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

by Bryce O'Connor

  She had hoped—no, expected­—the formal, honorary salute to at least draw the appropriate formal response, as was custom among the tribes. It was considered a near-unparalleled insult not to acknowledge the greeting of another man or woman, an insult reserved only for cowards and blasphemers.

  And, so, when Syrah received nothing but the glare of cold eyes from beneath wind-twisted hoods thrown up against the snow, she knew exactly where she stood.

  Regardless, after long seconds she decided to try again.

  “Ka vred es ül-karyn?” she asked them with a polite smile. “Ül-trebs nast brán dü.”

  What brings you to our mountains? My people have drawn no blood from you.

  That brought something out of the Sigûrth. One man, at the very center of the group, grabbed the individual next to him by the back of the neck and forced him abruptly to his knees. Then he squatted beside the kneeling figure, pale blue eyes never leaving Syrah’s as he murmured into his ear and reached out to pull the hood from the other’s head.

  “Lifegiver’s mercy…” Syrah heard Priest Loben gasp from somewhere to her left.

  The face beneath the hood, Syrah realized, was not that of a Sigûrth. It wasn’t even that of a tribesman. Rather, it was a gaunter, lighter face with the narrow tendencies of the valley towns. The man’s hair and beard were long and dark, beaded with wood, bone, and metal in the same fashion as those standing around him. There was, however, one great difference. A solid loop of thick, silvery steel that wound all the way around his neck, heavy and etched with patterns all too familiar to Syrah.

  They were the same etchings that decorated the staffs she and the others were currently without…

  “Laor’s mercy…” someone else gasped from behind her. “He’s a bloody Priest.”

  Before anyone could say anything more, though, the captive Priest began to speak.

  “My name,” he rasped out in a broken voice, “is Egard Rost. I was once a Priest of Laor, as you are. A man of the cloth, residing in the temple of Harond. Now I have seen the brighter light, and have abandoned my false faith in favor of a greater devotion and truth. Them of Stone crafted the world in their great hands, just as they crafted the men of the mountains from rock and ice, making them stronger than any other.”

  As Egard Rost spoke the words, Syrah could hear the shivering in his voice, an anguished sort of shake that had nothing to do with the cold.

  “I now act,” Rost continued loudly as the storm picked up, kicking the loose snow around them in gusts, “as the voice of my lord and master, the mighty Kareth Grahst, warrior beyond all others, and cousin to the Kayle himself, greatest leader of men.”

  The former Priest nearly choked on the words, but kept going. “It is my master’s first wish that your Witch”—he indicated Syrah with a hand—“be made silent, and cease to befoul the word of the Gods with her wicked tongue. It is then my master’s second wish that you all”—he gestured at the line as a whole—“take a willful knee to him, and accept servitude in exchange for your lives.”

  Syrah bristled at that.

  “‘In exchange for our lives’?” she demanded in the Common Tongue, barely keeping the fury from her voice as she continued to glare at the man called Kareth Grahst, whose eyes had still never left hers. “We meet here, beneath a flag of truce, and this brute”—she waved an angry hand at the Sigûrth—“has the gall to speak of murder?”

  There was a brief pause as Rost translated the words back to Grahst over his shoulder. The mountain man smiled cruelly, putting a big hand on the back of Rost’s neck and whispering a response in his ear.

  Still not once looking away from Syrah.

  “We do not recognize your flag, Witch,” Rost yelled over the wind. “We do not recognize your rights, your customs, and we certainly do not recognize the frail deity you so pathetically kneel before. We are men of the Stone Gods, and your beliefs mean little and less to us.”

  Syrah felt her temper boil at the words, but she forced herself to stay calm. She was not there to stoke the fires of this aggression, after all, despite the fact that every fiber of her being seemed to be urging her to do so. She’d come with a purpose, and had every intention of seeing it to the end, suffering any abuse along the way.

  With stressed determination she stepped forward, weaving her fingers into a rapid rune before pulling at the collar of her robes to drag them down her neck. There was the barest pulse of white, and when next she spoke Syrah felt her words rip painfully from her throat, magnified tenfold so as to be clear to every man and woman within a hundred yards.

  “Why have you come?” she began, speaking the mountain tongue, disregarding the irate grimaces on the Sigûrths’ faces as she ignored Grahst’s demands with obvious deliberation. Instead, she looked around at the others, the rest of the clansmen who stood in well-practiced formation around her. There were hundreds of them, possibly even as many as a half-a-thousand—she couldn’t be sure through the snow and trees.

  “I do not ask this man”—she nodded in Grahst’s direction—“why you have come, because I know his reasons. He comes with the hammer of war in hand, intent on nothing but the destruction of a people of peace. He comes desiring only blood and the spoils of battle, caring nothing of the cost of it, so long as he is satisfied. Do you think I mean my cost, though? Do you think I mean my home, my future, my life? No….” Syrah shook her head, seeking the eyes of as many of the tribesmen as she could, from every clan she could make among them. “Those learned among you will know that death does not carry the fear for me that it does for most men. My god is lord of all life, constantly tending to the circle of creation, replacing those of good heart, soul, and mind back into the world so as to continue bettering it for eternity. With my death comes only my rebirth and, so, I do not fear it.”

  Syrah could only pray the bravado in her voice hid the quiver that might have revealed the lie for what it was.

  “The cost I refer to is not one I must pay. It is not one of my faith, or my people. It is a cost you must pay, and have already begun to. I ask again: why have you come? Winter blooms in full, and yet you have left your wives to fend for themselves against the cold. The storms have come, and yet you have left your children to die, buried and forgotten beneath the snows. Why? Why, I ask you, have you abandoned your homes, deserted your lands, and forsaken your families?”

  Now she was starting to hear a murmur from the warriors. An angry one. It wasn’t the one she intended to leave them with, but it was the place she needed to start.

  Anger often left the mind open to more penetrating suggestions.

  “Is it because you chose to leave?” Syrah pressed on, still looking about. “Is it because you desired war and blood and death? Did you wake one morning suddenly so riddled with a lust for the sword that you took arms with the first war-band you came across? Were you so intent on murder that you simply had no choice but to leave your people to their fate? …I think not.”

  She paused a moment, letting her words sink into the tribesmen, smiling internally as many angry faces became steadily confused. She began to touch on the resentment she hoped­­—by the Lifegiver—existed amongst some of them.

  “You were not given a choice. You were not granted your right to refuse, to live life peaceably with your people. You were torn from that peace, friends. You were ripped from your beds, pulled from your homes and temples by a tyrant, a conqueror who deigned not offer any option but his sword, his army, and his goals.”

  Syrah narrowed her eyes, locking onto the gaze of one man in particular, an Amreht who stood flanked on either side by others of his clan. This man’s face was pure fury behind streaked blood paint, and Syrah wasn’t so sure it was directed at her anymore.

  She had touched a nerve. She was getting somewhere.

  “You fight. I understand that. You are men of the mountains. Men of battle and blood and of the Stone Gods. But who do you fight for? Who do you kill and die for? Is it for you? For your family, your fr
iends? Or have you become nothing more than the edge of another’s sword? Do you, men of the mountains, greatest of the world’s warriors, take pride in being wielded by another, like a borrowed ax or—worse yet—a stolen one?”

  The reaction was almost palpable now, like the rumbling of a distant avalanche at the very edge of one’s hearing. Among the Amreht it was greatest—Gûlraht Baoill’s conquest of their tribe had been particularly brutal—but they weren’t the only ones appearing to suffer discontent. Many of the Kregoan had dark looks on their scarred faces, and among the Sefî and the Velkrin—newest to have been brought into the fold—disquiet glances passed from warrior to warrior. Syrah was surprised, looking for their reaction, to see that only a few of the Goatmen remained, and many of those that did were in the act of slowly slinking back into the Woods while the Sigûrth had their backs turned.

  As though reading signs of danger around them…

  Syrah could barely gain control of the victorious grin that played at her lips as she watched her practiced words, rehearsed a hundred times with Jofrey, start to take their effect. The vanguard was crumbling, just as they’d hoped.

  “We have come to you in peace, unarmed and unarmored, in the hopes of waking you into the reality of your bondage—no, your slavery. Your Kayle claims to want to take the North for his people, to seize the world for the good of the clans, and yet which of his acts prove him worthy of being the lord he claims? His burning of your homes? His butchering of your children? His conquering of your kin? You, the warriors of the mountains, have long practiced the tradition of taking prisoners as your slaves, returning them to the tribe to be distributed and put to task. Tell me, then… How is what has happened to you any different? You were challenged, beaten, and taken hostage. Yes, instead of a hoe or sewing needles you were handed your swords and axes and hammers. Yes, instead of the fields you were sent to war. And yes, instead of a steel collar”—she gestured to the metal ring around Egard Rost’s neck—“you were told to wear the symbols of your tribes with pride. But how, in the end, does it amount to anything different? How—?”

  “AAAAARRRRGH!”

  Syrah’s words were cut short by an anguished shriek of pain and horror. She stared, wide eyed, at the grouped Sigûrth men, as did every other soul within the clearing’s boundaries. Taking advantage of Syrah’s own call to observe the slave collar around the former Priest’s throat, Kareth Grahst had decided to seize the opportunity to break the spell she was spinning with her words. The moment she had pointed out Rost, Grahst had pushed himself to his feet, pulled the man up by the back of his robes, and drawn a long broadsword from where it had been hidden beneath his furs on his hip.

  Then, without a moment’s pause, he’d run it through the man’s lower back.

  Rost screamed, twisting and thrashing in pain, slicing his own hand to the bone as he grabbed at the bloody blade protruding more than a foot out of his stomach. Grahst, after he was sure every eye was on the slave, withdrew the sword, then plunged it back in, this time forcing the steel through the lower part of Rost’s gut.

  Again and again Grahst impaled the man, metal penetrating flesh with a wet, sucking sthuck each time, careful not to pierce lung or diaphragm so as to ensure Rost would keep screaming. Again and again he ran him through, shoving the sword between skin and bone and muscle with such savage fury that soon the front of Rost’s abdomen was a tattered mess, too damaged to hold his entrails and organs in, and they began to spill out even through what was left of his shirt and fur cloak. Grahst had stabbed the man at least a half dozen times before he finally stopped screaming, and it was another three before he stopped moving altogether. When this happened, Grahst threw the body to the ground and fell to one knee beside it, grabbing the twitching man’s hair with his free hand and lifting the sword high with the other.

  With two savage chops, blood flicking across the settling snow in scattered lines, Grahst severed Egard Rost’s head as he lay dying in the snow.

  Throughout this entire ordeal, Syrah had stood paralyzed, unable to so much as twitch a finger as she watched the murder. Around her the other Laorin—all as equally numbed by horrified fascination—had done the same. Like her, none of them had ever witnessed such barbaric cruelty. Syrah had seen death in her day. Terrible deaths. But those had been passings of illness and injury. Even working on both sides of the battle line between the valley towns and the Sigûrth, Syrah had never seen such gruesome and callous disregard for life as what Kareth Grahst had just forced them all to bear witness to.

  And she had once seen Raz i’Syul Arro kill four men in as many breaths…

  Someone—Syrah wasn’t sure who—was vomiting behind her.

  “The Sigûrth say you silent… you silent.”

  A cold, unlike anything Syrah had ever known, washed down her back at the words. Kareth Grahst spoke the Common Tongue with a deep, booming tenor which carried over the wind, his words broken and heavily accented. He was getting back on his feet, attempting to wipe away some of the blood splattered across his face with the back of his sword hand as he did, Rost’s head in the other.

  And he was still smiling.

  “You silent,” Grahst repeated, starting in her direction, “and you listen. Words, not enough. Bravery, not enough. The White Wyth takes the Sigûrth’s traditions, takes the Sigûrth’s life ways. The White Wyth comes, tells Sigûrth to bow to the vrek”—he spat the slur the mountain men had for the people of the valley towns even through curved lips—“tells them bow must, or death. Tell them to peace make, or death. Wyth speaks of dying children, dying families, dying tribes. But words, not enough.”

  No more than two strides away, the Sigûrth tossed Egard Rost’s head at Syrah’s feet.

  “Blood, enough.”

  Syrah forced herself not to look down, forced herself not to imagine the scream that must be frozen into Rost’s pale, narrow features. Instead she held Grahst’s gaze, praying so hard to the Lifegiver for the strength to keep doing so that she was amazed no one could hear her pleas.

  “I came to your lands as a servant of your people,” she said firmly, lifting her head proudly despite the shake in her legs. “It was my wish to see them through the freeze, nothing more. If the ‘bowing’ you’re referring to is a reference to the late Kayle accepting the help from—”

  “SPEAK OF EMREHT, YOU WILL NOT!”

  Syrah stopped abruptly, surprised as, for the first time, Grahst lost his smile. The confident, leisurely grin was suddenly replaced by a snarl of fury, twisting his blood-smeared, bearded face into a wrathful, wide-eyed glare.

  It took Syrah a moment to make the connection.

  “Grahst…” she said slowly, the realization dawning on her. “Grahst… You’re his son!”

  The smile returned to the mountain man’s face, but it was as hard and cold as the stone of the stairs behind Syrah and her entourage.

  “Son, his,” he confirmed with a nod. “My haro, Emreht Grahst was, for shame of it.”

  “Shame?” Syrah demanded, feeling the anger seethe again within her. “Shame? You stand here, in the shadow of the man who butchered your father for his crown, spreading his evil and misery and chaos, and you have the balls to accuse Emreht of acting shamefully? It was your father’s decisions that allowed you to survive the last freeze, Grahst. It was his level-headedness—largely lacking in his offspring, it seems—that stopped the bloodshed for the first time in hundreds of years. Emreht didn’t like it, but he did what was needed of him to ensure the safety and strength of his people. He was a true leader. He was a—”

  “Welkin,” Grahst finished for her, obviously hard-pressed to keep the smile up. “Coward. Shame to Sigûrth. Shame to Gods of Stone. Shame to himself. Shame to family. We of Stone, not cowards. Not welkin. The storms, we survive. The winter—the Kerr’ëT—we survive. Of the vrek, we need nothing. Emreht is shame.”

  “Fool,” Syrah managed to say through clenched teeth. “Beast. Animal. The world has no use for men who seek nothing
but violence when there could be harmony, war when there could be peace. You create your own hardships. You kill your own children.”

  “Children, then, not blessed,” Grahst said with a shrug.

  Syrah glowered at him for a moment, tempering her desire to fling faith at him, to pound Laor’s will into his thick, dirty skull.

  But shitting on their beliefs was not going to win her back any momentum in this fight.

  “You pray to hard gods, Kareth Grahst,” she said finally, switching back to the tribal dialect. “I can see why the men of Stone have been made so strong.”

  “Cease your desperate flattery, Witch,” one of the other Sigûrth shouted in turn. “It won’t save you now.”

  Grahst put a hand up without turning around, as though to silence the interrupter.

  “Indeed,” he boomed, speaking in his native tongue as well. “It is time to forgo your foolish hope of seeding our ranks with mutiny, woman. My men may not be traditionally ‘loyal,’ just as you suspect, but there are other ways to guarantee the obedience of even clans as vicious as the Amreht and Kregoan.”