They kept up with the boy, who dashed hither and yon, through the commons to the back, then down a series of halls. Finally, he reached a tall door and rushed forward to open it for them. As he did so, a clash of steel rang from outside, furious and savage.

  Worried at the sounds of battle, Nyx slowed, but Frell hurried to the boy. He handed him another bit of brass and waved the lad out the door ahead of him.

  Frell turned and stopped them at the threshold. “Stay here,” he warned, then stepped out of the door alone and crossed a few paces.

  Jace kept beside Nyx, his brows pinched with the same fear as hers.

  What is happening?

  Past the door, a large courtyard was open to the misty skies. Lamps hung all around the square. To either side stretched a dozen archways, closed with half gates. Past the nearest, Nyx spied shadowy stalls, where a few horses stirred, likely disturbed by the commotion in the yard.

  Nyx kept near Jace’s shoulder.

  Two men fought across the breadth of the courtyard, hacking and slashing; both bore cuts in their shirts and breeches, some spots dark with blood. One carried a silvery sword that blurred in his hands. The other wielded two blades so thin that they seemed more mirage than steel. They clashed and parried, thrust and dodged. Their boots danced across the cobblestone yard. Sweat sheened both their faces, lips grimacing or smiling savagely, changing back and forth as swiftly as their swordplay.

  Nyx’s pounding heart slowed as she recognized that they were merely sparring, fiercely so, but not truly trying to kill each other. The boy headed over to the pair, whistling for their attention. They finally stopped, breathing hard, gazing with irritation at the lad.

  “What is it, boy?” The swarthier of the two men combed back a damp swath of blue-black hair over an ear. “It better be important, or I’ll cuff you soundly for interrupting us.”

  The lad’s shoulders rose by his ears. He fumbled with a pocket.

  “Leave the boy be, Darant,” the other said. He was a grizzled man with a dark scruff of beard over cheek and chin, salted with gray, which matched his lanky hair. He bore a jagged scar down one cheek. “Before the lad pisses himself.”

  Even in the doorway, Nyx felt the danger wafting off these two men.

  “M … Message,” the boy finally bleated out. He pulled out and handed the folded oilskin slip from Frell over to the scarred man.

  With a weary sigh, the man sheathed his sword and took it. “Demand for another day’s board, I imagine.” He glanced sidelong at his sparring partner. “It’s as if the inn doesn’t trust a pirate.”

  Pirate?

  Nyx glanced over to Frell, who waited off to the side. The alchymist’s gaze remained fixed on the man who held the message. Frell’s face held the same glaze of wonder as when he had observed the Kethra’kai lakeside ceremony, as if he were seeing history come to life.

  The man in the yard stiffened as he spotted a crimson wax seal that secured the message. He hurriedly broke it open and scanned what was written there. He glanced to the boy, who pointed over to Frell.

  “This was carried by you?” the man called over to the alchymist. “Written by the hand of Prioress Ghyle?”

  Frell nodded, nearly half bowing. “Yes, but I come with much more.” He turned to the doorway and whispered with a wave, “Nyx … it’s safe to come out.”

  She was not sure that was true, but she stepped into the yard, drawing Jace and Kanthe with her.

  Frell turned back to the man. “I come with Marayn’s lost daughter.”

  Nyx fell back a step. She eyed the man with the same look of shock as was mirrored on the stranger’s face. She barely heard Frell’s next words as he motioned across the yard.

  “Nyx, this is Graylin sy Moor, a man who may be your father.”

  They stared at one another for a frozen breath.

  “No…” the man finally gasped out. “It cannot be.”

  Still, he took a tentative step toward her.

  She retreated, running into Kanthe and Jace.

  “I’ve got you,” the prince whispered behind her.

  “We both do,” Jace added.

  With their support, she stood her ground. Her shock turned to something colder. If any of this were true, here was the knight who had left her for dead in the swamps.

  As he approached, he studied her, first with one eye, then another. His steps suddenly faltered. He slipped down on one knee. His voice cracked when he tried to speak.

  “Y … You look just like her. It’s unmistakable.” His gaze tried to consume her. Tears welled, seeming to rise from both sadness and happiness. His lips thinned with agony. “By all the gods … I know you must be Marayn’s daughter.”

  Nyx took her first step toward him, drawn by his grief and guilt, which matched her own heart. She searched his face, trying to find a similar match in his features, but she only saw a hard, broken man.

  “I … I’m sorry,” she whispered to this stranger. “But I doubt any of this is true.”

  Her words wounded him, but she felt no satisfaction in it, even as much as she had resented him for most of her life. There were angry words trapped in her chest, long turned to stone. She didn’t know what to make of this fallen knight. She had tried to prepare for this, but she had never truly believed it would happen. She dared not even hope it.

  And now that it was here …

  She realized a hard truth.

  He means nothing to me.

  As if hearing her private thought, a growl echoed across the courtyard. Then another. From one of the stables to the right, a large striped shadow bounded over a half gate, followed by a twin. They looked somewhat like wolves, only each stood as high as her chest. They stalked back and forth, crisscrossing one another, heads lowered, with tufted ears held high.

  Jace gasped, and Kanthe swore.

  Frell tried to herd them back toward the door. “They’re vargr,” he warned, his voice both scared and awed.

  Nyx ignored him and stood firm, captured by the dark chatter behind the beasts’ growls. She listened to the underlying high whine. The pitch shivered the hairs on her neck.

  Graylin, the man who could be her father, turned to the pair. “Aamon, Kalder, back to your den! Now!”

  The vargr ignored him, sweeping wide to come around either side of the man. They passed him and squeezed back together in front of him, filling the space between her and the knight. The pair of vargr growled, lips rippling, baring teeth, challenging her.

  She remembered Xan’s warning: There are beasts who will be drawn to your trail. They will seek to kill anyone who risks bridling them.

  Still, she faced down the pair. She picked out the thread buried in their whine. It sang of dark forests under cold stars, of the fire of the hunt, of the rip of flesh off bone, of the warmth of the pack in snowy dens. She let those wild strands inside her, to entwine through her. She accepted the vargr’s feral nature, their savage lusts. She had no desire to bridle any of that, but she also refused to be cowed by them.

  Instead, she gathered all the anger, grief, and guilt inside her, even her loneliness and shame, until it demanded to be loosed, to burst forth in a wild scream. She remembered unleashing that storm after her father was murdered, leaving many dead in the wake of her rage.

  Not again.

  She focused all that raw power onto one image. Of a small bat fighting to save her, of dying because of it. Of milk and warmth shared. Of a brother tied to her heart. She closed her eyes and keened that kinship, fueled by all that was inside her. She sang it back along the twin threads to the two wild hearts crouched before her.

  As she did so, she exposed her own heart, welcoming them to it.

  Slowly their two songs merged. Her keening transformed into a silent howl inside her chest. She shared their haunting cry to icy stars framed by frosted branches and brittle needles.

  After a seemingly endless time, Jace gasped again behind her.

  She opened her eyes.

  One vargr bowed before her, then the other. Their chins lowered to the cobbles. Amber eyes glowed up at her. Tails swished in greeting. Two throats flowed with quieter mewls of reunion, welcoming a lost pack member back to the fold.

  She stared at her new brothers, then lifted her gaze over their haunches to the man behind them. She offered him no kinship like she had these beasts. She faced his bewilderment, the awe in his face.

  She had only one message for him.

  Here is what you abandoned in the swamps.

  TWELVE

  BLOODBAERNE

  So it is written: Magi im Rhell, First of the Klashean Dresh’ri, cut his heart out before his brothers & heald it forth as proof of his superiority. He gave it unto the Second of his ordre before finally succumbing to deth. It is claim’d, for centuries, the Imri-Ka kept the sacred talisman in a consecrat’d vault—where it still beats to this day.

  —From Baskal’s History of Arcana and Thaumaturgy

  39

  THE KING’S BRIGHT son stood in shadows.

  Mikaen paused on the dark stairs that delved through the ramparts of Highmount. He stared out an arrow slit that afforded a view to the north, to the smoldering ruins of the city’s mooring docks.

  It had been three days since the craven attack on the defenseless sprawl of wyndships. Still, a pall hung over the field, like a shawl of mourning. Hundreds had burned to death, thousands more maimed. Innocents all. Past the smoke, the towering warships loomed high, waving flags of the sun and crown.

  At least those ships had been spared, and thankfully so.

  Mikaen settled a palm on the pommel of his sword.

  War is now certain with the Klashe.

  His anger stoked higher. It was not the homecoming he had hoped. He still wore the ceremonial garb from his celebratory nuptial parade. The procession of knights, nobles, and servitors had traveled from Azantiia to the Carcassa family estate in the western stretches of the Brauðlands. He had left his new wife, Lady Myella, at Hold Carcassia, a sweeping manor that spread across green hills. Its rolling low roofs were sodded in the same grasses that fed their vast herds. Rumors of war had been the pretext for securing Myella at the ranchhold, to shelter her out of harm’s way. But in fact, the sojourn had already been planned, to help mask how quickly her belly grew with the prince’s child, the future heir to the throne of Hálendii.

  He closed his eyes against the pall outside and thought instead of holding his child in his arms. He pictured a crown of curled blond hair to match his own, and the bright emerald eyes of his beloved Myella. Already a paternal protectiveness warmed through him. He would let nothing happen to his child.

  “We should not tarry,” Liege General Haddan urged from a few steps below. “The king awaits. And fury has quickened his temper.”

  Mikaen nodded his understanding. After hearing of the Klashean attack, he had ridden hard back to Highmount, arriving with the dawn bell. His polished black boots were scuffed by stirrup and horsehair, his dark blue cloak carried half the road’s mud on it, and his body stank of sweat, both his and his steed’s. As soon as he had stabled his horse to be curried and cooled, he had climbed toward a cold bath and a welcome steam in the Legionary’s bathiery, ready to rid the trail from his pores and cracks.

  Before he could even strip off his cloak, Haddan had appeared with his father’s summons. Knowing it could not be refused, nor even delayed, Mikaen had headed straight back down through the ramparts with Haddan.

  And they still had much farther to go.

  Mikaen followed the stone-faced Haddan around and around the stairs, past where he had stabled his horse, and deeper again, going from mortared stone to raw rock. Finally, they reached a landing and a section of wall that looked no different than the rest. A crack hid a hole that Haddan unlocked with a black key. The liege general shoved a narrow door open and stepped across the threshold.

  “Hurry now,” Haddan commanded gruffly.

  Mikaen followed and pushed the door closed behind him. They strode down a long hall that sloped even deeper. Mikaen kept his head ducked low, sensing the weight of the ramparts over his head. No smoky torches lit their path, only softly glowing veins in the rock wall. It cast Haddan’s shaved pate into a sickly pallor.

  Mikaen hated coming down into the Shrivenkeep, but he understood the necessity of secrets buried deep and how some dark knowledge was best locked away from the brightness of the Father Above.

  At last, an open doorway appeared, framed in firelight.

  Haddan increased his pace, seemingly as happy to abandon this hall as the prince. Or maybe it was the pull of what awaited ahead. Past the ebonwood door, a cavernous domed space opened up. Its obsidian walls had been fractured into a thousand mirrored surfaces, reflecting the ring of torches flickering before other ebonwood doors, all sealed, except for the one behind Mikaen and another to the right, where two figures waited.

  Haddan rushed forward and bent a knee, bowing his head. “Your Majesty.”

  Mikaen trailed him, but only by a breath. He dropped to the same knee. “Father, I’m sorry to have arrived so late after such a cowardly attack upon us all. I should have been here.”

  King Toranth waved them both up. “It gladdens me to have you back at Highmount, Mikaen.”

  The prince regained his feet. His father’s expression did not look gladdened. The white marble of his skin was ashen, nearly gray. His brow lay in deep furrows, shadowing his blue eyes into a storm. He had even shed the finery of his embroidery and velvets and wore a legionnaire’s boots and thin underleathers, creased at knee and elbow. It was a knight’s habiliment, one put on before he donned his armor. The only adornment was a simple dark blue tunic over his leathers, emblazoned with the Massif house sigil.

  Here was a highking readying for war.

  Mikaen appreciated his father’s garb and hard countenance. He could see the storm clouds building around the man’s shoulders—and made a silent promise.

  I will do all in my power to be the bright lightning to your great thunder.

  The king turned to the other waiting beside him, a figure who had haunted his father’s shadow for as long as Mikaen could remember. The Shrive’s tattoo-banded eyes stared hard at the prince, as if irritated by his intrusion here—until the king spoke.

  “Wryth, take us to the prisoner. We’ve given Vythaas long enough to prepare.”

  The Shrive bowed and turned toward the door behind him. “He should be ready when we get there, especially as we still have a ways to travel.”

  The king and the general followed Wryth. Mikaen took a deep breath while no one was looking before heading after them. He had never been farther than this threshold into the Shrivenkeep, and he had hoped never to do so. He was the prince who shone best under the sun, helmed in bright armor. The clash of steel and ring of shields were his music. He preferred to leave such dark places to the creatures who shunned the Father Above. Its halls were said to be shivered by screams, both from the throats of men and those of daemons.

  Still, he followed the others past the door and into the bowels of the Shrivenkeep. Wryth paused beyond the threshold to unhook a glowing lamp from the wall. It was quickly needed. The torches grew scarcer as Wryth led them farther and farther. They passed down narrow stairs worn at the edges by centuries of Shrive’s sandals. Every passageway was more crooked than the last.

  In the upper levels, they swept past gray-robed Shriven who ducked out of their way, clutching dusty texts to their chests, likely forbidden tomes from the Black Librarie of the Anathema. One Shrive they passed had a hand wrapped in bloody bandages, being led by another, suggesting an experiment gone awry.

  Eventually, as they delved deeper, the passageways emptied of Wryth’s brethren.

  Mikaen’s ears strained for any screams, for daemonic howls, but instead there was a hushed silence, which grew to be as weighty as the stone overhead. His nose caught a faint whiff of sulfurous brimstan, which their group seemed to be following, like a thylassaur on a blood trail.

  The source finally appeared down a long serpentine tunnel. Near its end, the passageway was riven by a steep-sided ravine, as if the god Nethyn had cleaved it open with his obsidian blade. A stone bridge spanned it, flanked by two black pillars.

  Wryth led them toward those stone columns. As Mikaen followed, he saw a crimson asp, crowned in thorns, curled on each pillar. The two horn’d snaken faced each other, as if daring anyone to trespass between them, clearly marking the territory ahead as the domain of the dark god Đreyk, and thus the Iflelen.

  Mikaen hurried past those dead-eyed serpents and across the stone bridge. He made the mistake of looking over its edge. The chasm stank so heavily of brimstan that it turned his stomach and watered his eyes. Still, he spotted a baleful shine far below. It was not the ruddy cheer of a fiery hearth, but the same sickly emerald of the glowing seams that ran through the black stones.

  He shuddered and rushed the last of the way across the bridge, joining the others who gathered under an archway into a large tunnel. The stone of the arch was scribed with arcane symbols, all glowing that abhorrent green, as if the very veins of the rock had been bent to the will of the Iflelen to form those symbols.

  Mikaen balked at that threshold.

  “It is not far from here,” Wryth offered, as if sensing Mikaen was near to bolting.

  The Shrive headed under the archway with his lamp. His father and Haddan followed, which left Mikaen no choice but to continue after them. He certainly had no idea how to get back on his own.

  Finally, Wryth reached an iron door. He hung his lamp next to it and grabbed the door’s circular hasp—a ring shaped like a curled asp—in both hands. It seemed to take all of his strength to pull it open. As the heavy door swung on oiled hinges, fiery light flowed out to them—along with a scream that burst into the hall and echoed away, as if trying to escape.

  Mikaen shivered, knowing that the cry had come from no daemon, but from someone being broken.

  Wryth waved them inside and trailed in afterward.