The Winds of Crowns and Wolves

by K. E. Walter

  Aghast, but returning his heart to normal palpitations, Neach rose to his feet and shook Dirk by the collar playfully.

  “You should be careful with that,” Dirk urged, “It could get you killed in a place like this.”

  “And the same goes for you; I nearly took my blade to you!” Neach hollered.

  Alas, the young men laughed and joked about the situation, in an attempt to mask their underlying concern about the intended mission at hand. He had almost forgotten his true intentions in the good cheer and festivities, and his brothers arrived at an optimal time to remind him of his duty.

  “So Neach, how goes it?” Tyrin asked, his voice returning to its stern normality as his brow furled up in a peculiar motion.

  What could he possibly say to them? That life wasn’t all that bad in the castle? That the King had taken a liking to him? That the girl he had fallen in love with many months earlier was the King’s daughter?

  “It goes well, brothers, come along, to a place where we won’t be bothered,” Neach said, betraying his true feelings.

  Behind the watch tower nearest to his room, there sat a training ground for the Castle’s young knights. If he would have spent his youth within the confines of these Castle walls, Neach would have no doubt picked up a sword at a young age and learned the art of swordsmanship.

  Metal clanged against metal, and wood thudded against wood, as the different levels of knights engaged in training that was relative to their skill. When they reached the yard, Neach led his two brothers behind the weapon smith’s hut and began to speak.

  “Has there been any plan set forth by Fenris or Daniel?” Neach asked immediately, desperate for some answers or, at the very least, action.

  Tyrin lowered his head and looked off into the distance for a moment before responding.

  “I’m afraid our situation is much more perilous than we thought before,” Tyrin began, “The King called for the raid of Siriac, and we’ve just gotten word that we lost six more brothers during the fighting. He moves swiftly and efficiently, as the House taught him so well,” he concluded, his face taught with the lines of stress and sorrow.

  Neach waited for more, but was left hanging onto nothingness.

  “What does that mean for me; for us? Are we meant to stand by idly until he rounds us up from right underneath his nose?” Neach asked in a demanding voice. The shy boy of old had been replaced by an ever hardening man, intent on action.

  Tyrin shook his head and spit on the ground behind the hut. His demeanor told the entirety of the story as if it were a finely crafted tapestry from the ancient times.

  “You are meant to… abort the King’s chipper spirit in three days’ time,” Tyrin said softly.

  Neach looked confused at the choice of words Tyrin had espoused.

  “Abort the King’s ‘chipper spirit’? And how am I meant to do that?” Neach asked, again commanding a dominant role over Tyrin for the time being.

  Tyrin paused for what seemed like an eternity before he humored Neach’s question with a response.

  “You are meant to kill the King, Neach” his words were met by horror in the face of the young man who hailed from a western village not too long ago. He had barely been fit to kill his sheep, and now he was meant to kill the most powerful man in the Kingdom.

  “You’re insane!” Neach shouted, immediately hushing his voice after the initial disbelief.

  Some of the men who were training in the area looked backwards, but continued on in their task momentarily afterward.

  “You expect me to kill the King? What am I to do after that?” Neach begged for a reply which would spare his own life. He was not in the business of bartering his head for honor, and he did not intend to begin today.

  Tyrin glanced around the corner of the hut and looked Neach directly in the eyes with his steely gaze.

  “Two days from today, a day from the ‘morrow, you are to maim the King whilst he has you performing your feats of archery. I, Dirk, and Plix will have snuck into the Castle that day, and will be present during your show. When the arrow leaves your bowstring, we will do everything in our power to ensure that we all leave the grounds with our heads intact,” he spoke the words coolly, but they threatened to burn his mouth with each syllable. What he was suggesting was regicide, a direct act of treason against the King. People had lost their heads as a result of much less in times past.

  Nevertheless, Neach agreed to the plan set forth by Tyrin.

  “Fine, I will do it. Let us hope that the Gods are in our favor when we follow through,” Neach spoke as if he were a military commander in the presence of men who were all as young as he. Their faces still smooth, their chests bare, but their hearts were filled with the anger and passion of a hundred warriors dead. So many of their own had died in the struggle against the King, and they felt it was their duty to end the bloodshed, once and for all.

  Tyrin and Dirk left without another word, as they shook hands with their brother, who they were sending into the deepest chasms of danger for the good of their house. As Neach watched them walk away, through the gates of the Castle, he could not help but think of Jenos. Her beauty seemed to radiate through the walls of the fortress, as if it were the strongest star in the universe. In just a few short days, everything he had known had been turned on its side. The identity he had started forging when he left the confines of Spleuchan Sonse now seemed a distant memory, and he feared that it still had some settling to do before he could finally sleep easy.

  XIX

  His dreams.

  They burned white hot in his memory, and twisted like a sharp knife in his mind every time they came. Luckily, when they left, there was no permanent damage to either his body or his psyche.

  As he tossed and turned in his sheets, his eyes fluttered back and forth in rapid succession, as if they were searching for an undefined object in his room.

  Inside Neach’s mind, he was frozen.

  He looked down at his feet and they were exactly as he knew them, but he was incapable of moving them. When he looked at his hands, they too were just as he expected, but stuck in one place without any flexibility. They were raised high above his head, as he lay down on the ground, and his legs were pointing directly downward.

  His breath exploded into the night air with every inhale, and a cloud of fog seemed to be rising up from the ground around his body. In complete contrast to the fear that he held deep within him, the sky above was completely clear. Neach was thankful for this, until he realized that his eyes had not deceived him.

  The sky was completely devoid of any clouds, but it was also devoid of starlight. A grand moon presided over the field which he laid in, and he took comfort from the fact that he wasn’t completely isolated in the dark. As he looked down again, he saw a familiar sight.

  Coming toward him, slowly, but with determination, was a frail wolf.

  It was black in color, with eyes that shared various hues of red and yellow. Its fur had streaks of gray in it that made his body shiver at the sight. He had read about this wolf before: the wolf of death. Glinjatuk, as it was known in the book, was strolling toward him slowly as it licked its lips.

  The wolf circled him for a few minutes, and Neach’s heart stopped, as it came to a halt next to his right arm. Slobber ran out of its mouth and onto Neach’s hand, as it stood over him, looking more ominous as the time passed.

  Neach couldn’t understand why he was having this vision. The wolf represented death: that much was sure, but was it present because of the King’s imminent death, or his own? The very thought of dying in the catacombs of the Castle made him shudder in his bed, as his mind continued to race at a terrifying pace.

  At the moment when he thought Glinjatuk would claim his body, a strange thing happened; Neach heard a rustling from close by. The dastardly wolf growled and bore its teeth, but after a few moments paused completely.

  Out of the brush, another wolf emerged. Neach knew it by a name that was close to his own heart: Fenris.
The purple eyed creature moved with pace toward Glinjatuk, and when they met, they both evaporated into a colorful smoke above his body.

  Neach was awake.

  The night was not kind to Neach, and as more time passed, and his task grew closer, he found difficult to do anything without his mind wandering to the inevitable. He was out of bed for near an hour when he headed to the hall to grab his morning respite, in the form of ripe fruits and hearty breads. The hall he knew from a few nights earlier was a distant memory, and Henrig’s family crest hung low from the ceiling above, representing the commencement of celebrations.

  He remembered something that Fenris had told him in Rosalia: the King hailed from a long line of righteous men, one of the most revered in all of the Western Empires.

  This meant little to Neach at the time, but as he ventured deeper into his role as an entertainer, he realized that the King was held in the highest regard of the people of Duncairn. It would be a tall task to convince them that their own loyal, noble leader was in fact a traitor. This thought, however, was senseless. There would need to come a day of reckoning before that would have even the slightest relevance.

  It was almost as if the blood was already on his hands. When he would take to the bath to cleanse himself, it was a subconscious effort to cleanse his body of the wickedness he would be participating in, just a few days from the current time.

  Succulent strawberries and blueberries were left in a bowl for him at the high table, most likely by the King himself. He had taken a great liking to Neach in the few days he had been here, and had seen to it that he was treated to various amenities that the other subjects were not privy to. They looked on in disdain, as he grasped the fruit from within its bronze cask.

  A woman walked toward him with yellowed teeth and smiled an incredulous smile.

  “If it isn’t the King’s bitch himself,” she jested, “Come to dine after a long night with our Highness?” when she laughed, the others followed suit in a caucophony of laughter that threatened to make Neach’s ears bleed.

  Alas, he kept his cool and returned the favor of jest.

  “Unfortunately, no; when I called upon the King it seemed your boy son had already taken my position,” Neach said with a brazen smile, taut with lines of outright hatred for the putrid woman who stood before him.

  With a look of horror, the woman walked swiftly away before yelling out at him.

  “You be careful boy! There are secrets within the confines of these walls that none would dare speak; there is most certainly room for more,” she warned with a gravelly claim. The ominous tone in her voice sent shivers down the young man’s back, but he proceeded to indulge in the fruit left for him by Henrig.

  Sans drunken debauchery and merry song, the hall was a beautifully decorated place. Functioning as the center of the bustling castle, the hall was where men and women of the crown came to dine and drink in the presence of royalty and their fellow subjects. On any given night, the hall would see hundreds of visitors who lived within the borders of the castle walls, some staying till the sun rose the next morning.

  But something was different about the hall this morning.

  It had been thoroughly cleaned the night before, and Neach could not help but notice the fine detail which was put into the décor. Though the crest banners fell low, near to the table, they were held up by ornate golden rods that protrude from the wooden ceiling beams. On each table, sat a collection of flowers, gathered from the garden just outside his window. Summer snaps, fire roses, and spring lilies completed a molten bouquet, which threatened to light the wooden table below it aflame. The flowers of spring and summer were a welcome sight for the weary Neach. He always remembered the coming of the season was marked by the first fire roses sprouting from the ground outside of his home in Spleuchan Sonse. In the winter, none but the frost thistle survived the harsh weather, but in the spring and summer, grand blooms took place and covered the ground, as far as the eyes could see.

  He was admiring the stunning centerpieces when a familiar voice whispered just behind him.

  “Hello, fleet-footed boy,” it cooed in his ears, tickling with every word.

  Neach wanted to spin around quickly, but decided it would be best to play it off as normality.

  “How long we’ve known each other and you still don’t know my name?” he quipped with a beaming smile.

  She sat beside him and placed her hands within her lap.

  “Now, now, Neach, don’t be so hasty,” her black hair flipping over her right shoulder, “there will be plenty of time for niceties.”

  Though he was unsure exactly what she spoke of, it caused butterflies to erupt within his stomach. Jenos looked stunning as usual. She was wearing a red, yellow, and orange based dress that resembled the flowers placed atop the tables. No doubt planned for the celebration, the gown contrasted with her black hair miraculously, and caused Neach to become short of breath momentarily. In her hair, there laid a sprig of summer thistle. Different from its winter peer, the summer thistle lost its hard, prickly, spikes, and was left with soft hair in its place. The green of the thistle met the green of her eyes and they danced together in sweet harmony.

  He must have been staring oddly, because Jenos tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Neach?” he struggled to regain functional consciousness as she laughed, “Perhaps there won’t be time for niceties, then.”

  His cheeks must have turned the color of her crimson dress from embarrassment, but he did his best to recover.

  “My apologies, Lady Jenos, I’m afraid last night’s sleep was not kind to me,” his quick witted response seemed to please her, as she pushed her hair behind her ear.

  “Well whatever it is, I’m sure it can be fixed by a day in the city,” she said shyly, all the while smiling.

  “Don’t try to use your feet on me again, Neach, my father has already approved of it,” Jenos beamed from ear to ear, and Neach couldn’t help but follow suit.

  He rose from the table, and was grabbed on the arm by the fair lady, the daughter of the King of Duncairn.

  Never before had he seen a more beautiful summer’s day in the Kingdom. He had been lucky enough to experience wonderful weather in the recent days he spent at the castle, and this day was unfolding into what would prove to be its pinnacle.

  Jenos bowed to the guards as she led Neach out the front gate of the castle, toward the heart of Leirwold and the city seemed to open its arms in a wide embrace to the gallivanting couple, as they left the safety and security of the large stone castle behind them.

  There were few words spoken in the first few minutes of their walk, but Neach found comfort in the silence. Their minds existed in sync, a mental harmony, and they expressed their joy without a single phrase uttered. A gnawing cold had once bitten at Neach’s insides when the winter was young and he feared it would reach its maturity quickly. But now, in the warmth of the summer, his heart filled with an unbridled heat, that he would have attributed to the meal a night previous, if it weren’t for Jenos by his side. Never before had he seen a girl as beautiful as her, and he was struggling to make the impression that he desired.

  Yet, as they walked through the university district, past her library and favorite tea place, along cobblestoned grounds, their hearts mended as one. Engaged in a perilous dance that threatened to drop their very hearts to a hungry pack of lions at any second, the two forgot their lives momentarily and lived as if they were free creatures. Free to roam the lands, unencumbered by human suffering; free to speak and laugh as they please; the burden of man’s intelligence a distant memory.

  They reached their destination, as the sun raised high above them in an effort to shed its everlasting heat all at once, atop their unprotected bodies. Jenos had jested with Neach when he asked the location they were headed for, and she kept the secret held deep within her until it was directly evident before them.