A Prince Among Killers

by S. R. Vaught; J. B. Redmond

  The children.

  The children had caught him unaware.

  Their leeching would kill him in moments.

  He stared into the sky, watching the last of the pounding cloud of gryphons sailing in from the east. Maybe these would make the difference. Maybe these Sabor and soldiers could turn the tide and save Triune and Nic and Eyrie, maybe even Dari and Lord Ross and Lord Cobb, even if Aron was beyond assistance.

  The energy attacking him shimmered, then shifted away. He saw the little children running, herded by their handlers, making off toward the trees with the graal force they had stolen.

  Seconds later, an ear-splitting roar overrode the chaos on the battlefield.

  Aron’s pulse stilled, and he wondered if that sound would be the last he ever heard.

  He didn’t need to see the creature to know what it was, but it filled his vision, covering all of the empty sky before his eyes.

  A scaled, long-necked beast the size of a castle tower—one he had seen before.

  This dragon was stark white, and its barbed tail seemed polished and sharp. Its outstretched wings pumped once, stirring debris on the ground, which bounced and struck soldiers who had gone as still as stone monuments. Brilliant black eyes surveyed the battlefield, and the dragon’s mouth opened to show its curved teeth just before it let out a blast of fire that reached from the woods to the stones of Triune’s castle.

  As the flames died away, only silence remained.

  Aron turned his neck for glimpses of the battlefield. It seemed as though all the soldiers had stopped riding, stopped clawing and fighting, from Mab to Brailing to Cobb. Altar warbird soldiers lowered their hammers and pikes and swords. Ross Guardsmen backed away, green graal energy shoving outward to be taken by the children—as if it would have made a difference against a Stregan in full battle fury.

  The white dragon flapped its massive, leathery wings again, rising higher above the conflagration. When it roared, Aron’s muscles jittered as the animal instincts left to him tried to answer that call. It was graal, yet natural. Energy, but also spirit, almost tangible. The children didn’t seem to be able steal it or to stop it.

  Why would they?

  This was Lady Pravda’s ultimate weapon.

  Kate. A Stregan maddened by illness, then by cycles of captivity and misuse.

  In her arrogance, Thorn’s Lady Provost had thought she could control such a force, but Aron suspected she had no idea what she had done.

  Kate’s cry was a power unto itself.

  It was a summons, and a warning.

  The few talons left standing on the battlefield let out terrified bugles, and charged away behind fleeing horses. Aron thought he saw Tek amongst them, riderless and frightened, still swiveling her massive head as if she was searching for him.

  Go, he thought, wishing he could command her. Save yourself.

  From the mists of the Deadfall, the sands of the Barrens, and the rocky land of the Outlands came the wails of manes and mockers and rock cats, the screams of Great Rocs still infuriated by their enslavement, the howls of wolves and jackals and other creatures Aron couldn’t even identify.

  A hand closed on Aron’s forearm, and Stormbreaker’s silvery energy dribbled into his own, giving Aron enough power to pull himself to a sitting position.

  Stormbreaker was on his knees beside Aron, head sagging. “She’s … calling them,” he said, the words barely squeezing out of his throat. “The manes and mockers and predators. She’s a ruler of beasts, and she’s calling them… to kill us all.”

  “Kate!” came Dari’s wavering cry, and Aron heard the resonance in that single syllable.

  Dari, yet not Dari.

  Kate’s cries were rousing her Stregan instincts as well, punching through her exhaustion and the damage done by the children. In her weakened mental and physical state, what could Dari do but answer that call, and save her own life?

  Nic’s earlier words rushed back to Aron.

  If you join the battle as a Stregan, only death will come of it…. Don’t shift, for the sake of us all.

  “Don’t do it, Dari,” Aron shouted, on both sides of the Veil, but his words had no graal force behind them—and it was too late.

  A second dragon, this one also white but with black benedet-like swirls on its massive clawed forelegs, rose to greet its twin in the skies above Triune.

  “She is lost,” Stormbreaker whispered, unable to loose so much as a rumble of thunder or a drop of rain as soldiers began to shout and arrows began to fly at the Stregans. “And we are lost with her.”

  The two massive dragons blasted great gouts of flame toward the woods, burning the trees down around Pravda Altar and her quaking child protégés. Aron winced and Stormbreaker sobbed as the children fell. Aron hoped that the little ones felt only the briefest pain before the heat rendered them to ash beside their mistress.

  Energy returned to him in small measures, then more, and more, as the pall exerted by Lady Pravda and those poor children evaporated with their life essence. A crackle of lightning let him know Stormbreaker was feeling relief as well, though the price of that relief was far too terrible to consider.

  Dari and Kate turned their assault on the rogue energy of Lady Mab’s graal. Likely no one would ever know which twin actually killed Eyrie’s queen, if any human walked away from this battle to debate the issue.

  Nic…

  It was Aron’s turn to sob, for he saw no flare of Mab’s ruby-red energy, save for the weak issue of Mab’s many soldiers, who seemed to be scattering in disarray.

  Aron cried for Nic, for Dari, and for Kate, and for the children he had never even known. The twins had no understanding of what they were doing, or of the arrows tearing into their wings and flesh. When they fell—and they would, if they didn’t flee—Aron didn’t think he could survive the pain.

  “Take what I have left,” Stormbreaker begged, thrusting his graal energy toward Aron, intending to give his life to allow Aron enough power to do something to help Dari, or maybe Lord Cobb, who had roused his forces to battle back a surging host of mockers and rock cats and wolves. Humanlike monstrosities spit poison, striking holes in armor and Sabor fur—and Lord Ross had locked swords with Lord Brailing, their Guard scattering to get out of the way of the fierce battle.

  Aron hated himself for taking Stormbreaker’s energy, but he let the essence of lightning, thunder, and rain flow into his mind, his muscles, his essence. He fought his way to his feet, dragging Stormbreaker with him. They clung to each other as those tiny children might have done in their last moments.

  “Let me fall, Aron,” Stormbreaker said, trying to pull free of him, but Aron wouldn’t turn him loose. “If you don’t let me fall, you can’t save her.”

  Aron couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill Stormbreaker even to save Dari. Tears flowed down his face and through his essence—until Stormbreaker was ripped from his grasp. Aron stumbled but managed to draw his short sword as Stormbreaker crashed to the ground near the moat.

  A tall man dressed in dark robes towered over Stormbreaker’s fallen form. He had an old military sword raised in one hand, and in the other, he hoisted a great curved blade to hack Stormbreaker’s head from his shoulders. The man’s fingers were red and scarred, but Aron could see nothing of his face, because the man had wrapped himself like a Barrens sand-farmer.

  “Bandit!” Aron cried, striking the man with a burst of his graal energy, and spending most of it in that instant. His hand dropped to the belt at his waist, the one holding the pebble with the runes naming his first Judged. “Canus the Bandit. If you touch him, you’ll die where you stand.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  NIC

  The world made sense to Nic, but only in moments and pieces.

  Visions flooded his consciousness as the spark of his graal tried to reignite, failed, then sparked again.

  Had he suffered a fit?

  But no, he was not in Snakekiller’s wagon, or in his bed in the Stone infirmary.
He was in a field on a hillside, lying next to his mother.

  A moment later, Nic remembered more.

  When he rolled over and touched his mother’s burned face, he knew she was dead, but he didn’t know if he was sorry.

  The feral cries in the skies above him punched at his mind, but he couldn’t focus on them, couldn’t hold on to their meaning.

  Mab soldiers ran past him, and he realized their ranks were breaking and falling into chaos.

  They would be no help in this battle. Thanks to his mother’s madness, the soldiers couldn’t name their enemies, much less destroy them. There was something he had to do, but his graal seemed so sluggish he couldn’t call out to Aron or Dari for help, or even put his task into words. His mind-talent reached out for anyone and anything that might help him, making contact with more beasts than people, but maybe that was all right. Maybe a beast was what he needed.

  Minutes later, or maybe longer, a blast of snot covered his face, and Tek bumped him with her big, square nose.

  Nic reached up and grabbed her thick neck, willing himself to his feet, and somehow forcing his twisted body onto her back. His muscles burned, and his bones popped and cracked with each movement. More than once, he screamed aloud as he settled himself into the talon’s saddle.

  “Get me to the main gate and keep,” he told her, pulling at her one remaining rein until her head turned in the correct direction. “There’s something I have to do.”

  Tek gave a frightened trumpet, but she stomped forward, pushing through Mab soldiers, brushing past gryphons and Guardsmen, and dodging blasts of fire from the sky.

  Nic’s thoughts swam back and forth, but he saw little, and made sense of even less. His mind showed him his path, Eyrie’s path, and all he could do was follow it.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  ARON

  Fire strafed the ground near the moat, setting the water to boil and cooking corpses and mocker-fish alike.

  Aron and Canus the Bandit both leaped away from the destruction, but Aron never took his eyes from his quarry.

  With one hand, Aron dragged Stormbreaker away from the water’s edge, enough to be certain the remaining water-bound mockers wouldn’t kill him. His graal was nowhere near strong enough to reach out to Dari, and he didn’t think he could have much impact on the battle at hand.

  Flashes of silver at the far edges of the woods caught Aron’s attention, and a glistening wave of energy rippled out from the trees. It took Aron a moment to understand that the wave was actually made of people, tall and light-skinned and unarmed, dressed in simple cloth instead of armor. Led by Rakel Seadaughter, the citizens of Dyn Vagrat—nearly all of them, it looked like—flowed onto the battlefield and spread out amongst the fallen, reaching to minister to wounds and suffering.

  Almost at the same moment, Canus the Bandit lowered his blades. When his attention shifted to the rise on the side of the valley behind Aron, Aron figured it for a ruse.

  Then he heard the shouts from the battlefield, and the change in the cries of the dragons.

  Turning himself so he could see both Canus and the rise, Aron noticed what looked like a hundred golden-skinned, leather-clad people standing along the hilltop that had given him his first view of Triune, and his full understanding of the destruction the castle now faced. His senses sharpened, and his graal told him that none of these people were armed.

  His instincts led him to focus more closely on one man, who stood slightly forward. Aron let his awareness slide through the Veil, and his enhanced sight showed him a familiar leather tunic, stitched with the ruby image of a dragon in flight.

  The man seemed to sense Aron’s presence, and he nodded as if in greeting.

  It is, in part, for you that we are here, Aron Weylyn.

  The voice was so quiet that Aron wasn’t positive he heard it, but the light in the man’s eyes made him more certain. You, and your friend Nic. If Fae like you have returned to this land, perhaps we shall find our place amongst you.

  Dari and Kate let off a fresh round of screams, sounds that dug so deeply into Aron he couldn’t answer the man. He could barely keep his senses as Dari’s cousin Platt raised his hand, and his host of Stregan warriors charged down the hill, forms shifting with each step they took.

  “Brother save us,” said someone, maybe even Canus the Bandit. “They’re Stregans, too. They’ve come to protect their own.”

  A talon ran past Aron, and at the same moment, a battering ram once more struck the gates of Triune.

  “Tek?” Aron called, but the talon didn’t slow. Her rider was wreathed in a red so ruby-rich and deep Aron knew it had to be Nic, but that made no sense to him.

  With a great cracking groan, the beleaguered wood finally gave way, just in time to admit Tek and Nic, and a host of Altar warbirds behind them.

  As the skies of Eyrie exploded with fire-breathing dragons, Canus the Bandit fled past Aron toward the ruined gates, as if he were chasing after Nic and Tek, or maybe the Altar soldiers.

  It took Aron a moment to react, but he started running, too.

  To reach Tek and Nic.

  To pursue the Bandit.

  To escape the fire raining down on the battlefield—he really didn’t know.

  Aron just ran, brandishing his short sword before him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  DARI

  Dari came back to herself on the ground, with her cousin Platt beside her, holding her hand and guiding her quickly through her transition.

  Kate had landed with them, and was also fast returning to her human form.

  Dari gave a cry at how thin her twin was, and how fragile she seemed, then she let go of her cousin and wrapped her sobbing twin in her arms. For long moments, Dari could do nothing but savor their connection even as she searched through the Veil for some hint of her husband and grandfather, or of Aron, or Stormbreaker.

  Graal energy was still so muted from the attack of the children Thorn had stolen and trained for their own purposes. Dari wondered what had become of the poor little creatures. They were dead, surely, and if so, Dari hoped Lady Pravda had perished with them.

  Stregans still in dragon-form surrounded them, an impenetrable wall of claws and teeth and fire. Beyond them, Sabor formed ranks in their gryphon forms, adding another layer of protection. No arrow or spear or pike would penetrate this wall of flesh and scales and fur.

  Dari located her grandfather and joined her energy with his just in time to feel the rattling jolt of sword on bone.

  Through her grandfather’s eyes, Dari watched as Lord Brailing’s helm flew off.

  The old wretch spewed blood from between his pale lips, then fell forward as Lord Ross yanked his blade free of the man’s half-severed neck.

  Kate and Dari snarled together, one sound, both human and Stregan, welcoming this victory, and letting Lord Ross know they were both alive and safe.

  His shout of joy rang across the battlefield, and across the Veil.

  Dari felt the shifts in energy as Platt directed and controlled the Stregans with his graal, working with their untamed energy, never allowing them to break free and feed on friends as well as foes. He dispersed most of the manes and mockers and beasts tearing into the armies of Eyrie. Those creatures attacking Brailing and Altar forces, he left alone, except to make certain they didn’t advance on the soldiers of Dyn Cobb or Dyn Ross.

  Dyn Mab’s soldiers were the most numerous, but seemingly the most confused. They attacked without sense or direction, both a menace and a help, and Dari couldn’t understand their purpose as they plunged the battlefield back into absolute chaos.

  Platt’s dark eyes weren’t focused on anything save for the main gate and keep of Triune. “You’re with child,” he said, matter-of-fact, and Dari turned Kate loose when she realized Platt was speaking to her.

  Her hand moved to her belly, and Kate’s hand slid across hers. Kate’s dark eyes widened as they both took in the stirring of life in Dari’s womb.

  “A son,” Kate
whispered. “A son with powerful graal. Stregan and Mab energy joined together—just as the rectors tried to do during the mixing disasters, but failed so many times.” She paused, then added, “That’s good, Dari. For us, for Eyrie, I think.”

  Platt grunted his agreement, then pointed to the tallest point on the right tower of the main gate and keep. “Would that be the father?”

  Dari’s gaze whipped toward the tower, and her awareness leaped through the Veil.

  Nic.

  Cayn’s mercy.

  Her husband was perched on the tallest point of the tower’s roof.

  Nic! she called across the Veil, but he didn’t seem to hear her. His mind was so focused on his task that he had closed out the rest of the world.

  As Dari watched, clinging to Kate and crying out with all the force left in her body, Nic spread his arms and leaped off Triune’s tower.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  NIC

  Air blasted against Nic’s face and body, tearing at his skin, his senses, his mind as he dropped toward the hard battlefield ground below.

  His stomach lurched upward, just like before, like the weightless blankness nothingness that took him when he sailed off the castle turret at Can Rowan.

  What happened then was clear to him now.

  I reached for something and grabbed hold of the future.

  I called the future to me.

  And I flew.

  The ground seemed closer, and closer still.

  He doubled his fists.

  The miracle had to happen again, before he died, before Mab’s soldiers killed their countrymen and one another, before Eyrie descended into war after war, until there was nothing left but death and suffering.

  If Nic didn’t unite his people, no one would.

  The muscles in his back tore and ripped, and Nic shouted from the fresh agony, suspended in time, but not in space.

  He threw the force of his will behind his intent, and with every bit of graal available to him, he pulled Eyrie’s future into his mind, into his essence. He let the future explode from the cells of his body, from his fingertips and toes, from his screaming mouth and disintegrating bones.