Winter's King

by Bryce O'Connor

  He was hanging onto Ahna. Not resting on. Not helping himself with. Hanging. With both hands he clung to her haft, feeling his arms burn every time he wrenched her pointed tip out of the packed snow to plunge it back in one or two steps ahead of him. His legs were long past such pain, the thick, bone-deep ache of fatigue having dissipated into resolute, sluggish numbness around the third hour of their ascent. His breath came in heaving billows, his lungs screaming from a combination of the thinning atmosphere and icy temperature of the air that was only getting colder as they climbed. This, however, was the one thing that didn’t bother Raz. He welcomed the chill that filled his chest with every gasped inhalation, cooling him from the inside out. Despite the frigid winter evening, for once Raz was boiling beneath his furs, burning up as his body worked to carry him along the stairs step by step by step.

  Never again, he thought to himself, looking up to see where Carro had gotten off to. Never, EVER, again.

  The old Priest was, as always, well ahead of him. Almost from the moment they had started their climb the man had fallen into a sad, sullen silence, and Raz had given him his space. It was the first time since the previous night Carro had had any opportunity to be alone with his wandering mind, and Raz rather thought the man could use some time to himself.

  He’s alone, Raz thought sadly as he lifted Ahna yet again from the snow and shoved her back down again on the next step. That’s a feeling we know well, isn’t it, sis?

  The thought of Talo’s death had dredged up other memories with it, and Raz had taken his own time to let the darkness of the last few weeks sink in just a little bit, just enough to allow himself to feel what he knew needed to be felt. He remembered the horror of Arrun’s head as Quin Tern kicked it over the frosted pit floor of the Arena. He remembered watching Lueski’s mind crumble in silence as she looked down on what was left of her brother, watching her reach up and slice her own throat on the blade already held to her neck.

  As he remembered holding her, cradling her small hands against his chest while she died miserably in his arms, the little girl’s last words echoed up through his memories, as though the gusting mountain wind had carried it from the emptiness that extended infinitely outward, grey and subdued, to Raz’s left.

  “I’ll miss you,” she had said, just before grabbing for the blade.

  I miss you too, Raz thought sadly, feeling the scrabbling claws of sorrow dig in and pull his heart towards the ground.

  Raz turned the feeling into anger, though, and used it to fuel the endless upward climb long after his body had had enough. He drew from the rage, pulling from it like water miraculously drawn from a well that had long since gone dry.

  And so went their ascent, for the larger part of four hours, until the dim light of the Sun began to fade. Carro led the way, guiding Gale along by reins clutched in the hand slung across his chest, the steel staff in the other feeling about the snow and stone for good footing. Raz followed behind, simultaneously cursing the ache and fatigue of a body unaccustomed to this particular sort of strain and basking in the wallowing, pensive freedom the climb allowed him. The going was slow, but neither man complained, content in their own thoughts and in their own company. They might have found each other to be surprisingly pleasant company—especially since the tragedy of the previous night—but neither was upset to have some time to themselves.

  Despite this, Raz was more than a little relieved when he looked up to see Carro waving to him with his staff from above a bend in the path, thirty feet off and a dozen feet above his head. The Priest seemed to be shouting something, but as the winds whipped back and forth through Raz’s steel and furs even he couldn’t make out the words.

  “Hold on!” he shouted back, motioning that he was on his way. “I’m coming!”

  A minute or two later Raz had managed a rapid double turn in the path, catching up to the Priest, who stood overlooking the great plummet that dropped away before them. The world far below was a dim wash of green and white, the Arocklen spreading out across the earth beneath a layer of mists and low-hanging clouds, darkening quickly in the fading hour.

  “Are we stopping?” Raz wheezed, almost desperately, as he finally came to a halt beside Carro.

  “It’s about that time.” Carro nodded and indicated the path in front of them, which continued flat for a ways before curving around an edge in the rock. “There’s an alcove carved into the mountain, about a hundred feet past that bend. It’s a resting spot for pilgrims and traveling Priests.”

  Raz didn’t respond, focusing on catching his breath. He had seen such breaks in the path, flattened and cleared portions of stone cut around the steps or into the mountain. He figured they would camp for the night in such a place, given that the snows were slowing them down so much, and he hoped silently the walls of the alcove were high enough to keep out the mountain winds.

  At Raz’s silence, Carro looked over at him curiously. The Priest took him in with concern, eyeing his heaving chest and his legs, which Raz realized—to his great chagrin—were shaking under his own weight.

  Abruptly, Carro flushed as though in embarrassment, eyes widening.

  “What?” Raz asked, looking down at himself, confused.

  “Uh…” Carro began, sounding like he didn’t know how to start, an uncomfortable, awkward smile coming across his lips. “Well, I… I seem to have forgotten…”

  “Forgotten?” Raz demanded, suddenly concerned. Had they left something important behind? “Forgotten what?”

  Carro hesitated. Then, in response, he set his staff against the wall to their right, turned, and pressed his now-free hand to Raz’s chest.

  Almost immediately Raz felt strength flush back into his limbs, warmth rushing through him and chasing off the aches and pains of the afternoon’s climb like hounds running off an unwanted intruder. Within seconds he felt almost completely rejuvenated, his breath coming easier, his posture straightening as the fatigue vanished.

  In an odd combination of gratitude and fury, he stared at Carro.

  “MAGIC?” he demanded, his voice a shriek of incredulity. “You’ve been using MAGIC to help you climb?”

  “Of course,” Carro grumbled, looking sheepish as he pulled his hand away. “How do you think we manage the stairs every other day during the harvest season? I was wondering why you were so far behind…”

  “I was behind because someone forgot that my gods didn’t leave me with the miraculous gift of sorcery,” Raz spluttered, still utterly bewildered that he had not, in fact, had to have suffered through the last four hours in utter misery.

  “Sorry,” Carro mumbled, not facing Raz as he picked up his staff again. “I was… elsewhere.”

  As he watched the Priest turn to stare off once more at the darkening grey line of the horizon, Raz felt his anger leave him. Carro was lost in his own thoughts again, a small, heartbroken frown barely visible through the snow that caked his blonde beard.

  Raz knew whom it was the man was thinking of.

  “Come on,” Raz said gruffly, stepping past the Priest and plucking the reins from his bad hand as he did. “No use standing out here in the snow and wind.”

  It was a minute or two later—Raz leading the way this time—that the alcove Carro had described finally came into view. As they rounded the corner in the mountainside, Raz saw that the path extended even and straight before them for another twenty-five yards or so, then sloped upwards once again as the stairs resumed their winding climb through the cliffs. About a dozen steps above them, a ragged, worn slice of solid rock had been cut right out of the wall of the path, leaving an opening about five feet wide through which a man and—thankfully—a horse could easily fit. Pulling Gale along carefully behind him, Raz made his way forward along the last flat lane of the path, then up the stairs. He suffered a brief moment of subconscious confusion as his mind fought to cope with a sudden, unnatural lack of fatigue at the climb, his legs abruptly carrying him strongly and surely up the steps, one after another. Getting over
this, though, Raz made his way upward, then turned to lead Gale through the rift in the wall.

  At once the wind dulled. Raz found himself in a wide, circular niche carved out of the rock by what could only have been magic. The alcove was open to the elements, its walls extending no more than five or six feet above his head, but it shielded them well enough from the buffets of whatever storm might be brewing around them, and once they cleared the snow from the ground it would be plenty dry. Even as he thought this, in fact, Raz felt a pleasant warmth spread about his feet, and he turned to see that Carro had followed him and Gale promptly through the wall. The Priest was already at work, moving his staff gently through the air before him in a complicated series of motions, winding each into the other. As he did, Raz felt the heat around his legs intensify, and he recognized the spell as one similar to the casted warmth Carro and Talo would sometimes take turns weaving over their little party as they’d pushed north, across the Dehn, and into the relative shelter of the Woods.

  The snow melted quickly, crunching and sinking into itself as it turned first to water then trickling fog. For several minutes Raz did nothing more than watch, leading Gale around the wall of the alcove to stand beside Carro as the Priest worked, his staff moving in constant fluidity. When the last of the piled snow was gone, revealing dry, uneven slate beneath, Carro heaved a heavy sigh and stepped deeper into the space.

  “I’ll get the wards up, if you would be so kind as to start making camp.”

  Raz nodded, and before long the pair had settled into an old routine that—nevertheless—felt uncomfortably lopsided without the presence of the third man now missing from their company.

  A half hour later they were sitting across from each other, silently watching the pitch and dance of the hearty white fire Carro had summoned into existence in the center of the alcove. The heat the magic gave off was unneeded—the protective barriers the Priest had managed to eventually cast offered plenty—but nonetheless Raz reveled in its waves, extending his wings out and around the flames to bath in the arcane warmth. One hand was resting against the coolness of the stone beneath him, the other holding his gladius suspended over the fire, turning it every now and then so that the thin strips of meat impaled along the length of its steel cooked evenly. It was fortunate they were so close to the Citadel, Raz told himself. He wasn’t sure their remaining elk and venison would have lasted more than another two, maybe three meals.

  “How do you do it, Raz?”

  Raz blinked at the sudden question, lifting his eyes to look at Carro across the flames. The man wasn’t looking at him, his gaze on the twisting light of the fire. He had a lost, empty look about him, like a man who’d woken up to a world he knew nothing about.

  “Do what?” Raz asked, though he thought he could guess where the conversation was about to take them.

  “Carry this,” Carro told him quietly. “Bear this… this weight.” His hood was pulled down, and the snow had melted out of his beard and hair. He looked as old as Raz had ever seen him look, staring off, blind to the light and stone and sky around him.

  For several heartbeats Raz didn’t respond. He knew what the Priest was looking for, of course, but he suspected the man wouldn’t like the answer.

  “I don’t,” he said finally, retracting the gladius from over the flames as the meat started to sizzle and pop. “Or rather, I didn’t.”

  Carro looked up at that, eyeing him curiously.

  “Caring for another,” Raz kept on, “comes with risks, Carro. Sharing your soul means giving a part of yourself to another, leaving it exposed, vulnerable. I don’t doubt you are aware of this, in your own way, but age does not always equal experience in such matters. When grief—true grief, the kind that only the theft of a life can elicit—takes us… different people cope in different ways.”

  “What do you mean?” Carro asked, almost desperately.

  Raz sighed, waving the gladius about him slowly to cool the food. “I mean that death is a meteor, and the impact it has on us is relevant to our preparation for it. As a beloved elder succumbs to old age, we see the meteor far off in the night sky, and have all the time in the world to brace ourselves for it. When illness strikes suddenly, we catch a glimpse of death’s coming, and have at least a moment to ready for the fall.”

  He set the sword down carefully, the still-warm tip propped up on his knee so that the meat wouldn’t become soiled against the ground.

  “But when life is snatched away—when death comes so suddenly it leaves again in a blink—there is no preparation for the pain. There is no bracing for the impact.”

  Across the fire, Carro nodded slowly, his face darkened by shadows that played against the lines of his brow and cheeks.

  “What do you do, then?” he mumbled. “When the meteor strikes, what do you do? How do you bear it?”

  Again, Raz paused.

  And again, he decided to answer honestly.

  “I don’t,” he repeated quietly. “I didn’t. When I lost my family, Carro, I spent the next week in madness. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep… I just hunted. I existed as some vicious phantom of myself, some bloodthirsty, ephemeral projection of everything that eventually led the Mahsadën to extend me their hand, led the spectators of the Arena to cheer me as their hero, their bloody champion. I didn’t bear the weight, Carro. I let it crush me, let it break me. I let the weight mold me, until eventually what I was mirrored the moniker of ‘Monster’ all too well.” He held the Priest’s gaze firmly. “I’m sorry, but I’m not the one to ask such a question to. I was young, foolish, and I had the opportunity for an outlet, for vengeance.”

  “I wish I had that outlet,” Carro said in a broken voice. “I wish I had a way to—”

  “No,” Raz said harshly, sweeping a hand before him in anger. “That is not what you want, Priest. I may not be able to tell you how to bear the pain you now carry, and I’m truly sorry for that, but I am the one to tell you that—above all else—you must bear it. No matter what. Let it weigh you down, let it shape you, and you will be looking down a very dark path, Carro. A path that leads nowhere good.”

  “A path you know well?” Carro asked.

  Raz gave a hard, unwilling smile. “All too well, yes. And I can tell you with resounding conviction that it is not a road you will do well on. That trail is more shadow than light, more blood than life. Your Lifegiver does not exist down that path. His warmth does not penetrate the cold of that way.”

  He reached down, tugging a steaming slice of venison from the blade. Juice dripped from the meat over the ground as Raz reached over and around the fire, leaning forward to offer Carro the food.

  “You,” he said, kindly now, watching the Priest eye the meat with disinterest, “are best suited for the harder path, my friend. I caved, and I fell. Talo said that the fires I carry with me don’t consume me, but they did. Once, they did. They burned so hot I forgot what it was to live, what it was to care. I spilled as much blood in a week as any five of the men I killed had in their lives combined. I took the easy road. I don’t know if that’s because I was weak, or simply young and lost, but it doesn’t change the fact that I took the easy road.”

  He shook the meat pointedly. “You don’t get that choice, Carro. Your god wouldn’t let you, Talo wouldn’t let you, and I’m certainly not going to let you. Instead, you’re going to eat. You’re going to sleep. You’re going to hurt and wallow and bear that pain until it becomes a part of you, a scar that adds to the beauty of the ‘gift’ of life you say Laor has given you. In the end, you’ll be stronger for it.”

  There were tears in Carro’s eyes now, as he looked at the meat, understanding what it was meant to imply. If he took it, he admitted a willingness to continue, a desire to go on. If he took it, he was accepting the weight that tore at him now, acknowledging that he would carry it until such time as it was a part of him.

  Slowly, with staggered hesitation, the man reached out his good hand and pried the dripping venison free of Raz’s claws.


  “Good man,” Raz told him. “Laor would be proud.”

  At that Carro gave a helpless, croaking chuckle, then brought the meat to his mouth and started to tear into it.

  They spent the rest of the evening in conversation, talking as they had over the course of the earlier morning, speaking of nothing and of everything, resolutely staying away only from the topic of Talo and what was to be done about the mountain men now that he was gone. They spoke of Raz’s family, of the mother that had given Carro to the faith when he was young, and even of Lueski and Arrun Koyt. They spoke more of the Citadel and its inhabitants, and Raz once again felt the budding excitement well in him as Carro told him more about how the furnaces worked, about the battlements that offered breathtaking views of the world on the rare clear days, and about the education of the acolytes as they grew from initiates into consecrated Priests and Priestesses. They spoke of old friends, Raz telling Carro more about how he had met Eva, now far behind them in Ystréd, and about the master smith, Allihmad Jerr, who to this day worked out of the shithole that was Karth. Carro talked to him of the former High Priest, Eret Ta’hir, of Jerrom Eyr, the last of that generation, and of Jofrey al’Sen, whom Talo had left in charge of the Citadel in his absence.

  When Carro started to speak more of Syrah, though, Raz found himself suddenly hard-pressed to pay attention to the man, distracted once more by the inexplicable image of a white-haired girl dancing across his mind. He didn’t notice Carro smile as the Priest watched him, examining the distance of his gaze and the calmness of his face as he listened to stories of the woman’s youth, and more of her successes with the mountain tribes after she’d been granted her staff.

  Eventually, an hour or two after night had fallen in truth, Carro began to yawn. The ward would tell them if anyone came along the path behind them, but all the same they agreed to split the watch, neither trusting in the fact that the Kayle’s men weren’t hunting them up the mountainside. Raz took first shift, bidding Carro goodnight as the Priest extinguished the flames in the center of the stone floor and made for his bedroll. His sheathed gladius in one hand, Raz moved towards the alcove’s narrow entrance, settling himself against the right wall of the opening from which he could look back down along the path. Spreading his wings so that they wouldn’t get pinned, he slid himself down the stone, coming to a seated rest at its base.