“Laijon have mercy, no!” The baron scooted away. But Hammerfiss was kneeling behind him, blocking his path. One of his massive arms encircled the baron’s neck and shoulders, holding him in an iron grip.
“Do it, lad.” Hammerfiss growled at Jenko. “And make it quick.”
Jenko hefted the blade in both hands, testing its weight. He looked at Spades, uncertainty in his eyes. She nodded toward the baron. Jubal Bruk was unable to keep still, legs kicking out, thrashing madly, head trying to turn this way and that in Hammerfiss’ grasp, hands clawing at the red giant’s arms. Stabler immediately fell upon the baron’s legs, yanking them apart until the man was spread-eagled in the sand. The bald knight stood back, watching the display with flat, hard eyes. To Ava, it seemed the bald one had little use for any of what was happening.
Jenko knelt before his father’s injured, quivering leg. “You don’t have to do this, Jenko,” the baron said, pain quaking in his voice. “Let them kill me.”
Jenko placed the serrated edge of the blade along his father’s thigh above the previously torn flesh. Ava wanted to look away, yet couldn’t. Jenko’s face was devoid of expression now. And Ava’s sorrow-filled heart reached out to him. An anguished cry of horror formed inside of her, a silent, bone-weary howl of inner pain.
“Cut him,” Hammerfiss snarled.
Jenko seemed rooted in place. Frozen.
“Damn you, boy, do it already.”
Jenko slashed, cutting deep. The baron’s leg spasmed.
“You don’t have to do this!” Baron Bruk yelled. “Let them kill me!”
Jenko lifted the blade, eyes on his father.
“Keep at it, lad,” Hammerfiss growled. Jenko sawed back and forth.
Screaming, the baron raised his hands to stop the blade as it ate at his leg, but Jenko sawed until the serrated cleaver scraped against bone. Baron Bruk inhaled deeply, rapidly, through lips that sputtered as the air whooshed by.
“Fuck almighty, lad!” Hammerfiss yelled. “Just get it over with! Chop it off!”
Jenko stood. He raised the blade overhead like an ax. With two quick swings of the sword it was done. Stabler tore the leg free of the torso, severed muscles fluttering. Thick scarlet pumped in great gouts from what little remained of the baron’s thigh—the bloody stump freckled with pale sand. Jenko’s father was silent, unconscious.
Crying now, Ava stood there alone, motionless, the trauma taking hold of her mind again. She felt the wraiths prowling restlessly, roving within as if eager to wrap around her soul. For her soul was all she had now. Her family was gone. Her home was gone. And the crystal clear innocence of her thoughts was gone too, stained forever by this horror.
Hammerfiss picked Baron Bruk up and carried him toward the kettle of boiling tar. Jenko’s father dangled limply in the giant’s thick-muscled arms as his seeping stump was dipped into the steaming kettle and held there a moment. Hammerfiss lifted him free and dumped him on the ground in front of Jenko.
“Take his other leg,” Spades ordered.
At those words, Ava felt sorely unbalanced. She shuddered and drew a deep, ragged breath, wishing Jenko would just stop this madness somehow. Ava gazed one last time with empty eyes at the large blade as it fell. Then she lowered her head, blond hair falling over her face. She could hear the wet sound of Jenko’s sword as it chopped into his father’s remaining leg. The wraiths now gnawed at Ava with a keen hunger. She’d seen too much. Horror. Trauma. Stress. All engulfed her.
“He’s not so heavy now,” she heard Hammerfiss say, his voice distant and wavering. All was quiet as the baron’s second stump cooked in the tar. The dreadful silence of the air was heavy with the stench of burnt flesh. It mixed with the cloying smell of hatred and fear. She’d never be rid of this nauseating taste of death. There was a hiss and thrum in her head as she clenched her eyes shut.
“Now his arms,” Spades’ voice said as if from a great distance.
Time wore on, and the sounds and odors that surrounded Ava grew less and less distinct. It felt as if an eternity passed. And when she looked up, she was surprised at the faint red glow suffusing the hazy scene. The sun was setting, she realized, her mind working slowly now. Multiple suns along the horizon, repeated versions of a fiery globe, some sharper, some brighter, some brilliantly red, others orange. “Isn’t the sunset beautiful?” she murmured. But only the rhythmic rushing sound of her own blood in her own head answered. Her parched throat stung with every dry breath.
“The sun has not set,” a distant voice sounded from somewhere, a concerned voice, a familiar voice. Perhaps it was Nail. But she didn’t understand his words.
Of course the sun is setting. The glare of it burned her eyes. She was angry that someone would question that. Her anger focused her mind, cleared her thoughts . . . almost.
Then she found herself under the scrutiny of the White Prince himself. She hung her head, letting her hair cover her face again like a curtain, now realizing the significance of her situation—this was Aeros Raijael standing before her, the Angel Prince of Sør Sevier.
“Name?” he asked.
And her name spilled forth in a stuttering mumble as if she had scant control over her own mouth. Then, for some reason, she drew sustenance from the sound of her own voice. It took all the courage she could muster, but she lifted her gaze, shook the hair from her eyes, and met those of the White Prince.
His bearing was beautiful, like a marble sculpture, like the statue of Laijon in the chapel. He wore a white cloak open down the center; underneath, his pearl-colored chain-mail armor glistened smooth, as if freshly dipped in natural oils. Blond hair hung unbound to his shoulders in shimmering white waves. His skin looked bloodless, translucent, hollow. Veins pulsed, moving like worms under the paleness of his face, yet despite their grotesqueness, those slithering smears of blue only added to his charisma and allure. But it was his eyes that captured her; they were dark and wild at one moment, empty the next, the whites clear as a snow-driven field, the pupils like twin circles of blackness spiraling into the underworld.
But Aeros Raijael’s eyes lingered on her for a brief moment longer than was needed, as if he were reluctant to turn away. And the way he looked at her, no, leered after her lustily, was familiar. Most men, it seemed, looked upon her that way.
His look was more than she could bear. She closed her eyes again, tightly, and found herself lost in a hazy pink landscape of unrecognizable sensations she had never experienced before—a pink, weaving haze that left her trembling.
And the wavering pink bliss consumed her until all faded to black.
* * *
A man is commanded to memorize his own bloodline, and identify the heritage and bloodline of his fellow man. The grand vicar and Quorum of the Five Archbishops of Amadon have confirmed upon themselves the mantle of Laijon’s righteousness. But they are worse than fatherless. For under what birthright do they rule? For it is only in Laijon’s son Raijael where the true mantle of divinity is found.
—THE CHIVALRIC ILLUMINATIONS OF RAIJAEL
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
GAULT AULBREK
3RD DAY OF THE MOURNING MOON, 999TH YEAR OF LAIJON
GALLOWS HAVEN, GUL KANA
It was the beginning of a dark and starless night. In the light of the nearby bonfires, the whites of the prisoner’s eyes were stark moons against the black rivulets of blood that matted his blond hair and face and streaked down his battered breastplate and leather greaves. Gault gripped the young man’s right arm whilst Spades held the glowing branding iron against the underside of his wrist. There was the hiss of hot iron against flesh. Then smoke.
The blood-covered prisoner didn’t even scream as Spades’ branding iron sizzled against his skin. When she pulled the iron away, staring back was the raw brand marking him an official Sør Sevier slave—a broken S. He was the first captive to be branded tonight. As Gault handed the new slave over to Stabler, he made note that the young man also bore a thin, crosslik
e scar on the back of the same hand.
“Clean him up before you put him in the tent,” Spades instructed Stabler. “See if you can get a name out of him. If he still refuses to talk, we’ll beat it out of him later.”
“What should we do with his ratty plate armor?” Stabler bound the boy’s hands behind his back again.
“The prisoners can keep what clothes or armor they have until we find something more suitable. Until the rest of our supplies arrive from Wyn Darrè, we make do.”
Stabler marched the blond fellow up the grassy slope toward the slave tent. To Gault’s reckoning, these Gallows Haven folk had certainly been ill-equipped for war, clad in naught save a patchwork of rusty scrap armor, poorly tanned leathers, and the crudest of weapons. Perhaps this crusade against Gul Kana would be easy and over soon. For him, the redundancy of hard steel rasping from a sheath and striking warm flesh had grown old. It had taken five years to reclaim Wyn Darrè. He wasn’t sure if he had another five years of war left in him.
Enna Spades, on the other hand, relished the butchery. When the small band that defended Gallows Haven had fled the battlefield, none had been more displeased with the cowardice than she. Gault knew Spades hated lack of courage in a foe more than anything. She gloried in the wildness and excitement of war and admired those who would stand up to her and fight. She craved chaos, thrived on her own pain, and reveled in the pain of others. She was possessed of a pure wanton cruelty. And with today’s actions on the beach, she had taken the entire Sør Sevier army and bonded them all together as monsters in the eyes of the survivors of Gallows Haven.
A fortuitous boon if all of Gul Kana proves as ill prepared. The speedy conclusion of this war might finally earn Gault that small measure of peace that had been denied him these last ten years. Though fighting had felt good in the beginning, he hated himself for having loved it so much. The truth was, war was naught but marching and boredom. Yet in those brief moments of true fighting, the savagery was heady. At times it had been his sustenance, the sudden bursts of brutality and terror and blood, enough to keep him awake for days. A soldier’s life boiled down to one thing: survival. But over the years, Gault had come to realize that if a man wasn’t killed in war, then that man’s mind, spirit, and emotions decayed, or, even worse, were willfully buried because of it. War was a swift death for some, a gradual death for others. And having Enna Spades by your side in battle could age a man fifty years.
The next prisoner Stabler escorted down the grassy hill was the tall, brooding fellow who had dismembered Baron Jubal Bruk. The young man stood erect before Spades, head held high, pride fixed in his eyes, and despite all, a hint of arrogance in his stance. And like the first captive, this young man also did not squirm when Spades, smiling, pulled the iron poker from the fire and pressed it to his flesh. Perhaps these Gallows Haven folks had more moxie than Gault was giving them credit for.
Spades, ever confident in her charms, flashed the captive her winsome smile, which was as always a trace lopsided, seductive, and deceptively shy. “You’ll warm to me soon enough,” she said to the fellow. “You’ll soon realize I’m not the beast you think I am.”
There was a puckish glint in her green eyes as she snatched up a strip of cloth from the satchel under her stool and stood. She walked a few paces down the beach and dipped the strip of cloth into a bucket of water, wringing it out. Her legs were sleek and long in the firelight, clad in tight leathers tanned a dark umber. The young man’s eyes followed her every motion as she walked back toward him. The curves of her body were aglow in the torrid light of the various bonfires that lit up the beach. When she knelt in front of the prisoner and began wiping the damp cloth over the still-smoking slave mark on his inner wrist, the neckline of her billowy shirt hung open before him.
“Perhaps I’ll make you a slave of a different sort.” Again she flaunted that provocative smile under deep, flirtatious eyes and fire-red hair. Something smoldered beneath the prisoner’s eyes—not rage, not lust, but perhaps a sickly combination of both. Either way, Gault knew this young fellow wouldn’t be the first, nor the last, to fall under her spell. More than one lovesick man had crumbled in the fervent desire to win her love.
But only one man truly held Spades’ heart. Spades nursed a hidden simmering anger that commanded every aspect of her being. Hawkwood haunted her. All of her twisted complexities stemmed from that one man’s betrayal. Killing, torture, slaughter, this was how she took her revenge upon the world.
“You are hard for me now,” Spades said, reaching for young man’s crotch, palm against the leather armor covering his groin. He backed away as if scorched by her hand.
And she grinned. At all times, Enna Spades seemed unashamedly pleased with herself. “As I said, you’ll soon warm to me, boy.” She turned and jammed the branding iron into the glowing coals of the fire.
The next prisoner Stabler brought was the blond girl, Ava Shay—the girl who had fainted in front of Aeros right after Baron Jubal Bruk’s dismemberment. Despite the despair plastered on her face, Ava Shay reminded Gault of his stepdaughter, Krista, who now lived under the care of King Aevrett’s court in Rokenwalder. Krista had been a mere twelve years old when Gault had last seen her. He recalled their final parting before the invasion of Wyn Darrè five years ago. He could still envision her hair shimmering like white gold in the sunlight as she wished him good-bye, her bright eyes sad at his leaving, yet full of life and youth, her fine face aglow with boundless enthusiasm. Krista would be seventeen now. This Gul Kana girl, Ava Shay, looked no older than that.
In a heartbreaking way, Ava also reminded Gault of his wife, Avril, who had died at the tender age of twenty. Gault was twenty-three at the time; only two years they’d spent together, and after all this time, he missed her still. The smell of her hair and the sound of her laughter, the feel of her skin on his—it was a feeling no other woman had been able to replicate. Avril had come into his life and filled it with joy, only to be claimed suddenly by a fever. Gault had a vivid recollection of the day he had first met her—a lone cloaked figure, shivering and stumbling across the dusky plains of the Sør Sevier Nordland Highlands, a babe in swaddling blankets in her arms. Gault, newly knighted in King Aevrett’s army, patrolling the highlands, had ridden up to her on his roan destrier.
“Don’t take me back to him, Ser,” she had said, the hood of her tattered cloak falling from her face, revealing the eighteen-year-old beauty beneath. “I beg of you, Ser knight, don’t take me back to that monster.” Gault did not take Avril back to whatever monster had fathered her baby girl. He did not ask for the man’s name, either. Instead he had swooped Avril and the babe up onto his roan and carried them to Rokenwalder. In the city of their king they married. Together they had named the baby Krista, and for the next two years Avril and Gault had raised her, Gault treating the babe as his own. Even after Avril had died, Gault looked after the girl as a noble knight should, never telling Krista that she was not the seed of his own loins, never feeling the need to. The war in Adin Wyte had torn him away from Krista when she was but seven. A brief visit with her at twelve, and then off to conquer Wyn Darrè. King Aevrett watched over her now. Gault missed her so. As he missed Avril. He sometimes felt so lonely for his wife he feared the pain of it would someday be the end of him.
The sight of this Gallows Haven girl, Ava Shay, standing there so vulnerable in her simple woolen shift, struck a deep chord of longing within Gault he had not felt in years. Pale and wan and hollow-eyed, Ava appeared even more wraithlike and ashen-skinned now than when she had fainted on the beach. Had she fainted from thirst, hunger, or plain fright at laying eyes on Aeros Raijael? Gault knew not. Still, he had been the first to rush up and kneel at her side when she’d fainted. At the time, her skin seemed naught but a delicate, eggshell covering over her thin frame in the pink light of the sunset. Aeros had him carry her limp form to the slave tent. And Gault had done as Aeros bade him do, with much worry in his heart for the waif. Now here she was again, about to b
e branded by Spades.
“Jenko.” The girl’s voice was soft and low amid the cracking of the surrounding fires, an all-consuming love and concern for the prisoner, Jenko, in her greeting. But the young man she called Jenko did not answer, just hung his head, eyes hidden behind dark locks of thick hair as Stabler led him back up the grassy slope to the slave tent.
“Laijon spare me.” The girl cast her eyes toward Gault, pleadingly, as if desiring some measure of sympathy. Gault realized his initial assessment of her pallor had been wrong—there in fact was a tinge of color returned to the tone of her skin, a healthy look in her eyes, vigor in her movements. She was like a shining jewel embedded on this godforsaken beach. Her eyes stayed on him.
“You appear well, m’lady.” The words somehow spilled from his mouth.
“M’lady?” Spades looked from Gault to the girl and back. “Seems Gault here would desire his own personal slave.”
“Don’t be a blathering fool,” he said.
“Then quit mooning and hold out her arm.”
Gault cursed inwardly, knowing that nothing good could come of any overt display of worry where Ava was concerned. It was best he swallow his emotion and just behave as if this girl was of scant significance. Grasping her roughly by the arm, he forced Ava to kneel before Spades.
As the branding iron seared into Ava’s skin, Gault was utterly aware that this girl’s once presumably pleasant life had just been reduced to naught but suffering and despair. It would soon be made evident to her; human cruelty was to never be underestimated, always to be believed in, even above and beyond any belief in Laijon. Despite his best efforts to remain unfeeling, Gault felt a pang of sorrow at her suffering. Spades’ attempts to ask the girl questions got nowhere. Ava remained as silent as the two young men before her.
Stabler came back with a new prisoner, a pudgy red-haired girl. He yanked Ava to her feet and led her away. Gault watched her go, his heart crumbling for her with each step she took up the hill. “Best not get your hopes set on that one.” Spades smiled. “I reckon Aeros will lay claim there.”
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