CHAPTER TWELVE (cont.)

Uutresk Unhinged

They were still going at a steady gallop, but not riding as hard as they had been at first. Hank looked behind them to see only the moonlit plain, same as the last time he'd looked behind them a moment ago. He could no longer see even the rising smoke in the air from the fires set alight inside Uutresk. They had been riding for a while. The danger was surely well behind them.

Uellen. Oldbano. Bitsnout. Had they survived? Were they still fighting for their lives back there? Had there really been nothing they could have done? Their hosts had extended welcoming hospitality to them all, and what had they given them in return? Destruction. Death.

"There's water!"

Donnova's shout brought Hank from his haunting thoughts. He looked over at her.

"Back through there." She pointed. "Reflected moonlight. A pond. The horses should drink."

They all came to a stop and gratefully dismounted and stretched themselves. Hank was walking toward the horse that carried Sheila and Bobby, but Donnova moved in front of him and helped them down herself. He couldn't help but feel she'd done it intentionally.

"Are you all right?" she asked Sheila.

Sheila rubbed her hands together. "Yeah. Just a bit sore."

Donnova placed a hand on her arm and smiled warmly. "Rest."

Sheila nodded and sat next to her brother who sat, weeping, with his head in his hands.

Donnova turned to Eric. "Stay with them." To Presto she said, "We need saddles." Presto nodded, sat on the ground, removed his hat and rubbed at his neck. "Hank, Diana, and I can see to the horses." She looked to Diana, who nodded and stepped toward the one nearest her.

"No," said Hank. "Donnova and I can manage alone. You've been through enough for one night, Diana."

He saw a flash of protest in Diana's eyes, but she nodded and went to kneel beside Sheila and Bobby.

He looked at Donnova and saw in her eyes that his underlying message had not gone unnoticed.

The trip to the pond was silent, but that silence ended upon reaching it.

"You didn't have to kill her," he said.

"Her?"

"That woman. She was afraid. She only wanted to escape that place."

"The one who pulled me from my horse," she said, as though remembering last week's episode of some television show. "You can't fault me that, surely."

"What about Oldbano and Uellen? What if those people destroyed the entire city? We owed them our protection! We shouldn't have left!"

Her expression turned cold, icy even, in the moonlight. "Why should you care about their fate?"

Hank didn't want to take the bait, and he knew it was just that, but curiosity fueled by indignation got the better of him.

"What's that suppose to mean?"

"Nothing. Forget it." She crouched at the edge of the water, cupped a handful, and put it to her lips.

"How am I supposed to forget that? Just tell me what you meant!"

She spat the water. "Very well. How can you claim to care about them, or anyone, when you allowed the greatest threat in the Realm to live?"

Hank tensed, his face went hot, and his heart began pounding in his chest. How did she know about that? Did everyone in the Realm know about it? But then the answer came to him.

"Sheila. . . ."

He had to calm himself, had to keep control and think. He couldn't let her use this against him! But no words would come. He wasn't prepared to have had this thrown at him. All he could think of right now was that he'd never hated Donnova more than in this moment.

She rose. "We're friends, she and I. We share our tales. One of which happened to be the one about the day Venger was at your mercy in the Dragons' Graveyard, where, at the crucial moment, you became weak."

"I didn't become weak! I�"

"Outnumbered, overpowered, restrained, even, and yet he still defeated you! And it was defeat! He was at your mercy, and he deserved none!"

Hank wanted to be angry, he wanted to protest, but couldn't. There was a part of him that agreed with her. He'd been wrestling with that part of himself ever since the first arrow flew to release Venger. She had him, and he hated it. All his hatred for Venger, and all his own self-hatred since, was turning itself on Donnova. He felt a heated rage begin to boil within himself, much like the murderous anger that had once set him on Venger's destruction.

She went on, "All the unspeakable atrocities, all the dread in the hearts and minds of the beings who inhabit this realm, and you let him live! I would do anything for the chance to make that choice!"

"You would have killed him?"

She looked at him as though insulted by such a question. "How could you not! How could you pass up a�"

"I just wanted to show him! I wanted him to know how it feels! I thought it would change�"

"Venger is not a child!" she said. With a sigh of frustration, she turned away from him, only to turn back again. "How could you presume to teach him a lesson in morality? He is an evil that serves a far greater evil. . . . And are you not evil for letting him continue?"

He killed her ten different ways in his mind.

She wasn't finished. "What of the dead and downtrodden left in his wake? What of the lands he and his armies have ravaged? What of Edonlea? How many lives has he devastated since your fateful decision? And how many of those would understand your reasons? How many could forgive you, Hank?"

"If I had killed him, I would have been no better than he was! Can't you understand that?"

He didn't know if he understood it anymore, if he ever really did. But he could think of no other defense against her verbal onslaught. He had been plagued with all these thoughts already. It was his private battle. Intensely private. She was speaking these things that he would have kept hidden. It was like she was ripping him apart and exposing the deepest, ugliest parts of him � those parts that he only recently felt that he'd come to terms with. His pain was like a wound not only reopened, but made worse than before.

His hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists.

"No better than he? You would have been a champion, Hank, remembered and revered through the ages! Instead, you are an accessory to evil, a servant of evil! You are Venger's accomplice!"

He hadn't known he was actually going to punch her until there was no stopping the fist aimed at her face. The next thing he knew, she was on the ground, staring up at him with fingers to her bloody lips. In this darkness, her blood looked black.

Hank was breathing hard, exhilarated. Hitting her felt so damned good! But he had been wrong to have done it. She had made him do it, he felt. But, no, only he could be responsible for his own actions.

He was so tired of walking that line between right and wrong.

He heard the others coming and considered how this might look to them. Damn it! But he found he really didn't care right now. Sheila was now kneeling at Donnova's side. Eric was standing between them, his shield favoring Donnova. Even Bobby had come; he was standing behind Eric. Diana was seeing to the horses, as though she wanted to be close, to be helpful, but didn't want to get involved. Presto had never come the full distance.

Hank didn't care about them right now. It wasn't finished; he had something left to say.

"I did it for us, for my friends! I wanted to set an example! I'm not evil! And I don't serve Venger! I hate Venger!!"

No one said anything. Donnova got up, and then collected the other horses to lead away. Then she stopped and half turned to look at him again. "You'll be the death of us all," she said before she turned and began walking the horses back, Sheila at her side. They walked past Presto who whispered, "Donnova, we have saddles." Donnova nodded an acknowledgment and kept going.

Eric turned a sidelong glare at Hank. Hank didn't like the look. He had the feeling that Eric had just taken Donnova's side without so much as caring what their argument had been about � not that he would have told him. Then Eric turned away and followed Donnova and Sheila. Bobby followed Eric, and they were soon joined by Presto.

That's when it occurred to him that this was just what Donnova wanted. She had enticed him to violence just so his friends would see him lose control of himself. And he had fallen for it. He hit a woman who hadn't even hit first, and hadn't hit back. She was trying to turn his friends against him! But there was no proof. There never was.

Or perhaps it was merely a deflection, he thought. She hadn't liked his accusing her, so she accused him of something worse to throw him off.

"Hank? You OK?"

It was Diana. The only one who was willing to talk to him, the last one left standing by him. They knew and understood each other, he felt. He was glad to have her at his side now.

"Yeah. I'm OK. Thanks." And he meant those thanks, more than he was capable of expressing at the moment.