Evil Twin

He shook his head. “A bite will turn anyone into one of the undying beasts. We were scratched or clawed—then the wound was slathered in a paste of ragwort.”

The same paste that they’d begun coating their weapons in and that had turned the undying scourge into a dead one. Blades that had never harmed the undead beasts killed them easily after being covered in ragwort.

On their own wounds, the paste seemed to draw out the most poisonous and horrifying part of the venom—the part that transformed a human into a monstrous, ravenous beast.

With a satisfied little sigh, Echo smiled. “So it was the ragwort.”

“It was.” Drink in hand, Jorin joined them. “The weed that we’ve spent generations trying to eradicate in our grazing fields saved us all. Now there’s not a farmer along that border who doesn’t have the paste in the event a beast or two comes out of the forest.”

“But don’t they travel in packs?”

One big pack, at the end—the multitudinous pack they’d called the scourge. But the beasts did not always hunt in numbers, though it was rare to come across one alone. Bane told her, “Some might have been injured or left behind the scourge. A person missing a leg would become a beast missing a leg, and that beast couldn’t have kept up with the others.”

Her brow creased. “Do you think very many are left?”

“Not too many, I hope. But we all carry ragwort paste, just in case.”

“And there might be a few left in Crolum’s royal city,” Jorin said. “We never got a chance to see if it was cleared out.”

“It was.” And apparently Echo’s belly had gotten a second wind. She pulled her plate closer again, began picking at a piece of cake. “The meat was all gone. So they left, too.”

“The meat is returning,” Bane pointed out, even as his brain started turning over what else she’d said.

She smiled slightly. “So we are.”

Bane stared at her. As was everyone else. Slowly she seemed to realize it, raising her gaze from her plate and meeting his.

Her brow arched.

“Were you there—in the royal city?”

She shrugged. “Yes.”

“When?”

“When I heard you were headed to our southern border.” She poked at her cake and licked icing from her thumb. “The scourge was undying. So obviously there was some unnatural cause behind it. A spell, a curse. And we knew the terror had begun in the city. So I went to see if I could discover anything.”

In a low voice, a warrior said, “There was talk of a dark sorcerer in Crolum before the scourge began.”

“There is always said to be a dark sorcerer when something bad happens.” Echo rolled her eyes. “But most of the time, it is a spell that has scaled wrong.”

Because with magic, there was always a scaling—an effect that mirrored the original intent, but whether the mirrored effect was greater or smaller was impossible to predict. Usually, however, such spells and their effects were contained by magical wards.

Reaching for her ale, she took a sip before continuing. “It seemed clear to me that if a spell had scaled and created something undying, then the original spell was meant to save someone’s life or to prevent them from dying. So I went to the healer’s square in the city—and the last entry in her book was her attempt to heal a boy who’d been mauled by wolves.”

So the healer had tried to save the boy. But either the wards had failed or the spell had affected him differently than intended…and unleashed the scourge.

“She’d recorded the ingredients used in her healing potion. I didn’t know which one—if any of them—would help against the undying beasts. By that time, the city was dead and there were none of the beasts to test it on. So I sent word to you, instead.”

By messenger crow. Until this moment, Bane hadn’t known where the message had come from. Back then, he’d thought it was a joke. But he’d been so desperate, he’d tested each herb and weed anyway.

The realization gripped Bane by the throat. So it was Jorin who said hoarsely, “We owe our lives to you.”

Not just the warriors. “Everyone in the three kingdoms owes you.”

“If you wish to think so, please do.” She offered him a wry smile. “But it was not my sword that stopped the scourge. I bear no scars as you all do.”

She did. Because her parents had repaid what they owed by locking her away under a mind-numbing spell, and by planning to drug her and leave her in Tamas’s bed as Sapphira’s replacement on their wedding night.

Echo’s scars just weren’t as visible as his. Neither were her claws and fangs and strength.

But she had them, just the same.

“Did you go alone?” he asked her later, when they were in their cabin and she was wrapped up in his arms with her back against his chest. His cock was half hard, but no thought of fucking did he have now. Not after the hours in the carriage. She was still too sore. Better that he wait for a week or more.