The Shadow of the High King

by Frank Dorrian

  Cold knives sunk deeper, formless fog leeched back into Harlin’s head, bringing with it a pain so intense he thought it would cut him in two. Anselm and Ceatha’s voices were far away now, their forms growing indistinct. He saw Anselm knuckle his eyes, touch a hand to his own, but the fog was growing, consuming sight and thought. For a moment an eclipsed sun was on the horizon, a faint ribbon of red light rising toward it beyond a sea of silver mist. Ancu waited for him there in centre of that red stream, crouched and foetal, the pale stars of his eyes glittering. One long, dripping hand beckoned Harlin to follow.

  ‘You have done well, my little wolf.’

  Duana’s voice sent a chill up his spine. Harlin’s vision cleared, the landscape reforming before him. It had come from right behind his ear. He looked over his shoulder slowly, and saw only bloodstained rock. In the corner of his eye a shadow moved past the Sombrewine’s white expanse. He caught the briefest glimpse of violet eyes. His mouth moved wordlessly.

  ‘Harlin?’ Ceatha’s voice. ‘What is it, a muirnín?’ she said gently.

  Harlin’s mouth snapped shut, the fog over his thoughts lifting. Another fleeting glimpse, beneath the shadow of a tree past Anselm. Duana, obscured yet sensuous, lithe and barely clothed as ever despite the snow, her violet eyes aglow. Her form faded back into shade whenever he tried to directly look at her, changing places, always keeping to the shadows around them. He could only hold her at the very edge of his vision like a grey spectre, her tattoos seeming to writhe and snake over her body. He blinked hard, trying to drive the sight of her away, thinking her a phantasm of death, but she remained, and pressed a finger to her lips, grinning wickedly.

  You can’t be here, he thought.

  ‘Are you so sure?’ Her voice came from by his ear again, though she lurked near a pine tree to Anselm’s left. ‘I am proud of you,’ she said, ‘we all are, sweet wolf.’ He could feel her fingertips tracing the scars beneath his armour, smell her skin, her hair. She always smelled earthy, slightly of sweat, natural, delicious. Her form faded, a shadow passed across the Sombrewine’s vista, and he caught sight of her lounging by a rocky outcrop where the land shelved away.

  I’m afraid I won’t be meeting our child.

  ‘What,’ said Duana, head tilting in confusion, ‘because of that little cut? No, sweet wolf. No, this is not the end for you, not while there is still so much to be done. We will not see you fail now, not after such a promising start.’

  His wound burnt like someone had pressed a hot iron to it. He screamed, back arching in agony, hands clawing earth and snow feebly. The bleeding stopped, but Anselm and Ceatha were on him in an instant, holding him down and muttering soothing words to him.

  ‘Have your healers fix the bone if you want to use that arm again,’ Duana’s voice spoke, the pain ebbing but her image vanishing. ‘It will do you well to recover from a war wound. Your men will write songs of how no blade can kill you.’

  A lithe shadow loomed behind Ceatha then as she knelt over him, her mouth shaping words Harlin couldn’t hear. Violet eyes burned over her shoulder, wild and full of hate.

  ‘The red-haired spider,’ said Duana, light catching on bared teeth. A flash of silver, a grey hand brandishing a long knife – there, then gone in an instant. Only her hateful glare remained in that shadow, the glow of it framing her face in thin lines of amethyst.

  ‘I should kill her.’ Silver flashed again. ‘I’m tired of watching you two fucking,’ she spat venomously, eyes flaming.

  She sniffed suddenly as if surprised. ‘The bitch is with child.’ The knife appeared again, a shard of silver light. ‘She wanted to tell you before the fight but feared it would distract you. How kind of her. Now you are dying these are the only tears she will ever shed for you. I could solve this, though. I’ll take this knife and shove it up her cunt, see if she still has your child after that.’

  ‘No!’ Harlin spat, thrashing. Ceatha and Anselm pushed him down again, faces distraught.

  ‘Easy, Harlin,’ Anselm shushed, voice cracking and eyes streaming, ‘easy, brother, let it take you.’

  Duana’s shadow shrank back into nothingness, and Harlin felt her arms slip around his waist, her lips brush his ear from behind, as though she lay in ground beneath him. ‘She doesn’t love you,’ she hissed bitterly, ‘remember that. She loves power. Only I love you, my little wolf, only I – and soon so will our child. Your true child.’

  She reached inside him, stroking the dark thing that lurked in the deepest pits of him so it stirred gluttonously in its slumber. ‘Did I not tell you that one life would fix nothing,’ she said, ‘that it would be but a drop into an ocean of emptiness? No matter. This is only a beginning.’

  What?

  ‘We both want the same thing, our bargain was made on that promise, but that promise does not end at the death of one king. Your reign is only just begun, Harlin, and together we will make it a bloody one.’

  Duana’s nails sank deep into his chest in her unique, sensual way, though now they felt like the daggered claws of some hideous abomination.

  ‘A red dawn waits for Caermark, little wolf, and your name will be known in every corner of the land. They will speak it in furtive whispers lest you hear them. They will pray to their ugly little gods to be spared from your coming. The shadow you cast will be bleak and terrible as the storm that birthed our kind, and this land will fear you Harlin, the Black Wolf.’

  Duana’s voice and touch faded to nothing, leaving Harlin beneath Ceatha and Anselm’s pinning hands, a searing, white-hot rage coursing through his being. He shot upright with a roar, throwing off their grasping limbs, heedless of the pain flaring in his wound as he leapt to his feet. He ran to look over the shelf of the land, stopping at its very edge.

  The skies had cleared, a pale sun poured brightly over the treetops behind, and Harlin screamed his echoing rage out over the Sombrewine, over Caermark, bellowing till his throat was raw and burning, while his shadow stretched off endlessly before him, a straight, black knife, its edge pressed with deadly promise to the artery of the land.