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Kingdom's Forge: Book 01 - Paladin's Redemption

Page 35

by Kade Derricks


  Blood oozed from a multitude of small cuts on his arms and chest. Cuts her blades had inflicted. Eventually he would tire, she knew, and her daggers would slip home. She would have to be careful not to kill him. She needed him alive. The bleeding from her own hip and shoulder concerned her. She could feel the wounds draining away at her own strength.

  The human tried to take the offensive again and started a counterattack. He led with the sword this time, trying to lock up her blades.

  Koren avoided each of his attacks and threw herself back by stepping forward against his planted leg, then pushing off, and springing away from him.

  She landed on her feet and recovered. Again, Dain pressed in. He smiled infuriatingly, and began swinging with both weapons. Neither moved quickly, but the power of them shook her. Her arms and hands grew numb each time her daggers clashed with them.

  In her mind, desperation began to build. He was so strong. How long could he fight like this? How long could she?

  After a time, his smile faded and he grew winded. He made a sideways slash with both weapons.

  Again Koren deflected the blades and, when he stepped forward for a follow-up, sprang off his leg as before.

  Mid-flip, she felt an iron grip clamp around on her ankle. Shock and panic seized her.

  The human had grabbed her.

  The grip on her ankle tight, he swung her around in a wide, flat arc and tossed her against a nearby oak.

  The air left her lungs as she struck square on the tree’s thick trunk. Koren sagged down, gripping her sides and trying desperately to suck a breath into her chest. She watched him approach.

  The infuriating little smile had returned.

  She would teach him to taunt her. Once she caught a breath, she would carve that smile right off his lips, along with those laughing green eyes of his.

  Dain must have dropped the sword to grab her ankle, now he held a dagger, the one he had thrown at Slerian earlier, along with the wicked short axe. Only her right-hand dagger remained. The left had flown away when she struck the tree.

  Koren sprang up into a frenzied attack. The human’s own weapons met hers each time. How he could be slower and yet manage to hold me off, she asked herself.

  After parrying her slashes, Koren felt him lock her weapon arm under his. Helpless with her dagger trapped, she sensed an energy flowing through him and gathering into his axe. The edge glowed a bright yellow. He brought it back for a finishing blow and she tried to slip free, but his hold was tight.

  She felt the blade slam into her chest with crushing strength. It landed with enough force to throw her back once again, this time dangerously close to the canyon’s steep drop-off.

  She fought to get up on her knees, but couldn’t seem to rise further. Her legs refused to cooperate, betraying her. Blood flowed from a deep, ragged wound across her breast. Only the enchanted armor had prevented her body from being torn in half.

  “How?” Koren rasped. She had never lost. Never been beaten in combat. Even Haldrin, the finest warrior of the Golden, could only hope to fight her to a draw. This human had defeated them both.

  “Your brother was better,” Dain said.

  Koren looked out on the field. Humans and wood elves, thousands of them, were returning from the front. They milled about and sat, exhausted after the fight. A handful of disgusting dwarves walked among them.

  Though all seemed tired, many were smiling. They huddled in small groups, wiping their faces clean and clapping each other’s backs. This was not an army in retreat and disarray.

  This could only mean one thing.

  Her father’s men were lost. The golden elf army had been lost. They were defeated, undone by a ragtag collection of pitiful humans, dwarves, and wood elf scum.

  But hope remained, surely. Her father had taken most of his men down into Teran. They would return and shred these resting fools.

  Then the roar of water rose from behind her. Like a thousand waterfalls it thundered and echoed. Koren and the hated human both turned to the sound’s source. A churning wall of white-capped water rose from downriver of the wood elf capital and then crashed over it. Waves sloshed from bank-to-bank like water in a washtub. When the sloshing finally subsided, both canyon and city were gone, a turquoise lake glistened where they had been.

  She would have cheered at the destruction if she hadn’t known her father and his troops were down there. Now all were gone. There would be no victory this day.

  Koren still had something to finish. The wood elves might have won today, but she could avenge her brother. Dain lowered his head, turned, and walked off to join the victorious wood elves.

  Willing herself to her feet, ignoring her body’s pain, she raced toward him. She raised her dagger to drive it into his heart.

  “Look out behind—” she heard one of the stunted dwarves yell.

  Dain turned and threw the still-glowing axe. It spun, end over end, edge flashing in the sunlight.

  Koren felt the blade’s vicious bite, then air rushing by as she flew off the canyon rim and dropped into the lake. The splash shocked her on impact. She clutched at the weapon buried deep in her chest and drifted down into the cold, clear waters.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jin Gladstone stood in the creek’s clear, cold water as it swirled about her white shins.

  Already, she felt the faint beginnings of a sunburn on her calves and shoulders. Her blue eyes darted around the small pool as she sought out her quarry. With both hands, she held an iron-tipped spear, ready to strike. On the water’s graveled bottom a telltale flash of white told her where to drive it.

  The spear tip dove, unimpeded, and then stuck through something soft and wiggling.

  “Another one, uncle,” she shouted over her shoulder. She flipped her spear out of the stream and tossed a fat rainbow trout onto the grassy bank. The largest of five, it flopped and skidded, trying to regain the water despite its mortal wound. Jin took a moment to glance over her shoulder at Tarol while flashing a proud smile. So far, his catch numbered only three. He would have to work fast to catch her before dark. While she watched, he stabbed down with his own spear only to come up empty once again.

  Giggling to herself, she returned to own her fishing. She thought she saw another flash when a shadow fell over the pool.

  “Nice,” Dain said, examining her catch. “Tarol having no luck again?”

  “Better than usual. He has three this time, father,” Jin answered. The word still felt a bit strange in her mouth. It held a newness that she hoped never to outgrow.

  “We can’t all be master fishers like you, sweetie,” he said. He reached over and mussed her hair. “Your mother is cooking dinner a little early tonight, so why don’t we leave your uncle alone for a bit. He might have better luck without you around.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” Tarol rejoined. “Tell Sera to keep her cookware handy. I’ll have another three in a moment.”

  “Will do,” Dain answered. He strung Jin’s trout through their gills on a thin willow branch. He winked at her and she laughed.

  Jin walked beside her father toward their newly completed log cabin. Off the path, across an open field, she saw dozens of dwarves working on a large structure. Ringing hammers sang out as they chipped away at heavy granite blocks. She thought it strange that a dwarf, like her friend Razel, could be a grownup and yet remain short and squat. She’d never seen anything like the bearded workers. A group of wood elves aided in the construction, using their abilities to summon the earth elementals that were stacking each finished block into position.

  “Razel says the interior keep will be done in another two years. Then we’ll start on the outer wall. It will take longer,” Dain said. He too stared at the construction.

  “Will they return? The golden elves?” she asked.

  “Who knows? But we’ll be ready if they do.”

  “Will Galena accept Drogan Baylest as their ruler?”

  “I doubt they’ll have a choice. He
has a small army now to back him.”

  “What about you? Why didn’t you want to be king?” He would make an excellent king, especially with mother at his side, she thought.

  “No thanks. Too many headaches. Between you, your mother, and the work to be done here, there’s too much for me to do already.”

  “And the babies,” Jin ventured.

  “And the baby,” he chuckled. He still refused to believe her vision that she would soon have two little brothers to contend with. Last night, he and Jin had felt the first little kicks from her mother’s swollen belly.

  “Tonight, will you show me how to charge a weapon again?”

  “After dinner.”

  “Razel says you and mother will be named Baron and Baroness if Drogan Baylest is made king.”

  “That mouthy dwarf talks too much, filling people’s heads with nonsense. You mother was born to rule, not me. I’m just a simple man.” He turned his eyes away and into the distance.

  Something didn’t quite sound right about his statement to Jin. It didn’t ring true.

  “Baron Gladstone does have a nice sound to it, though,” he added after a pause. He turned his gentle green eyes on her. “Are your visions still fading?”

  “Yes, I seldom see anything anymore. Like most, I am growing out of them. Grandmother’s gift was very rare.” At that, her father nodded, reaching out to muss her hair once more.

  Baron and Baroness Gladstone did have a nice sound, she thought. She was glad she and her mother had taken Dain’s last name.

  Dain used an iron hand pump to fill a basin with fresh water so they could clean the fish outside.

  “As my father would say, you kill it, you clean it,” he said, handing her a thin knife. Then he entered the cabin, leaving her to the fish.

  Jin put the trout on a sturdy wooden workbench. She removed the heads and fins, then cut into the soft, pink bellies. These were big enough to filet, she decided, and began slicing along their rainbowed sides.

  While working, she looked out at a rock cairn piled on a small hill nearby. They had buried her grandparents, the king and queen, under the quiet shade of a young mintril tree there. The mintril’s purple leaves shaded their graves.

  Cleeger, the shapeshifter who had fought her father in the tournament, had been the flood’s sole survivor. In bear form, he’d swam to the water’s surface gently holding her grandfather’s lifeless body in his ivory teeth.

  Fresh flowers, gathered by her mother no doubt, lay atop a single shared headstone. Dain had carved it himself. It seemed like a strange skill for him to possess. And even Razel, for whom complements were so rare, said the work was well done.

  Jin took a moment to mourn her grandparents with a silent prayer. It was her custom to honor them so.

  So many lives had been lost in the war. Only one in three wood elves survived Teran’s fall. Thousands of families were broken and lost in the conflict. But those that remained had all attended Teldrain and Selasa’s service.

  Jin finished the fish, stacking them up into a brace of neat pink fillets.

  In the spring, her parents had formed a gathering of elders to govern the wood elves. Tarol had refused the throne and her mother no longer believed that they should have a king and queen, preferring instead to share power with a dozen elders. Reluctantly, they had accepted—old habits changed hard, father had said—on the condition that Sera be the first among them with duties and responsibilities beyond the others.

  Dain, of course, served as her honored advisor.

  The gathering’s first act had been to organize a wedding for her mother and father. Its second was sending demands to Mirr, the golden elf capital, for the release of all wood elves held as slaves or prisoners. To everyone’s surprise, the Golden complied in exchange for a formal border between the two nations. Both sides now recognized the old road as the official boundary.

  Jin thought of all the death and pain that had sprung from something so simple as a line on the map.

  How many lives had been lost on both sides over the years?

  “Never again,” she vowed. The trees rustled gently around her.

  She entered the cabin and joined her parents.

  One Eye obeyed the master.

  The three chiefs before him had resisted, and all three were struck down by the master’s terrible wrath. In exchange for his obedience, One Eye now ruled the orc tribe. He answered only to the master.

  Now though, for the first time, he questioned the master’s orders. He’d been sent to find a hateful elf, of all things, and not just any elf but a specific female. What use could an elf possibly be to the master?

  In the end he obeyed, as he always had, dispatching dozens of scouting parties to comb over the area, searching for her. A demonic tracker led each one and they tried to catch the elf’s scent. They too were the master’s servants, but One Eye hated the sightless, gray trackers—the way they sniffed the air with long, forked tongues and then tasted it disgusted him.

  Showing his resolve to follow the master’s commands, One Eye led a party of scouts himself, and on the third day of their search, his own tracker had caught the elf’s scent. The foul beast now led them south along the great river’s edge.

  After losing so many troops when he had tried to invade the elvenlands, One Eye nervously watched the far shore. Making matters worse, he had lost even more orcs in the failed raid on the human’s richest gold convoy. The battle had been tilting his way until the elves arrived and slaughtered his warriors. Again, they had thwarted him.

  The master had made a mistake in trying to take the elf lands. He had underestimated the elves, both their strength and their resolve. And if the master could make one mistake, he might make another—might be making it now, sending them to search for a lowly elf female.

  The thought disturbed One Eye. He didn’t like where it led.

  The tracker stopped. His long, red tongue flicked out and then slid back inside his shadowed cowl. The demon’s mouth smacked, tasting the air loudly. The tongue extended again, and he repeated the tasting for half a minute. At last he extended a bony, slate-gray finger toward a moss covered boulder midway across the river.

  One Eye squinted, trying to see clearer.

  A female elf lay facedown atop the boulder. Long blond hair was plastered to the side of her face. Near one hand lay a small axe. One Eye saw bloody handprints near the top of the boulder where she must have pulled herself up from the water. Trails of dried blood ran down its sides into the currents below. One Eye prayed to the spirits that the search was for naught, that death had already claimed her.

  “Bring her to me,” the tracker said.

  One Eye sent two scouts out into the river while the rest kept watch. The elf never stirred as they dragged her across the rough boulder and then into the cold, rushing water below. They returned with the female, flopping her up onto the riverbank like some great fish for the tracker to examine.

  “With all the blood she’s lost, she has to be dead,” One Eye said. He spat a wad of thick, yellow mucus near the body.

  The tracker continued to study her wounds, ignoring him, hovering its hands over a deep gaping wound in her chest. One Eye could see bits of exposed white rib bone and purple lung tissue underneath.

  Finally, the demon turned its head in the orc’s direction.

  “She’s at the edge of death…the very edge. Take her to the master after I finish.”

  The beast leaned forward over the female’s face. It chanted a spell in its own cursed language. One Eye feared for his spirit just hearing the foul tongue. Serving with the trackers, being near them was bad enough, but listening to their accursed spellcasting was worse.

  That and imagining how they nourished themselves.

  The orc chief shook his head and tried to clear away the image.

  With the final syllable a thick, black liquid poured from the demon’s mouth. The oily substance dripped onto the female’s face and coated it completely. The demon cupp
ed his hands and caught up handfuls of the oil, packing it into the hollow chest wound. When the last of the vile liquid drained from him, he stopped moving and fell.

  “Tracker?” One Eye asked. He prodded the demon with his axe.

  “Dead, just like the elf, stupid beast,” one of the scouts said. “What now, chief?”

  The elf began to cough and sputter. She rolled onto her side, then propped herself upright. Black oil masked the whole of her face but for the icy blue eyes that opened and blazed at One Eye. Madness and death stalked in them like a trapped beast, and the orc leader felt a twinge of fear.

  “Take me to my master. Take me to Baelzeron,” she said.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Visit Kade’s website to keep up on the latest news:

  www.KadeDerricks.com

 

 

 


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