Heart of the King

by Bruce Blake

  Graymon pushed forward, intending to rush to his father’s side, but his feet didn’t touch ground. Instead, he was falling. His father disappeared, the village and tyger disappeared, leaving only him and the air rushing around him and nothing else.

  Graymon clamped his eyes shut. The rush of wind tossed his hair, air buffeted his face. He fell for a long while, eyes shut the whole time, until the wagon hit a bump, jarring him awake. Graymon opened his eyes.

  The darkness left him feeling disoriented and nauseated. He opened his mouth to call his Nanny, but the rumble of the wagon’s wooden wheels on uneven ground brought him back from his dream to reality. He sighed deeply to settle his belly and shifted on the uncomfortable boards of the wagon’s floor.

  He’d been awake for a minute when he noticed it wasn’t as dark as he first thought. He turned his head.

  A slight glow emanated from the woman, an undeniable aura of light around her. She sat on the bench where Graymon had spent much of the trip, regarding him with a look like Nanny used when he said something she found amusing. The boy held his breath when he saw her.

  “Hello, Graymon.”

  He stared at her full head of red hair, the freckles tossed carelessly across her cheeks. This wasn’t the same woman responsible for his captivity in the rickety cart surrounded by decaying soldiers, but he didn’t know her. He didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend.”

  I’m still dreaming.

  The woman’s smile widened; she held her hand out in an offer of comfort. Graymon peeked at her fingernails to see if tiny scenes of horror and death danced across hers like they did on the fingernails of the other woman, but there were none. Instead, the woman’s nails were unpainted and trimmed short. As he looked at her hands, he realized he could see the floorboards of the wagon through them.

  I’m still dreaming.

  He shrank away, holding his arm protectively against his chest. When the woman saw he wouldn’t take her hand, she took it back and leaned forward. Her smile faded and her eyes found and held his.

  “The tyger of your dreams is coming,” she said. “But he is a man.”

  “A man?” He never saw a man in the dreams, only the tyger.

  “Yes. A good man. He has dreamed of you, too.”

  “Really?”

  Graymon surveyed the wagon’s confined space, half-expecting to see the tyger or the man waiting in the shadows to reveal himself at a word from the ghostly woman. He saw no one. When he looked back to the woman, she was nodding.

  “Yes. He is coming to rescue you and keep you safe.”

  Graymon’s eyes widened.

  “To take me back to my da?”

  “If that is possible.”

  This is a good dream.

  The woman smiled again, though this time the expression held a wistfulness it didn’t have before. Graymon smiled back.

  “He will be coming soon. Watch for him.”

  “But how will I know him?”

  “You won’t need to. He’ll know you.”

  Graymon nodded. The light around the woman dimmed, her form faded. Before disappearing, she raised her hands and wiggled her fingers at him. He waved back. A second later, she was gone.

  What an unusual dream.

  He rested his head against the floor of the wagon, wondering what other dreams this sleep may hold. As his head touched, the left wheel of the cart hit a deep rut, rattling boards and jarring Graymon’s arm. Pain shot through his shoulder and into his chest; he cried out. The pain and the sound of his own voice startled him and he sat up, staring into the darkness.

  It wasn’t a dream.

  Chapter Six

  Khirro’s eyes fluttered open to see the washed-out blue of an autumn sky above. It calmed him, though whatever he lay upon pushed against his back, hard and uncomfortable.

  I’ve been here before.

  He recalled laying on the stairs of the Isthmus Fortress, when King Braymon saved him from a dead soldier’s rusted axe, then tumbling down the steps and nearly killing himself. Khirro closed his eyes and concentrated on remembering what happened after the fall down the stairs. Through his hazy and indistinct memory, the Shaman’s face came to him, then a soldier he once thought his friend. All at once, everything came back, and he saw his companions, their trip and sacrifices, their deaths. Everyone dead except him and Athryn.

  If Braymon hadn’t saved him, if he hadn’t fallen and put himself in position to be the one cursed to raise the king, he wouldn’t be wherever he was now and all his friends wouldn’t be dead.

  Then he remembered the Kanosee soldier in the tomato field with his sword raised skyward to strike the killing blow.

  “I am dead.”

  “No, Khirro. You are not dead.”

  Khirro turned his head toward the familiar voice and opened his eyes to look at the magician’s face. Athryn wasn’t looking at him, instead concentrating as he dipped the tip of his knife in a black liquid held by a cup-shaped stone. He pressed the point to a bare spot of flesh on his inner thigh and sucked breath through his teeth as a mix of black ink and red blood ran down his leg. It had been the job of his now-dead brother Maes to inscribe the spells in his flesh; this was the first time Khirro had seen Athryn do it himself.

  “Where are we?”

  “I do not know exactly.”

  Khirro’s brow creased.

  “How did we get here?”

  “I brought us.”

  “You brought us here, but you don’t know where here is?”

  Athryn shook his head.

  “Sounds a bit dangerous, don’t you think?”

  “And trying to best six warriors in battle is not?”

  Khirro sat up, the wounds he’d sustained during the brief battle surprisingly free from pain.

  He healed me, too.

  “Good point.”

  He saw he’d been lying on a stone path running between a number of buildings, all of them at least partially destroyed by force, fire, or both. A stout wall in similar disrepair surrounded the village.

  “Is there anyone else here?”

  Athryn’s knife dimpled his flesh again; he sucked another breath through his teeth and closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts before answering.

  “No one here alive but us.”

  The rotted faces of undead soldiers jumped to Khirro’s thoughts and he leaped to his feet, grasping for the hilt of the Mourning Sword to find it missing. Athryn paused in his tattooing and looked up.

  “The Mourning Sword,” Khirro gasped.

  “One of the soldiers knocked it from your grasp.”

  Khirro searched the ground by his feet, took a few steps toward the nearest run-down hut, but stopped when he thought of the ghastly undead soldier who came close to taking his life. He stopped short of the entrance. A pair of feet—one bare, the other clad in a worn boot—were visible just beyond the threshold. The flesh of the bootless foot was wizened like the corpses in the field.

  “Where is it? Did you bring it?”

  Athryn dabbed blood and ink from his thigh with the sleeve of his shirt, stood and walked to his companion’s side.

  “Khirro, I did not carry you here. The fallen soldier’s death gave me the power I needed to transport us.” He paused. “I could not bring the sword.”

  Khirro stared, anger roiling in his gut, but he held it in. The magician wasn’t to blame for him dropping the sword. On the contrary, Athryn was the reason he still lived. Again. No one deserved his anger but himself.

  “We have to go back for it.”

  “Go back where? We do not know where we are. And the sword will not be there. What soldier would not take it for his own?”

  Khirro gritted his teeth, his anger at himself increasing as he realized he’d not only lost the legendary Mourning Sword, but that doing so left him swordless in the land of the enemy. He looked away from Athryn, chewed his bottom lip until he tasted blood.

  “You said we’re the on
ly ones alive?”

  “Yes. Nothing but corpses like in the field. Many of them.”

  “But none of them are moving?”

  Athryn cracked a smile and put his hand on Khirro’s soldier.

  “No, none of them move.”

  Khirro walked toward the ruined hovels. He felt Athryn’s eyes on his back until the magician’s footsteps took him back to where he’d been sitting. A minute later, he heard him suck a pained breath as he returned to inscribing a fresh spell upon his leg.

  Khirro peered into the first hut. The desiccated corpse within looked to have been a man, but it was difficult to be sure. The eyeballs were missing, long chewed out by some vermin, and its patches of stringy hair gave no clue. Only the tattered shirt and dirty breeches suggested the dead person’s gender.

  In the next building, he found no corpses, though the table was set for a meal: three plates, three cups, three forks. They were picked clean by scavengers but for the last few crumbs of bread remaining on the wooden board set in the middle of the table.

  Khirro wandered building to building, peering into the ones still standing, occasionally toeing the charred remains of huts burned to the ground. He’d counted twenty-five corpses by the time he reached the shack that made him pause.

  It was half fallen-down and sparsely furnished, like the others, left as though life stopped in the middle of everything. A rocking chair sat beside a long burnt-out fire in a stone hearth; a woman’s corpse sat in the rocker. She wasn’t as badly dried-out as the others, her raven hair brushed and tidy, her gray dress without holes, her eyes closed. She looked peaceful as she sat with her legs crossed at the ankles and a bundle held to her chest.

  A familiarity to the scene caused a stirring in Khirro’s chest, but he couldn’t discern whether he recognized the place from a dream or from his life before being forced into the king’s army, before being cursed with his burden of restoring the king. That life seemed too long ago to remember, its contents hidden from him by the fog of time.

  He stepped across the threshold and found that the warm air inside smelled of dust and neglect, not death. The corners lay in shadow and his hand went instinctively to the scabbard where it would normally find the Mourning Sword, his fingers clutching empty air.

  “Gods,” he cursed and pulled his dagger instead.

  Each footfall raised a puff of dust as he crossed the room, eyes searching the shadows. Nothing moved. Five paces took him to the rocking chair where he stood, dagger in hand, staring down at the bundle the dead woman clutched, staring at the baby which she held to her breast even in death.

  A blanket, gray with age and tattered at the edges, swaddled the babe. Khirro pulled a corner of the blanket aside gently and saw the child’s cheek was plump, its skin smooth. Somehow, the child was the only thing he’d come across in his search that looked as though it may have been recently alive. He watched its face for a moment, doubting what he saw.

  The baby’s eyes opened and looked directly into his.

  Khirro gasped and stumbled back a step, feet catching; he tumbled to the dirt floor in a cloud of dust, landed hard on his backside and stayed there looking up at the woman and her bundle. The child made him think of another baby he’d seen in the recent past in another ruined village, but the mud baby had been a dream. This time, he was awake.

  He clamored to his feet and brushed dirt off his breeches as he stood, eyes never leaving the grubby blanket until he heard a sound behind him. He spun around, dagger held out before him, but saw nothing.

  When Khirro faced the woman again, he immediately sensed a change. The child sat lower on the woman’s lap, as though she’d slumped and her bundle slipped from her breast. As Khirro looked, the corpse shifted. He jumped back. The swaddled infant rolled off the dead woman’s lap and hit the floor with a dull thump, the blanket’s corner caught between her knees. The bundle rolled toward him, gray cloth unwinding until it came to rest near his feet.

  The baby’s once-plump cheeks were sallow, its glossy eyes pasted closed. The wrinkled skin on its face made its head look like an apple that had passed months beyond rotten. A tiny, brittle-looking arm stuck out at an odd angle, reaching toward Khirro’s foot. He stared at the dead thing, confused.

  “How...?”

  “It’s the magic. Athryn is right.”

  The unfamiliar voice startled Khirro and he swung the knife as he turned before thinking about what he was doing. If the woman had indeed been a woman, the knife would have opened a long wound across her belly. Instead, it passed through her.

  Khirro looked at the woman’s face, then down at the knife in his hand. His fingers loosened and the dagger tumbled to the dirt floor.

  “Elyea?”

  The word caught in his throat.

  “The Archon’s actions have broken the laws of nature and magic. Every time she raises an undead soldier, the life to sustain it must come from somewhere. They come from here.”

  She swept her arm in front of her indicating the building in which they stood, but Khirro knew she meant the village, or perhaps all of Kanos. He followed the sweep of her arm and saw again the slumping corpse of the woman, the dried-out babe at his feet, each of their lives lost in service of creating one of the hideous monstrosities he’d seen at the Isthmus Fortress. He imagined their essences as a stream of translucent color sucked out of them as the mother rocked back and forth, comforting her child. The streams of color twisted into a rope and seeped out the walls, escaped up the chimney, gone to fuel the rotted soldiers, the mother and child’s lives involuntarily given up for a cause they likely didn’t know existed.

  “How bad is it? Is all of Kanos like this?”

  Elyea’s ghostly feet carried her past Khirro to the dead woman’s side where she stopped and looked down into the shriveled face. Khirro reached out to touch her hair as she passed.

  “The Kanosee army has entered the Isthmus Fortress.”

  Khirro stared at the back of her head without seeing the waves of red hair which had tempted his touch seconds before.

  I must have heard wrong.

  “The fortress? What? How?”

  She faced him.

  “Therrador was proclaimed king after Braymon’s death. He opened the gates to the Archon and her troops.”

  Khirro’s gut shifted, his chest constricted. Anger rumbled at the back of his throat.

  “Bastard betrayer.”

  The words came from his lips, a growl fueled by rage, but they didn’t feel as though they belonged to him. Elyea tilted her head, looked deep into his eyes. The wan light in the room found the green in her eyes, made them sparkle. His chest loosened and he felt control return.

  “He had no choice. She took his son.”

  “Graymon?”

  He knew nothing of Therrador, yet the name of a child he knew in his dreams came out of his mouth as if he was the boy’s Godfather. Elyea nodded.

  “Therrador knows his mistake but the threat to his son clouds his decisions. Unless the boy is safe, it’s difficult for him to be on our side.”

  “Where is Graymon?”

  “They are bringing him to Kanos.”

  “Athryn and I could rescue him. Do you know where he is?”

  She nodded. “This is why I have come. They are going to the capital. If you follow the main road toward the land bridge, you will intercept them.”

  He didn’t say anything, instead looking into her lake-green eyes, at the spill of red hair across her forehead and shoulders, her freckled cheek. To stop his eyes from straying farther and bringing an ache to his heart, he looked at the floor.

  “I’m sorry for what I did to you.”

  “You did nothing but show me love and hope in a world I’d begun to think held none for me. Why should you apologize?”

  “But I killed you.”

  “No, not me. That was someone else.” She reached out and brushed her fingers along his forearm. “You loved me.”

  Khirro’s gaze settled on the baby lyi
ng near his feet. Was it a sign of things? Did it mean Graymon was close to lost?

  Or is it Emeline’s child? My child?

  So much time had passed since he last thought of them, long enough he felt shame for it. When once the woman meant everything to him—thoughts of her and of returning to her consuming his moments—now she seemed a memory of a one-time dream, barely remembered. But she was in Erechania where the Kanosee and their undead soldiers had taken over the Isthmus Fortress and controlled the king, where all were in danger. He looked up from the child; Elyea stood near the door.

  “Has this happened in Erechania?” he asked indicating the shriveled child.

  “No. Not yet, but it is why the Archon seeks to conquer your country. She needs lives to fuel her army of the dead. If we don’t stop her, Erechania is just the beginning.” She stepped into the sunlight streaming through the doorway and disappeared.

  “Elyea?”

  A second later, Athryn appeared framed in the doorway, a look of concern on his brow.

  “Khirro? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have been gone for hours.”

  Athryn’s words surprised him. It didn’t feel like he’d been away for more than thirty minutes. Khirro swallowed hard around a lump in his throat.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “We should go.”

  “Yes.”

  Khirro looked back at the child on the dirt floor, at its bony finger pointing at him. Accusing him? Choosing him?

  Both.

  He kneeled and placed both hands beneath the child, careful not to damage its dried-out skin and brittle bones. Its flesh felt rough against his fingers, furrowed and hard. He scooped it off the dirt floor, crossed the two paces to the rocking chair and placed the babe back on its mother’s lap. Athryn waited patiently in the doorway while Khirro looked at the mother and child.

  “There,” he said and faced his companion. “Now we can go. We must head for the land bridge.”

  Athryn nodded. Khirro stepped past his companion and into the light of the autumn sun. Feeling its warmth on his face drove the hut’s ill feelings from him and he looked to the sky. It was still blue, the Heavens still in their place despite what happened here. He sucked a deep breath and expelled the last of the musty, dust-filled air of the building from his chest.