he’d leaned against the wall. “I spent years refusing to serve. I didn’t want to be a Guard.”

She knew that feeling well. “What changed?” She suspected she already knew. It had only taken her a few moments to spot the second set of armor propped in the corner, much narrower in the chest than Sascha’s.

His eyes followed hers to the armor, set up like a shrine, a crossbow laid out in front of it. “I don’t know why he bothered,” he said quietly. “He had his own stuff to deal with. But one day, he was here, waiting for me, and we started patrolling together. I never asked him if he’d been ordered to do it.

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