The Swampling King (The Windwalker Legacy Book 1)

by Ben S. Dobson

  He was stuck, really, in the Plateaus and in the Keep. There was no place to hide where he wouldn’t be found, usually within a few hours. It had only taken them so long this time because of the festival masks, and those were not an asset he could rely on outside the three days of Dal’s Rest. Sometimes he was allowed a day or two, but it was never very satisfying—it only meant that his father knew exactly where he was, and had men watching him. As soon as Gerod needed him, they always brought him back. And then we do it all over again.

  “God Above, I hate this place,” he muttered.

  He didn’t think he had spoken loudly enough to hear, and he was surprised when Rudol responded. “Why not say it louder? It’s no secret. You spend all your time trying to run away.”

  The accusation in Rudol’s voice was far from unusual; Josen was accustomed to his younger brother’s disapproval. He could ignore it, most of the time. But he was already on edge—the swampling girl, the Keep, the looming threat of King Gerod’s judgement, it was more than enough. He didn’t need this too.

  He turned on his heel and gestured angrily at the drab stone walls. “Look around you, Rudol! This place is what killed our mother. This place, this life, that man.” He jabbed his finger toward King Gerod’s door. “This keep is a crypt, and we’re already buried in it. Is it so wrong that I want to pretend I’m still alive from time to time?”

  “Generations of our family have lived here. It’s stone and mortar, nothing more.” Rudol looked down again and was silent for a time, then spoke without raising his eyes. “Someday soon, the Throne of Air will be yours. Whether you’re ready or not, whether you’ve earned it or not. There are more important things than what you want.”

  “Yes, I know: I’m childish, I’m irresponsible, I’m selfish. It would be so much better for everyone if you took the throne.”

  Rudol still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “That is not what I—”

  “No, you’re right. If Father was a wiser man, he would let me go next time I try. I would be an awful king. But no one seems to care very much about that, do they?” Josen ran a hand through his hair, and his next words tumbled out before he could decide if he meant them or not. “Well, here’s a promise that should make you breathe easier, little brother: the day they try to put a crown on my head, I will throw myself off this mountain. You can have it.”

  Rudol finally looked up at him then, his large brow creased, and opened his mouth as if to speak. But he only shut it again, and clenched his jaw tight. He doesn’t know what to say to that. It didn’t feel like much of a victory. Stupid. He’ll tell Father, and then they’ll never give me another moment to myself. Josen didn’t even know why he had said it—it wasn’t something he would ever do, not really. He couldn’t think I meant it seriously, could he? Maybe he won’t say anything.

  But then… there had been days when he could see no other way out, days when he had looked down into the oily grey of the mist from the edge of the precipice in Cliffside and wondered, if only for a moment, what it would feel like to fall. If he believed the Word of the Wind—which he wasn’t certain he did—even the most impure souls would be born again, and it was hard to imagine a life he wouldn’t prefer to this one. That was the kind of freedom Elda Terene had chosen; a quicker path, perhaps, but the same destination. And how many times had King Gerod accused him of being too much like her?

  Rudol would remember that. He remembered everything their father said. Josen shifted his feet, suddenly uncomfortable under his brother’s searching gaze.

  At that moment, the door to King Gerod’s chambers swung open, and Cer Horte stepped out, breaking Rudol’s line of sight. Wind of Grace, thank you. Josen hadn’t thought he would ever be glad to see the man again, but just then, he was a welcome distraction.

  Horte kept his gaze rigidly forward and bowed awkwardly. “Highnesses,” he mumbled, then walked quickly to the stairs, ducking his head down until he was out of sight. I’ve seen men stand the cliff looking less scared. I wonder what Father said to him. Whatever it was, Josen doubted that Horte or his friends would be telling anyone what had happened in the tavern. King Gerod knew how to ensure a man’s silence.

  Eian Gryston came through the door just after Horte disappeared down the stairs, and despite everything, Josen couldn’t help but smile.

  “Eian!” He strode forward and clasped the lord general’s hand. “It’s been too long.” Eian had commanded the Royal Swords when Josen was younger; he’d tutored both the king’s sons in swordplay, and lent his ear more than once when Josen had needed someone to talk to. Now, though, they saw each other only rarely.

  My own fault, really. Since resuming his post as lord general of the Knights of the Storm, Eian had little time to visit the Plateaus, and when he did it was for tournaments and dinners and the like—all events that Josen took great pains to avoid.

  “Josen. I had hoped you might come to the tournament. It is good to see you, lad.” Eian smiled, though his lined face and deep-set eyes made him look more sad than happy when he did—Josen had never noticed that when he was younger. “But under the circumstances… well, we will have time to speak later. The king wishes to see the two of you now.”

  Josen winced. He hadn’t meant for his little adventure to trouble Eian, but the man was the lord general—his involvement had probably been inevitable. One more thing, Josen supposed, that would have been obvious if he had bothered to stop and think about it. But it wasn’t my fault. Horte and his like started it. They always start it. They’re in the wrong, not me. He might even have convinced himself, except that the swampling girl’s dark eyes still stared at him whenever he closed his own. God Above, if Eian knew about her…

  Rudol pushed away from the wall, straightened to his full height—a head taller than Josen, who was hardly short. “Come on then. We’re wasting time.” He shouldered past Eian and through the door.

  Josen looked at Eian a moment longer, wanting to say something—to tell him about the girl and everything else, just like he would have when he was a boy. But it was different now. Eian might forgive many things, but not giving aid to a swampling. He wouldn’t understand. Not anymore.

  In the end, he could only force a smile. “I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble. We’ll talk afterward.” Then, squaring his shoulders and feigning a composure he didn’t feel, he stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

  King Gerod’s receiving room was empty when he entered. Rudol had already passed into the bedchamber through the doorway at the far side. A fire crackled in the hearth, and the chairs around the fireside table were askew, as if they’d been used recently—the king would have spoken to Eian and Horte there before returning to his bed.

  Josen’s step faltered. He had sat before that fire many, many times while his father had lectured him; he wished he didn’t have to pass it by now. Even kneeling before the Throne of Air in the Windsmouth would have been better than going on into that bedroom. That bedroom, where King Gerod lay in a sickbed too much like the one he had never visited when his wife lay dying. Josen felt no pity for his father, but he had seen enough sickness in this place. More than enough.

  “Josen! He’s waiting.” Rudol leaned out of the far doorway and beckoned impatiently.

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming.” Taking a deep breath, Josen followed his brother into their father’s bedchamber.

  The room was dimly lit—a candle on the bedside table, another on the windowsill—and it stank of sweat and waste. The king had only been abed with this particular bout of illness for two days, but Gerod didn’t allow anyone in to clean while he was ill, and kept the single window closed and shuttered. “A king should never appear weak before his subjects,” he had told Josen time and time again.

  A small man with thinning grey hair sat beside the king’s bed, clothed in brown robes with a mantle of eagle’s feathers about his shoulders. A silver circlet sat about his temples, with a colored glass eagle’s eye in a golden sunburst at the brow. Renold Mulley, the
royal chastor. Mulley smiled in silent greeting, and Josen felt an unsettling but familiar sensation: that the golden eye affixed to that chastor’s circlet was peering at him independently of its wearer.

  Gerod had little use for chastors, but for whatever reason—and his motives were as mysterious to Josen in this as in anything else—he counted Chastor Ren among the few men he trusted. Aside from Master Jovert and his physician’s apprentices, assigned to the king’s care by the Tower in Orimscourt, the friendly little chastor had long been the only one allowed to see Gerod when the illness was at its worst.

  King Gerod was sitting upright in bed, wearing a loose gown of blue and gold. His blankets were pulled up to his waist. He seemed much recovered, but Josen had already guessed that—his father would never have let Eian and Horte see him otherwise. The illness had stolen much of Gerod’s body away over the last few years, leaving little but bone and sinew, and it seemed like more age spots marred his bald head every day, but his eyes were clear. Clear eyes usually meant a clear mind; Josen cared about little else. In the worst throes of his illness, the king’s fevered, unfocused lectures were unbearable to sit through.

  Gerod observed without speaking as Josen moved to stand beside Rudol at the foot of the bed. There was nowhere to sit save for the stool occupied by Chastor Ren—the king kept his bedchambers plain, empty but for the bed, bed-table, and an old wardrobe. Josen crossed his arms and met his father’s eyes with all the defiance he could muster. Gerod only maintained his silence, tapping his bony fingers against his leg as he examined his sons.

  Of all the very many things that Josen hated about his father, this was the worst: his complete lack of passion. He had heard stories of a young Gerod, stories of a very different man—a man who had married for love, and refused to dissolve his marriage even when his wife bore him no heirs. A man who had brought boundless wrath down on those who had murdered his queen during the Outer Duchy Rebellion. A man who had ended the lines of the Windwalkers Luthas and Berial for the role those families had played in the rebellion, putting every last scion to death against the protests of the high chastor and many of his own subjects.

  Josen didn’t trust such tales. He didn’t doubt the events themselves—those were historical fact—but he couldn’t look Gerod Aryllia in the eye and believe for a moment that the man had ever cared so much about anything. The king had his one true obsession, to be sure: the efficient governance of the Nine Peaks. But he pursued it with a dry, single-minded purpose, and none of the sentimentality he so despised in others. Whatever Gerod’s reasons for extinguishing two Windwalker families, Josen was sure they had been purely practical.

  Finally, in a slow, deliberate tone, the king said, “You have embarrassed me.” A long pause before he resumed speaking, his penetrating gaze fixed on Josen. “I suspect you know this. I suspect you do not care.”

  “You suspect correctly.” Josen ignored the sidelong glare Rudol directed at him for that. Gerod, of course, showed no sign of annoyance.

  “It does not matter.” King Gerod ceased tapping his leg and raised his hand to lay one long finger against his chin. “It was my own mistake to let things go this far. I humored your little adventures for too long. I had hoped that you would come to your senses on your own, given time—you showed at your wedding how poorly you respond to… demands. But lack of punishment has only made things worse, it seems. If you are determined to be contrary, I am left with no choice.”

  Even after five years, hearing his father speak of the wedding in such a calm voice made rage boil up Josen’s throat. As though it was nothing. As though it didn’t matter that he had been pushed toward a marriage he hadn’t asked for, that Shona would never talk to him again. There hadn’t actually been a wedding, not really; he’d fled the Keep hours before the ceremony. It hadn’t taken the guards long to find him, but Duke Falloway was too proud a man to give his daughter’s hand in marriage after such an insult—an insult grave enough to end a friendship between the king and the duke of Greenwall that dated back to the Outer Duchy Rebellion.

  It wasn’t fractured alliances that concerned Josen, though. It was the hurt in Shona’s eyes that haunted him still.

  That was your fault, not mine. He glared at his father, and barely fought back the urge to shout the words aloud. She was my friend—she was never supposed to be my wife!

  Gerod paid Josen’s fury no mind, if he noticed at all. “I have dealt with Cer Horte—a man who understands the value of silence, I think. But word of these recent incidents has already spread too far.” He stopped to cough into his hand. “I cannot allow the people to think my heir does not support the Knights of the Storm, not after the attack on Greenwall.”

  “What, then? A public apology? Would you have me stand on the Orator’s Rise and make a speech about the valor of the knights?” Josen laughed bitterly. “You know, of course, that you will have to chain me there first.”

  The king shook his head. “No. I have spoken to Cer Eian. You will accompany him back to Greenwall and train with the knights for the rest of the cycle. Duke Castar will be leading a purge of the Swamp on Aryll’s Rest, and you will accompany him.”

  Josen’s mouth opened, but no words came. The walls seemed to advance inward, and for just an instant, he was absolutely certain that the Keep itself was trying to grab him in a stone fist. He looked at his father in disbelief, and then to Chastor Ren, hoping for some sign that this was a farce, a test. But Mulley just returned his gaze apologetically and gave a slight nod.

  I can’t go to Greenwall. I can’t. Shona would be there, and that was more than he could take even without adding a raid in the Swamp.

  Rudol seemed as appalled as he was. “Father, this is not wise. Josen is not prepared for—”

  Gerod cut him off. “Then you will help him prepare. Both of my sons will be a part of this purge. No one will doubt our resolve then.”

  “But, he…” Rudol stammered helplessly, casting his incredulous gaze back and forth between Josen and the king. “He isn’t…”

  If his eyes bulge out any more, they’ll explode. He truly hates the idea of me in his precious Stormhall. It would have been insulting if Josen hadn’t agreed so thoroughly.

  The king waved a dismissive hand. “Enough, Rudol. You will do as I say.”

  And Rudol was, as ever, obedient. His shoulders slumped and he dipped his head in defeat. “Yes, Father.”

  “No!” The word shot from Josen’s mouth like an arrow. “I won’t do it!” He gestured at Rudol. “Isn’t one prince killing swamplings enough?” Hard as he tried, he couldn’t stop the swampling girl’s big dark eyes from replacing Shona’s in his memory. He had saved her from harm once; would he be able to kill her if they met in the Swamp? He didn’t think so, not now that he had looked into those eyes. So what does that make me? A traitor?

  “You are my heir,” Gerod said. “Rudol is not. The people do not look to him.”

  “I am not a warrior. If I die down there, Rudol will be your heir.”

  “You will come to no harm; you will not be near the fighting. It will be enough for you to go at all.”

  “I will not go!”

  “You—” Gerod’s voice choked off, and he doubled over in his bed as a coughing fit took him. Flecks of blood and phlegm spotted the sheet over his lap as he blindly groped for the handkerchief at his bedside; Chastor Ren quickly grabbed it and placed it in the king’s hand. Gerod covered his mouth until he had mastered himself, then dabbed the red from his lips and looked at Josen again. “You will—” But the coughing took him again before he could get the words out.

  Watching him try to speak through the convulsions was satisfying, in a perverse way. Josen knew it was cruel, but he also knew—or could guess—what his father was going to say, and he very much did not want to hear it.

  “Majesty, if I may?” Chastor Ren’s voice was soft and a bit apprehensive.

  The king nodded, still coughing, and motioned for the little man to speak.


  Chastor Ren turned his eyes—two plain grey and one, at the center of his circlet, piercing gold—toward Josen. “Prince Josen, perhaps it would be good for you to spend some time with the Knights of the Storm. You have only seen them here in the Plateaus, far from their battlefields. In the Swamp you will witness firsthand the good work they do to protect us from the swamplings and the Deeplings. Surely you see that we would not long survive without them? It is all as the Wind wills it.” Mulley glanced upward, touched two fingers to the eagle’s eye on his circlet, and breathed, “Auna Celyn.” Praise the Sky, in the chastors’ Highspeech—the phrase that ended prayers and sermons. The only bit of the language Josen—or most anyone outside the Convocation—knew, aside from chastor itself, which meant something like speaker of the Word.

  “What if…” Josen hesitated. He knew that what he wanted to say would not be well received, but he wouldn’t get a better opening. “What if I don’t see that?”

  Chastor Ren wrinkled his brow in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “What if the swamplings are… less dangerous than we think?” The girl in the tavern hadn’t seemed dangerous. At least, I don’t think she did. Wind of Grace, let her not be dangerous. “Maybe they were once, but… it has been hundreds of years. And the Deeplings hardly need anyone to tell them to attack. They’re beasts; maybe they’re just hungr—”

  “Enough!” Rudol’s face was flushed bright red. “This is blasphemy! The Word of the Wind is clear: the swamplings learned their deepcraft from Dalleon himself. They command the Deeplings. And even without that, they would not be innocent. They spill our blood as much as we spill theirs. They would destroy us if we let them. Do you think that we hunt them for sport?”

  “No, I just…” I just don’t want to believe that girl will come back to hurt us. I just don’t want to fight in the Swamp. I don’t want any of this! But he couldn’t say that; Rudol wouldn’t understand or care. His father certainly wouldn’t. Nothing Josen said would convince them.