The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1

by Bryce O'Connor

  Why in the Lifegiver’s name was he fully clothed?

  Talo awoke blearily. Something was knocking harder and harder against the bottom of his foot. Groaning, he turned over under his thick swaddle of furs.

  Carro was grinning down at him, kicking the bottom of his boot.

  “Rise and shine, old man. It’s past time to get going.”

  Talo groaned again, but sat up. They were camped out beneath the lowest branches of a massive pine, the ground around them a soft layer of brown needles. The air was chilly, still smelling of the thick Arocklen Woods they’d left behind only the day before, and the winter winds had finally started in earnest. They were under the last of the trees before the Dehn Plains, and from beneath the canopy Talo could just make out the distant greenery of hills and valleys.

  It was beautiful, this place.

  But it was also as cold as the freeze’s arse.

  “I was having—quite possibly—the most wonderful dream a man could ever conceive in our current position,” Talo grumbled, throwing the furs off and shuddering as the cold morning air whooshed over him.

  “You’ll have plenty more nights to continue it,” Carro snorted at him, bending down to fold up his bedroll. “We’re still a week out, and if we don’t get going we could get caught in the open if the snows start.”

  “Bah,” Talo muttered sourly, but he got to his feet, flinching at the spasm in his bad knee. The remnants of the previous night’s fire still smoldered at the foot of his bedding, radiating vestiges of warmth, and it was with some regret that Talo extinguished them with a flick of his hand.

  “Come on,” Carro called from outside the tree, where he was strapping his packs back on his horse. “If we make good time we’ll reach Ystréd before nightfall.”

  Ystréd was one of the few towns along the road to Azbar, and the thought of an actual bed and a hot meal was all Talo needed to galvanize himself into action. Not a quarter hour later the pair of them were leaving the camp behind, hoods pulled up and hand-spun-wool scarves wrapped loosely over the lower halves of their faces to fend off the wind.

  The Dehn was truly a magnificent place. Steep hills rose up around shallow riverbeds that glittered in the cloudy sun. Everything was dark green, the earth grown thick with tall grass that made the world look like it was shifting and moving as the winds changed. Short waterfalls pooled into shallow depths where fish glimmered along the bottom, hardly moving as they prepared for the coming cold. Deer leapt across the hilltops in groups, and once Talo caught sight of a lone wolf eyeing them, seated at the mouth of its den beneath some stony outcrops.

  Leaving well enough alone, though, it didn’t move to follow.

  It had been years, Talo realized, since he’d been this far south. The Arocklen he’d still ventured through on the occasional summer days when his knee would allow it, but even then he could only ever explore the few miles that hemmed the great mountain stairway without making camp. Not to mention that as High Priest—and before that as Eret’s caretaker—he hadn’t the luxury of such freedoms in quite some time.

  Now, though… such scenery was half the reason he had wanted to make this trip in the first place.

  Talo smiled behind the wool scarf, looking out over the plains. He couldn’t help the memories rising up unbidden from past years. He remembered taking this very road—little more than a pair of tracks through the grass torn up by years of wagons and horses—with Syrah, Reyn, and Jofrey, winding in and out of the hills as they made for the grand dry deserts of the South. And before that, when he’d first brought Syrah back to the Citadel. She’d been such a little thing…

  “What’s so funny?”

  Carro was looking around at him, raising his voice to beat the wind. Talo realized he was still grinning behind his scarf. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Please,” Carro laughed. “You think I need to be able to see you smiling to know when something is amusing you? Go on. What is it?”

  “Not amusing,” Talo told him, pulling his horse up side-by-side. “Just… It goes by fast, doesn’t it?”

  “What does? This little quest of ours?”

  “No, no,” Talo chuckled, waving a hand out at the horizon. “Time. Life. The years… It’s there, and then it begins to pass you by just as you start to figure out what you’re supposed to do with it.”

  “Oh.”

  Carro turned away from him. He, too, took in the Dehn, and for a second looked like he was lost in his own memories.

  “It does.” He nodded after a moment. “I remember the first time I came through this way. My mother finally got tired of seeing my father’s reflection in my face. I must have been six or seven, I can’t remember. She didn’t tell me where we were going.”

  “A sad story with a happy ending.”

  “True enough.” Carro nodded again.

  They rode on in silence for a few minutes, lost in the past, letting the horses wander a little off the road to graze.

  “I remember bringing Syrah through this way,” Talo said after a while, reaching down to pluck a purple flower that was swaying above the grass. “When her parents first gave her to the faith. She fought me tooth and nail all the way from Stullens until we got here. It was the end of the freeze, but still the trip was as horrible as you can imagine. She was miserable, and I wasn’t much better off. Here, though, we got lucky. A few days of no storms and calm winds. Have you seen the Dehn under snow?”

  Carro shook his head.

  “You can’t imagine it.” Talo held the flower up to look at it. It was frost-tipped in the cold. “There is no end to the white. It was like walking across a new world that had never been touched. We were the only ones for miles and miles.”

  He opened his hand and let the flower be picked up and whisked away by the wind.

  “Who knew what she’d become?” he said softly.

  “I’m sure you did,” Carro told him, and Talo could tell he was smiling. “You know best that great people can come from unexpected places.”

  Talo snorted, pulling his horse back onto the road. They crossed a narrow stone bridge suspended over a shallow river that was already icing along its borders.

  “I found Laor in the pit. I didn’t have him thrown upon me.”

  “Still, you weren’t born into the Priesthood, like most of the others. Take Valaria Petrük. She claims her family has been among the Cyurgi’ Di’s residents since it was taken over by the faith and she’s—in your own words, mind you—a ‘venomous cow.’ So why would you assume Syrah would have been any different from you?”

  “If you’d seen how hard she fought me up until these plains, you’d have wondered the same thing,” Talo chuckled. “I swear I thought that girl had gladiator blood in her. Did I ever tell you about how she almost ran away from me in the forests between Drangstek and the Fehlons?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Carro laughed. “But that’s a story I have to hear.”

  “Well,” Talo began, remembering back, “she’d been fighting me all day, and it had been raining nonstop, so I was in no mood. I was seriously considering tying her to the bags, but then…”

  As he told the story, elaborating to Carro how a young Syrah had daringly escaped from him by climbing a tree and hiding in an old owl hole for a night, Talo remembered other things. Looking out over the Dehn as they trotted along the crest of a particularly high hill, he remembered his own first trip across the plains.

  And he remembered, for the first time in years, that feeling of starting over. Of walking into a new life.

  It does go by fast…

  They made excellent time, just as they’d hoped, but it was still an hour or two after nightfall when they rode into Ystréd. A larger village whose low wall cut up and down the hillsides, the town was dark and quiet as they passed beneath its only gate, heading for an old inn frequented by the traveling faith in too much of a hurry to claim lodging at the local temple. The Red Bear was bright in the night, raucous laughter and the comfortable clatter o
f dinner plates and flagons on wood rolling from the open doorway.

  Talo and Carro dismounted, tying their mounts to a nearby post before shouldering their travel sacks and making for the warmth inside. The inn was a simple two-story structure, the rooms on the top floor while the ground level was taken up by a high-ceilinged common area and bar. Torches, candles, and a large hearth fire in the right wall filled the place with cozy light and heat, and a number of patrons were scattered around three long tables perpendicular to the door. A few more were seated at the counter, behind which a barkeep was cleaning dirty glasses with a worn rag, laughing and talking with a big man swaddled in old furs.

  It was this man who noticed the Priests first, and the surprise on his face must have caught the attention of the barkeep, because he too looked around. It didn’t take long before the entire common room quieted down, most faces turning towards them as Talo and Carro started for the bar.

  Laorin weren’t uncommon in the North, but it was still a rare sight to see two Priests, staffs in hand, come strolling into the local tavern.

  “Peace, friends,” Talo said loudly, pulling the scarf down off his face and raising a hand as he laughed. “Return to your drinks. We aren’t spreading the word today.”

  A few of the patrons chuckled, then turned back to their own business.

  “Get you something, sirs?” the barkeep asked, putting down his glass as Talo and Carro took a seat just down from the man in old furs. “Mead? Frostberry wine?”

  “Wine for me,” Carro told him, reaching into his pack for a few coppers to pay.

  “And me,” Talo said, doing the same. “And two plates of whatever you have that’s hot.”

  The barman nodded, disappearing through a narrow door in the back corner. He reappeared shortly after, skillfully balancing a pair of dented plates steaming full of what looked like beef stew, and two large goblets filled to the brim.

  “I assume you’ll be headed for the mountains?” he asked, placing their dinners before them. Talo, already reaching for the wine, let Carro answer.

  “Coming from, actually.” He accepted a wooden spoon as it was handed to him. “You haven’t heard word about the weather south, have you? We’re hoping to make Azbar within the week.”

  “Azbar?” a brusque voice asked suddenly. “You two lookin’ ta’ see the fights? Ain’t you lot banned from tha’ sort a’ thing?”

  Both Priests turned to look at the big man down the counter from them. He was an older fellow, maybe a few years younger than either of them, but his furs were well used and dirty, as was the leather pommel of the longsword strapped at his hip. He was eyeing them curiously.

  “Name’s Abyn,” he said gruffly, extending a hand over the empty chair between them. Talo shook it briefly. The man’s palm was calloused from what could only have been years at the sword.

  “Beg pardon me manners, jumpin’ in like tha’, but Solva and me”—Abyn indicated the barkeep—“were just chattin’ ’bout the news.”

  “We’re banned from partaking, yes, but not from watching,” Talo said calculatingly, putting his wine down. “We heard Azbar had opened up its Arena again, and wanted to see for ourselves what the fuss was all about.”

  He could tell Carro was about to say something in surprise—he was, after all, not the least bit interested in seeing the fights—but nudged him in the ribs with an elbow.

  Something the man had said had piqued Talo’s curiosity. News? What news? What had Quin Tern come up with now that could spark muttered conversations in tiny pubs hundreds of miles from Azbar itself?

  “Aye,” Abyn nodded solemnly. “S’not just a few who are curious, I ’spose. Ten thousand Southern crowns ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.”

  “Ten thousand crowns?” Carro asked.

  It was the barman, Solva, who responded.

  “Bounty that’s been promised, along with a victor’s purse, to whoever can slay the new champion.” He picked up another glass and eyed it disapprovingly. “Rassiyul, Rassisule, or something like that.”

  “Wha—? Raz i’Syul?”

  The barkeep blinked in surprise at Talo’s sudden outburst, as did Abyn.

  “Aye,” he said, shifting over to sit beside the Priests and leaning in. “Ya’ heard of him, have ya’? Scourge a’ the South, they’re callin’ him now. They say he killed a thousand men and butchered the slave rings in Miropa ‘afore they chased him northward. There’s a price on his head, and it sounds like Azbar sent birds out to anyplace that might have a man what wants to try his luck at claiming it.”

  Talo was stunned. He sat in shocked silence, staring at nothing as Carro looked between him and the other men.

  “Raz i’Syul?” he asked, confused. “Who is he? I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Southern sarydâ, apparently,” the barman told him. “Desert mercenary. Word is he’s the only atherian to have made a name for himself in civilized culture. I’ve had all kinds coming in and out for the last day or so, trying to beat the snows to get to Azbar. Some to fight, and more to watch the fights.”

  “Atherian?” Carro looked shocked. “Lizard-folk? I thought they were beast-men, that they didn’t even venture into man-made cities.”

  “Raz i’Syul did.”

  They all turned to look at Talo. While he was still staring emptily at his stew, he seemed to have regained the ability to speak.

  “He was taken in by one of the nomadic trading families, back when the caravans still crossed the desert.” It was easy information. All he had to do was repeat the facts he’d come across all those years ago. “He was raised by the Arros, one of the largest families, and learned the Common tongue, not to the mention the desert culture. A talented fighter, but I’d heard he was a good man… I thought he was a good man…”

  His words trailed off for a moment, but suddenly he looked up at Solva.

  “He came this far north?” he demanded. “You’re sure? The slave rings are hunting him?”

  “The Mahsadën themselves, the word is,” the barkeep nodded. “You seem to know a lot about him, Priest…”

  “A gladiator,” Talo muttered under his breath, ignoring the comment. “What madness possessed him to do that…?”

  “Talo, what—?” Carro began to ask, sounding thoroughly confused, but Talo stopped him with a hand.

  “A room,” he said abruptly to Solva, pulling a silver piece from his pack and tossing it onto the counter. “And please have the rest of our meal brought up to us.”

  The barkeep blinked in surprise, but reached into the pocket of his apron to pull out a long copper key.

  “Second door on your right up the stairs,” he said, holding it out. “But what about—?”

  “Thank you,” Talo cut him off, snatching the key from the man’s hand and giving Carro a significant look. At once Carro jumped off his seat, grabbing his own gear.

  “Pleasure meeting you both, have a lovely evening!” he said hurriedly to the two men, rushing to follow Talo up the stairway and leaving the bewildered pair at the bar.

  When they were upstairs, Talo unlocked and opened their room door at once, closing it quickly behind them. It was a small space, barely wide enough to fit the two beds that largely filled it. Ignoring it all, though, Carro whirled on his partner.

  “Talo, what in the Lifegiver’s name was that all about?” he demanded. “Who is Raz i’Syul?”

  Talo looked up at him. “Do you remember, six or seven years ago, the mission Syrah and I took with Jofrey and Reyn Hartlet? The one that took us south?”

  “You came back early,” Carro nodded, but he sounded suddenly suspicious. “Syrah was mugged, or something like that. You felt the town you were in was unsafe.”

  “That’s not exactly how it—That’s not what happened. Carro… Raz i’Syul Arro is the only reason Syrah made it out of that city alive.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “I cannot aptly describe the feeling in the air these last two weeks. Word has spread. People are whispering in the
streets. Places amongst the stands in the Arena are always valued highly, but not since I was matched with the Lifetaker have I known every single seat to be sold off in advance. The stories they say about him… I’d heard a few obviously, before they sent me out to meet him in the woods. But what I’ve been told since then, what larger truths seem to be mixed in with the rumors and tall tales… I can’t help but wonder what kind of beast we’ve let into our home…”

  —private journal of Alyssa Rhen

  Raz was cold. Raz was wet. Raz was so muddy he doubted he looked like much more than a shapely pile of filth with eyes.

  But Raz, unlike his opponents, was at the very least standing on his own two feet.