A Prince Among Killers

by S. R. Vaught; J. B. Redmond

  “He’s treacherous. Don’t let him fool you, my boy.” Another pat. His mother’s eyes were growing distant again, as if she might be listening to warped visions instead of Nic.

  Snakekiller’s frown was so intense Nic could tell she wanted to try a dose of elixir on his mother, to see if the medicine might calm Lady Mab’s madness enough to make her see reason.

  He knew better.

  His mother was about to lead a force of thousands into a war she didn’t even understand how to fight, though her commanders seemed to have a fair enough grasp. Nic tried to read their faces, to make eye contact with each one and determine what they planned to do, irrespective of her orders.

  If he seized his mother, or had Snakekiller take her again, would they defend her?

  Nic didn’t even know if he and Snakekiller could hold her if she poured the force of her insanity into the powerful graal that was his legacy from her.

  The risk was too great.

  He was certain that if Lady Mab had been a man, and if she had possessed even a measure less graal to allow for vulnerability, one of these commanders would have killed her by now, whether or not she had a viable heir.

  How many would act against her wishes and come over to him, when Lady Mab still lived, still ruled Eyrie and wielded her will with brutality enough to slaughter hundreds of rectors in their Temples, just to weed out a handful of traitors?

  “Ride with me,” he said to the commanders, though his mother thought he was speaking to her. “Ride with me to save those who gave me aid—and to save Eyrie.”

  “Of course I will,” his mother said, unaware of his dual purpose.

  Of the dozens of men who could hear him, at least half gripped the hilts of their swords in silent assent.

  As for the others, Nic had no idea if they meant to follow her command or his. Their eyes and faces gave no indication of their intentions, and he couldn’t blame them. If he died in battle and his mother lived, she would kill them all and their families, too, if she thought they hadn’t given her proper service.

  She might kill them all anyway, no matter what the outcome.

  “Bring my son a horse!” Lady Mab shouted, and Nic heard the movement in the ranks as a battle steed was passed forward for his use.

  He turned to see the horse just as his mother pointed to Snakekiller. “As for her, this Stone Sister who put a blade to my throat—kill her.”

  “No!” Nic yelled, turning so quickly he lost his balance and smashed to the ground at his mother’s feet. He loosed his graal in a fierce burst, using all he knew to shield Snakekiller and drive back anyone who meant her harm.

  A burst of silver-blue light exploded around him and the advancing soldiers, deflecting his graal and knocking the soldiers aside like so many armored gnats.

  Where Snakekiller had been, a huge hood snake reared, taller than a heartwood and thicker around its coiled midsection.

  The great beast opened its fanged mouth and struck, terrifying its attackers. Many threw down weapons and backed away, hands raised.

  Nic wanted to shout, to shift into some monster himself and roar beside her, taking down anyone who dared to do her harm. He had no idea if this was illusion or some secret skill Snakekiller had nurtured, telling no one of her full and deadly potential. And he didn’t care.

  When the big snake launched itself over the heads of the fighters who would have killed it, when those fighters lunged aside to save themselves, he did shout.

  By the time Nic managed to pull himself to his feet, Snakekiller was gone, leaving a swath of bloodied soldiers on their knees in her wake.

  “We’ll deal with her later,” Lady Mab said, oblivious to Nic’s attempts to pull free the light sword he carried. She grabbed the stallion meant for him as it tried to run by her, using her legacy and the unnatural strength granted to her by insanity to stop the beast and bring it to the ready for his use.

  Nic stopped struggling with his sword and snatched the reins away from her. She commandeered a horse for herself as he bit back shouts of pain and hauled himself into the stallion’s saddle, intent on finding Snakekiller, then Dari and Aron. If some of the Mab commanders came with him, so be it. If they didn’t, then he hoped they fell in battle right beside his mother, or what was left of the woman who once was Lady Mab.

  “Ride with me!” she shrieked, to Nic, to the commanders, to all the soldiers who could hear her as her graal swelled above her like a deadly red cloud. “I see our future. I see it clearly and it’s there, over that rise, in the valley below. Ride against Ross. Ride to Triune!”

  Before Nic could react or speak against her, the great tide that was the army of Mab swept him up in a clatter of hooves and shields and swords, battle-cries ringing as they rode.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  ARON

  “Can you hold them?” Stormbreaker asked as he and Aron took down the last of the Thorn Brothers who had attacked them, sending their barbed swords flying into the moat around Triune. One of the men toppled to one of the many sets of hammered boards that had been used to breach the waters and carry attackers closer to the castle.

  “Can you stop those children?” Stormbreaker shouted again, sounding more urgent as he engaged two charging Brailing soldiers, dispatching one with a cut to the throat and another with a spinning stab to the gut. He used his lightning to shield Dari and Lord Ross, who were battling beside him, as fierce as any five Stone Brothers, dealing death like assassins born to the task as Lord Cobb shouted and slammed his blade against foes on the other side of the mocker-filled waters, doing what he could to reach them.

  Lord Brailing and his forces were advancing nonetheless, riding and running, moving ever closer, like a blue tide of destiny.

  Above them, on Stone’s battlements, Lord Baldric barked orders and bellowed commands to shove away ladders and shore up damage done by catapulted stones. Blazing arrows sailed above them like crazed, burning birds. Smoke almost blinded Aron, and he couldn’t smell anything but mud and fish and the stink of molten tallow ready to spill through the castle’s murder holes. His arms ached from stabbing, thrusting, slicing, and the dozen wounds he had taken across his shoulders and elbows. Yet he was supposed to concentrate. He was supposed to go through the Veil.

  And attack children.

  Bile surged up his throat as his shoulders struck the stone walls of Triune.

  He stared at the group of children on the other side of the moat, huddled next to the overturned carriage. Sixteen or so tiny bodies were still standing, and being reassembled by four Thorn Brothers who had thrown down their weapons and refused to join the battle around them.

  At first glance, they seemed to be protecting the little ones, but Aron’s graal told him differently. They were readying the children to launch another attack. He thought about striking down the Thorn Brothers, but what would happen to those children then?

  “Where is my sister?” Dari shrieked, beheading a Brailing soldier who had leaped from the nearest moat breach. The man’s head rolled into the moat, where a mocker-fish shifted to human form long enough to grab it and haul it below the water’s surface.

  “Where is she, Aron? I can’t find her. Why can’t I see her?”

  Aron made it through the Veil, trusting Stormbreaker’s blades and weather to keep his body alive as he tried to figure a way to block the inhuman graal these children were bringing to bear. If they joined their energies again, Aron didn’t think he could stop them. Not without Nic, if Nic was even still alive. Not without every bit of mind-talent he possessed, plus the loan of some of the strongest abilities in Eyrie.

  His awareness seized on the first child, a boy, maybe five years, maybe six. Blond and blue-eyed like Nic, with the slight build of a Mab child in his formative years.

  Powerful graal, trained, yet unformed, threatened to burst from the boy and overwhelm Aron.

  Stop, Aron commanded, careful to focus on the energy, not the child’s life essence.

  For a moment, the bo
y’s mind-talent faded to a dull shade of pink, but a shock of copper energy made the boy’s essence twitch. He redoubled his efforts, rudimentary but effective, with a child’s single-minded focus.

  Aron held fast against the blast of red graal, already separating himself from the child’s attack and searching for the source of that copper energy. Altar graal, but joined with other colors.

  Who did that Aron demanded, letting the question rise and flow through the Veil. Who just struck this child’s mind?

  His awareness soared over the battlefield, taking in a new rush of fighters, veiled and primitive, disorganized but crushing toward the moat as they swung curved silver blades. Aron couldn’t discern who they were attacking. Everyone, it seemed, save for the children and their Thorn handlers. These new menaces seemed only to want to reach the spot where Aron’s body sagged against Stone’s fortress.

  Stormbreaker’s thunder exploded through the Veil, making some of them stumble, and Dari’s Stregan graal, shielded in the forceful green of her grandfather’s energy, pounded forward, knocking more to their backsides.

  Aron tore his thoughts from the spectacle and chased after whoever was communicating with the freakish children stranded on the battlefield in front of Triune. He drove his energy toward the wisp of copper graal retreating into the nothingness of the void at the edge of the Veil.

  Show yourself, he demanded, flinging a tendril of his own mind-talent outward with the full force of his legacy. Show me where you are!

  A scream of rage answered him, and a figure came tumbling out of the void, as if someone had fastened it to a catapult and fired.

  It landed, ghostlike and shrieking, near enough for him to make out familiar features.

  The tall frame.

  The wisps of blond hair. The blue eyes, cornflower but blazing with hatred.

  As Aron’s false goddess lifted both hands to the sides of her head, he roared and struck at her with his sapphire energy. She absorbed the blow, but staggered and dragged at the multicolored energy supporting her own.

  “Stop!” Aron shouted, intent on severing Pravda Altar’s connection with Kate, and stopping the evil woman’s mind and heart as well. Before his bolt of graal reached her, she fell straight through the Veil, down, down to the woods closest to the fallen carriage below.

  Her location glowed a brilliant copper and silver, ringed by a rainbow, as obvious to Aron as if someone had struck a flint to the land’s largest funeral pyre. Then a gray shield of formless energy sprang over the spot, covering it and preventing him from sinking down to take hold of Thorn’s Lady Provost.

  Aron swore and forced his awareness back into his own body.

  “She’s in the woods,” he called to Dari and Lord Ross, forcing his voice above the raging clatter of swords. “They’re in the woods nearest the carriage—but hurry. I don’t know how long before they bolt. The children have them shielded.”

  Beside him, Stormbreaker spun, both jagged blades moving with the speed of his lightning. Veiled bandits poked and struck at him from all sides, but with each step, he drove them back, back toward the moat, and the eager, hungry mockers waiting below the churning surface.

  Dari and Lord Ross stormed forward onto the nearest moat breach, and Lord Cobb thundered toward them, chopping a path through Brailing warriors as his few remaining Guardsmen did the same on either side.

  Aron turned his focus to the children, but before he could select a course of action, shadows crossed his vision. Huge shapes wheeled in the sky above Triune.

  His pulse raced as he prayed this would be the Sabor, arriving with Cobb and Ross reinforcements—but this cloud of screeching motion was coming in from the wrong direction. Great wings battered the air, swooping down from the west, from the direction of the Barrens and Outlands, and Dyn Altar.

  “Rocs!” Stormbreaker shouted. “Rocs carrying warbird soldiers!”

  Above them, Stone Brothers took up the call on the battlements, and Lord Baldric bellowed, “Take cover! Take cover now, now, now! Where are my archers?”

  Aron counted ten massive birds diving toward the battlefield, each overmastered by a thin but well-disciplined cloud of coppery graal. Each carried four to six Altar warriors, swords gleaming and flaming arrows ready to fire. The first bird dived behind Stone’s battlements, breaching the fortress as no battering ram or ladder or tunnel had been able to do.

  Aron ripped his focus from the children across the moat and attacked the graal controlling the Rocs.

  Exhaustion swept over him as he took on that sharply focused energy and the wild impulses of the birds themselves. It felt like slamming his head into Triune’s walls, and he couldn’t stay on his feet as he cracked through first one copper cloud, then the next. Aron’s vision blurred on both sides of the Veil. Dirt brushed against his lips as he toppled belly first to the berm, close enough to the water’s edge to hear the snapping jaws of fish creatures only a few feet from his face.

  He beat at the tiny but deadly mockers, feeling needle-teeth lance into his fingers as he used his mind to tear apart the soldiers’ control of the Rocs. At least two birds made it through into Triune’s grounds, but Aron ripped open the graal driving seven others, and Stone’s archers brought down the eighth. The massive bird plummeted to the ground near the overturned carriage, landing in a crash of feathers and armors and swords. Some of Brailing’s Guard fell beneath the bird’s bulk, but not enough.

  Aron heard an old man’s shrill cry, and saw a thin, reedy soldier dressed in Brailing colors, wearing a sapphire-studded helm with eagle’s wings, wading through the Brailing Guard unhorsed.

  Distant memories stirred inside Aron’s mind, and he knew the soldier for who he was.

  His sapphire-crusted sword hilt raised, Lord Brailing bore down on Lord Cobb, Lord Ross, and Dari, who were just breaking free of the moat breach and starting across the main battlefield toward Kate’s last-known location.

  Dark, bleak hatred surged through Aron, familiar and seemingly as old as Lord Brailing himself. He tried to rise to stop the monster from robbing him of his family a second time, but the most he could do was pull his bleeding, bitten fingers into fists. He was spent, and even as Stormbreaker hauled him to his feet and shared some of his furious, storming graal with Aron, Aron couldn’t muster the force to hurl a single command at the person who had torn his life and heart asunder.

  The banditlike men Stormbreaker had been battling had turned away from him, inexplicably raising their swords to drive back the Brailing Guard who managed to make it across the moat. Above them, freed and furious, seven Great Rocs winged back into the sky away from the human tumult below. They turned their great necks and beaks on those who had sought to use them for unnatural purpose, and for a time, it rained swords and arrows and screaming Altar soldiers.

  Brailing and Altar forces flooded past the fallen men, filling all available space, overrunning the remnants of Ross and Cobb protectors and beginning to surround Dari, her grandfather, and Lord Cobb.

  From within Triune came screaming and the shrieks of the Rocs who made it through the defenses.

  A body struck the ground beside Aron, and his knees buckled all over again as he beheld the large, twisted form of Lord Baldric. With his neck at such a terrible angle, there was no way the man could be alive, but Stormbreaker cried out and threw himself on the ground. He worked his fingers over the Lord Provost’s chest as if he could force life back into his former mentor and guild master. Lightning struck in every direction, indiscriminate, felling bandits and Brailings alike, and barely missing Aron twice.

  The sky darkened again, and Aron shouted a curse at the Brother in hopeless frustration. He couldn’t even lift his short sword yet, and his bloody fingers didn’t have the coordination to unsheathe his silver dagger.

  This time, the threat poured in from the Eastern sky.

  Winged creatures, so many they darkened the ground like clouds of doom.

  It took Aron long moments to realize that the golden, winge
d beasts were gryphons, bearing soldiers clad in Ross’s greens and golds, and the obsidian and ruby uniforms of Dyn Cobb.

  Almost at the same moment, a massive mounted force crested the farthest hill of the valley, the hill opposite the spot where Aron and the Stone Brothers had charged into the battle.

  Aron picked out the banners, and saw Mab’s ruby colors, and the great red dragon’s head seeming to roar from their battle flags.

  In the front rode a small figure, a woman on horseback, and he could see the wild stream of red graal floating behind her.

  The graal wasn’t… normal.

  It exploded in bursts and spouts, uneven and as uncontrolled as Stormbreaker’s weather.

  Just behind her came an essence Aron recognized as Nic.

  Riding into battle.

  Riding into battle with his mother.

  The shock of seeing Nic on horseback with the Mab army, looking so strong and brandishing a sword, nearly drove Aron back to the ground.

  For a moment, Aron thought Nic was whipping the Mab forces to a frenzy, but then he realized Nic seemed to have some other purpose.

  Brother save them.

  Was Nic trying to reach his mother to cut her out of her saddle?

  A snake the size of two Rocs arched from the woods to strike at Lady Mab, but it overshot its target and took down Nic and his mount as well.

  Aron wasn’t certain he really saw that—a giant snake. A giant snake attacking Eyrie’s queen and heir. It was there, then gone.

  And so were Nic and his mother.

  Aron fell forward, desperate to send his energy to Nic, but unable to even maintain his own body weight. He dragged himself in the direction of where Nic fell, but that was so far away, and Aron couldn’t see anything but the moat and soldiers and swords and blood.

  Sabor and Cobb and Ross Guard landed like saviors in every direction, but the Mab forces engaged them as fast as they took on Altar and Brailing soldiers. The gryphons screamed and roared, stamping and flinging soldiers out of their paths.

  Aron rolled onto his back, gasping, fighting to control the faltering beat of his heart as gray, formless energy washed over him.