The 19th Bladesman

by S J Hartland

  Throw them off, Aric willed. Run.

  Yanked to his feet, held, Kaell uselessly writhed. One struck him, a heavy blow that snapped his head back. He hung limply in their grasps as they stripped him naked and hoisted him onto the stone. Pinned his arms and legs until they shackled him.

  The figures parted for Aingear. Aric’s gut churned. He guessed what she intended but didn’t know why. Interfere and he defied the temple. But do nothing and Kaell died.

  Gesturing to his men to fan left and right, Aric crawled closer. Two moons, high and full, washed the knoll in light, soft as though filtered through mesh.

  Their glitter struck steel as Aingear lifted a knife. The robed figures ringed the stone.

  “An Isles princess bound him to our gods. She struck the first blow.” Aingear’s ceremonial voice carried across the hillside. “Each of us, each priest and priestess of The Three, must take up this blade to complete the spell.”

  The blade came down. Kaell jerked. Aingear stroked his hair, speaking softly. A priest at her side took the knife and stabbed. This time Kaell cried out.

  The last of Aric’s men moved into place. He leapt up, sword drawn, bellowing, “Stop!”

  Aingear whirled. “You.” Her stirred-up gaze swung from Aric to the the Isles soldiers surging from the trees. “How dare you! This is the will of The Three. Leave.”

  Her companions closed protectively about Kaell.

  Aric walked purposely towards the stone. He didn’t want a fight. Not with her. But now he had drawn steel he could not turn back. “Release him.”

  The high priestess stamped her foot in fury. “Have you lost your wits? With this sacrifice, we can again protect the Isles from Archanin and those who drink life.”

  “You intend to restore Roaran’s blood spell.”

  “Yes.” Surprise in her tone. She had underestimated him; forgotten Aric had studied history along with swordplay. He knew every ancient text in Tide’s End.

  “Pairas told me about the defiled burial tower. This is not the answer, priestess. Do you even know how Roaran cast this spell? Are any of you as powerful as him?”

  Beneath hoods, resentful faces glowered. Kaell shifted. Hands pressed him down.

  “I have the words of Roaran’s spell,” Aingear said. “The Three showed me this boy in visions. They demand him as the sacrifice. Roaran’s spell to keep ghouls from the Isles is blood magic and the gods require a life.”

  Aric took a step towards Kaell. Robed figures blocked him. He pushed them aside. When others rushed him, his men shoved them back.

  “My lord,” one of his companions began uncertainly. “What if it is the will of our gods?”

  Then Aric brought a storm of outrage and condemnation down upon his head.

  Memories knocked together in his mind. An interrogator’s moist palms on his buttocks. Leather slicing air, the starburst of agony across his shoulders. The odours of the king’s prison, dust, blood, air rank enough to cut with a knife. His despair.

  But most of all, he remembered a young man on top of a tower, throwing back his hood and grinning as he bid him climb down to safety.

  Aric shouldered through. Kaell groaned, his eyes shuttered with pain. Pooling blood from shallow wounds trickled from the stone to earth.

  Not allowing himself time to think, Aric crashed steel down on the chains.

  For a heartbeat time stalled. The priests and priestesses drew in disbelieving breaths, the sound like swooping wings. Then chaos erupted. Enraged, the high priestess clawed at him. Aric held her off. Her followers surged at the stone. His men kept them back.

  “The king will hear of this.” Aingear’s voice rose to a screech. “Take him then, you foolish prince. But I’ll have him back. Your father is no ghoul lover like you.”

  “It’s murder. Just like your so-called executions of cultists.”

  The only just death was steel against steel where a man stood a chance to change his fate.

  “Murder? Of a half-ghoul?” The high priestess laughed aloud. It whipped with coldness. “Fool, fool. You do our enemies’ work.”

  Aric closed his mind to her taunts. “Can you walk?” he asked Kaell.

  Kaell moaned as he sat up clutching his belly. Blood streamed through his fingers. “Don’t know.”

  “The two moons are full again tomorrow. And the night after,” Aingear hurled at his back as Aric helped Kaell hobble. “All you’ve done is delay this ceremony by a day.”

  All he had done was make an enemy. Of her and his gods.

  Azenor

  She could not even retch. It would not be that easy. Nor could she run, flee the tears held close inside. Poisoning tears she had no right to.

  Azenor could only collapse on the sand near her brother’s boats, her drawn-up knees a wall against guilt. That sickening scene repeated again and again in her mind; the knife, how it tore into his skin, his blood slick on her hands. Kaell’s weight on her. The hurt in his voice.

  Cold, he called her. A single word that shouldn’t wound as it did.

  “You must take it where it leads.” Roaran’s voice hammered, a dreadful echo in her mind. “Even to death.”

  One death to save the Isles, to save Telor. Just as Roaran promised. And she believed in Roaran. Who could not? He was extraordinary; the seer king returned. The only man able to stop Archanin.

  Then why did her gut roil? Why did her breast ache?

  “Azenor.”

  Him? Here? At last. Oh, at last. Blood pounded in her head as Roaran took her shoulders. She long imagined this moment; how he reassured her with soft words, soft touches, told her everything was all right.

  Except it wasn’t. Her guilt soured it all.

  Azenor beat her fists against his breast. “I disgust myself.” Miserable tears strained at her eyes even as his death rider’s touch restored her sight.

  Slowly his face sharpened. She blinked, staring in wonder at shattering waves, at stars dimmed by the moons. “Oh.” Azenor touched her eyes. “I forgot what it’s like to see.”

  “I’m sorry it had to be like that, Azenor,” Roaran said. “But everything’s all right now.”

  She clutched at him. “Please tell me I don’t have to be apart from you. Not again.”

  “You don’t have to be apart from me,” he said.

  Was there an undercurrent in his voice? Or was it her? Her doubt.

  She curled her hand. The hand that had held the knife. The hand she furiously wiped on her gown, unable to forget how the blade cut Kaell. No resistance. Just flesh tearing. Then blood. Sticky, warm blood.

  “I did everything we planned,” she said. “But it’s too much, Roaran. I hurt him.”

  He drew her close, his body so familiar she melted into him. How she ached for this man. But her lies tainted the comfort she thought she’d find in the press of his arms, his nearness.

  “You bound the boy to us. Your part is done.”

  Azenor clung to him, dazzled by longing, by that half-forgotten, beautiful face. An artful symmetry of brow, cheek and chin. Eyes no poet had ever properly described. A colour not like the sea or sky but that blue-black of twilight.

  “Take me with you beyond the Enarae again. Just as you promised. You never lie.”

  “I said I’d come,” Roaran smoothed her hair with his palm. “To take you back with a kiss.”

  “A kiss.” Azenor remembered the words she threw at Kaell to wound him, to cover her guilt.

  You had warning enough. Yet you never wondered about that kiss.

  At last her tears poured out. For Kaell. For herself. “You warned me not to care.” Azenor pulled her hands free. “Do you think I could know him, lie with him and feel nothing?”

  “For duty? Why not?” His voice had a harsh edge. A stranger’s voice. “I can. I have.”

  Sounds beat about her, through her. Wings. Caws. The sea’s murmur. The startled clamour of her heart. Surely she misunderstood. “What?”

  “Drink this.” Her lover pressed an
ampoule to her lips.

  “What do you mean, Roaran?” Her voice shrilled. “I thought, I thought—”

  “That I love you?”

  His tone chilled. Yet his arms tightened about her as though holding something precious. “Love. What is that? I no longer know. Now quickly, we have a ways to go, you and I.”

  “We have a ways to go. That’s what you said the first day I met you.”

  “When you seduced me?” Roaran laughed. How warm that laugh had once seemed. Now, stripped of that warmth, it prickled her neck with alarm.

  “I thought I’d have to work harder, Azenor Caelan; be charming, fascinating, play a part I’ve not had to play for a long time. But you made it easy—that bit at least.”

  “Roaran, you’re frightening me.”

  “I do care, Azenor. Enough to spare you what happens next. We have a ways to go, but you can’t be the one who goes with me. It can only be him—Kaell.”

  The words hung between them. Senseless, meaningless words. She could not take them in. But slowly, slowly the truth beneath seeped into her.

  Azenor began to laugh, the sound bitter even to her ears. How did this happen? The man she had spent a decade with beyond the Enarae, her lover, betrayed her. She thought she knew him, every breath, every expression. Every intention.

  For Roaran she became someone who could deceive Kaell. How horribly poetic that the man who asked that of her was the one to deceive her.

  Even then she clutched at a faint hope she misunderstood. Roaran patiently planned his moves over centuries, every piece put in place, but it achieved nothing, surely, to betray her.

  “You sound so distant, my love. I don’t understand—” She stopped. Stared at him. “You want me to hate you? Why? Because you hate yourself for what you must do?”

  “Drink, Azenor.”

  She tried to pull away. Roaran pressed the ampoule to her mouth.

  “I promise,” he whispered. “Like a fairy-tale I’ll awaken this body with a kiss.”

  Aric

  His father sagged in his chair. “This cannot be true.” He glared at Kaell, chained and on his knees before him in the long hall. “That my son should defy the temple to free this, this—”

  Monster.

  The word unsaid. But Kaell dropped his head. An angry mutter stirred through the crowd.

  Every servant who could sneak away crammed between pillars, shoulder-to-shoulder with soldiers, officials, perfumed courtiers, even ladies of the court in cambric gowns that swished as they fidgeted in the heat. Aric knew most by name, but none met his eyes.

  Aric stood near Kaell at the front of the throng, a space about him as though defiance was contagious. Perhaps it was. Kaell defied the king to free him; now he defied his gods.

  “And Azenor?” Gendrick dug his fingers into the back of his father’s chair. “Why won’t she wake? Is it as the priestess says? A curse born of her bond to this changeling?”

  At the shocked cries, the dismayed murmurs, Aingear thumped a stick into tiles.

  “The princess will recover once I complete the ceremony.”

  Aric forced open his clenched hands. He’d found Azenor just hours ago lying on the pebbled shore near his boats, barely a breath in her. Neither the physician nor the high priestess could wake her. This spell, whatever it was, had nothing to do with Kaell.

  “My sister’s illness is your fault.” Gendrick jabbed a finger at Aingear. “You bound her to a ghoul. Before the gods. Kill him and that bond ends. No nonsense about sacrifices.”

  More murmurs coiled, then fast fell away, expectant.

  In the hush, Hatton rapped his fingers on the chair arm, the tap, tap, tap like axe blows.

  “The king is at our gates,” he said. “Roaran’s magic is broken. And yet my son, the commander of the Isles, concerns himself not with defending this castle but rescuing ghouls.”

  A low hiss ballooned. Aric took a step back, surprised at the glares from men and women he’d known since childhood, from soldiers he commanded. Even the painted figure of Rainer Caelan dismissed him from the wall with steely eyed contempt.

  No one understood. With an army besieging them, with the high priestess warning of ghouls and monsters, talk of honour and repaying debts sounded hollow and intangible.

  Aingear thumped her stick again. “Your Grace, let me speak.”

  Righteous, always so righteous; her blinkered certainty dangerous. When Aric became Isles commander, his father bid him remember one thing: only a fool never doubted. Doubt meant examining decisions from all angles, seeking consequences.

  Hatton again tapped fingers. A bad sign. He gave a curt nod.

  “Your Grace,” Aingear said. “Our gods showed me Kaell in visions. They chose him. Even led him, a Mountains warrior, to me. I explained the ceremony to you. Let me finish what I began.”

  Gendrick swiped at air. “He does not serve our gods. What use is he to you?”

  “What he believes is irrelevant.” Aingear adopted the ringing tone she used for ceremonies. And executions. “I bound him to an Isles princess and thus to our gods.”

  A sharp rap pierced an outburst of discordant voices. Not Aingear’s stick this time. A sword hilt against the door at the far end of the hall.

  At the sight of Aiden, Aric turned cold. He strode to meet his new captain. The crowd reluctantly parted, their sullen glares torches on his back.

  “What news?”

  The man glanced at those within earshot. “My prince, I have a message for His Grace.”

  “Go forward.”

  Cathmor’s beast of a siege engine must be here. Ready to test the strength of their walls. And their wills.

  Aiden fell to one knee before the king.

  “Captain,” Hatton said. “You are a welcome diversion. Speak.”

  Aiden swallowed hard. “Your Majesty. I do not how to say this. It is unexpected. Impossible, even. However, here it is: We have taken the Fern Castle on the border.”

  The king clutched his knees. “A Mountains castle? How? Every Isles warrior is here.”

  “It seems.” Aiden tore out a breath. “We have new allies.”

  A chorused gasp exploded. Men and women exchanged startled looks.

  Aric did not know what in Aiden’s words alarmed his brother but Gendrick blenched, his face ashen, a muscle twitching below his eye.

  Hatton frowned. “I still don’t understand.”

  “Your Grace, I know only this,” Aiden said. “The castle fell to an invader who declares it his gift to us. His warriors slaughtered all within the walls, but one squire. He bid the squire bring a message, a specific message for Prince Gendrick.”

  “For me?” Gendrick flicked his tongue over his lips. “From whom?”

  Aiden’s glance flickered to Aric. In a voice thick with reluctance, he said, “the message is signed—” Another pause. Another uneasy glance. “Archanin.”

  In the wake of that single name the hall seemed different. Smaller, airless. Perilous. The sunlight splintering between fluted columns too bright.

  Voices stripped away. Their absence exposed every other sound. The doleful beats of a smith’s hammer, the ebbing tide’s rasped whisper, the groaning rigging of ships at anchor in the bay below the windows.

  Aric braced a palm against a pillar. As Isles commander he should grab the message, decide what it meant. Except he could neither move nor speak, only stare at a bead of sweat on Gendrick’s temple, at his curled hands gripping their father’s chair.

  Slowly Hatton rose. “Clear the hall. This is at an end.” He looked to Gendrick, his voice not quite steady as he said: “We’ll deal with this in private.”

  Kaell

  A silence ripped through the emptied hall. Shattered only by Hatton’s footsteps as he paced. They all watched him. Kaell, Aric, Gendrick. The priestess, knuckles white on her staff.

  Kaell’s shackled wrists dangled by his thighs. So weary, every limb heavy, his body battered and torn. Yet of all his knife wounds, only one
hurt. The first cut.

  The shiver of Azenor’s hands on his skin, the taste her lips lingered. For one heady moment he had foolishly let himself believe he could be like any other young man. He thought—no. No point dwelling on it. She deceived him. That was all.

  Hatton broke off his pacing. Without his echoing steps, the hall sat quiet and vast. Too big to contain the clamouring sea or the wind slapping against pennants atop the towers; too small, though, to contain this tension.

  “What have you done?” Corded muscles strained in the Isles lord’s neck. “Gendrick, what have you done?”

  His son said nothing. Ankles crossed, he leaned a shoulder to a pillar.

  “Answer me. Why does this Archanin send you a message?”

  Gendrick’s insolent gaze passed slowly over them all. Then he shrugged, smiled and said, “Because Archanin is my ally, father.”

  He spoke as he might repeat gossip about castle dalliances. Complacently. Dispassionately. But in the wake of those words, shock sank down, all of them shaken.

  “No,” said Aric, his voice strange.

  Kaell struggled to understand. An Isles prince in league with Archanin? Impossible. Gendrick didn’t realise how dangerous the ghoul god was.

  “You fool.” Hatton’s bewildered expression fell away to fury. “Ally? Did you invite this creature to attack the Fern Castle? You put us in danger.” He struck his son across the face.

  Gendrick staggered. Straightening, he touched his jaw, still smiling.

  “You invited ghouls here?” Aric shook his head in dismay. “Why?”

  His brother rounded on him. “To save the Isles. Because you can’t. You couldn’t even save our sister.”

  Aric opened his mouth to speak, then abruptly turned away.

  Just like Kaell couldn’t save his men at Thom. In his nightmares he heard their screams, watched, frozen and lost, as ghouls fed like beasts upon the wounded.

  “The false king will bring down our walls.” Gendrick fisted his hands. “You must see that, father. With every lord against us, this castle is lost. Unless we accept Archanin’s help.”