“Ghendii. No one says that but Lefkani pirates. Are you a privateer from the border-coasts of Thuruman?” Khouren managed, blinking to clear his vision.
“Nah, kid. Just something I picked up. I did my time on the high seas, long ago.”
The man’s lilting voice held a laughing presence as he hunkered before Khouren. A wild mane of russet hair partially streaked with grey was pulled half-back with narrow Elsthemi braids, though his face showed the deeply bronzed skin of Cennetia. His cheekbones were high and strong, a reckless humor and weathered hardness in his green eyes, echoed in his grin of impeccable white teeth. Khouren blinked. Memories flooded in, as if they’d never spent over a hundred years apart.
Over a hundred years hating each other.
“Ihbram!” Khouren breathed, stunned to see Ihbram Alodwine den’Sennia, third son of Fentleith Alodwine, hunkering before him. The renegade Brigadier was Khouren’s only remaining uncle out of the six treasured children Fentleith had spawned over the centuries. Ihbram’s clever concoction had cleared Khouren’s mind, but his presence befuddled Khouren’s tongue, stunned as he was to see his uncle here in Lintesh.
The last place Ihbram would ever be.
“How—?” Khouren gaped.
Ihbram den’Sennia lifted one russet eyebrow. An amused but dire glint lit his lance-sharp green eyes. “We’ll worry about the how of me being here later. Right now, let’s get you up. Find somewhere better to rest.”
Ihbram reached down, and with surprising strength in his weather-honed frame, seized Khouren and hauled him up. They faced the portcullis, dispossessed citizens flowing around them in a steady stream. Halting like a marionette in a Travelers’ show, Khouren gazed at the golden plane beyond the shadows of the gate, then up into the arch’s purple gloom.
He balked, that sinking, sliding sensation filling him again.
Trying to focus, Khouren watched the sea of grass upon the far side of the dusty highway. He focused upon the city of squalor that rose there, with its reclaimed stones and repurposed beams – a rickety mess of shanties and strung-up awnings. His salvation squatted amidst the plains spreading to the violet, mountainous horizon. Golden from the autumn chill, the grasses undulated like a sea in the sighing wind. They mocked Khouren: as if living could be simple, filled with new dawns like it had been when he was young. Khouren watched the grass curl and sway, forming eddies of color. Dark now beneath a towering swath of cumulus clouds; bright now under the sunshine.
But gaze as he might, Khouren couldn’t approach. Couldn’t set a single foot into the shadows beneath the gate.
“Come on, ghendii.” Ihbram gripped Khouren by the collar and hauled him onward. Black iron and bluestone yawned above as they stepped into cold shadow. Khouren shuddered, his chest gripping, his feet stumbling, his breath coming in panicked sips. His knees turned to water and he sank down, gasping, heart thundering as if it would break his chest.
The weight of the portcullis pressed down, and he was sinking.
“For fuck’s sake!” Ihbram’s curse was disdainful. Seizing Khouren by the collar, he dragged him backwards – into the sunshine and out of the way of carts and people. Some spat in Khouren’s direction for holding up traffic, and Ihbram made pacifying gestures. Khouren curled up in a ball in the dirt and soot, gasping, his vision blacking out.
The vial wafted beneath his nose and Khouren coughed, returning.
“Aeon dammitall,” Ihbram cursed softly. He hauled Khouren to his feet and brushed smirch from Khouren’s greys.
“I can’t—!” Khouren doubled over, dry-retching.
“I know, I know,” Ihbram chuckled, both amused and disgusted. “Welcome back to the wide fucking world. You’ve been stuck in that prison of a palace far too long. Come on. It’s gonna be cold tonight, wind’s got that snow-skirl bite. We need to find some fire.”
Khouren’s uncle pulled him toward a sprawling mess of new shanties along the inside of the First Tier and Khouren went without a fuss, defeated by the portcullis. Most of the lower Tiers had burned, and these extensive new shanty-villages were the response. Threading through impromptu alleys, Khouren and Ihbram maneuvered around tents and lean-to’s, hastily cobbled apartments of slat-board, and hovels of repurposed bluestone. Wash-lines were strung in a hodgepodge, barely above them. Tired women hunkered against the wall of the First Tier, shushing mewling babes. Men with deadened eyes idled against slat-boards, smoking pipes and looking lost. Some were industrious, bustling around cook-fires as they roasted deer and boar, cauldrons of stew simmering over braziers, but most idled in the gloom, as ruined and bleak as their blackened clothes.
The sensation of pressing spaces and darkness was familiar, and Khouren breathed easier in the tight confines of the shanty-city. His belly cramped with hunger suddenly and Ihbram glanced at him as if he’d heard Khouren’s thoughts. Khouren didn’t know if his uncle had actually read his mind, but Ihbram sidled them into a crowd now forming around a crisp and blackened boar, nearly finished roasting.
Five brawny men corralled the amassing people, demanding coin for the meat. Determined to have the meat for free, the famished crowd had started to push. Through a slick maneuver, Ihbram slipped through the throng, close to the carcass on the spit. He threw a hard elbow into one profiteer’s gut, so fast that the man stumbled – and so uncannily that the man thought it was a peon with black hair nearby that had done it.
The profiteer threw a fist. The man with black hair went down. The crowd surged, irate, and suddenly the men who protected the carcass had their hands full with a melee. Ihbram was smoke on the wind as he slid through it all, straight to the carcass. Khouren hardly saw the belt-knife flash in his uncle’s hand. As the distraction raged, Ihbram’s swift cut sliced off a generous hunk of meat, which he slipped into a pocket of his rucksack as he slid back through a gap in the ruckus.
“Come on,” Ihbram murmured to Khouren, low. “I don’t pay poachers.”
Slick as specters, the Scions of Alodwine melted away through the seething crowd. Soon away through tight alleys, a deserted nook with a lit brazier welcomed them as the evening’s shadows lengthened. Slinging his pack to a block of byrunstone next to the brazier, Ihbram sighed as if exhausted. Khouren noted that sigh – it was unusual for his uncle to show weariness. Settling to the block, Ihbram fished out the crisped meat from his pack, sliced it with his razor-keen knife and handed half to Khouren.
“Here. Eat.”
Khouren needed no second urging. His stomach roared as he dug his teeth into the roasted boar. It was heavenly; crispy with fat, dripping and hot. Khouren ripped into the meat, but a relentless thought made him speak even as he ate.
“Ihbram. How are you here? I thought you were in the mountains near the Elsee—”
“I was.” Ihbram stretched his worn boots toward the brazier, tearing into his meat with more refined gusto than Khouren. “I was guarding a young Kingsman in the High Brigade these past ten years. Just after the Summons, your grandfather and I organized protection for some of the Kingskinder who showed wyrric promise, as many as we could. We couldn’t let all the old bloodlines get killed off. No thanks to you.”
Ihbram shot Khouren a severe look, hostility piercing through his emerald gaze. Khouren swallowed his bite of meat, feeling their ancient feud rise, renewed in blood and fire. Khouren lowered his dinner to his lap, watching his uncle. Shadows choked their alley and a wind picked up, making the firelight flicker across Ihbram’s high cheekbones. Ihbram’s emerald eyes flashed gold-red in the night, but Khouren knew it wasn’t the firelight.
It never was, with the Scions of Alodwine.
“You swore you’d never return to Lintesh,” Khouren spoke softly, “because I called it home. Have you returned only to resume berating me for my choices, uncle? If you have something to say – say it.”
“You have a lot of balls, ghendii,” Ihbram growled, his eyes flashing, “leaving your rat-hole.”
“Unlike some rats,” Khouren’s tone was ic
e as his eyes flashed back, “who enter too many holes. Of other men’s wives.”
“Elemnia del’Letti came to me that night, not the other way around, you know that,” Ihbram simmered. “Besides, she was never your wife, not officially.”
“Nothing’s ever official with you,” Khouren growled. “No pledge of devotion could ever interrupt your eager loins or get through your thick skull.”
“I’m not the one who became so freakishly zealous that I tried to light my own uncle on fire because my woman slept around on me!” Ihbram’s eyes flashed fury in the fire’s light. “Gods, Khouren! If it hadn’t been for Lenuria’s healing a hundred years ago, I’d be a disfigured lump of candlewax for the rest of my days!”
“Maybe you should be.” Khouren’s gaze was hard across the flames. “Maybe then that lump wouldn’t fit in so many holes.”
“And here I thought maybe you’d changed after all these years,” Ihbram’s gaze had gone from hot to glacially chill, “but you’re still the same bitter, zealous asshole I recall.”
A dark silence stretched across the flames, the two Scions of Alodwine eating up all the light in their simmering feud.
“How did you know where to find me?” Khouren asked at last.
“Come on.” Ihbram gave him a snarling smile. “I’m not that bad at mind-tracking. If I can find silver weaves of the Kreth-Hakir five leagues away, I can find your tangled red strings, Khouren. Besides, I’m not here for you. I’m checking on information I heard in the mountains while I was tracking Kreth-Hakir. I came to talk to Lenuria.”
“Figures that you’re not here for me,” Khouren snorted. “I suppose hate is thicker than blood.”
“If you hadn’t gone so insane over Elemnia way back when, we’d all be in a very different place right now.” Ihbram gave Khouren a level look. “You and she were the reason things went sour between all of us. Aeon’s balls! You and Lenuria and I, we fought together for over two centuries! Don’t you remember any of that?”
“I remember confiding in you about how I was going to ask Elemnia to marry me,” Khouren darkened as he stared at his uncle. “And having you, of all people, tell me to give it up.”
“She was a bad kind of trouble, Khouren,” Ihbram growled back. “Illianti poison and not much else. I wasn’t her first liaison, nor her hundredth. You only turned a blind eye on it until you snapped. She was a woman of the fight, the fuck, and the kill.”
“I loved her, Ihbram.” Khouren continued, a darkness settling about him, though a hot wrath roiled in his gut. “And you know love only runs one way for me.”
“Blind fucking devotion.” Ihbram gave a hard sigh, running his finger over the stone upon which he sat. “You should have become a monk like Lenuria. Prayed that damn love of yours up to Aeon, for Fifth’s sake. You’ve the zealousness for it.”
“What I want to know,” Khouren countered, bitter anger rising at their centuries-old dispute, “is how is Jennaia? Or Lemnitha? Or – what was her name with the golden hair? Oh, right. There were at least fifty of them with golden hair. Have you even kept count of the women you’ve left in the lurch over the centuries? Pining for you with a baby on their hip?”
“You know I loved every one of those women.” Ihbram’s words were soft, his emerald eyes wrathful in the darkness. “You’re the one who had severe problems with love. Elemnia was a storm and you were unhinged around her. She was smart to leave when she saw you turn me into a human torch with pythian resin for sleeping with her. You terrified her, Khouren! She had seen so much killing in the dark that her veins ran bloody, yet your zealous shit terrified her. That’s on you. Fuck you for trying to drag my ass through the mud when yours is just as full of crap. I’m going to sleep somewhere else. Have a nice fucking life.”
Khouren watched Ihbram turn, rising from his perch and taking up his pack.
“Wait.” Khouren reached out, fingers splayed to forestall his uncle’s departure. “I shouldn’t have said those things.”
Ihbram’s gaze could have seared flesh, but he settled back down to the stone block. He was silent so long that Khouren began to ease his fingers toward a hidden knife in his jerkin, wondering how this would go. At last, Ihbram gave a heavy sigh, scrubbed his short russet beard with his fingertips and took a deep inhalation. “Fuckitall. We’re family, Khouren. Are we going to be at each other’s throats forever? Because forever is a long time for Alodwine blood.”
Khouren’s fingertips eased away from his knife. “What I did to you... it kills me more than you know. That’s why I left and came here.”
Ihbram’s russet eyebrows lifted in the flickering light. “Is that a fucking apology?”
Khouren was quiet a long moment, fighting to not rise to his uncle’s bait. It was what he would have done yesterday or the day before, but today he was trying to be different. Inhaling a deep breath, he spoke again. “It was wrong. I knew as soon as I did it. But the feeling – the rage – it consumed me. I couldn’t live among the real world for a while after that. Not with... the burning inside me.”
“The burning.” Ihbram snorted, then lifted a hand to his beard and rubbed it. He ended up scrubbing both hands over his face, as he let out a heavy sigh. Quiet finally, Ihbram stared at Khouren with eyes that were no longer wrathful, but strangely understanding. “Did it ever get quieter living down in the shadows beneath Roushenn?”
“Some.” Khouren murmured. “Not enough.”
“So to escape your ghosts you became one?”
“Except that ghosts can never be outrun.” Violet eyes surfaced in Khouren’s vision, and the impression of long sable hair, the last memory he had of Elemnia. Time had blurred her, and her face sighed away, replaced by Olea’s.
Yet another woman who had never really been Khouren’s.
“Love and ghosts,” Ihbram spoke solemnly. “Both will track you down to the end of your days. Alodwine love is the worst of all: we desire it even though it kills us, but Alodwine love brings conflict, Khouren, and from conflict comes our power.”
“Werus et Khehem,” Khouren murmured, bleak. “I just – I broke, Ihbram. One moment, I was furious at what you and Elemnia had done, and the next... I was blank inside my mind with nothing but red fire.”
“From your conflict of loving, your wyrria grows, Khouren,” Ihbram admonished. “But you have to realize, that you and I are far more than dangerous blades when we’re wrathful. We are the blood of the Wolf and Dragon. Every conflict we endure grows our magic. Makes it wild, stronger. And from the conflict of all those women I’ve loved and left, all those families I sired but never knew—”
“Your wyrria grows.” Khouren blinked, understanding something about his uncle’s history at last. His gaze swung up to meet Ihbram’s, and he saw a dire truth in his uncle’s eyes. “You leave the women you’ve bedded—”
“Because my magic strengthens when I leave something I love.” Ihbram’s eyes were haunted by the fire’s light. “I am the mind-fighter that I am today because I’ve wrestled my emotions, year after year. And your love that you lost – that makes you stronger, too.”
The air hung heavy between them with memories and regrets. Khouren let his gaze flicker away, watching the brazier. “I didn’t think I would ever fall in love again, Ihbram. But I did love someone again, recently. One woman who outshone them all.”
“Just one woman in all this time?” Ihbram raised his eyebrows. “Well, where is she?”
“She’s dead. Lhaurent killed her. Just a few weeks ago.”
“Aeon’s fucking burn.” Ihbram’s voice was soft. “Though I can’t say I’m surprised. Lhaurent’s vicious bad news, Khouren. The longer you serve him, the worse it will go for you.”
“The Rennkavi is not my problem anymore.” Khouren held his uncle’s gaze. “I left Lhaurent’s service.”
“Say what?” Ihbram sat up, interest prickling his demeanor as his simmering rage slid into astonishment. “Are you playing me, ghendii? Because you know I can break that mind of yours
anytime I choose.”
Khouren swallowed. He remembered Ihbram’s formidable mind-reading talent. It would hurt, if Ihbram chose to find out any truths Khouren was hiding. Ihbram’s wyrria wasn’t as strong as the High Priest of the Kreth-Hakir, but it was damn close. The Brethren would have tried to recruit Ihbram had they known about such a vast talent, but Fentleith Alodwine had kept all his children and grandchildren a secret from Leith’s Kreth-Hakir – as well as from Leith’s Khehemni Lothren.
Until Khouren had decided to align himself with them over a hundred years ago, in his bitter wrath against his blood-family.
“I tell you no lies,” Khouren murmured. “Lhaurent crossed too many lines.”
“Well.” Ihbram gave a snort. “Thought I’d never see the day. Was it the death of this woman that moved you out of Lhaurent’s darkness? Because slaughtering thousands of Alrashemni Kingsmen didn’t do it, as I recall.”
Khouren ignored his uncle’s barb, but the truth was hard to pull from his lips. Even now, it gripped his heart. He told himself it was Olea den’Alrahel, her beautiful face and terrible death that twisted him. He had loved her, worshipped her beauty and queenliness like he’d worshipped no one since Elemnia. Khouren had been devastated when Olea had died at Lhaurent’s hands. She had possessed his heart these past ten years, scalded his loins, and poured through his mind.
But the hard truth, the one he hadn’t been able to ignore, was that as much as he had obsessed over Olea, there was only one woman who could have ever made Khouren turn from darkness.
“Lhaurent killed Lenuria,” Khouren whispered, his heart twisting in his chest.
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