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

by Bryce O'Connor

  “That I’d want to find you?” Eva finished for him. “Like I said, he’s a good enough man, when it comes down to it. After you got the others and me out of Miropa, we made north as fast as possible, just as you’d said. Made it as far as Azbar without trouble, but…” She trailed off.

  “You found trouble there,” Raz finished darkly, nodding. “Not surprising. What happened?”

  Eva looked as though it was a painful memory, grimacing as she spoke. “The city guard let us in without issue, but within a few nights Tym and his idiot friend Dayle got into a brawl at one of the local pubs. Before any of us could do anything, the guard had swooped in and thrown everyone in irons, the two of them included.”

  She sighed sadly. There might not have been any love lost between herself and the men, but Raz could imagine what happened next wasn’t anything they deserved.

  “They were thrown in the pit,” he said stoically, pulling his hand gently out from beneath the covers to place it atop of Eva’s. “I’m sorry, Eva.”

  The woman shrugged. “Nothing any of us could do about it. Didn’t even have time to get to the town hall and make a plea to the Chairman and his council before Tym and Dayle were dead.”

  Raz nodded from the pillow. “If it makes you feel better, the Chairman got his due, in the end.”

  Eva’s eyes widened at that. Then she allowed herself a hard smirk. “Gone the same way as the Mahsadën, has he?”

  “The Mahsadën had it easy in comparison,” Raz replied, though he didn’t smile. “There are some lines that even slavers hesitate to cross. Tern didn’t, and he paid for it.”

  Eva’s brow furrowed at the words, but she didn’t voice her curiosity. Raz suspected the edge with which he’d spoken had been enough to imply it was nothing he wanted to discuss.

  “Well,” she continued as though there had been no pause in the conversation, “after what happened to Tym and Dayle, the rest of us decided it was time to go our separate ways. The Azbar guard were looking for any excuse to add to the fodder of the Arena, and we knew some of them had seen us all arrive together. A few stayed, promising to keep as far from the eyes of the law as possible, but most made west for the larger valley towns of Drangstek and Stullens, or south again for some of the smaller border towns.”

  “But you came further north?”

  Eva nodded. “I wanted to be as far from the South as I could get. I would have made for the High Citadel itself, if I could, but the Twins might frown on me pretending to pray to another god.” She laughed at the joke, though Raz didn’t follow.

  “Anyways,” she said after a moment, “Ystréd is as far as I got. I was on my own, and didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do next. I couldn’t bring myself to beg, even though I was sleeping on the streets with all the other tramps. I was this close”—she held up the thumb and forefinger of her free hand, peering through the tiny space between them at Raz—“to selling myself to one of the slum brothels when I met Sven. During the summer he trades tonics and salves to the beggars and vagrants for what coppers or food they can scrounge together during the day. It’s not pretty work, but it keeps him fed and many of the slum dwellers from dying of infection and diseases, even if he is as shitty a doctor as they come.”

  Raz snorted at that, gritting his teeth as the action jolted a sharp burning pain in his back.

  “Seems he did a fair enough job on me,” he managed to wheeze out eventually. “Last I remember I was close enough to dying to start seeing ghosts.”

  Eva smirked. “If Sven had gotten his hands on you, you’d probably have been worse off, and he knows it. No, you’re alive because it turns out I’m a damn sight better with a scalpel than I ever thought I could be, and your Priest friends”—she waved at the door of the room—“have powers unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “Priest?” Raz asked, confused. “Did Brahnt find­—?”

  “Getting to that!” Eva cut across him, obviously enjoying the recounting of her adventures over the last months. “As I was saying, Sven took me in and got me back on my feet in exchange for my help when necessary. I made him a better healer, and he made sure I didn’t starve to death, or die beaten and raped in some snowy back alley of the city. After a while I started making waves of my own, treating the more gruesome injuries the idiot gangs and criminal rings of this place manage to make each other suffer, the stuff Sven would never have gone near.” She laughed. “They call me ‘the Carver’ if you can believe it.”

  “I can,” Raz chuckled in a pained way. “Feels like you carved half my back right out of me.”

  Eva punched him in the chest, making him wince.

  “So,” she kept on, failing to hide a smile, “when you landed on his table, Sven knew enough about you and I both to put two and two together, and he convinced the men who’d brought you to him to loop me in. Apparently their leader thought you were worth a lot more alive than dead. As soon as I could, I made a run for this place.” She waved a hand about her to indicate the room. “And—as it turns out—I wasn’t the only one looking for you.”

  “Lucky me.” Raz coughed. “I imagine I’d be in chains and halfway back to Miropa by now if that hadn't been the case.”

  “Probably not, actually,” Eva said with a mockingly casual shrug. “Apparently your friend—the High Priest, I think—put down the mercenaries as they were bringing the sword down on your head. So… you’d just be dead.”

  “Oh, well that’s pleasant,” Raz said with a grunt. “Is that the bedside manner you keep for all your patients, ‘Carver’?”

  Eva winked. “Only the ones I like. Now—” she removed her hand from under his and stood up, patting out the wrinkles of her shirt and pants—“unless I’m much mistaken, there are a couple individuals who would appreciate it if I didn’t keep the fact that you’ve woken up from them any longer. One has been so on edge to leave the city you’d think the place was about to burn to the ground or something.”

  Raz chuckled again. “al’Dor,” he said with a nod. “Don’t judge him too harshly. He never seemed a man capable of anything more than the best intentions.”

  “Well his anxiety is making me anxious,” Eva said with a little pout before making for the door. “I’ll fetch them, and you can tell him so.”

  “Tell him yourself!” Raz did his best to yell after her as the woman left the room. When she was gone, he rolled his head back to the opposite wall, in which was inlaid a narrow window of cheap glass panes, the kind that distorted the light and made it hard to see through.

  Despite this, Raz stilled as he made out the snow falling outside once again.

  A darkness started to creep back into him as the blurred, shifting white descended against a grey sky. For a few minutes, as Eva had been recounting her stories, Raz had forgotten it all, lost in a sort of reminiscent comfort. Now, though, as the woman’s warmth left the room, leaving him only with the chill of the winter he could see through the window, the weight of everything came crashing down once again.

  His fever might have broken, but even in lucidity Raz thought he could see the outline of children against the glass, laughing and playing in the snow.

  Hearing movement in the hall, Raz turned his head back to the door in time to see it pushed open. Two men entered, the first leaning on the arm of the other with his left hand, his heavy steel staff in his right. As he watched a smiling Talo Brahnt and stern-faced Carro al’Dor make their way slowly into his room—followed again by Eva, as well as a woman he didn’t recognize—Raz couldn’t help but grin a little.

  “I’m told I have you to thank for saving my neck,” he said, speaking to Brahnt as the High Priest accepted al’Dor’s help in easing himself down into a wooden chair on the left side of the bed. As always he favored the bad leg that had plagued him for what Raz was sure was much longer than they’d known each other.

  “Quite,” Brahnt chuckled, leaning forward in his chair to get closer to the bed. “Though don’t be fooled into thinking it was a selfl
ess act. Syrah would have me murdered in my sleep if she found out I’d allowed some ratty sellsword to kill you off.”

  He reached out his free hand, then—the one not still wrapped around his staff for support—and rested it on Raz’s exposed shoulder.

  “It’s good to see you again, boy,” he said with deep sincerity, blue eyes shining as he spoke. “I admit my hopes weren’t high that our paths would cross again after Carro and I left Azbar.”

  Raz nodded, but said nothing, feeling the darkness claim a little bit more of his mood as the memories of his flight from Quin Tern’s city reluctantly re-emerged.

  “How are you feeling?” al’Dor asked sympathetically after a moment. There was, perhaps, not as much of the almost-fatherly affection in his words that Brahnt managed, but the concern was genuine.

  “Ask me in a day or two,” Raz groaned, straigthening himself up slowly until he half-sat, half-leaned with his bare back against the plain wood of the wall at the head of the bed, his wings falling to either side. “I feel like I’ve been speared and tossed around by a bull elephant.”

  “A what?” the strange woman asked curiously. She was bedecked in the same robes as Brahnt, white with a single black line down the apex of the hood and back, and stood with the sort of nervous authority exuded by those not yet used to their station.

  “Big Southern animal,” Eva told her, bringing her hands up to her mouth and extending her index fingers. “Tusks the size of your arm.”

  “Oh,” the woman—whom Raz deduced likely to be the leader of Ystréd’s Laorin flock, as Kal Yu’ri had been of Azbar’s—responded with wide eyes, and she said no more.

  “Arro,” Brahnt said, seeing Raz’s eyes on her, “this is Tana Atler, High Priestess of the Laorin temple of Ystréd.”

  “Where I assume I’m currently claiming someone’s room and bed,” Raz said with a nod at the woman. “You have my thanks, High Priestess. I’ll do my best to be out of your home as soon as possible.”

  Atler seemed unable to responded, her eyes still wide as they met his. After an awkward moment of silence, Eva made an effort to nudge the woman, but Raz smiled and waved her away.

  “I understand your shock,” he said with as much of a laugh as his mending wound would allow. “I don’t imagine you see much of my kind this far into the North.”

  At that, the High Priestess seemed to find her voice.

  “That-That’s one way to put it,” she squeaked, before continuing in a rush. “Of course, any friend of Talo’s is a friend of ours. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need. Are you hungry? There’s pork left from the evening meal, though it was a bit dry. I’ll have Doren bring you up extra furs, too. Talo says you’re not much for the cold, and the weather is only going to get…”

  She mumbled to a halt as al’Dor coughed pointedly, but Raz just kept smiling.

  “And he’s right, but I’ll make out fine with the fire and what you’ve been able to provide me with already.” He waved a hand at the bed and the blanket that still covered the lower half his body. “Again, though, you have my thanks.”

  Atler nodded but said nothing more this time, her face red with awe and embarrassment.

  “Arro,” Brahnt spoke from beside him. “Can you tell us what happened? How you ended up in the hands of those men? And that wound… Did they do that?”

  “Getting captured wasn’t my intention, if that’s what you mean,” Raz told him, reaching up to rub the back of his head unconsciously as he remembered the blow that had taken him by surprise. “And no. The blade that did that belonged to a man dead a good three or four days before I was stupid enough to get myself caught.”

  Beside Brahnt, al’Dor winced, but Raz ignored him, continuing.

  “I was making my way here, I think. At least, that’s what I set out to do from Azbar. A day or so in, though, and it’s not so clear. The wound got infected—”

  “You think?” Eva asked sarcastically from the back of the room.

  “—and things went downhill fast,” Raz kept on, disregarding her, too. “By the time I found their camp, I was in bad shape. Really bad shape. I think I remember asking them to take me to Ystréd. Tried to tell them to take me to you, actually, if memory serves. Instead, one of them snuck up from behind and got the drop on me. From there… well, from what Eva says, you actually probably know better than I.”

  “And Azbar?” al’Dor asked him, arms crossed as he hovered behind Brahnt’s shoulder. “What of the Arena? And the Koyts?”

  The name chilled Raz to the bone, hearing it from another’s mouth. It was as though the realization that the children had not been his alone to remember, to suffer the memories, was turning his blood to ice. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe. There was no anger directed at the Priest, but Raz stared up at him from his place on the bed, mouth hanging open, unable to answer.

  There was only emptiness.

  “Raz…” Brahnt started gently, half reaching out, as though wanting to touch Raz’s arm again. “Raz… Where are Arrun and Lueski?”

  Slowly, Raz’s amber eyes moved from al’Dor’s dark blue ones to the ice-chip irises of Brahnt’s.

  Then they moved again, to the back of the room, where Eva and Atler still stood.

  Talo got the message.

  “Ladies, if you could give us a moment,” he said, looking around at the two women.

  Atler nodded at once, but Eva seemed hesitant, eyes on Raz as though seeking acknowledgment that this was what he wanted. When he did nothing but meet her gaze, she took it as silent confirmation and followed the High Priestess out the door.

  When it had closed behind them, Raz turned to look out the window again.

  For a long time he said nothing, watching the flakes fall against the rapidly coming night outside. Someone had lit a lantern below the lip of the glass, so that it almost looked as though the snow were falling into distorted flames, swallowed by the light and heat.

  As the lives of the small and innocent are swallowed by those of the cruel and ambitious, he thought to himself.

  Neither of the Priests spoke up behind him, giving him his moment. By the time he was able to form the words, Raz had no doubt Brahnt and al’Dor had developed their own suspicions based on nothing more than his silence.

  “The Koyts are dead,” he managed finally to get out. He still refused to look away from the window, as though not seeing the men’s faces would make their reactions less raw for him. “Tern killed Arrun, or had him killed, rather. When she saw what had been done to her brother, Lueski took her own life.”

  Though he couldn’t see the Priests, their responses to this announcement turned out to be nothing he could escape. Brahnt let out a noise somewhere between a pained grunt and a moan, and al’Dor gasped before letting a dark “No…” slip his lips. Their genuine shock caused a well of emotion to build up inside Raz, and not for the first time in his life he was grateful that the Sun hadn't born him into the world with the ability to shed tears.

  He gave the men a minute of their own privacy, letting them come to terms with the news. It wasn’t until his keen ears made out the steadying of Brahnt’s angry breathing that he finally looked around.

  al’Dor—the only man in the room with much of a soul left to him, Raz believed—was red-eyed and white-faced despite never actually having met the children. Talo, on the other hand, was obviously fighting to control the rising tide of fury and sadness that Raz was all too familiar with. He had spent the few days before his descent into delirium fighting it off himself.

  “What of Tern?” Brahnt eventually managed in a tone of forced calm. “The Arena?”

  “The Arena stands,” Raz said darkly. “Though very likely under new management, by now.”

  He let the meaning of the words sink in, watching as al’Dor turned even paler and Brahnt achieved a sort of violent calmness, barely able to hold back a cold half-smile. Raz chose very deliberately not to spell out the details of Tern’s end. The Laorin were an odd breed, c
apable of violence and—according to the Grandmother—even cruelty, but they stood firm by the cardinal rule of their order: that no death ever be dealt by the hands of the faithful, even in self-defense. The Laorin believed life to be the greatest gift their god, Laor, had granted man, and so to take it away was just as much the greatest form of blasphemy, a direct spitting into the face of the creator Himself.

  While Brahnt, Yu’ri, and—as far as he knew—al’Dor had tolerated Raz’s methods of doling out his own forms of justice, he didn’t feel the need to weigh down their consciences with unnecessary details.

  “We can only hope Rhen will be given the reign of the place, then,” Brahnt said thoughtfully, all too obviously trying to steer his thoughts anywhere from the Koyts. “If the council is allowed to take over, things won’t be much improved.”

  “Short of burning the whole damn place to the ground, the Doctore would be the best option,” Raz agreed with a sigh, happy to take the opportunity the High Priest was offering them all. “I realize, looking back, that she deserved more credit than I ever gave her.”