When he found a sheltered spot between towering pillars of ice, he sat down and opened his sowen. The aura of a demigod was like a crashing storm, a thunder of ice and snow, and all he had to do was gather a fragment, and his sowen would fill. He would leave strong and powerful. The trip out of the caldera and back down the mountain would feel like dancing across clouds.
He’d been to this lake more than twenty times, visiting every year since he was an initiate. A master sohn, in this case his father’s former pupil, had taught him how to collect the Great Drake’s aura without being overwhelmed. And yet he was unprepared for what came next.
The moment he opened himself, the dragon’s aura blasted across him in a cold, howling wind. It filled his sowen, then thrashed at the ends, tearing it like a battered tent in a gale. He fought desperately for control, but before he could achieve it, the ice heaved beneath him. He went flailing, and when he fell, he lost control of his sowen entirely in the shock of it. He felt the Great Drake all around him, over him, through him. His sowen, even his own aura, was torn away and scattered.
Terrible cracking noises filled the air. The ice ruptured in front of him. Something sprayed into the air, which he realized with shock was water bursting forth from some place deep in the lake. It showered him with a stinging, icy blast that left him gasping. He tried to crawl away, but without his sowen, he was no stronger than any common person, and couldn’t seem to catch his breath. The lake ice was breaking apart all around him, and he thought it would open entirely and swallow him.
And then a massive shape exploded into the sky. He stared up in shock and horror as a blue-green figure blotted the sky. Its head was knobby with icy horns, each the size of a bull elephant’s tusk. Its icy scales glittered like gemstones. Each wing was a hundred feet in length and covered with feathers that looked like knives of ice. Its head alone was the size of a house.
The dragon opened its mouth, and out came a whirlwind of snow and ice. The sky overhead turned instantly dark, with leaden clouds appearing from nothing. A wind howled off the surrounding peaks.
Miklos lifted his forearm to shield his face from the stinging blast of snow and sleet and hail that suddenly pummeled him. And then the creature, the great flying demigod dragon, turned a single blue eye toward him and swung around in midair.
He fell onto his back, mouth open in a wordless scream. Terror had seized his limbs, and he could not move. The Great Drake swooped overhead, but instead of devouring him or blasting him with a cone of ice, it gave its wings a shake as it flew over.
Shards of ice came flying down from the sky like a thousand glittering darts. They struck him, pierced his skin, and pinned him to the ground. When the beast had passed, he freed himself from the ice and rolled over with a groan, his trembling fingers touching at the objects that had torn through his cloak and shirt and ripped into his skin. They weren’t ice or shards of glass.
They were feathers of the dragon demigod. Clear as glass and hard as diamonds, and each one so cold it burned. They’d buried themselves in at the quill, and came out only with a terrific, searing pain as he tugged them loose, one by one. When he’d got them out, he could only lay there groaning while the snow continued to fall. It threatened to bury him, but he couldn’t move.
“Miklos!” Gizella called. The wind swept up her voice and drove it away. “Where are you?”
If he didn’t get up he was going to die, buried and suffocated by the snow. He staggered to his feet and groped for Gizella’s sowen, which would be easier to follow than her voice. It was out there, but as he touched it with his own, he felt her flinch. He touched at his chest; it was as cold and hard as ice. Something felt like it was tearing at his insides. Demons and demigods, what was happening to him?
The wind was already dying, and the clouds clearing as he reached the edge of the lake. Gizella stood there, as close to the edge of the lake as possible without stepping onto the ice. She’d swept back her hood, and worry lined her aged face. She spotted him, and her gaze hardened as he approached.
“What happened to you?”
“The Great Drake.”
“I saw the dragon. I’m talking about you. Your sowen. . .it’s wounded.” Gizella felt for him, and he recoiled, shading his sowen from her touch.
“I’m all right. I just need to catch my breath.”
“Don’t hide from me,” she said. “You have something—let me see.”
“Hand me my sword,” Miklos said.
His cousin frowned. “Whatever for?”
“To help me gather my sowen.”
“It’s plenty strong already. It just feels wrong. Wounded, almost. No, not that.”
“I can’t concentrate until I have it in my hands.” Miklos snapped his fingers. “Come on, where did you leave it?”
Gizella turned around, still frowning. She kicked through the piles of snow until her foot struck something, then bent to dig out his sword. She was still brushing snow from the sheath as he came up, impatient to have it in his hand.
“Hold on,” she said. “I’m getting to it.”
Gizella turned, and her eyes narrowed as she seemed to spot something in his expression. He made a grab for the sword, and she jerked away. He grabbed her hands and struggled to get the sword away from her.
“No, Miklos! Wait. You’ve got”—she panted as she wrestled him for the weapon—“something wrong. Don’t—”
He wrenched the sword free of her grasp with a cry and dragged it from the sheath. He almost cut her with the mere act of drawing the weapon, and she jerked back. He was burning with anger at her stubborn refusal to comply, and without thinking of it, had the two-handed sword drawn behind his shoulder, ready to strike her down, even as a small part of him was begging him to stop, to throw it down, to think. Gizella sprang away, but she was old and slow, and his sowen was swirling about him with power. He easily blocked her path.
She threw up her arms and her eyes widened in terror. “Miklos!”
He swung the sword with all his strength.
Chapter Seven
Three months had passed since murdering his cousin, and now Miklos was thinking on that day as he knelt gasping for air with the dragon feather glittering in the mud in front of him. The cursed thing must have entered his chest that day on the lake, when the demigod had pierced him with feathers. That fateful day had set him down the path of war, of spreading his curse to the other sword temples.
Miklos shuddered with the memory of it. He’d entered the caldera helping Gizella down an icy staircase, stopping only to rub warmth into her arthritic old hands. Nothing but sympathy in his heart. Minutes later, he’d cut her in two unprovoked. He’d left with bloodlust singing in his veins, already plotting to destroy other sohns.
Miklos had been on his way to the command tents to meet with Lady Damanja and her lieutenants when the fit came over him. Several people had now gathered around, including a woman with a green cape—a full captain—who’d been the one to speak to him as he fell into his fit.
“Someone fetch the healer,” she said.
Miklos held up a hand. “No, I’m all right. I’m getting up.”
He wrapped his other hand around the dragon feather still lying in the mud and used his bent torso to shield it as he rose. The feather wasn’t cold, as he’d expected, but cool and inert, like a shard of crystal. He tucked it into his cloak.
Miklos pushed aside other offers of assistance and made his way through the camp. Damanja’s forces were more organized than Zoltan’s had been, with trim, clean tents in rows, sergeants keeping foot soldiers in line, and engineers bringing up siege weapons and directing work crews of men with shovels. The crews dug mines and protective trenches, while cavalry, quartermasters, fletchers, and others built their own sections of camp to the rear. Damanja’s vaunted corps of female archers had set up practice ranges and were busy drilling, as were companies of spearmen.
At the same time, there was a lack of the energy and excitement that had attended Lor
d Zoltan’s forces at all times. Depending on the whims of fortune, Damanja’s rival crowlord had been capable of stunning victories and crushing defeats, whereas she was cool and calculating. Damanja rarely lost battles, but at the same time opportunities occasionally slipped through her fingers for want of action.
Damanja’s tent commanded a hill overlooking the Lornar River as it gently curved through a verdant patchwork of rice farms. The ruins of a castle crowned the hill behind them, little more than foundation stones after the hill defenses had been abandoned when the river meandered away and rendered the fortifications unnecessary. The city had migrated along with the changing course of the river, and whatever town had once bordered its old course was now lost to grassland and rice fields. The castle ruins were a good watch point, and a defensible place to site Damanja’s army. Too far to threaten the city walls, but well-placed to intercept reinforcements before they could reach Belingus.
The crowlord’s tent was open to the military encampment on one side, and toward the river on the other. It had been raining earlier, but the air had grown still and hot, and the double opening allowed a slight breeze to stir the interior. Damanja’s lieutenants—three men and two women—were offering opinions on the siege when Miklos entered, while the crowlord sat on a small wooden stool, patiently listening.
Damanja wore trousers and boots, with a polished leather belt over a padded surplice that itself was above a military cassock that descended to the knee. She wore her falchion strapped to her back; the weapon was the temple-forged sword that Miklos had given her. Damanja truly looked the crowlord, ready to stride into battle at a moment’s notice.
The pain had passed in Miklos’s chest, but he remained too unsettled to take command of the meeting, so he stood to one side, unremarked upon for the moment. The talk bored him, so he glanced out of the tent and down at the town. It was tucked into a bend in the river, occupying ground some forty or fifty feet above the bank. The whole of Belingus was a walled fortification, but it was stronger on the landward side, the narrow neck that left it open to the plains. In part that was because there was no bridge across the Lornar, but the town also had its own ships that could be sent out to attack enemies attempting to invade from the river itself.
There had been a secondary village outside the town, beyond the neck formed by the bend in the river, as the town had outgrown its confinement, but defenders had burned these outbuildings so as to leave the ground clear up to the city walls and gatehouse towers. A force of several hundred of Damanja’s men had plugged the bend, but weren’t currently moving against the town itself.
Even if the people of Belingus felt secure behind their walls and the protection of the river, the flock of crows wheeling and cawing over their heads surely gave them pause. Among the dozens of birds were a number of the large, nearly raven-sized crows that had once belonged to their master. Zoltan was dead, and the crows seemed to know that others ruled the fiefdom now.
“There are only a few hundred defenders in the city,” one of the women was saying. “We could take the walls with a direct assault once we’ve got siege engines in place.”
“And how long will that take?” Damanja asked.
“Five days, maybe six.”
“And our losses in a direct assault?”
“Our losses, my lord, would be heavy,” the other woman said. “Even with the walls breached, the defenders would have the advantage. Three of ours would fall for every defender killed.”
“Against three months for a siege,” Damanja said. Her gaze drifted down to Belingus. “Assuming we can shut down the river to enemy traffic.”
“If you close the river upstream,” said a younger man, “I guarantee I can choke it off to the sea. It’ll take nothing more than stringing chains and then holding the riverbanks on either side. After that, it’s a simple matter of starving ’em out.”
His tone was brash—this was one of the men Miklos had brought over from Zoltan’s surviving forces. The lieutenant had already proven his worth by capturing several villages along the river some twenty to thirty miles east of Belingus. Most of those villages had been wiped clean, their people killed and scattered, their crops abandoned, and their livestock slaughtered to feed Damanja’s army. The man and the others Miklos had commanded to bend a knee to the Lady Damanja were practicing the same brutal tactics they’d have used against Balint or Damanja, only now in their former lands.
Miklos had started this war, or at least had turned it into something beyond border skirmishes and occasional raids. He was struggling now to remember why.
He rubbed at his chest. There was a dull ache there, but the pain had almost entirely gone.
After killing his cousin, he’d traveled to the firewalker temple, hid next to the road at night with his sowen masked, and ambushed one of them on the road and killed her. Only one of their initiates, but it had set the game into motion. Two other firewalkers had run him down on the post road as he fled—sohns named Tankred and Volfram, who swore they would spill his blood in revenge for the murder. They’d fought, exchanging wounds, and Miklos had escaped.
That battle convinced him that he wasn’t yet strong enough. Not to openly declare himself sword saint and challenge sohns, confident he could defeat them one by one. So instead of attacking them directly, he’d returned to his own temple in the warbrands long enough to make off with several weapons. From there, he’d conceived of his idea to seize control of the three fiefdoms of the central plains. Zoltan would be the first to fall. It had been a good plan.
Was that really your plan? Or did someone else plant it in your mind?
He shrugged off the thought. Of course it was. If not his plan, then whose?
Yet here, standing on the hillside overlooking Belingus, he couldn’t help but think of the hundreds who’d already died in this war, and the tens, even hundreds of thousands who would surely perish before he stood on a pile of bodies with his sword held overhead. None of that had concerned him before, but now his mind seemed clear in a way that it hadn’t been before. Questions rose that he hadn’t considered.
The dragon feather is out of your heart, that is why.
Yes, his mind was clear. Clearer than it had been for months. It was like waking from a dream, except he could remember every detail of what had happened while asleep. All the brutal things he’d done. Something like a bloodlust had tormented him since that day on the frozen lake, and he’d been incapable of turning aside.
Demons scald me, I killed Gizella.
He could still hear the crunch of her collarbone as his sword swept in for the killing blow. His cousin had fallen facedown in the snow with a look of horrified understanding on her face as she died.
It may have been the feathers piercing him that had pushed him to it, but that was a small consolation. As soon as they’d struck him, he’d become an agent of chaos, an agent somehow in the war between the demigods and the demons who formed their eternal enemies. Now that the feather had fallen out, he’d regained control of his sowen.
So what now? He couldn’t unravel what he’d started, could he? Firewalkers had heard the call; one was already roaming through Balint’s land unless he was mistaken. Most likely Tankred or Volfram, or perhaps both. Narina from the bladedancers hadn’t felt his blade, but she’d joined the fight all the same. There was no way backward, only forward.
The only way to bring peace is to defeat them.
And that put Miklos back to standing on a pile of bodies with his sword held high. Only then would there be an end to the madness he’d started. He felt calmer knowing what had to be done.
“Well?” Lady Damanja was demanding.
Miklos gathered his thoughts and tried to recall what she’d been saying. She’d asked him a question, something about troops sacking Belingus, letting them loot freely as reward for their loyalty. Or would it be better to capture the town intact?
“You’ll need a river port if you plan to control this land after the war,” he said. “That
means salvaging something of Belingus.”
“I’m inclined to let this land go,” she said. “Find a distant heir of Zoltan’s and give him the crows. Someone compliant, who will tear down the border castles and rid the hill country of brigands. He can buffer us against Stronghand, and I’ll only have to worry about those villains to the south.”
That struck Miklos as naive. One couldn’t be a crowlord without feeding the crows. Any replacement for Lord Zoltan would either fill the man’s boots eventually, becoming equally rapacious, or be overthrown by someone more deserving. For now that meant either Damanja herself or Balint Stronghand. If Stronghand, she’d suffer a stronger, more powerful enemy to her north than ever.
“But something bigger seems to be stirring,” Damanja continued, which erased the impression of naivety. “A larger war. We’ll hold whatever we can, keep it out of Stronghand’s grasp.”
“I agree, my lord,” one of the lieutenants said. Miklos found himself nodding along with the others.
“All the same, I can’t afford a lengthy siege, even if that means destroying the only real port on the Lornar. Even if it means heavy losses to our own forces. Belingus gets an ultimatum. The war is over—their lord has lost. His body was eaten by his own crows.” Her voice hardened. “If the garrison refuses to surrender and join us, we’ll tear down the walls and sack the town in the most brutal way imaginable.”
Lady Damanja spent a few minutes giving instructions to her lieutenants, presenting a general outline for how she’d like to see the attack change from a slow siege to a brutal assault. It was the difference between suffocating an enemy and cutting off his head. Her comments showed a solid understanding of the tactical situation, and a realistic approach to defeating a weaker, but heavily defended enemy in as short a period of time as possible.
The questions asked by her officers showed that they were capable and well selected, even—or perhaps especially—the women. While some of the crowlords of the south employed female officers, this far north, war was almost entirely a male domain. Men were seen as stronger, more brutal, and better able to suffer wounds and other physical deprivations, at least in the popular imagination of crowlords like Balint, Zoltan, and even female crowlords like Lady Yesmin, whose fiefdom lay where the post road dropped out of the mountains onto the northern peninsula.
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