Lonen felt it the moment Oria died.
The bright, warm spark of her inside him simply flickered out. Gone as if it had never been. Leaving him cold and empty. As much as her pain and torment had tugged at him, as much as he’d hated the gradual attenuation of their marriage bond as he rode farther and farther away from her—this sudden loss was so much worse.
He must have made a sound. A startled cry like a man wounded in ambush, because the two nearest riders ahead of him spun their horses, weapons drawn. The two behind rode up to flank him with their weapons facing out.
“Your Highness!” said Fenive. “Are you hurt?”
Alyx was there in moment, but he was already shaking his head. “I’m fine. Keep riding.” No reason to hesitate now.
“Your Highness?” Alyx questioned.
“She’s gone,” he replied shortly.
They all fell silent, somber with shock, perhaps shared grief.
“You’re certain.”
“We were magically married. I’ve been attached to her since that moment. No longer.”
As one, the women made the sign of Arill, bowing their heads in prayer. With the forest canopy arching overhead, the early winter evening descending—and the near moon, Sgatha, hanging full, round, and rosy in the sky between the stark branches—the woods felt like a temple. The murmurs of them speaking the prayer for the dead only reinforced the strangely sanctified moment.
Lonen couldn’t bring himself to speak the words, or truly even listen. He’d been alone back on that plain before the walls of Bára, and he was alone again. Except for cold duty.
And retribution.
If Nolan hadn’t driven them away, Oria and Chuffta would’ve stayed safe in the palace. Lonen might have only his duty to his people—and Oria’s—but that was something. He’d cling to that. And he would make Nolan pay.
The last whispers of the prayer faded away, taken up by the susurrus of a wind high in the bare branches.
“Let’s ride,” he growled.
This time, he took point. Let the others keep up if they could.
Darkness swirled around them, formless and without sign of light. Sgatha had fallen out of sight behind the mountains, and even Grienon on his wild and impetuous path had disappeared over the horizon. In the very early dawn, no habitations had lit lanterns yet.
After riding at a breakneck pace all night, they’d been forced to slow. The horses still sensed the trail, through scent or some sensitivity of their hooves, but the riders had to be wary of unseen dangers.
Besides, not all the horses in their group possessed Buttercup’s stalwart endurance. Lonen would’ve left them behind, if Alyx’s warriors hadn’t been so determined to keep up—pushing themselves and their mounts to do it. A great deal to prove, he supposed, and because he knew they’d kill themselves trying rather than risk being inadequate, he restrained his snapping impatience.
Finally he agreed to stop for a short break. They’d reached the outlying farmlands around Arill City, the ones scored by the Trom dragons. They knew it because the muffled and crowding shadows of trees had opened up to the echoing space of a flat landscape. And a glimmer of light showed finally, the snow-covered fields picking up the glow from beyond the horizon. In another hour or so the sun would rise, and they’d have all the day to reach Arill’s Temple and declare Lonen alive and ready to face Nolan’s challenge.
Something truly dire would have to happen now to prevent that. As the worst thing possible had already occurred, Lonen couldn’t imagine what could stop him now. He’d fight Nolan, probably kill his brother to exact revenge for Oria’s death, and afterward there would be time to mourn.
Besides, Nolan might insist on having the duel right then and there—and Lonen would welcome the opportunity to vent his rage and grief on the prideful sod who’d caused all this sorrow. It would be best if he arrived rested and ready to fight.
So he agreed to Alyx’s proposal that they rest in an abandoned farmhouse, one that had escaped the fires and destruction. They gave the horses food and water, ate the last of their own food, and tried to sleep a little.
Some of the women did sleep, with that enviable ability to grab rest at any time. Lonen had once possessed it, but he’d long since passed into an attenuated state of hypervigilance. He’d sleep when he was king. Arill knew he’d never take another queen. His bed would remain empty and Lonen would devote all of himself to his duty.
The image of himself, a mad king in his own right, prowling the palace at Dru in his loneliness, made him too restless to even try for sleep. Instead he joined Alyx on the porch of the farmhouse where she perched on the rail, cupping a mug of hot broth, staring out over the fields. The morning light revealed the burnt landscape with stark brutality.
“I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “We heard about the Trom attack, of course, and I thought I understood how bad it was. But I hadn’t seen it for myself yet.”
He leaned against the rail, the frozen landscape much the same as his heart, the scorched earth showing in ridges of scars against the ice-encrusted snowdrifts. Lonen wasn’t a farmer, though since he’d become king he’d learned more than he’d ever cared to know about what the land required to bear crops. Looking at the baked earth, so slick it wouldn’t even hold snow cover, he wondered how the Destrye could possibly recover these fields. They might have to abandon Dru after all.
The prospect didn’t bother him as much as it once had. At least then he’d be far from anything that reminded him of Oria.
“I keep thinking,” Alyx continued into his silence, “that if we’d been there, if so many of us hadn’t retreated to the hermitage with the queen, we might’ve been able to help or maybe—”
“Don’t,” he cut her off. “No one could’ve done anything. The Trom dragons are unstoppable. We can no more fight them than we can thwart lightning or make it rain.”
“I can see that now,” she replied after a pause, “what destruction they wreak.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
“How will we fight them, then?” she finally asked. “I have no doubt that you’ll defeat Nolan and claim the throne, but what do we do then? I mean, may I ask what your plan is, Your Highness?” The hastily added addendum to her plaintive question made him smile, though bitterly, because he had no answer.
“My plan was Oria,” he confessed. “She could’ve fought the Trom with her sorcery. We’d thought to drive away their dragons and supplant her brother Yar, so that these monsters couldn’t be brought against us again. Without her…”
“Ah.” With that breathed sound, more of a sigh than an actual word, Alyx acknowledged the powerful inevitability of their doom.
“I think we’ll have to leave,” he said. “Take the Destrye and go as far as we can.”
“We will of course go wherever you lead, Your Highness.”
“Will my mother, do you think?”
Alyx hesitated too long, perhaps searching for a soothingly noncommittal answer. Lonen chuckled mirthlessly. “Never mind. I know she won’t.”
“There will be others, Your Highness, who won’t leave. You know that. The ones who’ve lived here their entire lives, the ones who know they’d die on the journey and would rather lay their bones in Dru, the stubborn, the ones so hopelessly optimistic they’ll cling to the hope of victory long after everything points to defeat.”
Hopelessly optimistic. How many times had Oria accused him of just that? Countless times. She’d said that nothing could defeat his sunny outlook. Grief surged bitter as the tides of Bára as he—more than anything in the world—longed to tell Oria that she was wrong, something could kill his native optimism. All it had taken was her death.
“I won’t force anyone to leave,” he decided. “Anyone who wants to stay and fight it out can.” Maybe he’d stay with them. That would at least end his misery in a noble and fitting way. The king perishing with his kingdom.
“But you will lead the people,” Alyx insisted.
“Yes,” he conceded. He could hardly defeat Nolan and then refuse to lead as a king should. And there was no question of whether he’d fight Nolan. His brother would pay. “Speaking of which, rouse your warriors. Let’s be done with this.”
“Yes, Your—” Her words choked off as an arrow pierced her shoulder and pinned her to the porch post.
Lonen ducked before he fully processed what had happened, his iron axe in hand. Even in sleep he kept it near—and it was not lost on him at the moment how fully useless it was against an enemy armed with bows and arrows. Alyx gasped, tugging at the arrow, and another thudded into her, making her cry out. The warrior women shouted from within, and the farmhouse door flew open.
“Stay down!” He yelled. “Fenive, get to an upper window with your bow.” He levered up next to Alyx, hating himself for using her as cover as he peered past her hip—but also ignoring her pleas to leave her and save himself.
Bows and arrows meant people, not golems or sorcerers. Another arrow flew past him, narrowly missing his head and hitting the wall behind him. A volley of arrows shot outward from the upper story, toward a low hedge by the road. Using the cover, he scrambled back, breaking off the arrow as he rolled inside.
Destrye arrows, the sort used by the palace guard. Fury boiled up in him, like fire that might erupt from his throat. No longer caring about his safety—a ridiculous concept—he charged out the door, shouting, “Nolan, you fucking coward! Show yourself.”
No arrows thudded into him. Silence, except for Alyx’s ragged, pained breathing, fell heavy in the crisp winter air. “Hold your fire,” a man called, and stepped out into the open, followed by five more.
Twenty more emerged from the copse of trees across the road. And forty more from around the side of the house. All heavily armed, and wearing the uniform of the palace guard.
Lonen and his six warriors couldn’t possibly prevail. “This is treachery,” he ground out. “You betray your king.”
The leader sketched a bow, a reasonably respectful one, given the circumstances. “With apologies, Prince Lonen, we serve His Highness King Nolan. Given your wartime desertion of the Destrye forces, His Highness has taken up the sword and wreath of Dru. He sent us to escort you back home, should you appear.”
Lonen bit out a harsh, disbelieving laugh at the insulting words. “An escort? Is that what you call it when you shoot at loyal soldiers in the king’s party?”
“We saw only a woman and figured her for one of the prince’s camp followers,” the man replied. “Lay down your weapons, turn over the sorceress to us, and we’ll escort you home peaceably, Prince Lonen.”
So that was the way of it. No sense in lying about Oria’s fate, however, and better to remove that chip from the bargaining table. “The sorceress Oria is dead,” he informed them, tossing his useless battle-axe aside. “I’m going to tend to Captain Alyx. We won’t fight you.”
Turning his back on them in deliberate dismissal, he checked Alyx’s wounds. Mostly attention-getting and not piercing any vital organs, the wounds nevertheless bled enough to kill her if they delayed treatment. “Thanks for the promotion,” she said, her lips stretching across clenched teeth in a pretense of a grin. “But don’t worry about me.”
“We’re getting you to a healer, Captain,” he replied. “I’m breaking off the arrows. On my mark.” She screamed at the first, passed out on the second. He’d have expected the same of any man, so hopefully she wouldn’t see it as a weakness. Not an easy burden to labor under, having something to prove. Camp follower, his ass. Fenive arrived just in time to help him slide Alyx’s unconscious body off the shortened stakes pinning her to the post, so she took over staunching the bleeding.
Lonen turned to face Nolan’s men, who’d assembled in the farmhouse’s erstwhile yard. Scanning the faces, he identified several men he knew well—though at least none from his own battalion, which provided obscure comfort—and a number who looked familiar. “So Nolan is too much of a coward to face me in a legitimate duel,” he noted.
The leader—who Lonen didn’t know at all, which meant he’d likely been one of Nolan’s men, probably had traveled with him through the tunnels from the underground lake at Bára—reddened in impotent anger. No doubt they were under orders not to kill Lonen outright. A coup would look bad, whereas compelling Lonen’s submission would work entirely in Nolan’s favor. A number of the other men, however, shuffled uneasily and wouldn’t meet his eyes. This wasn’t how the Destrye fought, not though guile and treachery.
“If you wish to challenge His Highness King Nolan to a duel for the throne, you may seek Arill’s blessing for it,” the leader replied stiffly.
“I’ll take it up with the goddess,” Lonen answered. “However, since Prince Nolan challenged me, and I have been ruling as rightful king since the deaths of my father and Prince Ion, I believe the question of a duel has been resolved.”
The leader shook his head. “I’m sorry, Prince Lonen, but you abdicated when you abandoned the throne and crown.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mott,” Fenive snapped. “You can’t declare His Highness dead until sundown tonight. The seven days aren’t up yet.”
Mott smiled thinly. “Indeed that’s true, but Prince Lonen would have to present himself at Arill’s Temple before then.”
“So? We’re a couple of hours’ ride away at best, and it’s only just after sunrise,” Fenive argued.
The plot dawned on Lonen, and he cursed himself for being so thick and slow. The profound betrayal gutted him—another ambush, one so foul he’d never imagined it possible. “You don’t mean to escort us to Arill City, Mott, is it?”
“You don’t remember me, do you, Prince Lonen? No, the likes of me wasn’t good enough for you and your battalion. But His Highness recognizes worth—and rewards loyalty. It was my honor to volunteer to escort you to Arill’s Temple, and I will. Eventually. Well after the sunset deadline. I suggest you make yourselves comfortable. Tomorrow morning should be soon enough to leave.”
Fenive made an incoherent sound of anger, but Lonen gestured her to silence. “Captain Alyx will die before tomorrow morning without healing.”
Mott gave Alyx’s prone body a cursory and contemptuous glance. “Alyx—and you, Fenive—have always offended Arill’s eye with your aspirations to men’s work. If the goddess chooses to strike you down for your blasphemy, then so be it.”
“I believe it was your archer who struck her down, not Arill,” Lonen replied mildly.
Mott flushed, hand clenching his sword as if he’d love to use it on them. “Don’t you defile the name of the goddess!” he shouted.
“I am still your prince,” Lonen answered, striding down the steps and meeting the point of Mott’s sword. “Though you may have been misled over who rules Dru and the Destrye, you will give me the respect of rank.”
Mott’s lip curled. “You won’t have to be ritually declared dead if you are truly dead.”
Several of Mott’s men made sounds of agreement—but more seemed dismayed, shifting uneasily. “Will you kill me then?” Lonen asked softly, leaning his chest into the point of the sword. He’d almost welcome the slicing pain, cleaving his broken heart in actuality as well as metaphorically, followed by the sweet release of death.
“His Highness is right,” Mott breathed. “You are insane, driven mad by that foul, foreign sorceress who—”
Lonen’s hand shot out, seizing Mott by the throat, taking him so by surprise that the sword skidded off Lonen’s leather breastplate, carving only a shallow cut. Lonen had suffered far worse and for sorrier reasons. “You don’t speak of her,” he said, spacing out the words, as Mott was clearly a numbskull. “Am I insane because death doesn’t frighten me, that I’d be just as pleased to squash you like the bug you are and lose the throne to my power-mad brother—or because Oria enchanted me to want the throne above all? Both can’t be true.”
Mott gasped like a fish out of water, unable to breathe, much less answer, and Lonen took a savage satisfaction in it, vising his grip. But the image of the fish reminded him of that day at Lake Scandamalion, when Chuffta landed the stardew fish and Oria scolded him for it. How full of love he’d been—and terror that he’d lose her to the seductive power of the mask. Now he’d lost her entirely and he longed to go back to that moment, to turn time to prevent the cascade of events.
“Prince Lonen, sir, release the captain. Please.” Several swords pointed at him, ringing him round with lethal edges. One sharp blade lay against the arm holding Mott immobile, the face above the sword a familiar one. “Please, Your Highness,” the man urged, expression contorted with fear and dread. “Don’t make us do this.”
With a surprising amount of effort, Lonen forced his fingers to open, and Mott fell to a crumpled pile at his feet. Two men moved forward to drag him away. Lonen met the gaze of the man who’d spoken. “Nestor. I wouldn’t have expected this of you.”
Nestor met his gaze, firming his chin, though guilt crawled over his face. “It hasn’t been an easy week, Your Highness. We are simple men. Our loyalty and fealty should be simple also, not a question of choice. We’re doing our best to keep the peace.”
Lonen supposed he could understand that. Their rightful king had disappeared, slipped out like a thief in the night, with no explanation. Because no explanation was possible. “How are things in Arill City?” he asked.
“Uncomfortable, Your Highness, though guards such as we are not privy to much of what transpires.”
Hmm. That meant a lot of political wrangling behind closed doors. And conducted quietly enough that not even servants’ gossip carried it to the men at arms. “Did Queen Vycayla and her retinue arrive?”
Nestor glanced from side to side, though who he feared overhearing such a straightforward answer—one that should be common knowledge—wasn’t clear. “Yes, Your Highness. Two days ago.”
He said nothing more, and Lonen didn’t press. Whatever transpired within the royal family was beyond these men. “If you prevent me and my party from reaching Arill’s Temple before sundown, you’ll be thwarting Arill’s divine right to determine who will be King of the Destrye—and jeopardizing Captain Alyx’s life.”
Nestor, sweat rolling down his temple, swallowed hard. But his sword didn’t waver. “Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but you’ll have to sort that out with the goddess and King Nolan. We don’t dare disobey.”
“You’ll betray me but not my brother, is that it?” Lonen asked mildly, though he boiled with defeated rage. To come this close and fail… He should’ve gone back for Oria. Would she still have died if he’d kept going when he tried to turn back? The possibility throbbed with such tender agony that he had to set it aside.
“Your Highness, I—ah, I…” Nestor stammered as he groped for an answer, so Lonen waved him silent.
“Would you at least detail some men to carry Captain Alyx to the temple, so she won’t die?” he asked instead.
Nestor swallowed again, still bravely meeting Lonen’s gaze though panic lit his eyes. “Our orders are to let none of you past this point. Not until after sunset.”
Lonen stared him down another long, endless moment, then called to Fenive. “Take Captain Alyx inside and do your best to tend to her. We might as well stay warm while we wait out this treacherous imprisonment.”
He turned his back on the sweating Nestor and climbed the steps to help carry Alyx indoors, glancing back at the sound of boots on the wooden steps. Nestor starting to follow. “Not you or your men, Nestor. You can hold your vigil outdoors.”
Nestor bowed, out of habit, stopping himself halfway at an uncertain angle. “And Captain Mott? Sir?”
Lonen didn’t bother to look at the man gasping in the snow. “Let him rot for all I care.”