The wise man sees death for what it is: a mercy. Those burdened with much wisdom hasten their mercy by all means to their avail. Would that every man wielded such wisdom.
-The Triptych; Book of Hells, Panel 1
Tern, Dridon
Sir Godwald died of an infection on the third morning after their return. His wounded leg had turned, blackness creeping across the pale of his skin day by day, and by the end of it, a foul smell hung in the room. The chirurgeon worked his bloodletting, and the healers sprinkled their salts and burned their fragrant herbs, and nothing changed. He was dead the moment his leg was torn open. That was what the chirurgeon kept saying in full earshot of Lucanh, so that maybe the consequences of his failure might not be so severe.
But Lucanh had no interest in blaming the chirurgeon or the healers. He blamed only himself. He felt the guilt of Sir Godwald’s death in the back of his mind, but he dared not speak it even in the privacy of his thoughts—it was too painful.
The prince read to the knight from the Book of Heights through the end of his life, when the man drew his last shallow breaths. His breathing had grown wet and ragged. In time, it became a sharp crackling sound that made Lucanh wince, but he kept reading. He knew from his studies that this was a death rattle. He’d never heard one before.
He had never seen a man die before that night on the road. He had never seen it clearly until that third morning. When he was very little, the first he saw of death, aside from a swatted fly or a crushed spider, was when his queen mother took him to a farm on the outskirts of Tern to watch sheep be slaughtered. She told him how important it was that they learned how their food was produced and paid respect to the farmer and the animal who made it so.
All Lucanh could remember was the bleating of the poor creature. The quick draw of the blade. The spray of blood, red on white—that was when he looked away and started to cry. He cried in full view of everyone. The memory often caused him shame when it resurfaced late at night on the edge of sleep, or randomly at the table in the dining hall. He should have been brave. That was what he kept telling himself. He should have been brave. Such tender emotion over a simple fact of life was unbecoming of a prince, even one his age. It was most certainly not what a man ought to do.
Now, sitting at the side of his father’s deathbed, he tried to be braver. He tried to make himself stone-faced. He tried to give the occasion the proper level of solemnity and respect it deserved, but without getting weepy about it. It was difficult. He had to bite his tongue, tense his whole body to keep his composure. He focused on his reading.
Sir Godwald drew one last crackling breath and then he breathed no more. There was an alien stillness to him now, and yet Lucanh kept reading the lengthy panel from the Book of Heights until it was finished, and every now and then when he reached a new block of text or turned the page, he could have sworn that he saw his father’s chest rising and falling with a new breath, silent and healthy like he was only sleeping, but in truth, it never happened. It was only a trick of the eye.
After he spent a long while in the foul-smelling room alone, the chirurgeon entered again and placed a hand on the prince’s shoulder. “I know,” said Lucanh.
At the prince’s insistence, they held an ornate but private funeral for Sir Godwald on the grounds of Castle Tern. Three triarchs read from the Triptych and one delivered a short speech commemorating the knight’s life and his spotless record of service to Dridon. Officially, it was a funeral only for a knight of middling rank, but everyone seemed to know his true relationship to the prince. Had this always been the case? Had everyone always understood? Secretly, Lucanh felt ashamed to be the last to know.
“The true king of Dridon,” said the boy, and no one rebuked him for it. He was the one to stand at the edge of his father’s grave and throw the customary three stones into the open coffin. People shuffled off one by one in silence. His mother stood there waiting to comfort him, but he never acknowledged her presence, leaving her standing alone by the graveside.
From the day of the funeral forward, Lucanh read not another word of the Triptych. The massive tome collected dust on its plinth in the royal library. Neither did he pick up his sword again. He had no one to drill with, no one to train him in the finer arts of swings and parries anymore. But his true loss ran far deeper. He felt he had no friends left in Castle Tern—his servants, the other knights, none of them counted. He had no peers as friends because they were all too intimidated by his station; otherwise, everyone he encountered was either doing their duties or paying court to him to gain favor with the queen. He’d lost his only true friend, the only one he felt treated him with real respect. The only one he saw as an equal.
The one who understood him most.
He no longer prayed to Triad, refused to bring even the smallest nightly petition to the three-headed god. He kept mostly to himself in his chamber and said little at meals. Sometimes he skipped them altogether. His mother prodded him every day but he refused to yield, resolved not to give her the satisfaction of breaking his composure. To be stoic was to be a man. In all this mess, he reasoned that he’d lost not only a father he never knew—at least for who he really was—but also a mother who never knew him, one who sat on Dridon’s throne and wore the silver crown but was no better than a stranger. How could she even begin to understand his suffering?
“My hands were tied,” she tried to explain to him one day after a late supper. The attendants had cleared the dining hall, the lingerers were few, and servants were closing the shutters against a cold draft outside. “I don’t expect you to understand this at your age, Lucanh, but in Dridon—in all places, really—a person’s station determines a great deal about one’s life. It dictates everything from where you can build your house to what you can own. It tells you what your vocation can be. It tells you what sway you hold in society. With whom you can associate.” She dabbed at her mouth with a white napkin ornately embroidered with interlocking silver triangles. “Even whom you can love.
“You say you’re a man now? Well, then, here’s the truth I was saving for when you were old enough. My brief time with your father, it was all in secret and behind cover of lock and key. I was a young princess. He was an up-and-coming knight. It was foolish of us both.” She hit a bump in her storytelling, casting a long stare through the gray stone wall of Castle Tern before finding her place again, swirling the wine in her chalice as if to refresh it before taking another sip. “Not that I consider it a mistake, since you were born. But in every other respect, it was shortsighted. Rash. We never thought about the consequences. We weren’t much older than you are now when we fell in love.
“One night, we had a heated argument about what would happen if I bore a child. He swore to me up and down in the Six Eyes of Triad that he would never deny it. He would admit to everything—our secret affair, our undying love. He would take responsibility for you. He would accept any punishment my then queen mother or the courts of Dridon might levy against him.”
At least one of you had honor, thought Luke. He wanted to say it to her face, but then he also didn’t want to break his habit of not talking to her anymore. She didn’t deserve it. All he did was glower at her as she spoke, but she didn’t meet his challenging glare.
“In our society, if a princess my age announced she was with child by some middling knight... Lucanh, they would have flogged him in the streets for the sake of my honor. No matter what I commanded, or what I begged my queen mother to decree. Would it have been better to tarnish our honor forever, have him beaten to death’s door, thrown in the dungeons, have me locked in one of the towers for the rest of my life... Or to have done what we did? Kept up appearances for the time needed, and allowed him to have a place in your life?” At first, Lucanh recognized her question as merely rhetorical, but she let it hang there in the air between them, and eventually he began to wonder if she was seeking reassurance from him that they’d made the right choice. “I went away to Zan Vayonado mere days after our argument.
“I knew I was already with child then. And I knew that your father would never abandon his own form of honor. He actually told me once that he would have accepted even a public execution, if only to be free of his lies and hiding. He simply wanted the whole world to know of his love for me, and for you, no matter the cost to any of us.” She took another long pull of wine. “You would have suffered, too, you know. An illegitimate son of mine would have had no royal birthright, no political power.
“I knew I had to protect your place as my heir. After presenting the case to my mother, who was already ailing and half-bedridden at the time, I arranged a hurried sham of a wedding to the even frailer old Grand Emissary of the time. Everything I’ve told you about your father, your false father... I know that you must already know now that it was all a lie. And I’m sorry for that.” She heaved a deep sigh; the wine was thickening her speech, dulling her lips so that her words were a tiny bit slower, a tiny bit clumsier, like walking through mud. “I never even knew the man. He was old enough to be my grandfather. He never said a word, sometimes seemed like he didn’t even know I was in the room. Neither of us ever felt anything for the other—if he did, he was never able to say so. Two or three moons later, he was dead. We strengthened ties with the Zan and the scribes had a name for your father to write in their history books.
“So, when I came home to Dridon to prepare to assume my mother’s throne when her health finally failed, and when I bore a son under the Six Eyes of Triad and named him Lucanh, I had done the best I could with my circumstances. You were born a prince of full royal blood. Sir Godwald retained his knighthood and his life. We reached an agreement that he would be your caretaker and raise you up in the ways of manhood, and he did. And that is all the history books will say of it.” At this, she looked up at the servants milling around the dining hall, as if daring them to say otherwise. No one seemed to be paying any mind to their conversation. “All I can say, Lucanh, is that I am truly sorry.
“I’m sorry fate wouldn’t allow us to be a happy family together. I hope you know that your father loved you very much. And I hope you know that I still do, too, despite what you might think.”
A long silence elapsed. Everyone else had cleared out of the dining hall, save for the knights standing guard at the door; all was quiet but the popping of sparks in the hearth, the rain pattering the castle grounds. “I wish I still believed in the Hells, Rhoda,” said Lucanh finally. “I would hope they’d frighten you into being an honorable person.” With that, the prince stood from his place at the table, his heart racing, and he made for his bedchamber at the other end of the keep. He was no longer a son who lingered at the sound of his mother’s crying.
***
Some time had passed since Sir Godwald’s death, more than a moon, maybe two. Lucanh learned for the first time how his grief could change. The sharp edge of it dulled with time, but it never left him, and even though he was young and keenly aware of his inexperience, he had the sense that this grief would never leave him as long as he lived.
He resumed his vow of silence in the queen’s presence. Even still, she adopted the new habit of speaking to him daily as though nothing at all had changed between them. He wondered if she’d gone mad. Maybe he had, too. His thumb idly drummed the pommel of his sword, which he still wore at his waist—whether for old time’s sake or as a royal formality, he couldn’t remember anymore.
He still hadn’t touched the Triptych since the day of the funeral. He had no plans to change that, either. But he began to entertain thoughts of leaving Castle Tern and his princehood altogether; he envisioned packing a bag and sneaking away in the dead of night, stealing a horse from the royal stables, and riding south. Far south, past the vague borders of Dridon where no knight or soldier ever patrolled. There were Tomeless in the Southern Frost. Maybe he could burn his copy of the Triptych and learn to live among them.
He was stewing on this fantasy one day in the cap house of Castle Tern’s south tower, watching wet snow fall in fat white feathers past the window, when he heard a voice at the door. “Your Highness,” said Sir Stepan. “Are you up here alone?”
Lucanh turned from the broad stone sill of the window and gestured to the circular room with his hand. “Do you see anyone else here?”
Sir Stepan nodded once without cracking a smile. Sir Godwald might have laughed or playfully chided him, but the High Knight was coldly indifferent. “The queen was looking for you.”
“No, she wasn’t. She sent her servants to do that.”
“Do you blame her for worrying about your absence?”
The knight’s words stung him. Lucanh was pleased with himself at first for what he felt was his acerbic wit, but when Sir Stepan dished it back in full force, his sarcasm rang hollow. “You mean what happened to Sir Godwald, don’t you? Save your breath. You won’t make me feel any more guilty than I already do.”
“Guilty? For what?” Sir Stepan did something then that a knight typically wouldn’t be seen doing, especially the High Knight: he leaned against the inner wall of the cap house, even crossing his boots to relax.
Lucanh scoffed. “That’s a stupid question. I got Sir Godwald killed.”
“So it was you who sent the assassins from Grackenwell?” Sir Stepan’s eyes were stern but dispassionate.
Lucanh rolled his eyes. “Obviously not. What kind of a question is that?”
“And I’m sure you weren’t the one who inflicted that grievous wound on Sir—”
“No!” Lucanh yelled. At this, he jumped off the edge of the sill. His sword hand itched, but he resisted the urge to draw it, and, for a moment, he recalled those instances when he’d seen Sir Stepan himself suppress that impulse in flashes of rage. “Why would you ask me that?”
“I’m trying to ascertain why you would burden yourself with guilt for something that wasn’t your fault.”
Now Lucanh understood what the man was trying to do, but he lacked the grace and patience of Sir Godwald. He wondered if his mother put him up to this. “Of course it is. If it weren’t for me, he never would have been out there.”
“If it weren’t for those paupers and their foolhardy mission to the north, you never would have been out there at that time either, would you? So is it their fault Sir Godwald was killed?”
Luke shook his head. “No. They... They couldn’t have known—”
“But you could have?” The knight folded his plated arms, his leathers creaking softly with the movement. He arched an eyebrow at the prince.
“No.”
“Then whose fault was it?”
Now the prince hung his head. If this verbal exchange were a swordfight, he would have been disarmed, knocked on his back, and his opponent’s sword aimed straight at his face by this point. “The assassins.”
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“And who sent them?”
“King Kimbel.”
“Aye.” The High Knight nodded, letting this truth sink in for Lucanh. A half-melted snowbank had accumulated on the outside of the windowsill behind him; he picked at it, pressing the snow between his fingers. It wasn’t ideal packing snow, but on a day like this, he would have had a melting snowball fight with his knight father. All those moments had been stolen from him now—first by his mother, then by death. “You know,” said Sir Stepan after a while, “Godwald and I were friends as boys.”
Lucanh perked up to hear this. “You were?”
The knight nodded. “The best of, at one time. We even squired together under knights of the same rank.” Sir Stepan got that same look in his eyes that Lucanh saw in his mother when they recounted stories of Sir Godwald, that long stare off into nothing. It was a trance that grownups seemed to enter in order to commune with their memories. “When all that business with your princess mother began, we grew apart. I worked my way up the ranks. He was your caretaker, according to their... arrangement.” He shrugged. “But I never lost my respect for him. He always had the heart of a hero.”
“He didn’t have the death of one,” said Lucanh bitterly. “On that table. All alone.”
“What makes you think that?”
The prince turned away suddenly, a mist coming over his eyes that he hadn’t expected. “When my mother told me stories of my father—my false father—she always described him as this gallant hero on a white horse. Heroes are meant to be praised. People adore them.” He bit his tongue before he spoke again, so as to keep from showing more emotion. “He deserved better than that.”
“He deserved better. I’ll give you that. But he died protecting the innocent and his only begotten son. He also singlehandedly defeated assassins who were sent to kill your mother, the queen. It’s a nobler death than even most knights can aspire to have.”
“But now no one will remember him. How is that a hero’s death at all?”
Sir Stepan stood up straighter now, his armor clunking heavily as he moved. “Your Highness, I know we’ve never gotten to know each other particularly well. Do I have your permission to speak freely?”
Now Lucanh shrugged and gestured around the room again, as he’d done before, and said, “Have you not been this whole time?”
Now the High Knight rewarded him with a smirk. “As boys, we all have a boyish vision of what a hero ought to be. You think of a hero as the one leading the charge on the battlefield, and even though those men are often the first to die... somehow, he survives. He beats back the enemy and lives to tell of it. He spends the rest of his life recounting the story in taverns and great halls, everyone crowds around him to listen, and he gets everything handed to him for free by virtue of being a hero. All the women fawn over him and all the men are jealous. But these are storybook ideas of heroism.”
The prince shook his head. What he was saying sounded wise, but it didn’t mesh with what he already knew about heroes and legends. “That’s not true. Is it? Heroes are remembered for a reason. Heroes do what others can’t.”
“A hero is not just what he does. It’s why he does it. It’s his character.”
Lucanh met the knight’s gaze now, and forgot in that moment to be ashamed of his tears. “How do you mean?”
“It was just as he raised you up in secret all those years, cherishing every moment he could get with you. He didn’t demand praise or recognition for what a great father he was, did he? He simply was. He didn’t meet the assassins at the gates of Castle Tern for the whole city to see him fight on some white horse. He fought them in the dark, on the road, where no one could see or remember him if he didn’t survive. That’s because it was the right thing—saving you and those poor paupers who were in over their heads.”
“Because that was his character?”
The High Knight nodded solemnly. “Character is what one does when only the gods are watching.”
The two stood there in the cap house of the south tower for some time. The prince didn’t say anything, absorbing the knight’s words and trying to make sense of the world and what had happened. Another knight appeared at the doorway a while later and immediately bowed upon entering. “Your Highness,” he said to Lucanh, and then to Sir Stepan, “Sir. Just doing rounds. I apologize for the—”
“It’s all right,” said the High Knight. “His Highness and I were just discussing current events, but I had better be going. Drills at the city gates today.”
“Combat?”
“Siege.”
The young, low-rank knight gulped. “Understood, sir. I’ll be on my way as well.”
The two metal-clad men made for the door, and Sir Stepan cast Lucanh a parting glance, one last nod of acknowledgment, and then they were both gone. The prince was alone with his thoughts and the silent snow. His sword hand itched again, but there was no one to spar with him.
***
Some days had passed since Lucanh’s talk with Sir Stepan. He showed his face more outside of meals, and that day, he sat in his princely throne and waited for court to be held. Knights and nobility gathered and chattered among themselves like any other day. There was a frigid bite to the air that morning, and this day’s snow was not so autumnal as the last one; it was dry, thoroughly frozen, and when it clung to the dead grass, it piled up without melting. The wind was still as stone, the white flakes falling like ash from the slate sky.
The acoustics were pristine, then, to carry the distant clopping of horse hooves all the way across the city and through the proud walls of Castle Tern. The prince’s stomach sank.
More assassins? More messengers? He wasn’t sure who was fast approaching the castle, but he knew it wasn’t a good omen.
“Sir Stepan?” the queen murmured uneasily from her throne. “Investigate, please.” The High Knight began to stir in his polished armor when someone’s shouting caught the throne room’s attention.
“Open the doors!” came the desperate cry. “Open the doors!”
Recognizing the softer-sounding Dridic dialect, Lucanh felt slightly more at ease. At least they weren’t from Grackenwell. But why the urgency in the speaker’s voice?
The guards at the front door of Castle Tern took down the massive steel-braced bar and hauled the towering doors apart. A squire left his horse with guards just outside the castle keep and scrambled inside. He tripped once, bashing his knee against the stone floor, but kept running down the expansive hall to the throne room. “We must man the defenses!” he barked. “They’re here! The city’s already falling—my master sent me! We must secure the castle! Protect the queen and the prince at all costs!”
“What is the meaning of this?” asked Queen Rhoda. “Slow down.”
“Grackenwelsh...” The young man jabbed a finger wildly behind him, his eyes bulging. He looked not much older than Lucanh; the prince saw visceral fear in his gaze, the kind he remembered from his night on the road. “Grackenwelsh at the city gates, Your Majesty!”
“How many?” Sir Stepan asked gruffly.
The squire shook his head as if to say, No, you don’t understand. “All of them, sir. My master sent me to give the word. Patrolling knights are already engaged, but he says they’re too scattered.”
“They’ll be slaughtered,” Sir Stepan muttered gravely. “How much time do we—” But his next words died in a peal of thunder.
The first of many.
“This way, Your Majesty!” another knight barked, and a pair of his cohorts guided the queen toward the inner bowels of the keep. “You, too, Prince Lucanh! We’ll protect you both with our lives!” Two knights appeared at his side, gently pulling him along down the same corridor as his mother, likely headed to the catacombs under the dungeon. They could take refuge there and ride out whatever was to come. At first, he let himself be led.
Then he thought of his father. The assassins. The smug boy king in the North who was surely breaching the city gates by now. The peasants and homeless of the city being cut down or taken as slaves while royalty and nobility holed up and prayed to Triad for deliverance.
And then he broke away.
***
Beyond the castle grounds, the city of Tern had fallen into the Hells themselves.
Spheres of black iron issued forth from long metal barrels with loud booms, tearing through most everything but solid rock with ease. But even the stone foundations of buildings were starting to take damage, bricks crumbling and pulverized into clouds of dust, tiled roofs exploding and clattering to the cobblestones like teeth knocked out of someone’s head. The thunder left fire in its wake.
Peasants ran clumsily through the streets, seeking shelter anywhere they could find it, moving with all the panicked precision of drowning rats. Lucanh knew he was in far over his head this time. Worse than the road. His body froze up the same way it had on that night when the assassins ambushed them. The sight of the devastation sapped the courage out of him.
The advancing Grackenwelsh soldiers rounded a street corner and came trudging slowly toward the castle, lugging their cannons along on large wooden wheels. They tore people from shops and houses, tossing them around like ragdolls, binding the women and children and some of the men. Those who resisted fiercely enough were put to the sword. When the others saw what happened, most stopped resisting altogether.
Lucanh felt tempted to surrender alongside them. Perhaps if he offered no resistance, they might spare his life.
Then it dawned on him. I’m the prince, he thought, as though it were a riddle he’d just solved. I’ll be nothing more than a hostage to use against Dridon.
Another voice found him then.
‘They all mean nothing if you only wield them on your own behalf. It’s others who are most important. It’s others you must protect. This is the code of a knight.’
‘When in your life did you feel strongest?’
‘When I had to be.’
“I-I can’t,” Lucanh choked out. His hand trembled at the hilt of his sword. There was nothing he could do against the full might of the Grackenwelsh army bearing down on the city from all sides. He longed to be back in swordsmanship training with Sir Godwald. He would have been more present, more attentive, more patient... a better pupil. But that was just a memory to him now, and its comfort was far from him. Sir Godwald was gone. Now his only company was the enemy. “I should never have come here. I was a fool... again! Why? Why did I come here? I can’t—”
“Help!” shrieked a familiar female voice. “Somebody! She’s stuck!” It was Zumawi.
His attention diverted momentarily, Lucanh bolted for the source of the sound. His body acted on instinct alone; it gave his conscious mind a much-needed respite. He found them in an alley tucked away between a tavern and a blacksmith.
A chunk of the tavern’s wooden awning had broken off from the force of a cannon shot and pinned a small child to the ground. Zumawi was working desperately to free the little girl’s legs. The wood was too heavy.
“Prince Lucanh!” Zumawi gasped. It was as much a question as an exclamation.
“Is she hurt?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Here, help me lift it!” The little girl was crying hysterically, but it could just as easily have been from the chaos and fright of it all than from a grievous injury. The prince tried with all his might to lift it. He even used the strength in his legs, just like Sir Godwald had taught him to lift something truly heavy. It budged a hair then fell back in place.
“I can’t,” he panted.
“Then pull her out. All at once, fast as you can. Got it?” He nodded, grabbing the girl under her arms. “On three, all right? One... Two... Three!” Zumawi gritted her teeth and pulled the awning up a hand’s breadth for just a moment. Lucanh tugged the girl out of harm’s way and the awning crashed back to the cobblestone.
The girl was a bit bruised and had a nasty gash on her left knee, but she was able to stand and walk. That was the best one could hope for at a time like this.
“Thank you,” said Zumawi. And then, “What in the Hells are you doing here?”
“I came to help,” he answered. “Where are we needed?”
“We’re not needed anywhere, prince. There’s nothing we have—no armor, no weapons, nothing that can stand against those cannons. What we need to do is find a rock and hide under it until this has all passed.” Luke turned his head back toward the action and she grabbed him by the chin, turned his face toward her. He gasped. “Listen! You shouldn’t be here! Compared to what they’ve done to us, they’ll do to you—”
Crack! Another cannonball bit into the blacksmith’s wall at the other end of the alley. Another plume of dust, another burst of fresh gravel tossed in the air. The Grackenwelsh were advancing even faster now. Their final push toward Castle Tern.
Thinking quickly, Lucanh grabbed the girl by the shoulder and Zumawi by the wrist. “I have a place we can all be safe! Hurry! While there’s still time!”
He led them across the street and down an adjoining alleyway, this one even darker and tighter than the last. It was barely wide enough for two knights to patrol shoulder to shoulder—far too narrow for one of their cannons to roll through, that was certain.
“Where are we going?” Zumawi asked.
“The keep!” Lucanh panted. “Below the dungeons! It’s where Sir Godwald always trained me to go if something like this ever happened. There are catacombs beneath the dungeons—”
“What about the others?”
His gait slowed momentarily. It felt like the guilt of that question tugged at his ankles, beckoned him back into the war-torn city. “We can’t save everyone,” he answered, and he wondered at the source of his sudden resolve. “But we can save you two. That’s something, isn’t it?” He felt the urge to look back, but he resisted. “I’ll go back for more once you two are safe.”
The gate of Castle Tern opened once more to accept the prince and the two peasants. The guards manning the gate kept a close watch to accept only Dridic entrants, ready to repel any invaders at a moment’s notice, but the knights and soldiers parted like grass underfoot when they saw him. “Make way!” they shouted. “His highness, the prince!”.
Lucanh led two of the refugees through the doors of the keep itself. It was another checkpoint that needed to be negotiated, but once his subjects saw who he was, they all but fell over themselves to grant him passage. Some of them were shouting half-orders, half-pleas for him to get to safety. It was a tricky thing for them to protect him and serve him at the same time—they weren’t quite sure how to address him. He took advantage of their uncertainty to do what he needed to do.
“Follow the crowd to the catacombs,” Lucanh advised Zumawi and the little girl. “Below the dungeon. You’ll both be safe down there. I’ll go back and get as many more as I can!”
“Thank you. Dridon will be in good hands one day, young man,” said Zumawi, clapping a hand hard on his shoulder. She looked him in the eye. “If we survive this.” With that, she took the little girl’s hand and they joined the procession of women, children, elderly, and peasants into the tunnels far underground.
It was good that she turned and ran with the girl in tow, because Lucanh was at a loss for what to say in response. He’d never been of use to anyone before. It felt good to have done something, had some tangible impact on some small part of the world. He could do this. He couldn’t save everyone, but he would save everyone he could.
He took a moment to steel himself, ready to run back out into the bedlam and rescue more citizens, but he froze in his tracks when he saw the doors of Castle Tern groaning toward each other, the column of snowy white daylight shrinking and shrinking.
Then they shuddered with the force of a cannon shot.
The cannonball was just small enough to slip between the doors, splintering both of them at their edges and even bending their metal bracings. The projectile blew past Lucanh scarcely more than a sword’s length away. It crashed against the inner wall of the throne room with a hard thump, impacting just behind the queen’s empty throne.
The knights at the doors tried again to force them shut, but two more cannon shots incapacitated enough of them that they could no longer seal the entrance. Knights fell in their armor, some of their legs broken, their armor caved in, bent apart. More knights rushed to their aid to help close the doors. By then it was too late.
The Grackenwelsh were breaching the keep of Castle Tern. Lucanh trembled at the realization.
Then, in the lead, he finally laid eyes on the boy king from the North. He was kingly, but didn’t seem quite so boyish as Lucanh had imagined him—he looked more like a man. Where the Dridic prince expected a peer, though slightly taller, King Kimbel Garrotin was a broad-shouldered mass of muscle in comparison.
In his hands was a fearsome war hammer, nearly as long as he was tall. It was made of frigid steel now warm with blood. Bound in the skin of those ferocious monsters called gators, the stuff of horror tales here in Dridon. But they were real. He was real. The hammer of legend was real, and he sensed that soon it would be trying to kill him.
But what most struck fear into the boy prince was the look in Kimbel’s eyes. They were not angry, as one might expect them to be in times of war. They were not even excited or pleased, as his sadistic reputation might have predicted.
The light had gone out of them completely. They were dead.
Dead as the eyes of Sir Godwald on the morning he breathed his last, before the chirurgeon closed them. Dead, while the body around them was so very much alive and ready to strike. Dead only in spirit.
“Are you ready for this, boy?” Kimbel taunted him. This time, a grin finally played at the corners of his lips, but his eyes did not smile along. “Because I am.”