He wasn’t attacking.


    Even with a sword in my hand, he looked bored rather than concerned or threatened.


    “You’re the Touched hunting Fyga.” I glanced at the woman beside me. She had a pair of daggers in her hands that were made completely out of ice.


    “And you’re the Chosen that’s pretending to be a Corrupted.” His deep voice held no emotion. “Are you done stating the obvious?”


    “What do you want?” I gripped my sword. I’d never seen a yellow stone. If that was a real Bokor blade, then he had to have gotten it from one of the other kingdoms.


    “Figgy in chains would be a good start.” He cocked his eyebrow. “But you don’t look like you’d agree to that.”


    “I’m not handing her over.” I started taking in the environment. There was a cliff behind us. We could jump in the ocean, but I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t jump in after us. Fyga might be able to make an ice bridge like Val had, but that would be difficult to run on.


    There were rocks around us at the top of the cliff, with pine trees behind the Touched. There wasn’t a lot of underbrush, but there was a decent layer of brown pine needles on the ground. I could light it on fire, but I wasn’t sure how fast the fire would spread to the Humans. Though that might be a good way for me to alert Val that there was a problem.


    “Didn’t think so.” He sighed. “What if we promised not to burn that city to the ground if you hand her over?”


    The Bokor in me knew that would be an easy trade. The lives of almost ten thousand Humans against a Touched? The Bokor would have handed a Touched over for nothing. Part of me felt ashamed that I was going against what I’d been taught my whole life, but I couldn’t step aside and let someone I knew die, even if I didn’t fully trust her. Fyga had helped during the invasion for a little while, so I didn’t think she was all bad.


    “Just making that threat makes me think that you’ll do it anyway.” I glanced at Fyga, then looked back at the other Touched. “It’s two against one. I think we have the upper hand.”


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    “You might.” The blue-eyed Touched man shrugged. “But then how will you save the city?”


    “What do you mean?” I glanced to the south. It’d take me five minutes running as fast as I could to reach the wall. I didn’t know what he was planning, but that distance started to feel like miles as my mind tried to imagine what he could be planning. There weren’t any Zombies that I could feel within two miles, which should be further away than Van and Eveth were.


    “Right now my colleague is inside that place they call Reggo with a very interesting contraption.” The first emotion the five-foot-four man showed was a smile that sent a shiver all the way to my toes. “We haven’t had a chance to test it on a group that large, but what do you think happens when you crush a mindstone and spread the dust in the air?”


    I’d worked around heartstones enough that I knew crushing one and getting the dust on your skin wasn’t a guaranteed change into a Zombie. As long as you didn’t have any open wounds, you could just burn it off and the worst you’d have was a burn or a rash. Maybe an upset stomach for a day or three. Ingesting the concentrated plague was how Eveth and I became Touched and Val ascended to a Bokor, but that was only because we’d been around the plague enough that our bodies had started to build up a tolerance to the plague. For the average Human that never saw a Zombie, let alone touched one, their bodies would die from exposure before the magic could take root. While I doubted getting hit with dust would trigger an outbreak, there would be some that turned into Zombies, while the others got sick.


    “You wouldn’t.” My heart felt like it was starting to freeze even though it was speeding up.


    “It’s a win for us.” His smile got even wider. “With a horde that large, we could cleanse that island of Corrupted. Who knows how far it could go?” His blue eyes locked on to Fyga. “What will it be? One prodigal Chosen for the lives of ten thousand?”


    The amount of heartstones it would take to infect the whole town was astronomical. Most heartstones were the size of a grape. Just throwing the dust in the air would take four or five heartstone per person. There was no way that they could have collected that many stones. He had to be bluffing.


    “Byler…” Fyga started to rotate further right, putting some distance between us. “You can’t believe him!”


    She must have taken my silence as an indication that I was considering taking the deal. “I don’t think you can do that.” I adjusted my grip on my sword.


    “It’s tiring always being right.” He reached for his sword.


    I had a chance to end the fight before it started.


    I just hoped I could reach him in time.