It was the birds that woke him.
Woke him.
Warned him.
The nightbirds in the trees. Thousands upon thousands of them huddled together in the cool evening air, their dark feathers no different in hue or definition from the shadows beneath the forest canopy. They whispered and gossiped in their secret bird voices, and the sound of it silenced all of the other voices of the natural world.
Kagen lay there, though, trapped by the immobility of stupor. Aware that he should move but unable to summon the strength of will to actually do it. A part of his mind seemed to stand to one side as if observing a scene in a comedy playing out on a stage. That observer was in no way objective but instead looked upon the sprawled body with scorn, with quiet anger, with disapproval, and with heartbreak. It was not who or what he wanted to be, but since that terrible night when the Hakkian Ravens invaded Argentium and all of the other capitals throughout the Silver Empire, this was what he had become. Captain Kagen Vale of the Imperial Guard, Warden of the Sacred Garden and bond-sworn protector of the Imperial Seedlings. That was who he had been before awakening in a whore’s bed while his empire burned. That was before his very gods—Father Ar the Sower and Mother Sah the Reaper—appeared in the sky and then turned their backs on him.
Now he was Kagen the Damned.
Kagen the drunkard.
Kagen the useless fool.
“Gods of the burning pit,” he breathed, though even Kagen could not tell if it was the version of himself watching or the man on the ground who said it aloud. On a branch above him, one of the nightbirds—a ragged old crow—scolded him with a sharp caw.
The sun was weaker than he thought it should be, but the dimming light was not cloud cover. The beams slanting through the branches proved that. But how could twilight be so close? He did not remember falling asleep. His head ached horribly and his stomach churned, and those things chilled him. Had he injured his head? Cracked his skull?
Kagen had been knocked out before. The first time was when he was a lad, playing at dares with his brothers Jheklan and Faulker as they climbed rickety scaffolding that had been built around a ruined building. Jheklan, ever the sure-footed one, ran out along a pole that wobbled under him, but he reached safety and made it look easy. Then he turned and taunted his brothers to follow or forever after be labeled as weak sissies.
Faulker, always game for a dare, ran after him, and although twice he nearly fell, and spent time windmilling his arms, he made it to the other side. Then Kagen, the youngest of the three, hesitated, but the jeers and wildly obscene insults hurled at him by the others made lingering there in safety an impossibility. So he ran out onto the bar and got exactly five steps before it cracked and sent him plunging down. He broke two ribs, sprained his left wrist, and struck his head so hard that he was ill and vomiting for days. The only satisfaction was that Father had taken off his thick leather belt and given Faulker and Jheklan such a hiding that they had to stand to eat meals all that week.
The feeling in his head was like that now. The sickness was the same. The only difference was that he had not pissed his trousers as he had then, and that was a very small and very cold comfort.
Sitting up was a feat of engineering to rival the building of the pyramids in Skyria. It required so much of him that by the time he was more or less upright, Kagen was sweating and panting. His sweat smelled of alcohol; his breath burned in his throat.
“I hate you,” he said to his horse, the forest, and the day in general, though he really meant himself.
For some people a fall from grace is a simple thing; for others it is a plummet from a very high cliff into a very dark valley. The empire was gone. That was a fact with which he could not reconcile. There had been no war, just what people were now calling the Night of the Ravens.
The Witch-king of Hakkia had conquered the unconquerable and had made it look like child’s play. All the pieces seemed to have been swept off the game board.
Kagen looked up at the trees and spent uncounted minutes staring at the nightbirds. One of them twitched its tail feathers and dropped a glob of white shit on his chest.
“You can keep your fucking opinion to yourself,” he muttered.
Two other birds shit on him, and that compelled Kagen to get up off the damned ground. He crawled to a sapling and used it to pull himself to his feet. The wine in his belly sloshed and his hands trembled, but he got up. He tore a handful of leaves from the young tree and used them to remove the excrement. As he dropped them, he saw something that made him pause, and made him frown.
There were animal prints in the dirt. Fresh ones. And although Kagen was city-born and-bred, with only a scant score of hunting trips into the forests, he recognized those marks. His older brother, Hugh, who was an avid hunter, had kept a pack of hounds, and except for one or two of his brutes, the prints Kagen saw were larger. Large dogs often spread their toes with all four claws radiating outward, but these toes were not. The claws were also longer and more well-defined, biting deeper into the tough forest floor. Also, the front feet of Hugh’s dogs typically had a round appearance, with both width and length about the same size. These tracks were longer and more rectangular.
Kagen had seen tracks very much like these once, years ago, when he accompanied Jheklan, Faulker, and their ascetic older brother, Herepath, on a long journey to the Winterwilds. To get there they had to cross the imposing Cathedral Mountains, and it was in the snowy passes that Faulker had pointed out a set of tracks. It was he who had told Kagen the difference between dog tracks and those of coyotes … and those of …
“Wolves,” breathed Kagen, and despite his stupor, his hand flashed for the handle of his sword.
Which, of course, he was not wearing. That was lost—stolen by the wench with whom he’d drunk and romped back in Argentium the night the Ravens came. Instead, his hand closed around the handle of one of the matched pair of daggers he now wore. The handle was slim, strong, with pearl inlays. Kagen half-drew the blade as he turned slowly to scan the woods.
The daggers—which were really short swords but merely called daggers because of odd and ancient laws about the length of carried steel—once belonged to his mother. The Poison Rose.
Now they were his.
His inner voice—astute but unfriendly—whispered, Legendary blades in the hands of a failure.
“Shut the fuck up,” he told himself. Reductive and dangerous thoughts like that were unhelpful at the best of times.
He stepped carefully away from the sapling, testing his balance, listening inside his body for weakness, forcing it back.
The wolf prints were everywhere, often overlapping. Some, he saw, were larger than the others. Two wolves? Three? A pack?
He drew the dagger and held it in a tight fist.
The woods around him were quiet in the way that forests are. There were sounds, of course—leaves moving with soft rasps, songbirds singing in their indifference, the scuff of the nightbirds in the branches, and the breeze riffling the leaves of the shrubs. These were natural sounds, and in the deep forest it was possible to edit them out of what he listened for. Beneath those sounds was a kind of quiet that told stories. He remembered Hugh teaching him about woodcraft. How to step so as not to crack a branch and create a noise that other listening ears—like the elk and bear they hunted—would know and recognize as a threat. A cough, a sniff, the rasp of knife being drawn, the sound of fabric on moving limbs …
He listened.
But the woods were as silent as if the forest itself held its breath.
Kagen stood there for a very long time, still as a statue. The slanting sunlight slowly leveled out as the sun dropped toward the horizon. He saw the shadows growing like fungus beneath the trees and bushes.
Twice he called for Jinx, but there was no answering whinny.
He was alone in the woods.
Except for the wolves.