Winter's King

by Bryce O'Connor

  Before the atherian could completely free himself, though, Jofrey’s magic struck him full in the chest.

  Raz’s scream of fury in his last moments of consciousness was cut abruptly short as the spell collided with him. The remaining four lashes all broke together, overloaded by the power of Jofrey’s casting. Untethered, Raz’s body was lifted clear off the ground, careening up the steps, his long arms and great wings trailing behind him like the grotesque tail of some bright comet.

  He only stopped when the spell carried him all the way to the top of the stairs, smashing him into the heavy door of the room itself.

  Meeting a solid object, Jofrey’s shock spell finally dissipated. For several heartbeats Raz half-stood, propped up with his back against the wood, the carved portraits and scenes around him charred and blackened by the residual discharge of the magic.

  Then he fell to his knees, and it was only a moment before he collapsed face first to the stone floor in a heap of dark limbs, brown fur, and red wings.

  For a long time no one spoke. There was no shout of triumph, no call of victory. Even Petrük and Argo were silent in their fear, eyes fixed on Raz’s still form. It was quiet, save for the groans of Priest Loric as he came to, and the continued pained wails of the Priestess up in the seats.

  “Lifegiver’s fat fucking arse,” Kallet Brern finally managed to get out, and the world took life once more.

  “Valaria, Behn, Jerrom,” Jofrey shouted in a commanding voice, already moving up the stairs. “You three see to Loric and Grees. Kallet and Benala, get Aster and Reyn to the infirmary. Tell the healers the truth. No use in trying to keep this under wrap now.”

  Carro had to agree, looking around. While the members of the council were moving as quickly as they could to do as their new High Priest ordered, the other Priests and Priestesses in the room were standing rock still, eyes wide and mouths hanging open. Each and every one was staring without fail up the stairs, mesmerized by Raz i’Syul’s prone form.

  The story would be told and retold a hundred times before the evening meal, Carro knew.

  “Carro!” Jofrey yelled from the top of the steps. “Cullen! With me!”

  Carro jumped, shaking himself free of the residual shock of what he had just witnessed. Pausing only to retrieve his staff—and hissing as his re-broken arm shifted in its sling—he fell in quickly behind Cullen Brern, hurrying up the stairs.

  They found Jofrey standing over Raz’s prone form, staring down at the atherian, face pale.

  “Could someone please explain to me,” he said in a half-furious, half-desperate voice, “what in the Lifegiver’s name just happened?”

  Carro swallowed painfully as he felt Cullen’s eyes move to him. Taking the hint, Jofrey’s mimicked the motion, piercing Carro’s with confused anger.

  “Carro?” he pressed firmly.

  For a moment, Carro could say nothing. He stood there, staring at his new High Priest, left arm throbbing against his chest, right hand shaking at his side.

  This was going to be harder than telling them about Talo, he realized suddenly.

  After a few seconds—and all the limited patience Jofrey seemed to have left—Carro opened his mouth. Slowly, painstakingly, he told the two men standing on either side of him of the horrors he suspected he and Raz had abandoned Syrah to, down there at the bottom of the pass, in the shadows of the snow and trees…

  XXXII

  “There is no shame in defeat, so long as the battle lost was one worth fighting…”

  —JARDEN ARRO, CHAMPION OF THE ARRO CLAN

  RAZ WOKE to pain the likes of which he had only rarely experienced. It consumed him completely, an angry, bone-deep ache, like every inch of his body had been pummeled and kicked by a hundred men wearing armored boots. He groaned as he rolled onto one side, trying to get his bearings and figure out where he was.

  As he did, he felt the unfamiliar touch of cold granite against his scaled skin.

  Raz jolted up instinctively. He regretted the motion at once, feeling the aches intensify and wash through his body in one nauseating wave. It reminded him on the one hand of his first weeks training with Ahna, echoing the constant tenderness of brutalized muscles, and on the other of the time—some months back now—when a crossbow bolt had taken him through the side.

  Neither were particularly fond memories.

  Raz pushed the pain aside, forcing it out of his mind to make room for greater concerns. Chief among these: he was naked, or at least very much felt so. He had been stripped of every piece of his armor and weaponry, left bare save for the long pants he had taken to wearing under steel in order to add an extra layer of buffer between his already-cool skin and the bite of the Northern freeze. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been within arm’s reach some part of his gear, usually Ahna, or his gladius at the very least. He felt, for half a moment, utterly helpless.

  Then he decided he didn’t like that feeling either, and shoved it aside as well.

  He was in a cell of a sort, Raz realized as he looked around. He’d been laid out carefully on the flat stone “bed” carved into the back wall of a moderately sized room, the entire space about five paces wide by eight long. It might have been more spacious than he was giving it credit for, but most of the floor was taken up by a half-dozen tall, layered shelves, line up on either side of a narrow path that led to the room’s reinforced timber and iron door, stacked high with any number of foodstuffs. Potatoes seemed to take up most of the space, piled wherever they fit, but there were roots, dried berries and other fruits, grains, spices, flasks of wine and ales, and a stack of barrels between the shelves on the left wall that had the distinct smell of salted meats.

  Raz chuckled to himself, momentarily amused that the Laorin had so little use for their dungeons that the Citadel could afford to turns its cells into larders. Then he remembered why he had been thrown into this place, and all amusement fled, swallowed by the pit that ripped open in his stomach.

  Syrah.

  He had left her. He had left her to her suffering, to the savage treatment of Gûlraht Baoill’s men and all their horrid pleasures. He had been so close to her for a moment, been practically within arm’s reach. He had heard her, though the memory of her pained cries brought no pleasure to him. His gladius had been in his hand, half drawn and all too ready to spill the blood of the men taking their liberties in that tent.

  But he’d sheathed the blade, and left her.

  Abruptly, the rage returned. Raz felt his heart start to beat faster, thudding in his chest as a fire sprung up within him. His breath began to draw itself in in ragged, burning heaves. He barely noticed his clawed hands ball into massive fists, nor the twitching, threatening rise of his neck crest, flaring for no one in particular.

  When the anger reached a boiling point, Raz opened his mouth and screamed.

  He screamed and screamed, howling out in thundering, shattering roars filled with grief and fury. When the fire didn’t die within him, Raz threw himself at the nearest of the shelves, shattering the wood with a single colossal blow, ignoring the pain that lanced through his unarmed fist and hand as splinters and potatoes and carrots and all manner of other fare tumbled through the air around him. Before the mess even had a chance to settle Raz had moved to the next shelf, crushing the horizontal slats with a heavy two-handed blow.

  For another three or four minutes Raz allowed the Monster to rage once more, barely keeping a leash on the animal. He rampaged around the cell, unchecked and half-mad as he drowned in the emotions spilling out from within.

  I left her, was the only thing his mind allowed itself to register. I left her.

  By the time he had run the madness out, Raz had turned the larder-made-cell into little more than the aftermath of an earthquake. Not a single shelf remained standing, their fractured and broken remnants scattered about the ground like the bones of long dead enemies. Their broken forms mixed in with the mess, strewn up in the chaos, the potatoes and roots coming to rest in the
grooves and cracks of the slate floor, the grains and other dry stuffs soaking in the wetness of spilled wine and spirits.

  And in the center of it all, flat on his knees as he stared at the cuts and bruises of his hands, Raz sat defeated.

  I left her.

  And he had. He and Carro both.

  For a long time Raz gave himself to the wallowing, allowed himself to flounder in that truth, that inconceivable irony. His interest in seeing Syrah again, in discovering what she’d become in the years that separated them, had swelled over the last weeks. Raz realized now that he needed to see the woman, needed to witness the one good thing that had risen from the ashes and butchery that were all that was left of his memories of Karth. She was, in so many ways, the only thing left that even remotely connected him to an old, coveted life.

  Raz traced the twin scars that ringed both of his wrists, the paler flesh almost bright against the darkness of his otherwise scaled skin. It seemed an eternity since he’d last really looked at them, really remembered the feeling—that acrid, sickening sensation that never faded, no matter how old he got—of the chains that bound his hands.

  And he had left Syrah to that bondage, abandoned the one true gleam of goodness to have risen from his past to those same irons, and renounced her to the horrors that came with them.

  Once or twice, Raz tried to convince himself it wasn’t actually reality, talking himself—as Carro had tried to—into thinking the woman he had heard was some camp slave, some battlewife taken in the Kayle’s march of pillaging and death. For moments at a time he conned himself into experiencing a mixed sense of relief and grief, thinking it much more likely that the tormented woman he had heard had been some commoner, some unfortunate who’d fallen into the hands of the mountain men as they marched.

  Every time, though, Raz returned to the truth. Reflecting back, he knew he hadn’t heard any other women when they’d first found the camp. He hadn’t made out the gossip of cooks, nor the grumbles of discontent washerwomen, nor the shouts of true wives yelling at their men. The contingent Baoill had sent to the pass were nothing but male warriors of the mountain clans. They had been sent ahead, untethered and unencumbered by women and families and all such other distractions in order to make all haste for the Citadel.

  And there, they’d found Syrah.

  I left her.

  Raz continued to stare at the blood dripping from his fingers, smelling the iron scent in the air that swirled to mix with the odd, musky perfume of the smokeless magical candles set into the walls around him.

  So what are you going to do about it?

  Raz blinked, then grimaced. The question came from a different part of his soul than the softer, fragile portion that was allowing him to be so submerged in the desperate sadness of the situation. It was a colder, harder part, one honed by tragedy and a hard life.

  And it was much, much stronger.

  Raz felt himself lifted up and out of his melancholy slowly, steadily. It took him a long minute, but eventually he got to his feet, letting his hands fall to his sides as he gave his wings a shake to free them of the dust and splinters that had settled within their folds as he had taken his revenge on the room. Eventually a smile, unyielding and wicked, began to play at his mouth. Slowly it spread, bringing with it an odd, corrupt tingle of pleasure as Raz realized what it was that he was going to ‘do about it.’ It wasn’t an elaborate answer. It was a brutal, bloody solution that took a simple, uncomplicated path, one that Raz had enacted too many times in his life already.

  But for the first time, Raz thought he would rather enjoy showing the mountain men of the western ranges what true savagery looked like.

  First, though, he thought, looking around himself before eyeing the chamber’s single heavy door, how to get out of this damn room…

  “Syrah Brahnt is dead, you old fool!” Valaria Petrük was saying with a dismissive sneer, eyes on Carro. “And if she’s not, then it’s no mercy. Perhaps Laor is punishing her for fraternizing with practicers of untruths and worshipers of fraudulent divinities!”

  Not for the first time in his life—nor indeed for the first time that morning—Carro had the abrupt and devouring urge to leap across the table and grab the old Priestess by her scrawny, mottled neck, and choke the life right out of her.

  He tempered the desire, however, choosing rather to glare at the woman with as much malice as his nature would allow.

  “She’s alive,” he said for what had to be the hundredth time in the last hour. “I swear it, and Raz will swear to it as well.”

  “That thing?” Behn Argo scoffed. “Swear to what? To family? To gods? Does it even understand the concept of gods?”

  “That’s enough,” Jofrey said, his voice a dangerous, impatient hiss.

  At once, every participant in the argument fell silent.

  They were standing in the wide, vaulted space of the great hall, everyone on their feet around the leftmost worn and food-stained table. Those still breaking their fast had been unceremoniously banished and told to finish their meals elsewhere. The benches that usually flanked the table had been slid out of the way, every single member of the council—with the exception of Jerrom, who had retired to rest after the excitement of the morning—far too agitated to even think of sitting down.

  They’d been there for two hours now, arguing themselves in a circle, half the time spent debating whether Syrah Brahnt was indeed alive, and the other half equally divided into disputes on what should be done if she was, what Carro was thinking in allowing a beast like Raz i’Syul Arro into their halls, and what use could be made of the news the pair of them had brought up the path with them.

  And in those two hours they hadn’t made so much as an inch of progress.

  “We have been chasing our own tails long enough,” Jofrey continued, the harshness of his tone spelling out all too clearly that his patience was at its end. “This pointless hounding is getting us nowhere. I choose to believe that Syrah is alive, and as you were all fool enough to cast me as High Priest, that part of this discussion is at an end. As for Arro—” he turned to Carro “—if you say you’ve never seen the likes of what we witnessed in the consecration room, then I believe you. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it happened.” He picked up a roll of parchment from the table before him, the letter having been delivered not ten minutes prior by a red-faced acolyte who looked like he had run flat-out from wherever it was he had been sent. “The healers say they had to set Aster’s leg, and will be keeping her asleep until they know she hasn’t suffered anything worse. Vora Grees is likely to walk with a limp the rest of her life. Bonner Loric has a concussion, broken ribs, and won’t be allowed to move his neck for at least a week. And Reyn—”

  “Priest Hartlet’s injuries are purely of his own doing,” Carro said, bristling. “He attacked Raz and I without provocation, going against direct orders, as Cullen has already explained three times.” He paused just long enough to allow the master-at-arms to nod gravely from where he stood by Jofrey’s left shoulder. “As for the rest, Raz was not in his right mind, and even in that state was only defending himself, and doing so with the utmost lenience, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” Elber asked, crossing his arms over his chest and narrowing his eyes.

  “He means that the atherian could have ripped the lot of us to ribbons and then some, if he’d wanted to,” Cullen Brern cut in before Carro could answer. “And I’ll second that, too. I’ve seen him move, when Hartlet decided he’d rather preach war than peace. If Arro had wanted Grees or Loric dead, then we’d be scrubbing blood from the stone of the consecration room right now, not arguing amongst ourselves.”

  “Then the only thing you’ve proven is that al’Dor has brought a killer into our home,” Petrük snapped pointedly. “What sort of beast is this ‘Arro’ if you can so calmly tell us that he would end life so easily?”

  “He is a friend,” Carro snapped. “Of mine, as he was of Talo’s.
If we were to shun every man in this world who did not walk the path of Laor’s light, then we would be nothing more than sour old hermits bickering amongst ourselves up on our lonely mountain.”

  “Your ‘friend’ attacked me!” the old Priestess howled, slapping the table between them with both hands in anger. “With no cause or reason, he attacked me.”

  “While I’m not denying that he went after you, Valaria,” Benala Forn said coolly from beside Carro, “it’s a little brazen of you to claim that he had no reason. I seem to recall you caging him in a detaining ward before the man had so much as lifted a hand against us.”

  At that Valaria Petrük flushed and fell silent. Her lapdog, though, was quick to come to her aid.

  “It was a preemptive measure,” Behn Argo snapped. “The beast was going after our High Priest.”

  “He was after the stairs, you deluded IMBECILE!” Carro roared. “Raz realized—just as I had!—that we had left Syrah behind! We left her, when we had the chance to save her!”

  “Syrah Brahnt is d—!” Argo began, but the retort choked off under the withering gaze Jofrey gave him.

  Carro forced himself, then, to calm. He took a long moment, feeling the eyes on him. He had already explained to the group what he and Raz had borne witness to, as they snuck past the Kayle’s camp, what they had been forced to ignore. There had been a few accusing glares, but most had borne looks of pity, both for the woman and for the hard choice Carro had had to face.

  Now, though, he didn’t need their pity.

  Now, he just needed them to listen.

  “Syrah Brahnt is alive,” he said slowly, evenly, “and Raz i’Syul Arro is our only chance at getting her back.”