Winter's King

by Bryce O'Connor

  Syrah blinked at that, but didn’t look displeased.

  Then she sidled away from Raz, making for Carro.

  Raz watched the pair of them lean close together for a minute, listening to Syrah whisper to the old Priest everything she had just told him. As Carro grew more and more pale, though, Raz decided it wasn’t his business what the man had to say, so he distracted himself by turning back to the infighting still ongoing within the ranks of the Citadel’s council. Cullen Brern had been joined by his brother, and the two of them were arguing with Benala Forn and Aster Re’het. Priest Elber was bending low in hissed conversation with the withered Jerrom Eyr, while behind this pair Valaria Petrük and Behn Argo had their heads together, muttering to each other and every now and then casting dubious glances in Raz’s and Syrah’s directions. Only Jofrey stood apart from the group, arms crossed, his body outlined against the broader light of the hall outside.

  And, for once, he was looking right at Raz.

  Raz met his eyes, watching them disappearing and reappearing behind the flash of his spectacles. The High Priest didn’t move towards him or indicate that he had anything to say, but something tugged at the corners of his mouth as Raz watched him. The man’s eyes flicked, then, moving to where Syrah sat with Carro, then back to Raz.

  Then he raised an eyebrow, and the question was plain on his face.

  What are you planning?

  Raz had just taken a step towards him—thinking Syrah wouldn’t mind if Jofrey had some idea of what it was that she and Carro were discussing—when Carro himself suddenly gave a loud cough. Raz turned to him, as did Jofrey, but they seemed the only ones to have made out the Priest’s polite attempt to interrupt the heated conversations happening about the room. The rest of the council continued in their mutterings, oblivious of Carro’s call for their attention. The man tried again, then once more, each cough becoming louder and more obvious than the previous.

  Finally, he lost patience.

  “OY!” the aging man bellowed, cutting across the general rumble of the others. “SETTLE DOWN!”

  The noise died away almost at once. Syrah stayed where she was, seated beside the Priest, carefully set several inches apart from him so that they wouldn’t touch, even inadvertently. As Raz watched, she looked around, met his gaze, and gave a quick, sharp nod. It was not an excited motion, or a happy one, but it spoke to the desperateness of the situation.

  Carro agreed, Raz realized, and the tingling sensation returned, sweeping across his whole body now.

  At the same time, he felt a knot tightening in his stomach.

  “There is an avenue we have not explored,” Carro told the gathered men and women about him. His voice was coarse, and he had the ashen look of a man following a path he very much did not want to take. “One that could play greatly to our advantage. Not to mention—” he glanced over at Raz briefly “—Laor has seen fit to deliver onto the Citadel all the pieces we could need to win this particular game.”

  “Explain yourself, al’Dor,” Priest Argo said testily. “This is no time for riddles.”

  “I will,” Carro promised with a nod, reaching up to tug nervously at his braided beard, “but before I can, I must first have an answer from you.” He paused, and looked to be steeling his resolve for the question that was to follow. It was a long few seconds before he found his voice again.

  “Would you allow a Priest of the faith to condemn the life of one, even if it meant saving the lives of a thousand others?”

  The rumblings began again at once, the council’s faces ranging from extreme agitation to borderline nausea to outright anger. Raz watched them all, feeling his heartbeat quicken in his chest as he waited for their answer. His eyes trailed across the ensemble, settling once more on Jofrey.

  The High Priest looked suddenly ill at ease, as though he sensed trouble on the horizon.

  “The law is absolute, Carro,” Priest Elber spoke up finally after a minute or so of discussion. “Whatever doctrine Talo might have instilled in you, and whatever good you perceive might have come from your actions, a man of the faith who knowingly plays a part in the death of another is no Priest.”

  From the corner of his eye Raz saw Carro nod slowly, as though he had expected the answer. When the Priest started to get to his feet, though, it was still Jofrey that Raz watched.

  Jofrey, who looked suddenly horrified, his mouth open and his hand half-outstretched, almost as though he wanted to cry out and stop the madness that he suddenly understood was about to occur.

  “In that case,” Carro al’Dor, Priest of Laor and the High Citadel, said in a hollow, hard voice, “I confess to the full extent of my crimes, to the betrayal of the Lifegiver and His light as a whole, and beg of you to remove me from the ranks of the consecrated faith while time is still on our side.”

  XLVIII

  CARRO WAS Broken at dusk of the following day.

  Raz, not being of the cloth, was allowed to accompany the old man and Syrah to the entrance of the consecration room, but barred from entering the chamber itself. He had been of a mind to challenge the paired Priest and Priestess who’d informed him of this, stopping him at the door, but Carro himself had put a big hand on Raz chest, his face tense as he looked up. There’d been a sadness to his blue eyes that Raz had never seen before, something separate from the depths of loss that had overtaken the man after Talo’s passing.

  “This isn’t something I want you to see anyway, lad,” he’d said simply.

  Then he had given Raz a forced, pained sort of smile, and allowed the man and woman to lead him into the room, starting down the stairs towards the black dais Raz could just make out at the bottom of the steps, looming ominously beneath the wooden carvings and floating braziers filled with white flames. Syrah had lingered a few moments longer, torn between desiring to stay by his side and wanting to be there for Carro as the ceremony began.

  Raz had told her to go.

  As the door closed behind the woman, slamming shut on the glance back she gave him, Raz stood stoically in the hall, suddenly alone in the dim glow of the candles and torches, each alight with magical fire. For a long time he told himself he would stay, told himself he wouldn’t move from that place until the ritual was at an end.

  Then the crackle of spellwork began, and Carro began to scream.

  It was a sound unlike anything Raz had heard in his life. It was strange to him, in some ways, and yet all too familiar. There was pain, there, true, miserable pain, but there was also much more. More than the physical agony that the man seemed to be suffering, the nature of the scream reverberated with the notes of loss and sorrow, like a man who had just been told about the death of his child. Carro screamed and screamed, howling unintelligible words of denial and pleas to the men and women Raz could just imagine surrounded him, standing about and above him in the rising stands that lined the room’s four sides.

  After a minute had passed into two, then three, Raz found he could stand it no longer.

  He turned his back on the door, moving along the long outer hall of the Citadel, looking for the companionship of a friend who wouldn’t weigh on his weary mind with needless conversation and questions.

  Raz found Gale settled down in the wide room he’d been shown only the evening before, after he and Syrah had been all but forcibly removed from Carro’s company. It was a large space, warm enough despite a number of narrow arrow slits that looked over the harsh edges of the Saragrias and the grey and white of the mountainsides below and around them. A substantial amount of yellow straw had been poached from somewhere and laid out thickly over the greater part of the room’s stone floor, and a large wooden trough, filled with the clear, clean water the Laorin collected from melted snow, took up much of the uncovered surface. The day before, the room had been brightly lit with a single floating orb of blazing magic, its white light chasing away any shadow apart from Gale’s. Today, though, the magic seemed to have run its course, for which Raz was grateful.

  He was in
the mood for the peace and quiet of the dark, rather than the bright cheer of light and sorcery.

  Gale—as good horses sometimes do—seemed to sense Raz’s mood before the room door had so much as clicked shut. He snorted and ambled slowly over, dipping and bobbing his head as he moved, shaking his neck so that his black mane fell unevenly to either side. Reaching his master, Gale thrust his nose right into Raz’s clawed hands. As might occur if a favorite dog did much the same, it wasn’t long before Raz found himself almost smiling despite himself, stroking the horse’s head absently as he looked out at the wisps of clouds one could discern through the nearest balistraria. He wondered, briefly, what the room would be like in the middle of a storm.

  Then, as though this hollow query were the key to the quieter place in his mind, Raz allowed his thoughts to wander, desiring even just the smallest taste of escape from the echoes of Carro’s screams he convinced himself he could still hear. For half an hour he stayed like that, absently brushing Gale’s black hair, the huge horse occasionally stepping this way and that and lashing at his flanks with his long tail. All the while, Raz willed himself to be elsewhere, anywhere that was not there, in that place, in that moment.

  Only the eventual groaning sound of the door opening behind him brought Raz back in the end. Even then, it wasn’t until he heard it creak shut again, the latch clunking roughly into place, that he looked around.

  Syrah stood just inside the room, her back pressed against the wood of the door. She said nothing, her white hair—which had been cut evenly to her chin only that morning—moving gently about her face as a thin breeze snuck its way in through the arrow slits. Her robes had been replaced, her hands re-bandaged, and as he took her in Raz was so vividly reminded of the first time they’d met that for the space of a heartbeat he felt almost a boy again.

  Then his eyes met hers, and the present returned.

  Syrah had not cried, he saw at once. Her left eye, pink and bright even in the gloom of the room, was dry, and her jaw was set. Despite this, her arms shook by her sides, and Raz could see the weight of what she had witnessed bearing down on her. Whatever morbid curiosities he might have had about what had occurred in the consecration room banished themselves from his thoughts, and he turned away from Gale to face her in full.

  She did not lunge, or run at him, despite however much he thought she might have wanted to. Instead, Syrah stepped towards him slowly, the hay crunching delicately beneath her new boots as she walked. He made no move as she approached, doing nothing more than watch her come steadily closer, here and there her face brightening with the natural somber glow of the Sun outside.

  When she reached him, she didn’t hesitate. She just reached out, wrapped her arms around his waist, and pulled herself tightly into him.

  Raz returned the embrace gently, saying nothing as he brought one arm around her shoulders, his other hand drawing clawed fingers carefully through her shortened hair. Behind him Gale huffed and moved away, satisfied that his job was done.

  They stood like that in the hay, beings so different from one another that they might have been almost eerie to witness in the same room. They spoke not a word, and only when Syrah began to shiver did Raz move, gently bringing his wings around and wrapping her in them like a pair of leathery blankets. She didn’t flinch as they settled around her, and only held him tighter until her quivering subsided.

  Together, desiring nothing more at that moment than each other’s company, they shared in mourning the sacrifice a friend had made for a people he was no longer a part of.

  XLVIX

  “It would take the spirit of war itself to best a man who fights already as though he were half-a-god…”

  —CAMP WHISPERS, REGARDING THE KAYLE

  GÛLRAHT BAOILL’S heart hammered in his chest, his spirits soaring so high it was as though he had remembered what it meant to be alive. Snow crunched beneath his boots, settling between his heels and the rough stone beneath. The wind, singing the song of approaching storms, blew his hair and beard about his rough face. As he climbed the air seemed almost to harden, sharpening to cut at the bare skin of his shoulders, growing colder and harsher with every passing hour.

  And to his left, stretching out far below him and shrinking until it seemed a world he could practically hold in the palm of his hand, the white and green blanket of the Arocklen extended to the horizon beneath a veil of low-hanging clouds.

  As he led his army upward, into the vastness of mountains much like the ones they’d left behind only months ago, Gûlraht couldn’t stop himself from smiling towards the slate-grey of the heavens above. It was more than just the four-day that had passed since his rejoining with the vanguard, time which he had largely spent venting his suppressed impatience and anticipation on unfortunate sparring partners, often to the point of unconsciousness. It was more than just the weeks he and his men had spent sunken in the murk and gloom of the cursed Woods and its world of great shadows and even greater trees. From the moment he had descended from the Vietalis, leaving the lands and villages of his ancestors behind to march south and east on the weaker men of the valleys, Gûlraht was realizing he had left some part of himself behind.

  Now, as cool mountain air filled his lungs once more and the coming squall blew drifts of powdery snow across the icy path before him, Gûlraht found that lost sliver of his soul again. The higher they went, the more he reclaimed, and by the time half the climb was behind them the Kayle felt what could only be described as the will of Them of Stone coursing through his veins. It was an enthralling excitement, the sort of thrill that usually came only before battle.

  When the shapes in the clouds above them changed, suddenly becoming something more than jagged cliffs and the outline of the path crisscrossing along the mountainside, the thrill spiked.

  “Hold,” Gûlraht said calmly, bringing his left hand up into a fist as he quit his endless climb. At once he heard the word repeated behind him, borne down and along the path a thousand times like some strange echo.

  “You’ve seen it, my Kayle?” Agor Vareks asked, coming to stand beside Gûlraht. The older man was dressed for battle, as was every member of the Kayle’s entourage. He had matching swords strapped to each hip and a round shield thrown over his shoulder. In the true tradition of the clans he wore no helmet, but a studded leather band had been wound tight about his head, keeping the beads and metal in his greying hair out of his face. Like Gûlraht, the upper half of his arms were bare, hardened and worn by a lifetime spent in the elements, and—despite his age—beneath the hide-like skin, thick muscle pulsed and flexed as the man moved.

  “I’ve seen it,” Gûlraht answered, not taking his eyes off the shapes that vanished and flickered in the shifting sky above their heads.

  Nature did not breed straight lines…

  “Are the Gähs still above us?” the Kayle asked at last, still not looking down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Agor nod.

  “Elrös and his clan are likely to be in the outcroppings there, further west.” Agor pointed upward towards a jagged line of jutting, snow-covered stone. “They were to get as close as could be dared without being seen.”

  Gûlraht nodded. “Send a runner to call them back. Tell them to meet us along the path.”

  Agor stepped away at once to do as instructed. As Gûlraht heard the man give orders to one of his subordinates, he finally took his eyes off the outline of the Laorin’s High Citadel far above, turning around.

  The mountain below appeared almost afire, shifting and flickering with the writhing darkness of twenty-five thousand souls.

  Since dawn Gûlraht and his generals—along with a small party of a hundred or so more—had led the slow ascent along the worn stairs that had been carved like a scar up the faces of the mountains. Others had followed behind when space and opportunity permitted, but the mere fact was that most of the path did not allow more than one or two abreast, much less what it would take for the army as a whole to climb in a timely fashion. As a result,
the greatest part of the common warriors had been left to devise their own paths.

  The result was a sea of steel and dark fur, seething and rumbling above and below where Gûlraht now stood, strong hands and a life among the cliffs making steady work of terrain the men of the false-god would never have dared attempt.

  After several minutes a lone figure could be seen breaking off from the army’s edge above them. By the way it moved, dashing and vaulting through the crags as though the bluffs were nothing more than a precarious ladder, Gûlraht could tell it was one of the Goatmen. He watched until the Gähs vanished among the layered edges of the bluffs.

  Then he turned back to where Agor, Erek Rathst, and Rako the Calm stood awaiting his command.

  “Start the drums.”

  Not long after, the army was on the move again, pressing ever upward. This time, though, they were accompanied by the slow, rhythmic beat of half-a-hundred heavy wood-and-hide drums, each slung about the thick neck of a Kregoan warrior.

  Gûlraht did not call for another halt when Elrös of the Grasses dropped down from the snow banks above them half-an-hour later, landing on all fours some twenty feet before his Kayle as a dozen others fell similarly around him. The chieftain of the Gähs stood and waited for the march to meet him, the greyish-white pelts slung about his shoulders for camouflage flourishing in the wind as he fell into step beside Gûlraht.

  By the graveness of his face, it was easy to guess that the man did not come bearing good news.

  “Speak, Elrös,” Gûlraht said quietly, not bothering to look at the man as he moved.

  “My Kayle,” the Gähs started up at once, his voice hoarse from the dry chill of the air. “A figure awaits you, at the top of the path. Behind him, a hundred men of the fortress stand along the gates. They prepare for us, I think.”

  Gûlraht was surprised by this, though only mildly. He had guessed the hateful powers the Witch and her ilk wielded would have a way of informing the Citadel of his coming. It was why he had started the drums. If surprise was of no advantage to them, fear might as well be.