Winter's King

by Bryce O'Connor

  Ahna was torn from his hands, the dviassegai clattering and rolling over the stone deeper into the courtyard, disappearing into the falling snow.

  As the ax came down again Raz did his best to react, dodging back and reaching for his ax and gladius. With the understanding of his sudden disadvantage, though, awareness seemed to rush into his body, as though his mind were screaming at him that this was a fight he was going to lose. His legs suddenly felt sluggish, his hands and arms thick and heavy. He managed to pull his ax free of its loop at his hip, but his right hand slipped off the sword hilt as it stuck firm in its scabbard, frozen shut by the snow and ice that had built up as they battled. Baoill’s great ax came around, unrelenting, and Raz spun to cross his ax and armored forearm in a desperate block. Iron hit wood and steel. There was a crunch, and splinters flew about Raz’s face as the shaft of his ax shattered, leaving only the bottom half in his hand. The blow carried through, barely dampened, slamming Raz sideways.

  His claws, finding purchase at the last moment beneath the snow, were the only reason he didn’t slide right over the edge of the cliff.

  Raz stood himself up precariously, his right arm numb and throbbing beneath its steel bracer after accepting the blow, the splintered shaft in his other hand. Behind him, maybe a foot away, the edge of the plateau waited, the endless gaping mouth of a terrible leviathan come up the mountains to claim him.

  And before him, looming like a shadow against the backdrop of falling snow, stood Gûlraht Baoill.

  The Kayle of the mountain tribes was not the erect, powerful man he had been a quarter-hour before. His hair was wild and matted with freezing sweat, his face bruised and his mouth bloody. He panted, grimacing in pain as he held his right arm to the stained cloth of his torn and cut shirt. Red ran down the weathered skin, dripping off his elbows to trickle about his right foot. His armor was a mess, little of it left unscathed and much of it punctured and torn completely off as more blood seeped here and there from between iron-studded plates. All in all, the man looked more dead than alive.

  And yet, Raz knew as he waited for the inevitable killing blow, it was he who had won this fight.

  As he watched, Baoill toed at something in the snow, kicking it up and over the edge of the cliff. Raz saw the glint of the head of his war ax plummet down to vanish into the tumbling grey of the storm.

  Baoill spat, splotching the ground with yet more red.

  “My admiration you have, beast,” he wheezed, edging forward as he brought the great ax up in his good hand. “Not lightly given. I would have the name of yours, so seek you out in the afterlife I might, when time comes.”

  “I have many names,” Raz responded, playing for time as his mind whirred. “Which of them would you prefer?”

  As he spoke he looked around, seeking a way out. He still had his sword, but he didn’t trust himself to be able to pull it free in time when he had already failed once. His claws wouldn’t reach the Kayle before the ax fell, and the same went for his teeth. He had to find another answer, had to find a way to survive.

  Then Raz’s eyes fell on the dull outline of the Laorin, huddled under the looming silhouettes of the Citadel’s walls, and he saw something that made his heart stop. As he looked, he thought he saw a portion of the group shifting and moving. He couldn’t make them out through the snow, but it looked as though several people were holding back another.

  There was the barest glimpse of white hair, and Raz’s suddenly remembered a smile he had told himself he would fight for, no matter what.

  Even if survival wasn’t an option, in the end…

  “I would have all,” he heard Baoill answer him, as though from a far-off place. “Names you have won. Name your father placed upon you, and name of his, so tell him of the strength of his son I might.”

  Raz’s eyes didn’t leave the Laorin. For once, he didn’t care what the Kayle was doing. He sought the hint of that pale hair once more, seeking the warmth it brought his soul.

  When he saw it again, clear for a moment as the woman struggled with the men that held her back, he began to find the courage he needed.

  “I am Raz i’Syul Arro,” Raz thundered, turning back to the Gûlraht Baoill and standing tall as the mountain man continued his slow advance forward. “Son of Agais, son of Aigos. I am heir to the masters of the Arro clan. I am the Monster of Karth, the Scourge of the South. I am demon and dragon, a child of the Sun and Moon, watched over by Her Stars.” He raised a hand, pointing a steel claw at Baoill. “You can tell my father that, whenever you meet him.”

  Gûlraht Baoill nodded his approval.

  “I shall remember your name, Raz i’Syul Arro,” he said, stopping some four feet away. “And my men. They call you dragon, as well they should. I doubt I will ever meet a more worthy opponent.” He set his feet, preparing for the final blow.

  “So…” he said quietly. “Until we meet again, dragon.”

  Then he lunged.

  And Raz met him.

  He did not leap forward, as if to collide with the man and knock him off balance. He did not strike at his face, for he didn’t have space to get his hands up. Instead, Raz darted forward just enough to get inside the arc of the weapon, wrapping his arms around the Kayle’s body as he felt the great ax’s haft slam into his side. Baoill, understanding his mistake in an instant, roared and wrapped his left arm about Raz, ax and all, pinning him to his body in turn.

  Then Raz set his feet, said a small prayer to the Sun hiding somewhere above the storm overhead, and strained backwards.

  Under the momentum of his pull and the Kayle’s lunge, they tumbled, entwined together, into nothingness.

  LII

  “It was with this great act that the Dragon of the North was born. As a man he had proven himself, driving the Kayle of the clans—who many among the mountain tribes had begun to suspect was perhaps some bastard of the Stone Gods themselves—to the brink of death. As a beast he had shown his character to be more human than animal, demonstrating himself capable of sacrifice and abandonment of desire for others.

  But only as the Dragon could he have been responsible for what came next…”

  —BORN OF THE DAHGÜN BONE, AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  “NO!”

  Syrah’s barely heard her own scream reverberate over the howl of the storm. She stared, still struggling against the powerful arms of Cullen and Kallet Brern on either side of her, at the empty spot along the edge of the plateau.

  The empty spot where, only a moment before, she had watched the dark outline of Raz drag Gûlraht Baoill down with him over the edge of the cliff.

  “NO!” she shrieked again. “NO! RAZ! RAZ!”

  “He’s gone, Syrah!” someone bellowed in her ear, though she wasn’t sure who. “Please! He’s gone!”

  But she wouldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. From the moment they had seen the great spear Ahna skitter by them across the snow, Syrah had felt dread consume her entirely. She had tried to intervene, tried to get to the shadowy shapes lingering in the snow at the edge of the precipice, but Carro of all people, standing beside her, had shouted for someone to hold her back.

  And so the Brern brothers had taken her under the arms—their touch only driving the building panic within her—and kept her from rushing to Raz’s aid.

  And now he was gone…

  At once, Syrah stopped fighting, all will ripped from her. She fell to her knees in the piling snow, shivering and shaking. Cullen and Kallet released her as they realized she had given up, the younger of them crouching down beside her.

  “Syrah,” Kallet said quietly. “I’m so sorry. But please, we have to move. Please. They’re coming.”

  There was the sound of bodies in motion, and Syrah realized that all about her the Laorin were retreating, rushing back for the relative safety of the Citadel’s walls. She looked up, seeing a score of men and women moving forward before her, forming a wall between the others and the dark mass that was blooming through the snow towards them across th
e courtyard, the rough outline of a hundred bodies pressing forward through the storm. Light bloomed in complicated tendrils through the air as the Priests and Priestesses before her began crafting a line of interlacing wards, sealing Cyurgi’ Di’s entrance from assault, at least for a time.

  “We failed…”

  Syrah looked around. Carro stood beside her, staring with sadness through the weaving magics at the coming line of mountain men. His scarred face was heartbroken, that of a man whose last hopes had just been snuffed out.

  “We failed,” he said again, and then Syrah understood. Carro’s sacrifice had been in vain. Raz had not won the fight. The Kayle was dead, but no champion stood to claim his title. It would pass on to the next in command, to the generals of his army.

  Generals who seemed to have wasted no time in pressing their advantage.

  Syrah felt hot tears build in her eye, stinging in the wind, and yet they were not tears of grief. Watching Raz fall had torn her apart, ripping away a part of herself she hadn’t realized had become so entwined with the atherian, but it wasn’t sorrow that claimed her now. As she watched the coming onslaught of men, men who had chained her, defiled her, stolen away her body and her freedom and now the very man who had pulled her from their clutches, something scorching billowed up from within.

  Wrath took her by force, and Syrah’s quivering turned suddenly into spasms of fury.

  Before anyone could stop her, she was on her feet again, barreling towards the mountain men with a raging scream.

  The three Priests directly before her, still weaving their sorceries, started and looked around at the sound. One reached for her as she charged by, but she was too quick, her eye set resolutely on the distinct shapes of the men she could now make out clearly through the snow. As she passed through the unfinished magics she thought she might have heard someone shouting her name, thought she might have heard shouts for her to stop, but she would have none of it. Fed by her anger, the spells she gathered in either hand crackled and snapped audibly, erupting from her palms in twin balls of blinding flame.

  When she was ten feet from the front line, she leapt as high as she could, then slammed the magic into the ground.

  Fire, true, raging fire, bloomed outward across the stone from where her hands splayed over the rough slate. It arched like lightning over the courtyard, crisscrossing and cutting through the legs of the tribes before her. Steam blasted upward in a gushing cloud, ice and snow vaporizing in the explosion of heat. The fire spread, dragging back and forth across the plateau until it found the wall and the cliff’s edge to her left and right respectively.

  In the same instant, the men before her began to scream, and Syrah felt satisfaction course through her.

  She might not know how to kill, but fire is painful, no matter how it is born into the world.

  Her victory didn’t last long, however. Men were moving before her, leaping over and around the lines of flames, avoiding the magics as they charged. They came, bellowing their war cries, axes and swords raised, and Syrah suddenly realized she was all alone in the no-man’s-land, facing a flood of steel that threatened to crush her.

  Then, abruptly, men stood on either side of her.

  “Dammit, Brahnt!” she heard Cullen Brern curse from her right as he sent a shockwave into the very heart of the mountain men, blasting the first dozen over the heads of their companions behind them. On her left, his brother did the same. “Don’t be a fool! Get back!”

  But Syrah ignored him. The fire within her hadn’t even begun to run dry yet, and she had always had a talent for combat. Before Cullen could say anything else she was casting stunning spells into the crowd at a frightening rate, howling her defiance as men fell like toppled statues about them. Anyone who managed to get too close was knocked back again, either by her or one of the brothers, and before long the forms of the unconscious and injured were piled about their feet. Eventually they found themselves surrounded, and Syrah heard Cullen continue to curse as he shifted to protect her flank, Kallet muttering under his breath as he continued to hurl spells from her left. They were being pressed now, though, every man they knocked down or aside replaced just as quickly by two more. Syrah summoned a ring of fire up about them, willing it to rage and roar, but it only slowed the mountain men down as they stomped out the magic and pressed forward. Like a churning ocean of grey and brown, the tribes tightened the circle. Syrah could see the gleam of the blades, see the hunger in the eyes of the men, fixed upon her. Her rage began to falter, replaced by something darker as she saw what a fool she had been, how selfish and thoughtless. Fear began to take her over as the hungry faces grew nearer, her spells wavering when images flashed before her of the last time she had been so near their savagery.

  Her courage was just about to give out when a thundering wave of a hundred shouting voices rose up from behind, and the mountain men at her back broke and split, many tossed aside and into the air on the ripples of a dozen different spells.

  The others had joined them in their final stand.

  Goaded on by her charge, it hadn’t taken much for the Priests and Priestess of the Citadel to find their own courage. Where a minute ago they had been fleeing inward, making for the safety of the fortress, now they poured out in all directions from the wall, wards and spells leading their rush, steel staffs flashing in the dim light of the day. Bloody and dirty snow was trampled to slush beneath their feet as they pressed the enemy, struggling to push them back.

  But push them back they did.

  Syrah felt a thrill as she realized the line before her was staggering. The tribesmen were being forced off the plateau and onto the path again, giving way foot by foot under the onslaught of spellwork and steel. They were winning, gaining ground and reclaiming the outer courtyard. If they could take back the semicircle of stone, then they might have a chance to get the greater wards up again, which would make it ten-fold more difficult for the tribes to assault the—

  There was a hiss, the wet sound of metal burying into flesh, and Kallet Brern tumbled to the ground before her in a tangle of white robes and thick limbs, an arrow through his eye.

  Before she had time to do more than gape at the body of the man that had been her friend, there were a hundred more twangs of arrows let loose, and instinctively Syrah cast a protective ward upwards, above her head. As she felt the heavy strikes of the projectiles against her shield she looked up, feeling her heart drop at the sight above her.

  Along the cliffs above their heads, sliding down like an avalanche of leather and steel, the rest of the army had come to the aid of their brethren on the plateau.

  In an instant, the tide of the battle turned again.

  Syrah saw Goatmen standing along the ridge overhead, bows drawn and firing at any white robes they could distinguish through the snow. Kregoan and Amreht and every other tribe tumbled and leapt down upon them to join the thick of the fight, managing the bluffs with ease. They poured forth, a never-ending cascade of bodies, and within seconds the Laorin found themselves no longer fighting for ground but rather struggling to survive long enough to make it back to the relative safety of the Citadel. Priests and Priestesses were falling now, their magics and staffs failing them as the one man they had been dueling became two, then five, then ten. Soon the ground was equal parts trampled snow and still forms, the mountain men unconscious or screaming and clutching at their injuries, the Laorin dead or dying.

  “BACK!” Cullen Brern roared, not even blinking down at the body of his brother. “BACK TO THE WALL!”

  But it was too late.

  The Laorin were crushed, pinched here against the bastions and the outer wall of the Citadel and there with their backs to the drop of the plateau along its southern ridge. Some managed to make it to the tunnel, funneling in as quickly as they could, but not fast enough to compensate for the constant, violent push of the tribes. More men and women fell, more screams echoing over the mountain tops to join with the clash of steel and hiss of arrows. All around Syrah dea
th reared its ugly head, and the Lifegiver carried his servants off one after the other to return them to the cycle of life. Soon Syrah herself began to wonder if she would be allowed the honor of glimpsing the face of Laor as she died, or if she would simply be born squalling back into the world to taste life anew.

  But then, in the moment she thought this, a very different face loomed out of the battle towards her, and fear ripped through Syrah like a sword.

  Between the writhing mass of tribesmen before her, each fighting the other for space as they clashed, a man was making his way in her direction, his blue eyes fixed on hers. She recognized him in an instant, noting the black, silver-lined hair and the paired swords he held in each hand, as well as the way the army seemed to separate before him. This was a man she had heard of, but never seen with her own eyes until today. He had been banished from Emreht Grahst’s council before the chieftain’s death, his ambitions too bloody and his will unyielding. He had aided Gûlraht Baoill to power, then stood by his side as the man rose higher still. He had led the sacking of Metcaf beside his master, and she had heard rumors during her imprisonment that it was he who had had the idea to poison Harond’s waters with the corpses of slaves.

  More frightening still, Agor Vareks had only minutes before performed the Baresk ol-Sayrd, the Blessing of Blades, marking himself as the right hand of the Kayle.

  Syrah knew then, without a doubt, that the greatest of Baoill’s generals was after her head. He would hold it aloft, proclaiming himself the slayer of the Witch, and demand the crown his master had died with.

  And he’ll have it, too, she thought in a panic, watching the man advance on her.

  He was less than then ten feet away, now, barely three or four bodies separating him from Syrah. Not once, as he began shoving aside the battling men on either side of him, did he look away from her. Even as he ducked under a stunning spell she threw at his head, then stepped nimbly over a line of fire that still burned smokeless beneath the feet of the army, he never glanced away. Syrah prepared herself, watching the general manage finally to break through the front line of his warriors, steeling her body and gathering a protective ward about her, summoning a fistful of fire in her free hand.