Knightswrath (The Dragonkin Trilogy Book 2)

by Michael Meyerhofer

  Jalist searched the shelves and cabinets and found bread—stale but edible—plus some dried sausages. Untapped barrels of beer were stacked high in the cellar. His stomach rumbled again, but he did not eat. He had the wild thought that maybe everyone in the village had been poisoned.

  Searching for clues, he checked each of the inn’s rooms. More dark stains and broken furniture but no bodies. No discarded weapons or scorch marks left by fire.

  Someone hauled off all the bodies. They took the weapons, too. But they left all the food behind. Dhargots wouldn’t do that. They’d impale the dead… and the living.

  Jalist wondered who else might dare attack Dwarrs in their own realm. His people kept to themselves, staying well out of the feuds of the other kingdoms of Ruun, but they had a formidable army and were famously protective of their own. An old adage often recited by Dwarr stated that an assault on the least of them must be answered with the same ferocity as an assault on the king himself.

  He remembered the battlefield he’d seen earlier and wondered if that was connected somehow to the incident in the village. But he could not imagine Dhargots or Lancers doing such damage. And it did not seem like the Isle Knights’ style. That left the nomadic Queshi, whose realm was southwest of here. But they were frequent traders with the Dwarrs, and Queshi always fought on horseback, firing their composite bows from the saddle. The attack had been done on foot, with blades. Face to face, eye to eye. So who does that leave?

  He inspected the bloodstains again. They were old. He considered investigating every house in Stonehome, searching for anything branded with a sigil. Instead, he left the inn and followed the sound of crows. After only a few minutes of walking, he was forced to cover his nose. Even though he knew what he would find, he pressed on.

  He found the bodies in a gorge. Dwarrs and livestock alike had been flung down and left there, tangled and uncovered. A great murder of crows swirled overhead. They screamed with frustration because the gorge was deep and filled with death but too narrow for more than a few of them to access at a time. The crows fought savagely for the remains, even though there was flesh enough to feed them all ten times over.

  The bodies were slashed all over but dressed, with belts and pouches around their waists. He even spotted the glint of weapons in the gorge. Whatever force had wiped out the town had invested just enough effort to remove the bodies from plain sight without bothering to rob them.

  Jalist shook his head. He had seen death before, even slain children. But the attack on Stonehome was different, done purely for pleasure, for sport. He doubted that even the Dhargots were that sadistic.

  Whoever killed them could still be here. Jalist scoured the ground for a trail. He found it easily enough. As impossible as it seemed, the trail belonged to only a handful of killers, on foot. The trail led southward, toward Tarator. There were tears in Jalist’s eyes, but those same eyes narrowed as he straightened, gripped his sword, and began following the trail.

  An hour later, he found another town. Like the last, it, too, had been ravaged. But the dead had been left where they’d fallen. Jalist called upon all of his willpower to force himself to investigate the slaughter’s aftermath. The Dwarrs had not been taken by surprise. He found both men and women armed with axes, bows, and shortswords. He saw shields and Dwarrish ringmail. What he did not see were dead attackers.

  Jalist told himself that the killers might have carried off their own slain. He searched for clues about the invaders—a foreign weapon, a buckle off a dead man’s armor, or a scrap of fabric with a sigil on it. He found nothing. That frightened him. No matter how meticulous the invaders had been in hauling off their own dead, surely in all that chaos, they could never have completely cleansed the battlefield of their identity.

  Jalist searched and searched. Gradually, he accepted the grim reality: the Dwarrs had not managed to kill a single enemy.

  A chill raced down Jalist’s spine. Magic? He remembered hearing that some forty or fifty years ago, a younger King Fedwyr had sent his Housecarls to attack Fadarah when he tried to settle on the outskirts of their realm. Perhaps the Shel’ai had come for revenge. But surely, the sorcerers had more pressing battles to wage. Besides, even if some kind of magic had been used to immobilize the Dwarrs, they had been slaughtered with steel.

  Fine. Not the Dhargots, not the Shel’ai, not the Ivairians, not the Olgrym, not the Queshi, and certainly not the Sylvs, the Lyosi, or the Isle Knights. And not fellow Dwarrs, slaughtering each other. Who, then?

  Jalist wondered why the killers had bothered to hide the corpses in the first village if they would leave others where they lay. His stomach clenched as he inspected the rotting flesh. He suspected this town had been attacked soon after the first. Hiding the dead in the first village wouldn’t conceal the slaughter from the rest of the Dwarrs, since it was moving in their direction anyway. But it might conceal it from anybody passing through the Red Steppes.

  Jalist clenched his fist. So someone invaded the realm and started slaughtering Dwarr but didn’t want any of the other realms to find out about it. At least, not right away.

  What kind of host could wipe out two whole villages of Dwarrs without sustaining any losses? Among the Dwarrs, boys and girls alike were taught to fight starting at an early age. Even the children could throw axes with deadly accuracy.

  Maybe the attacks happened in the middle of the night. But he found no burnt-out torches on the battlefield and no characteristic smoke stains on the walls. The Dwarrs had died in daylight. There had been plenty of warning. It simply had not made a difference.

  Jalist glanced in the direction of Tarator. Whatever had killed all those warriors could still be there. Besides, he was an exile. The Dwarrs weren’t even his people anymore. He considered fleeing then continued south.

  The carnage only worsened as he traveled deeper into his homeland. Dead Dwarrs lay on the road, not just commoners but whole squads of Housecarls, too. The famed fighters had been mowed down in columns with no more difficulty than the dead sheep and goats scattered in the hills.

  Impossible. But there they were, in cleaved and bloodied ringmail, near fallen banners depicting a black wingless dragon set against a golden mountain on a field of white. Jalist trembled. For the first time, he feared finding Leander’s face among the fallen.

  No chance of that. He never was much of a fighter. Besides, the Housecarls would protect him. If Tarator were in danger, they would move him farther south—all the way to the sands of Dendain, if need be.

  But then what? Would they hurry him onto a ship and send him away? If so, where would he go?

  Jalist shook his head. One mystery at a time. But wherever you are, Leander, I’ll find you.

  He fought the impulse to sprint as he continued south. He fought, too, the desire to call out in search of survivors. For all he knew, the enemy was just over the next hill. Better they meet him only when they felt his blade splitting their spines at the neck.

  By sundown, Jalist still had not seen a single living thing, except for the crows. On foot, he was still a full day’s journey from Tarator. That meant he would have to seek shelter. And, as much as the sight of so much death had turned his stomach, he would have to eat.

  At the next ravaged village, he covered his nose and forced himself to enter an inn. Deciding that concealing his tattoo was the least of his worries, he removed his cloak and turned it into a makeshift sack, which he filled with dried meats, what little bread hadn’t gone moldy, and a skin of strong beer.

  As dark started to fall, the silence of the dead village frightened him all the more. He left quickly, frequently turning to look behind him. He had no intention of camping on the open road, so he went into the hills. He passed a field full of dead livestock. Nearby, he found a cottage with the family still inside, but he could not bring himself to haul out their corpses or force himself to sleep near them. So he moved on, his limbs heavy, his senses frayed. He knew he needed sleep, but he couldn’t imagine stopping anywher
e in the nightmare and closing his eyes.

  Finally, he found a ditch without corpses and a hole partially overgrown with tree roots. He crawled inside. Just then, it began to rain.

  “Perfect,” he muttered. The sound of his own voice frightened him.

  Shaking his head, he forced himself to eat. His stomach lurched, and he vomited up his first attempt. He drank half the beer, and once he felt his head swimming, he managed to keep down the rest of his food. He was tempted to finish the beer, but he knew he needed to keep his senses sharp. Cold and miserable, he wrapped himself in his cloak and tried to sleep.

  The nightmares came at once. He saw Tarator burning. He saw Leander being hacked to pieces. Jalist tried to reach him, but his legs had stopped working. Finally, somehow, he reached him, but Jalist’s axe did no harm to the shapeless demons tearing the Dwarrish prince with their claws. Then the shapeless demons turned to face him. They reeked of blood and sour milk. Terror filled him, and Jalist fled. He left Leander behind, and the prince laughed at him, screamed for help, and cursed him. And even in his dreams, Jalist wept.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ROYAL BLOOD

  Rowen woke from nightmares of fire, battle, and his brother. For a moment, he wondered where he was. He groped in the dark and, by chance, touched the thick black cloth covering the luminstone that his captors had left on the nightstand beside his bed. He tore away the cloth. No longer concealed, the luminstone’s soft-blue glow drove back some of the shadows. Rowen sat up, shirtless, and rubbed his eyes.

  “You were dreaming about Olgrym again.”

  Rowen jumped. Silwren was sitting in a chair across the room. The luminstone’s glow made her violet eyes look as black as night. She stood slowly and approached him. Her wispy nightgown was nearly transparent. Rowen felt his blood stir, even though her approach brought with it a pang of dread. He forced a smile to his lips.

  “Next time you rescue me, feel free to wake me up soon as you get here.” Rowen spotted his tunic and pulled it on. Blushing, he drew his trousers over his smallclothes, though Silwren did not seem to notice.

  “How long till dawn?” He glanced at his room’s three beautiful arched windows, but they were utterly dark. The sunrise was difficult to see through all those towering wytchwood trees, anyway.

  “The Olgrym are still a few hours away. The fighters are massing at the World Gate.”

  Rowen glanced past her at the closed door. He wondered if she had incapacitated the Sylvan guards outside or merely ghosted into the room. Since she had not yet led him out the door, he figured it must be the latter. “Are you going to join them?”

  Silwren gave him a look he could not interpret. “I have not been invited.”

  “Since when did someone need an invitation to defend themselves?” Rowen rubbed his eyes. A few frightful tendrils of his dream—dung-smeared Olgrym howling madly, setting themselves on fire before they charged—still clung to him. “Besides, you’re a Shel’ai in the Sylvan capital, and they aren’t trying to kill you. I think that’s as much of an invitation as you’re going to get.”

  Silwren stared at the luminstone as though she had not heard him.

  Rowen resisted the sudden urge to shake her. He went to a basin and splashed cold water on his face, grabbed a towel, and dried off. “I take it they still haven’t talked to you.” When Silwren shook her head, he said, “I tried to talk Briel into asking you for help.”

  For the first time, Silwren smiled faintly. “What did he say?”

  “More or less what you’d expect.” Rowen tossed aside the towel. “Doesn’t mean we can’t march down to the World Gate and help them anyway.”

  Silwren raised one eyebrow. “You want me to fight on behalf of people who will probably fire a hundred arrows at me as soon as they see me?”

  Rowen thought back to Que’ahl, where the Sylvs had considered peppering them with arrows, only to watch as Silwren turned all the arrows to ash. If she wanted to, she could turn the mighty World Gate to cinders along with the Olgrym and Sylvs.

  But that might drive her mad… and a mad Dragonkin is even more dangerous than a sane one. If there is such a thing. Rowen reminded himself that she could very well be reading his mind, and he cleared his thoughts. “Well, if you’re not going to side with the Sylvs, why in the hells are we here?”

  “We are here because you insisted on it.”

  “The Oath of Kin?” He flexed his empty hands and looked around, again, for something he might use as a weapon. “I was wrong. We shouldn’t have come here. Maybe we should just go.”

  “Go where?”

  Rowen considered taking Silwren east, so she could help the Isle Knights fight the Dhargots. But he’d lost Knightswrath. Crovis Ammerhel would see him put to death for that. “The Free Cities. The Dhargots are burning them. I say we go to the closest one and burn the Dhargots instead.”

  The words quickened his blood, but as soon as he saw Silwren’s droll expression, he knew she intended to refuse.

  “We both know you aren’t going to leave Shaffrilon, Human. And neither will I.”

  “But you still won’t fight?”

  Silwren turned to stare quietly at the luminstone.

  “You still haven’t chosen a side, have you?”

  Silwren winced. “I’ve killed Shel’ai… my own kind. I’ve protected you against everyone who’s tried to kill you. What more do you want from me?”

  Rowen thought back to the scroll they’d stolen from Atheion, telling of how Fâyu Jinn’s beloved had sacrificed her own life to ignite a terrible power within Knightswrath. That power had turned the tide of the Shattering War. Guilt filled him. What right did he have to ask that same price from Silwren? Besides, if Silwren could bring herself to kill Fadarah and Shade, then use her existing magic to help drive back the Dhargots, Knightswrath would not be necessary.

  Rowen turned and poured a glass of wine. He poured another for Silwren and passed it to her wordlessly. She took it with trembling hands.

  “Your people make good wine,” he said. “A little sweet but strong as hell. Jalist would love this.”

  “You’re worried about the Dwarr.”

  Rowen nodded. “Can you… use your magic to see him? Is he safe?”

  “He’s too far. And… I am not myself.” Silwren took a long drink, nearly draining her glass.

  Rowen wondered if Shel’ai could get drunk. Might be she needs to. He offered to refill her glass, but she shook her head.

  “You had a knack for forgetting that Fadarah is my father,” she said suddenly. “In virtue, if not in blood. My father. And you want me to kill him.”

  Rowen thought of Kayden again. “If you want to talk about family…”

  Silwren gave him what he thought was an apologetic look. “I know our sins—his and mine. Still, what you ask—”

  A shrill trumpet blast interrupted her. Rowen jumped again, nearly dropping his glass. “Olgrym?”

  Silwren closed her eyes. A faint, violet glow flared about her body then dimmed. She opened her eyes. “Just a vanguard. Their main host isn’t here yet. But there’s fighting at the gate.”

  Rowen nodded. He had already seen how little concern Olgrym had for tactics. They seemed to relish the idea of dying in battle. He imagined the vanguard hurling themselves at the World Gate, braving an impassible storm of arrows and steel, reveling in any slaughter—even their own. Rowen’s fist clenched around the wine glass. He drained it and set it down, fighting back the rush of blood that went to his head.

  “Well, if you don’t want to fight, we have no reason to be here. I say we leave before the Sylvs realize you aren’t still locked in your room.”

  For a long time, Silwren stood motionless, breathing faster, like a trapped animal. “I feel… something strange. I’ve felt it before, but I thought it was just my own madness. It reminds me of how I felt when Iventine or El’rash’lin were close by… Iventine, especially.”

  Rowen thought of the Nightmare, all scaled and fl
aming before the gates of Lyos, and shuddered. “Are you sensing Fadarah and the other Shel’ai?”

  “Maybe,” Silwren said, though she sounded doubtful. “I have to face them, Knight. You’re right. I haven’t chosen a side yet. But I must try one last time to stop them with words. If that fails, I’ll stop them with fire.”

  “You’ve promised that before.”

  Silwren looked up, hurt, then nodded. “So I have. But if you have faith enough for one last promise, I’ll make you one. Before the sun sets again, either I die or Fadarah does.”

  Her body blurred, as though he were seeing her through a waterfall. Then she vanished altogether. Rowen glanced at the dark mouths of the windows, listening to the distant cries of alarm and battle. He wondered if he should pity her or be angry at her for not setting him free before she disappeared.

  Finally, left with nothing to do, Rowen considered trying to sleep again. He covered the luminstone with the dark cloth again. But he’d hardly lain down in bed when he heard shouting outside his door. He rose and pulled the black cloth off the luminstone just in time to see the door flung open. A thin, wild-eyed Sylv lurched into the room, dressed in richly embroidered bedclothes. He had a knife.

  Rowen moved to the far side of the room, thinking for a moment that some madman from the capital had decided to kill him. The Sylvan guards entered his room as well. He thought they would restrain the thin man and wrest the knife from his hand. Instead, they drew their swords and stood by the door.

  The wild-eyed Sylv stabbed at the air in Rowen’s direction. “Where is she, Human?” The Sylv spoke in heavily accented Common.

  Rowen picked up a wine glass. He pretended to drink the last few drops, even as he rehearsed he motion that would allow him to break the glass on the nightstand and arm himself with a glass shard. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir, but I like your tailor. Tell me, does he live in the capital?”