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

by Bryce O'Connor

“What is it?” he asked in a shrill whisper, sounding suddenly terrified. “Another bear? Laor have mercy, not another b—”

  Raz stopped him again, this time with a single finger raised to his lips. He was listening once more. This time, though, it wasn’t an animal he was worried about.

  Raz had discerned two very distinct things as they’d shoved their way through the hedge they now crouched behind. The first: they’d found the path. It trailed, a narrow band of pale dirt through the cool lushness of the Woods, off right and left, north and south respectively. Carro had been correct in the end, they had been close, and clearly hadn't overshot the path by much, as they’d only been walking west again for about twenty minutes.

  The second thing, though, had been the distinct and unmistakable sound of men’s voices.

  Whether it was too many days with only the Priests—now Priest, Raz thought sadly—for company, or the fact that Talo had put him on edge when they’d first crossed the Arocklen’s borders, it hadn't taken more than an instant for Raz to realize that the voices had not been speaking in the Common Tongue. Rather, the sharp, garbled words he’d made out had been in a guttural, rough language, one he did not recognize. Couple that with the grind and clink of shifting leather and metal plating, and Raz deduced quickly who the voices had belonged to.

  “I think your mountain men are here.”

  He said the words very quietly, as though the softness of them would somehow diminish Carro’s reaction. It did no such thing, of course, and the Priest’s sudden intake of breath sounded howlingly loud to Raz’s sharp ears.

  “Shhh,” he said again, more urgently. “Quiet. They’re coming.”

  And indeed they were. Raz rather thought it was Gale, huffing and stomping behind them, who had gotten them caught. He and Carro’s voices might have been lost to the wind and creak of trees, but the horse’s nicker would have been distinct. Even as he thought this, the barest hint of firelight dug its way through the darkness to their right, north along the trail. The voices had stopped, but the sound of feet and the grind of armor were more and more distinct.

  Raz thought fast. There was no time to drill Carro on what could be expected if they were caught, or what the best course of action was to ensure that that didn’t happen. He had to act, and he had to act now.

  His grip tightened around Ahna’s haft as he made his decision.

  “Carro, I’m going to leave you.”

  Beside him, the Priest’s eyes grew even wider. He opened his mouth to protest, but Raz cut him off.

  “You need to trust me,” he said quickly, already getting up. “I’ll be back. We don’t know how many there are and we don’t know what they’ll do if they find us, but neither do we have the time to debate it. I’ll be right back.”

  He was in the process of turning north, intent on dashing through the flickering shadows of the trees as the torchlight grew ever nearer from the same direction, when Carro grabbed the loose furs of his leg. He whirled, about to hiss in fury at the man, but stopped.

  Carro was not looking at him in fear, now. No, that wasn’t true. He was looking at Raz in fear, but it was a different kind of fear. There was a strength in the scared complexion of this face, a rigidity in his composure. Raz had seen it before, this impressive—almost irritating—countenance, this bravery in the face of terror.

  He had seen it in the bearing of Syrah Brahnt, so many years ago, as she had vied for the life of a dying slaver.

  “Don’t kill them,” Carro said, the quiet demand somewhere between an order and a plea. “Please, Raz. Don’t kill them. I don’t want—I can’t let another… another be…”

  He trailed off. Raz hesitated. He only half understood what Carro was talking about, for one thing, and the last time he had bowed to such a request the results had been hellish.

  But, in the end, he nodded. Bending down he eased Ahna gently to the ground just as the light flared in truth around the trees, sneaking through the thicket that hid them both in a mosaic of brightness.

  Then Raz bolted right, running through the dark.

  He moved fast, but not far, whispering between the warped trunks like some demon of the night. He hadn't gone more than a dozen yards before he caught a glimpse of the men through the forest, running along the trail in the other direction. He took two more bounding strides, then spun and slipped left to the edge of the path, looking south.

  They were only two. The pair wore worn leather armor supplemented with iron plating in various forms and places, and from behind Raz was momentarily taken by how they could have almost been Carro and Talo. They were large, heavily muscled men, both with dirty wild hair—one blond and the other light brown—and as they looked around, searching for the source of whatever sound had alerted them, Raz saw decorative scars tracing lines through thick beards and up along their cheeks. Both carried torches aloft, their other hands hefting heavy axes at the ready.

  As he darted across the path Raz hoped, for a moment, that the men would run right past the thicket behind which Carro crouched and Gale stood. He kept an eye on them as he moved, quiet as a shadow, back in their direction, now on the opposite side of the trail. It seemed luck wasn’t about to favor him, though, and as one of the men shouted, practically skidding to a halt in front of the brush, Raz realized with an angry rush that while he and Carro had been well enough hidden, the stallion probably towered in perfectly plain view.

  By that point, though, he was even with them, and just when the two mountain men whirled in the horse’s direction, Raz’s great outline flickered against the canopy as he leapt out from the darkness behind them with a snarl like a wild animal.

  It was a short, brutal fight. One man caught a mailed fist in the side of the head as he turned towards this new sound, the other yelling in surprise when Raz’s tail swept his thick legs out from under him. The first went down at once, body going limp as wet paper, ax and torch tumbling from useless fingers. The second hit the ground with a muffled thud and the crunch of leather and iron, but didn’t get so much as a chance to start heaving himself back up before Raz was over him. He had only the briefest moment to look up, blue eyes wide as a clawed foot rose up before his eyes.

  “Dahgün,” he breathed in quiet shock, staring up into Raz’s face, illuminated beneath his hood by the two torches lying flickering beside the trail.

  Then Raz’s foot came down, slamming the man’s head into the ground behind it.

  There was a moment of silence as the forest around them settled, the Woods taking as much notice of the scuffle as it might have the falling of a single flake of snow.

  Then Carro came tumbling out of the brush.

  “Dammit, Raz!” he grumbled, hurrying over the man whose head Raz had just pounded into the earth.

  “They’re fine,” Raz said in exasperation. “I pulled my punches. They’ll wake up in a bit, though with a hell of a headache to remember me by.”

  “This one is bleeding, though!” Carro exclaimed, shuffling over to the first man, on his side on the path.

  “Huh, so he is,” Raz said, taking a cursory peek at the mountain man’s face over the Priest’s shoulder. The pointed steel edge of the gauntlet’s knuckles had ripped open the skin beneath his left eye, and it was bleeding profusely. Raz was about to voice some quip about “just adding to the scars,” when Carro started twisting his right hand over the man’s face. He watched the Priest work his magic again, fascinated by the golden, dancing lines of the healing spell. He stood witness, awed into silence, as the cut sealed itself before his very eyes, the loose fold of broken skin piecing itself back together again as though by—well, as though by magic.

  “Amazing,” he heard himself mutter.

  Carro finished his work, the gold light fading abruptly, and reached up to wipe sweat from his brow.

  “You Priests really go the distance,” Raz muttered, crossing his arms and shoving the man Carro had just tended to over on his back with a foot. “Waste of your gift, if you ask me.”

>   Carro sighed. “Why am I not in the least bit surprised to hear you say that?”

  Then he frowned down at the mountain man, taking in the scars of his face and what—Raz realized only now that he was closer—appeared to be a thick, vertical piercing of some ashen bone through the man’s nose.

  “Are they mountain men?” Raz asked tentatively. He had assumed—and was fairly sure he was correct—but it didn't hurt to ask.

  Carro nodded. “Kregoan, the both of them,” he said, glancing at the other unconscious form behind them as well. “One of the western tribes, of the Vietalis.”

  “Then they’re your Kayle’s men,” Raz said, frowning. “Unless there’s another reason members of the western ranges would be wandering the Arocklen in the middle of the freeze…?”

  Again, Carro nodded.

  “They’re Baoill's, without a doubt,” he concurred. “But what in the Lifegiver’s name they’re doing this far east, I haven’t got a bloody damn clue. Scouts, maybe?”

  Raz shook his head. “Not likely. Scouts would travel lighter.” He kicked the iron plating on the closest man’s armor for emphasis. “And they’d have supplies, maybe even mounts. These don’t strike me as the ‘scouting’ type, anyway…”

  “You’re not wrong there,” Carro mumbled, looking suddenly more troubled. “Kregoan are among the more savage of the tribes. Other clans are better suited for reconnaissance. So again: what the hell are they doing here?”

  Raz hesitated. For a moment he thought of not telling the Priest what he was afraid the men might have been. He considered every possibility that came to mind, starting with deserters and ending with the most obvious choice. Deserters would have run from the sound of people, rather than towards them. Patrols—if the mountain men were pushing units this far into the Woods—would have had more men and been better stocked.

  These two, though, were paired, armed, without supplies, and carrying torches…

  “Carro…” he said slowly, looking north up the path, along the route they were meant to take. “I think these are sentries.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Laor take me…” Carro choked in a shocked whisper.

  Raz considered muttering his own curses, but decided to let the Priest have his moment. In truth, he was more concerned with taking stock of the scene that lay beneath them, sprawling out from the base of the hill whose topmost lip they now crouched behind, a nightmare bathed in a bright orange glow beneath the trees.

  Hundreds of tents were staked sidelong across the broken terrain of the Woods, thrown up in any space that allowed for their width. They extended as far as Raz could see between the trees, illuminating the Arocklen with the dancing light of cooking fires that made the icy canopy above gleam and shimmer like a ceiling of solid crystal. Smoke hung thick in the air, an angry haze creeping across the forest when it was unable to escape upwards. The smell of the last ten-day, usually the crisp, clean scent of the evergreens and snow and wind, vanished in a curdling stench of fire and leather and piss.

  And through it all, little more than black silhouettes against the flames, dozens on dozens of men were moving about the camp, their voices and the sound of their day’s endeavors winding their way up the hill with ease.

  “He’s here,” Carro breathed in horror from beside Raz. “He’s here.”

  “He’s not.”

  The Priest blinked and looked around at Raz, who hadn't taken his eyes off the camp.

  “What do you mean?” the man demanded in near desperation. “Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? That’s the Kayle’s army! He came east. Lifegiver’s tits, why would he—?”

  “He’s not here,” Raz insisted, reaching up to pull back the furs of his hood, freeing his ears. “At least, I don’t think so. And that’s not the whole of his army. I don’t think there can be more than a thousand down there, probably less.”

  He couldn’t get a physical count, given that the tents stretched further into the Woods than he could make out, but it was the noise that gave it away. The camp raised a ruckus, true enough, but it was the din of hundreds, not thousands. Raz had heard the voices of thousands, listened to them ringing out around him as he stood among the dead in the pit of the Arena.

  Even among the Woods, the full mass of Gûlraht Baoill’s army would have existed in a constant, ebbing roar of sound.

  “Not here?” Carro asked softly, clearly having trouble wrapping his head around everything he was seeing. “But then… Where—What is…? I don’t understand… Why are they here?”

  At that, Raz frowned. Of the pair of them, he didn’t remotely think it likely to be he would be the one to have a better idea of why the Kayle would have a contingent of his greater force camped along the base of the Citadel’s mountain path. He didn’t have a damn clue what the man was thinking, or if this was even part of Baoill’s plan at all. Maybe this was a mutinied unit, pressing further eastward in order to escape the wrath of their former commander. No… too much of a coincidence. With hundreds on hundreds of square miles, it was just too unlikely such absconders would just happen to have settled along the bottom of the stairs. It was all the more likely they had been ordered here, ordered to set up camp, almost like they were—

  It hit Raz like a bolt in the head.

  “It’s a siege,” he muttered in realization. Carro turned to look at him again, confused.

  “A-A siege?” he asked hesitantly, not comprehending. “I’m not follow—”

  Then he stopped, eyes growing wide.

  “Oh no… the stairs. They’re trying to block the stairs.”

  “Is there another way to or from the Citadel?” Raz asked him quickly, peering back down at the camp.

  Carro shook his head, his voice strained as he spoke. “Cyurgi’ Di was initially built as a fortress to guard against some unknown enemy come from the Tundra, to the north of the mountains. There would never have been a need for a secondary escape if they were only defending the one direction.”

  “The Citadel wasn’t built by the Laorin?”

  “No.” Again, the Priest shook his head. “No one is actually sure who built it, but it wasn’t the faith. We’ve just occupied it for as long as there’s been written record.”

  “And whoever built it never thought they’d need to defend from the south,” Raz muttered, finishing the thought. “This is bad. It’s definitely a blockade. This must be some kind of advance guard, meant to keep the Laorin in place until the larger body of the army arrives.”

  “But why?” Carro hissed, his good hand shaking as it clung to the steel of his staff, lying on the ground before him. “Why attack the Citadel? What good does it do them?”

  Possibly quite a lot, Raz thought privately. If everything Carro had said about the Laorin was true, then crippling the faith would be like cutting the head off the snake. Eliminating the influence of the Lifegiver—and his followers’ ability to band the valley towns—didn’t seem like such a terrible move to make…

  Maybe that’s all this was. Instead of a vanguard, maybe this smaller force was merely a detachment of the army on assignment, aiming to disrupt the activities of Cyurgi’ Di.

  Still… something felt off…

  “Stop thinking strategically,” he told Carro. “Is there a reason the mountain men would want to starve the Laorin out? Any reason.”

  Carro, surprisingly, snorted.

  “If we’re ignoring military value, then there are a thousand and more,” he said. “Most of the tribes are devout to their Stone Gods. Many despise the Lifegiver, and those that spread His light even more. Syrah once told me that Baoill threatened her life when—”

  For the second time, Carro froze. This time his eyes were blank, drawn back to some memory, some fragment of thought as something clicked.

  “What?” Raz demanded in a hiss. “What is it?”

  For another moment Carro said nothing. He just stared emptily at Raz’s chest, piecing together whatever was going on in his mind.

  “Syrah,�
�� he finally said. “They… They might be here for Syrah…”

  That sent a chill down Raz’s spine he neither liked, nor fully understood. Carro’s words were simultaneously frightening, confusing, and infuriating.

  He didn’t completely know why, but Raz was sure of one single, absolute fact: he’d be damned if the mountain brutes thought they could lay a finger on the white-haired woman.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why would they be after her?”

  “I’m not sure they are,” Carro said, indicating the camp with an awkward shift of his broken arm. “Not personally, at least. But Baoill… Baoill might very well be. After Syrah returned from the Vietalis Ranges, she told us stories of the Sigûrth. She said even more in the letter she sent after the fall of Harond. It was part of her plea for us to return home…”