The Muryozaki sang as Iren drew it from its sheath. “I’ve heard enough,” he hissed. “I thought you were a good person, fighting against evil. I was wrong. You’re nothing but a jealous hag who couldn’t stand that someone else might be happy with the man you tossed aside!”
Rondel laughed then, but it was unlike any laugh Minawë had ever heard from her. It was too high-pitched even for Rondel’s sarcastic front. It was shrill, almost manic. “I knew,” she said, “that I made the wrong choice that night.”
Iren wasn’t laughing. “You thought killing an innocent woman could be the right choice?”
The old Maantec stopped her bizarre cackling and regained her feet. Her eyes sparked as Lightning Sight activated. “I wasn’t talking about your mother,” she said. “I was talking about you. I could have killed you that night too. I almost did. You were lying in the grass, your shoulder against the Muryozaki’s hilt. I knew then that you were the Holy Dragon Knight. It was unthinkable. I couldn’t let another Saito become the Holy Dragon Knight. I thrust my blade down to end your life, but then I saw your eyes—Iren Saito’s sky blue eyes. And not the eyes of the man I’d killed, but the eyes of the kind-hearted boy who healed me after my parents died, the eyes of the man I married. When I saw those eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to kill you, so I left you there.
“I thought I could forget the whole thing, but the next day the dreams started. Everywhere I went I saw your eyes. I realized I’d killed you, even if I hadn’t stabbed you. You were an infant. If you didn’t starve, you’d freeze. Either way, you’d die. So I went back to find you at the farmhouse, but of course you were already gone.”
Minawë listened in stunned silence. She knew some of this tale. Amroth had found Iren and taken him for his own by that time. He must have been on his way to Haldessa when Rondel reached the farmhouse.
“When I arrived and found three fresh graves, I despaired,” Rondel continued. “I thought you had died, and I knew I would never survive the guilt. I went to Haldessa, and that was when fortune came to me. Amroth arrived with you in his arms. When I saw you alive, I couldn’t help but exclaim in surprise. Not because I wanted you around, but because your survival meant I didn’t have to die.”
Iren raised his sword. White light swirled around him like a tempest. His magic had returned. “Stop talking, Rondel,” he said. “I’m not interested in your guilt, or how much you suffered. I care about avenging my parents. I care about avenging my mother.” He stepped forward.
Minawë leapt between them. “Stop!” she shouted. “I won’t let you two do this!”
“You’re going to defend this murderous witch?” Iren asked. “After all you’ve heard, you’ll still protect her?”
“I have to protect her,” Minawë said. “She’s my mother.”
The light circling Iren stopped. “She’s your . . .”
“And like you,” Minawë said, hoping she sounded bolder than she felt, “I’ll fight to protect her. If you want to kill her, then you’ll have to kill me too.”
Iren eyed her uncertainly. Minawë thought she’d managed to avoid the coming tragedy.
A pressure touched her shoulder. She looked to her right. Rondel had a hand on her. “Minawë,” her mother said, “you’re in the way.”
“What are you saying?” Minawë screamed. “You can’t mean to go through with this!”
“I have to,” Rondel replied. “It’s why I came here.”
“What? No, we came to rescue Iren!”
“Does Iren look like he needs rescuing? Open your eyes. If Hana or Melwar had wanted to kill him, they had plenty of chances long before we arrived. No, ever since Balear told us about Hana bringing Iren here, I’ve known Melwar’s plan. He meant to corrupt Iren by exposing his past. Even if Iren doesn’t become the Maantec emperor, Melwar has still turned him from the Holy Dragon Knight he once was into a demon obsessed with revenge. I knew Melwar would succeed in doing that, and I knew that because he would succeed, I would have no choice but to fulfill the Storm Dragon Knight’s duty.”
Minawë’s brow furrowed. “The Storm Dragon Knight’s duty?”
“Okthora’s Law says that evil must be annihilated. It’s meant in a broad sense, but it has another meaning as well. The dragons can only test potential knights at the moment they first make contact. After that, the knight can change in any way, and the dragon is powerless to break their bond. Divinion is the Holy Dragon. He chooses knights based on purity of heart. Once he chooses, though, his knight can become twisted, as Saito did. When that happens, the Holy Dragon can be corrupted.”
“Corrupted? How?”
“When a Dragon Knight uses magic, his will mixes with that of the dragon,” Rondel said. “If the Holy Dragon Knight is wicked, his will can corrupt Divinion’s. If that process isn’t stopped, Divinion himself could become evil. The Holy Dragon holds all the good in the world in balance. If he became corrupted, that balance would break, and Raa would fall into chaos.”
“That’s why you weren’t upset when you found out I couldn’t use magic,” Iren interjected. “If I couldn’t reach Divinion, then I couldn’t corrupt him. I thought you had more faith in me than that. You told me last year that I didn’t remind you of Iren Saito anymore.”
“Yes, and look how wrong I was. You turned out just like him in the end. I didn’t want to believe that you could. For a while I fooled myself into thinking you could avoid his fate. In a corner of my mind, though, I knew it was only a matter of time before you became corrupted. But if you couldn’t use magic, then I would never have to worry about it. I would never have to fulfill my duty as Storm Dragon Knight. Now it seems you have your magic back, and that means I have no choice.” Rondel drew her dagger.
“Then the duty of the Storm Dragon Knight,” Minawë gasped, “is to kill the Holy Dragon Knight!”
Rondel kept her eyes on Iren. “Before the Holy Dragon Knight can corrupt Divinion, that person must die,” she said. “The Storm Dragon Knight bears that responsibility. Evil must be annihilated, and a new Holy Dragon Knight, one pure of heart, must be chosen. When that person inevitably becomes corrupt, they must die as well. For the sake of the world, this cycle must continue.”
Iren raised his Muryozaki. Minawë’s eyes filled with tears as her mother and best friend squared off against each other. “Please,” Minawë begged, “please don’t do this.”
Neither Iren nor Rondel responded to her. They locked eyes, each waiting for the other to make the first strike.
“Don’t do this,” Minawë repeated. When they continued to ignore her, she drew her Forest Dragon Bow. “In that case, I’ll stop you myself!”
Magic welled within her. She would summon vines like she had in Aokigahara and ensnare them. Then they wouldn’t be able to kill each other. They would have to listen to her.
A gray blur flashed by Minawë’s head. Pain arced across her cheek. She wiped her face, and blood smeared her hand. Neither Rondel nor Iren had moved, which meant only one person could have attacked her.
Hana stood not a dozen feet away. She had kicked off her sandals so that she was barefoot. Three pebbles, each no larger than Minawë’s fingernail, floated in midair in front of the Maantec.
Minawë eyed the woman with loathing. “I thought you were ordered not to interfere.”
“I was,” Hana said, “but I have a second order. This battle is between Iren and Rondel. No one may get in their way. I’m here to ensure that.” She smirked. “If you want to stop them, you’ll have to go through me.”
Against Azar, Minawë had been terrified. Now she felt only cold fury. All of this was Hana and Melwar’s fault. She raised her bow. “Fine, bitch,” she said, “let’s go.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Yukionna’s Servants
When Veliaf appeared on the horizon, Balear stopped a moment to stare in disbelief. The landscape had transformed from what he remembered. A foot of snow blanketed the area around the village, and its wall had changed from slate
gray to a glimmering blue-white. Looking closer, Balear realized ice had covered it.
He charged forward, heedless of the cold. The heavy snow slowed his progress to a crawl. Balear cursed. At this rate the Fubuki would ransack Veliaf and move on before he could get there.
As he trudged, flickers of movement by the town gate caught his eye. At first Balear mistook them for tricks of the windblown snow, but then he realized what they were.
Fubuki. Four of them.
Balear denounced himself as a fool. Of course there was more than one! Granted, the number was small, but based on what the Ice Dragon Knight had demonstrated in the summer, four were more than enough.
The fifteen-foot-tall Fubuki smashed against Veliaf’s gate with hammers larger than Balear’s body. Their strength was unreal. Balear doubted Iren or any other Maantec could match it. Every hammerblow dented the gate.
Balear wracked his brain for a way to distract them. He didn’t have any ranged weapons and couldn’t have used them with one arm anyway. Still, he had one tool that might work over a distance.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Fubuki! Do you want to fight a Dragon Knight?”
He had no idea if the Fubuki could hear him over their pounding hammers, but whether by coincidence or not, one of them looked up. It roared and bounded toward Balear.
Although the snow slowed Balear, it didn’t affect the Fubuki. The beast plowed through the drifts with brute force.
Balear raised his Auryozaki. Memories of his only previous fight with a Fubuki surged through him. The Ice Dragon Knight had defeated him effortlessly. It hadn’t even used much magic. If this monster charging him had the same combat skill as the Ice Dragon Knight, Balear might die before he could meet his previous foe again.
Then the Fubuki was on him. He leapt to the side as the creature’s hammer smashed into the ground and flattened the snow into slush. Balear noted the back end of the hammer had no spear, unlike the Ice Dragon Knight’s weapon.
Using the Auryozaki’s weightless advantage, Balear swung from an otherwise impossible stance. The Fubuki raised its hammer, but it was too slow. The Sky Dragon Sword cut off the monster’s arm at the elbow.
As the blade swung, Balear felt a strange tugging at his mind. He recalled one of the dreams from his training. In it he had used magic to launch a cutting arc of wind off his sword and attack a foe at range. He’d never bothered attempting the move in real life. He knew he didn’t have magic like Maantecs or Kodamas.
So when the air current off his sword sliced the Fubuki in half, Balear nearly fell over at the sight of it.
“I,” he stammered, “I used magic?”
He didn’t have time to consider it. The other three Fubuki had seen Balear kill their ally, and now they charged him together.
Balear set his jaw and thought back on the dreams from his time in the wild. He’d considered magic impossible before, but now he felt like he’d used it a hundred times. He remembered every spell he’d seen in his dreams, and he knew exactly what to do.
One Fubuki was faster than the others. As the beast approached, Balear swung his sword. The air current leapt off it and beheaded the monster while it was twenty feet away.
Balear flicked back the Auryozaki and fired another shot. In his haste for a second kill, though, he aimed poorly. The attack went low and grazed a Fubuki’s shin, slowing but not stopping it.
Fortunately, the injury meant the two beasts arrived separately instead of together. Balear deflected the first’s hammer off his sword and countered by driving the massive blade up into the monster’s abdomen.
By the time the Fubuki with the wounded leg arrived, Balear had freed his sword and felt confident enough to make the first move. Before the monster could swing its hammer, it lost both legs. Its head followed a second later.
Balear took a moment to catch his breath, then pressed on to Veliaf. When he reached the gate, he banged on it twice with the butt of his sword. “Open up!” he shouted. “It’s Balear. I’m here to help!”
No response came. What that meant Balear didn’t know, but he wasn’t getting in the village this way.
Then again, neither were the Fubuki. If any remained, they must be on the far side of Veliaf attacking the northern part of the wall.
Balear plodded through the snow around the town’s perimeter. Veliaf wasn’t large, but it still took him half an hour to reach the far side. Now that he knew there was more than one Fubuki, he feared he would come upon an army of them. As a result, when he reached them, he stopped in surprise.
There were only five of them. Four stood against Veliaf’s wall and pummeled it with their hammers. The fifth hung back, and Balear could identify that one by its weapon alone.
The Ice Dragon Knight raised the spear end of its Ryokaiten, and a layer of ice sprouted on a bare patch of Veliaf’s wall near his subordinates. The other Fubuki then hammered the frigid stone. After they’d chipped off the ice, the Dragon Knight cast its spell again, and the process repeated.
Balear watched in confusion through three cycles of hammering. The strategy made no sense. Granted, flecks of stone came off each time a blow landed, but even with four Fubuki pummeling the wall, they would need hours to breach it. All the while, the defenders could rain arrows on them.
But then, no arrows were falling. Balear looked up at the wall and saw why. Atop it stood a dozen human bodies encased in ice. They had bows in their hands.
A cry went up from the Ice Dragon Knight. The other Fubuki stopped their attacks and faced their leader.
The Dragon Knight shifted to look at Balear. “Sky Dragon Knight!” it called, its voice a gravelly roar, “I thought you would have flown away by now. Or can’t you do that with only one wing?”
Balear scowled; he hadn’t known the Fubuki were capable of speech. He forced himself to stay calm. “Mock me if you want,” he said, “but your team at the gate is dead. I killed them.”
“Did you now?” the Fubuki asked, cocking its head sideways. “A human can’t kill four Fubuki. Here, I’ll prove it.” It gestured to its allies, and they strode over to Balear.
The Lodian let them surround him. Then, as the monsters raised their hammers, Balear smiled. He spun and let magic flow into the Auryozaki. He’d seen this technique in one of his dreams, one where he’d been caught in the middle of an enemy army. As he whirled around, wind sliced out from the Auryozaki in a circle. It cut down all four Fubuki at once.
Balear stopped his motion and leveled his sword at the Ice Dragon Knight. “Your turn next.”
“You have new tricks since we last met,” the creature said with a smile that showed its needle-like teeth. “Good. I hate boring fights. That’s why there were only nine of us. Any more, and I might as well attack this town while hopping on one leg.”
The Fubuki wanted to goad him. Balear knew that. If he rushed in, as he and Iren had in the summer, he would die.
He needed to focus. Every enemy had a weakness. That was a fundamental rule of battle, one Amroth had drilled into him in the Castle Guard. He had to find it.
Balear took a step forward. “You won’t conquer Veliaf,” he said.
“Conquer?” the Fubuki looked incredulous. “I don’t want to conquer it.”
“What?” Balear asked, taken aback. “You’re attacking the wall, and your other Fubuki were trying to get through the gate. What are you doing here if not conquering?”
For a few seconds the Fubuki considered Balear. Then it threw back its head and laughed. “You thought those four were supposed to get through the gate? They were just to keep the humans from running away. I needed them penned up so I could kill them all.”
The color drained from Balear’s face. “You didn’t come to raid?”
“Fubuki do not raid. We are servants of the Ice Dragon Yukionna, and she has only one wish: the death of all things.”
Balear felt cold, colder than the snowy conditions warranted. No one defended the walls. No one had answered at the gate. It wasn’t becaus
e they were afraid.
It was because they were already dead.
The one-armed man looked at Veliaf’s frozen wall and comprehended. “This ice extends all the way through the village, doesn’t it? The other Fubuki were diversions while you froze everyone.”
The Ice Dragon Knight bared its hideous smile again.
Balear clenched the Auryozaki. He was too late. He’d come to save Veliaf, but there was no one left to save.
There was one thing, though, that he could do. He pointed his sword at the Ice Dragon Knight. As he did, a great wind whipped around him. If he couldn’t protect the people of Veliaf, at least he could avenge them.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
No Mind’s Flaw
A year ago, Iren Saitosan had trained under Rondel. They’d spent four months practicing together. In all that time, Iren had only once landed a blow on her.
Those experiences flooded Iren’s mind as he stared across the distance between him and Rondel. Back then, not only had Rondel held back on her attacks, but she’d also been unarmed. Now she had her Liryometa. More important, their fight today was no sparring contest. Only one of them would walk away.
The pair circled each other. Iren couldn’t help but wonder what the old hag was thinking. She’d trained him in both magic and swordsmanship. She’d saved his life more than once. All the while, she had known this day would come. Did she feel any sorrow? Any fear? Any doubt?
If so, she hid them well. Rondel’s face looked as intense as during any other battle Iren had seen her fight.
Despite her grim expression, though, Rondel didn’t attack. She watched Iren and mirrored his movements as he slowly stepped in a long circle.
Melwar had warned Iren about that tactic. “Rondel will not make the first strike unless she sees a sign of weakness,” the Maantec lord had told him yesterday after Hana, scouting along the Aokigaharan border, saw the old woman enter Shikari. “She depends on Lightning Sight to give her an edge. She will combine it with her high speed to react to your movements and get inside your guard before you can counter.”
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