The weak appeal to commonalities that the strong may spare them, yet nature rebukes this foolishness. Bear tears out the throat of bear; vermin devours vermin. When you are dead and I yet live, no commonalities remain between us. Your fate was written when I named you Enemy.
-The Triptych; Book of Hells, Panel 6
Tern, Dridon
The following day, it rained and rained without rest. Lucanh had already packed his bag and stolen away from Castle Tern just after supper. He was careful to mind the rounds of the guards, their comings and goings through the stairwells and corridors of the castle. He knew their routines by heart—now it had finally come in handy. He slipped out of the castle and no one inside was any the wiser, nor would they be until morning, when he was already long gone.
But he forgot to pack his good cloak, the one that would better wick away the rain. He was soaked before he even reached the city gate. Cobblestones gave way to packed dirt, the road pockmarked with puddles, and the night breeze chilled him through his leathers. His only consolation was the smell of verdant petrichor hanging in the air. His favorite.
Zumawi and the others were waiting at the northern gate as planned. They wore cloaks of black like his, no doubt given them by their wealthy benefactor. They carried elite weapons like unblemished swords and intricate crossbows, but they carried them awkwardly—Lucanh surmised they’d never been trained to use them. Perhaps he could show them a thing or two on the long road north.
But first he would have to take his place in their traveling party.
Their rich arms dealer wore a fine black cloak to match theirs, plodding around in the mud with his black boots and waving his black-gloved hands with the air of a commander of sorts. “You have a ship waiting for you in Tuthbrough,” he said to them, “set to depart for Kellendock in a half moon’s time. A trading vessel, it will be fully loaded with cargo and planted passengers who’ve been paid to make the journey and mind their own affairs. They will be paid even more handsomely when they return to Tuthbrough without incident half a moon later.
“I have instructed the captain to depart for Dridon in exactly one moon’s time, with or without you, so as not to draw suspicion. If you would like to make use of the ship, you know where to find it and how much time you have. Otherwise, you’ll have to risk buying passage yourselves, or cutting through the Zan desert, which must still be swarming with those swamp people.”
They took out a length of parchment and drew up a rough itinerary of their journey and planned measures and countermeasures. They resolved to travel by cover of dark and, shortly before each daybreak, to cut off from the main roads and erect unsuspecting camps where they would sleep during the morning. They would set out back toward the road in the latter part of the day to continue their journey at night. They discussed what to do in the event their paths crossed with Dridic knights or even a wolf pack or a hungry bear.
The moon had shown its face, peering through dissolving cloud cover, when they were all in agreement and travel-ready.
“We owe you a debt of thanks for all your help,” Zumawi said politely. Lucanh inferred that her gratitude was begrudging, but given out of a sense of obligation, of reciprocity.
“You needn’t mention it,” said the nobleman. “This I do for Dridon and myself as much as I do for you.”
“Well, it was more than the queen was willing to do for us. And it will not be forgotten.”
The rich man nodded, turning to leave and casting one last reply over his shoulder. “For all our sakes’, I hope you one day remember my kindness here.” He gestured gravely to the north. “Not there.” And with that, he trod back toward the open northern gate.
Lucanh hid himself behind the stone wall, melding into the shadow undetected until the man was gone. Then the crafty prince stalked the others as they set out on the remnants of the ancient, weed-choked road. He was proud of himself for his cleverness.
He was going to become the hero Dridon needed.
***
They spotted him late the next morning.
He had hoped to put a much wider berth between Castle Tern and his inevitable discovery, perhaps the halfway point to Tuthbrough or all the way to the port if conditions were favorable. But the morning was quiet, dewy, tranquil. His unwitting companions raised their guards anew with the coming of daylight, wary of traveling knights or hunters stalking game in the woods. He crunched a pair of dry branches underfoot and they turned suddenly to see him.
Two even raised their crossbows. One shot.
The bolt bit into a tree trunk a head above Lucanh’s black hood. He was proud of himself for not flinching.
“Keep your weapons down!” Zumawi hissed. “That is the prince you almost killed!”
“What is the prince doing here?” one of them gasped.
“My lord,” said another, a gaunt young man who looked not much older than Lucanh, “forgive us. This is a misunderstanding—”
“I’m here to help,” Lucanh interrupted. He flashed the hilt of his sheathed sword under his cloak. “Fear not—I’m well versed in swordsmanship. I trained under a knight of the middling rank. I’m here to accompany you north to Grackenwell.”
Zumawi sighed deeply, hanging her head. It seemed she’d already come to a decision long before Lucanh understood what it was. “We will draw sticks,” she said with a sour face. “The shortest will escort the prince back to Castle Tern and face the queen’s judgment.”
Lucanh scoffed, utterly taken aback at her reaction. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“My lord,” said a rugged old woman with close-cropped white hair, “forgive me if I speak out of turn, but this is no place for you. It’s far too dangerous.”
“I am trained with a sword!” he repeated angrily. “That is more than can be said for any of you. My armor is sturdy but minimal, so as to keep light on my feet. And I can make arrangements with Grackenwell once their king is dead. I have political power—how many of you can say that?”
A pair of them in the back laughed. The others just shook their heads, averted their gazes.
“Darrlagh and I will escort him back,” said a dark-skinned man of middle age, broad in his shoulders but lanky below that. “We’ll hand him off to the first knight we see. Then we’ll call on our benefactor to supply us with horses and ride to meet you in Piedmorne. You should reach Piedmorne by tomorrow, right? An easy enough journey on horseback.”
“You cannot lead me back against my will,” said Lucanh. “I won’t allow it. You may walk back toward the city, but I won’t follow.” But they went on talking as though he weren’t even there. He felt like steam might start rising from his skin like the morning fog on the terraced farms they passed. “If you take me back to the city, do you think only one or two of you will face judgment? What will the queen think of this mission of yours?” That threat drew him the ire of everyone present, who stared daggers at him one after another. They no longer cared to mind their station in the Dridic hierarchy.
“You bluff,” said the white-haired woman.
He had them now. “If you take me back to the city, I’ll tell my mother exactly where I was and who I saw. Everyone. She already has her suspicions about you, Zumawi.” He felt cold to say such a thing. Backed into a corner as he was, he saw no kind way out of it.
The former High Supplicant eyed him coolly. “And what would you gain from such underhanded, immature behavior?”
Immature? Lucanh thought. How dare she? “Nothing. I have nothing to gain.” His rhetorical feet were placed—he needed only deliver the killing blow. “We all stand to lose if I go back. Don’t we? Let’s press on to Tuthbrough, then.”
“There is no small chance we may die in Grackenwell, young prince. You are not prepared for these stakes.”
“Yes,” he insisted, “I am.” He straightened his back to stand taller. He wasn’t afraid to die a hero’s death. But it didn’t matter to him anyway—he fully intended to survive and return home to glory. “You’ll bring me to Grackenwell with you. And I will flay that slaver king for you. For my people!” It looked like Zumawi was about to cut him off again, so he added, “I will do what my mother is too afraid to do!”
Zumawi gave him a sad smile that he remembered Sir Godwald sometimes giving him whenever he talked of his future knightly exploits. “This is not the way, Prince Lucanh. And the point is moot anyway. Your mother, or the knights, or your servants will notice you’ve run away. They’ll send someone after you within the day anyway. Let the road home be easy, prince.”
“If they send a search party,” said the one called Darrlagh, “then they’ll find us as well. We’ll all be caught!”
“How will they find us?” Lucanh asked. He felt walls closing in around him, walls he hadn’t foreseen or accounted for, and he felt desperate, prone to an angry outburst unbecoming of a hero. “If we travel far enough in the next day or two, they’ll never know where to find us! Don’t you see that?”
Zumawi shook her head. “Prince Lucanh, this is the only extant road within a day’s foot travel of the city. They’ll scour this road before they search anywhere else.”
“We can hide in camps far from the road like you planned. They won’t find us! I promise!”
Zumawi smirked at him. It made him boil. “You really believe that your mother wouldn’t turn over every rock on the Stone Continent to find you? She may be a failure in many regards, but love for her only child is not one of them. Now, come with us, Prince Lucanh. You cannot hope to make Tuthbrough alone if there are none to follow.”
“Zumawi,” said a tall, rough-looking man with pale skin and one missing eye. “Does this mean our mission is over before it even began?”
She bowed her head, her curly mane cascading down in coiling rivulets of russet and onyx. “Unless the prince has a change of heart when we deliver him home, and unless our benefactor can provide us with horses... I believe so, my friend. I believe so. Let us pray the queen will have mercy when she sees we’ve brought her son home unharmed.”
Everyone in the group except for Zumawi glared at the boy in their own unique ways, some deferentially, as scolded children, and others like they wanted to lift him by the throat and throttle him. Time passed and brought a discomfiting sobriety to the situation. He was out of his element. He actually found himself missing the dining hall, the comfort of his bedchamber, the familiarity of the library where he read the Triptych and discussed his readings with Sir Godwald. The open road was no place for the boy prince of Dridon.
He started to cry silently, and he was furious with himself for it. This was not what a hero did. He wished for the Grackenwelsh king to appear before him so he could gut him with his sword and prove that he was a brave man, a grown man. But he felt more like a boy than he had in a long, long while, and now everyone saw him for the boy he really was.
Zumawi put her arm on his back to comfort him. He bucked it off. They walked south together at the head of the pack in silence.
***
Shortly after midday, Zumawi announced that it was time to take a rest and build a cooking fire. They set up camp and Lucanh realized that he hadn’t slept in almost two days, none of them had, but he had yet to feel tired.
The others made a soup of dry ingredients, boiling water they’d brought with them in canteens. “Shan’t be needing to ration it now,” one of them grumbled so Lucanh could hear as they poured it into the cast iron pot.
“You win again, Rhoda,” Zumawi said bitterly, breaking off a corner of a dried cheese block. “You win again.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I understand why you’re angry with my mother,” said Lucanh, accepting a heel of bread torn away from a communal loaf. “But why do you hate her so much? She hasn’t done everything wrong, has she?” Lucanh was his mother’s most passionate critic, but for some reason, hearing someone else speak ill of her made him cross. Zumawi chewed without replying or looking up. “She gave you a seat in the Council of Three. She elevated you to that throne. You all asked, and she answered.”
Zumawi took a deep breath through her nose. Her features softened before she would meet Lucanh’s gaze. “To you, she’s your mother. She loves you and you love her, and that is all well and good. But to me, she’s a duplicitous ruler. She makes lofty promises to quell rebellions. Pacify those who would hold her to account. She’s a coward. Sometimes I think she’d sooner make herself a martyr, or even a slave, than pick up a sword.”
“That isn’t true.” Lucanh scoffed, furrowing his brow. “I know my mother is a cautious—”
“The emissary from Zan Vayonado begged for her help. He begged her. He pledged all his wealth, and for those people, a single coin is not so easy to part with, but she still denied him. Do you know what they did to that man?” She looked at him sternly but not unkindly—the hairs on his neck still bristled.
“Yes,” he answered meekly.
“Do you really?”
“They killed him.”
She shook her head. “No, sweet prince. They pried teeth out of his skull. They ripped the nails off his toes and fingers.” The boy winced at her words alone. “And then they did other things that no one but them will ever know now that he’s dead. And did your mother raise a battle cry to denounce that kind of unspeakable evil? No. She justified her own inaction again. And again. She’s never risen to the challenge of the crown.”
Lucanh scoffed again. “And you think you could do so much better than she could?”
She didn’t reply for a while afterward. She stared off into the woods, chewing another fragment of cheese, and he feared he’d said too much. “Better? That I cannot say. It would be foolish to be sure of that. What I’m certain is that our reigns would be as different as night and day. And when the little ones came to beg from me after a long night of sleeping on the cold cobblestones, contending with strays and the elements, I know I wouldn’t tell them to be grateful, or patient, or quiet. Not once.
“And when the prospect of war loomed on the horizon, I’d send my trained, hardy men to battle when the need arose. I would not prolong the inevitable. Force my poorest subjects to take up arms themselves... to protect my cowardice.”
Lucanh had nothing to say to that. He just sat next to the fire, accepting morsels of food that Zumawi and others offered to him, and he wished he’d either kept quieter on the road to Tuthbrough or not set out with them at all. One way or another, he had ruined everything.
How joyously he’d imagined them cheering his arrival, hailing him as the hero he’d always dreamed of being.
***
Night had fallen by the time they finally rejoined the road. Darrlagh calculated that they would reach the northern gate of Tern by midnight if they kept this pace.
“Perhaps I can convince my mother to send a team of real assassins,” said Lucanh. “I mean no offense...”
“None taken, you bowl-headed little imp,” said the white-haired woman. “No offense.”
“Perhaps she’ll be so grateful upon my return that she’ll come to her senses.”
“That, or she’ll throw us in the dungeon beneath Castle Tern,” said Zumawi. “And you might hear us wailing to be let free on a quiet winter’s day if you listen very close.” She laughed cynically.
“I won’t let that happen,” he protested. “I’d never do that to any of you.”
“Perhaps you can free us when you become king, then.” She snickered again to herself. “They say the surest omen of death to encounter in the wild is a bear cub. Do you know why?”
Lucanh furrowed his brow. “That doesn’t make any—”
“Ssh,” she cut him off. “Do you hear that?”
There came the distant sound of horse hooves clopping on the old dirt road. At first it sounded like only one horse, but more followed not long after that.
“Triad save us,” Darrlagh sighed. “Here comes your rescue party, Prince Lucanh! Oh, Heights...”
Lucanh peered ahead in the faint starlight, trying to tease out the shapes of men and horses from the formless black ahead of them, finding none. He couldn’t believe a whole search party had already been sent from the south to fetch him. And now they’d have a band of would-be assassins to bring home as well. All thanks to him. How humiliating.
“I don’t see anybody,” Lucanh said finally.
“They’re not coming from the south,” said Zumawi. She turned around, gasping.
Four hooded riders galloped up behind them, rearing their horses to a sudden stop.
“Out of the way, peasants!” one of them barked. He motioned for his fellows to dismount their horses and stand in formation before the band of travelers.
“Watch who you’re talking to!” Lucanh snapped back, standing between them and his companions. “I am Crown Prince of Dridon! She had a seat on the Council of Three, and these are her—”
“That’s enough,” Zumawi hissed at him through gritted teeth. She grabbed him hard by the wrist.
Still, he kept going. He was going to be brave in front of all of them. “You may ask nicely to go around us,” he went on, “or my mother will hear every detail of our encounter when I’m back in Castle Tern.”
What happened next was hard to make out in the dark as a cluster of clouds roamed across the moon. He heard the sound of sharp metal. Somebody screamed. Lucanh drew his sword and squinted in the dark.
The hooded horsemen attacked. He watched a dark blade cut through one of the travelers, watched silhouettes raise shaking swords and crossbows to answer their killers and be cut down quicker than they could scream. The sound of blades ripping through flesh sickened him as nothing ever had. He never imagined it would sound quite like that.
He tried to raise his voice, tried to be strong, but it was all he could do to keep his weapon up and stand rooted to the ground. It was not as he planned. Not even close.
“Where were you lot headed so late at night?” one of the hooded men laughed, hoisting one of the unharmed paupers in his arms. It was Zumawi. She spat in his face, faint starlight reflecting off her bared teeth, and she tried to bite his nose. “Oh, a fighter, are you? I like that. They’re no fun when they just lie there and take it!”
“More slaves the swamp boy has sent to do his dirty work,” she snarled at them. “The queen will hear a full account of what you’ve done here tonight. Not even she will be merciful this time. She’ll hang you outside the castle, and she won’t entertain your damn treaty for another moment!”
“Oh, we haven’t come to talk to her,” said another Grackenwelsh rider. “We’ve come to kill her. Which means we can’t let any of you three free to squeal on us, now can we?”
“The prince will fetch a hefty ransom,” another one chimed in. “I say we squeeze some coin out of that stuck-up queen before we kill her. Then kill him, too.”
“Maybe get her to agree to a secluded meeting somewhere. No guards, no knights... Yes. I like your line of thinking!”
“Tough brute we’ve got here!” they said of the dark-skinned man, and it took two of them to wrestle him into submission.
“That’s my brother!” Zumawi cried out. “Unhand him! Now!”
“Oh, we won’t hurt a hair on his head, lass. He’ll make a good, strong slave back home. And you’ll make a good toy for the night while he watches. I claim first turn!” He giggled like a child underneath the sounds of her crying out for help, screeching, sobbing. “I’m ready to go! Shall we start? I was thinking I—”
The rest of his words died in the air, wet and jagged, as he gasped for breath. The end of a blade caught the newly naked moonlight, metal glinting in the dark. Slice. It withdrew from the man’s neck and he fell dead to the ground. Zumawi scrambled over her motionless comrades and retreated to a safe distance.
“That was for all the men and women you ambushed tonight,” said a familiar voice. “A dirty death for your dirty deeds. The rest of you three I shall fight with honor. I promise you cleaner deaths than your friend.” Sir Godwald stepped out of the shadow of a tree, taller than he’d ever seemed before, and though the fear did not leave Lucanh entirely, its grip loosened.
“Cleaner deaths, eh?” one of them snickered. “Says the fat, perfumed knight from the south. Priss in a suit of armor. I’ve screwed girls that smelled worse than you.”
Sir Godwald cocked his head. “Shall I take that as a compliment to me or a slight to them?”
One of the hooded men charged him with his sword drawn. The knight parried his clumsy swing and plunged his broadsword clean through him, shaking him off the weapon like a speared fish.
The next two attacked at once. Parry. Dodge. Block. Swing. Block. Parry. Swing. One of them went to stab him in the side. He swept his great broadsword to parry the other and then block the sneak attack in one swipe.
Suddenly emboldened, Lucanh hefted his sword and charged into the fray.
Slice. One of the Grackenwelsh assassins jerked sideways under the force of the the knight’s killing blow, his trunk split open and spilling his insides. Lucanh froze. The man’s bulging eyes caught the moonlight. Wide, pained. Desperate. And then even in the darkness, even though Lucanh was but a boy, he could see the light of life leave his eyes as the man fell dead to the ground.
Sir Godwald put a quick end to the other hooded man and sheathed his sword.
“Prince Lucanh,” he said soothingly. “Prince Lucanh, are you all right? Have you been hurt?”
“No,” he answered. He shook with the terror of everything that had just happened. The knight took the prince’s dry sword gingerly from his hands and returned it to the scabbard at the boy’s waist. “H-how did you find us? Are there others?”
“Just me, my Prince. I knew to go looking for you when you weren’t in any of your usual hiding places. The others assumed that you had gone to be alone, as you’ve been fond of doing lately. But your mother had a feeling. Seeing as how I’m your caretaker, I set out at once to find you, and here I have. Thank Triad.” Sir Godwald smiled at him with tears in his eyes, maybe from the weight of everything that had unfolded this night. Lucanh himself still could scarcely believe that it wasn’t all some dreadful nightmare. “Thank Triad I found you in time, my Prince. I never would have been able to forgive—” Slice.
The knight sucked in a sudden breath. Stumbled once. He reached down to his inner thigh, where the hilt of a dagger stuck out. Slice. The last-wounded assassin ripped the blade out of his leg.
“There’ll be more,” the assassin croaked. “Least I got... you...” He rolled over on the dirt road and ceased to move, bloodied dagger still clutched in hand.
“Sir Godwald!” Lucanh cried out. “Sir Godwald!”
“Lucanh,” he breathed. “Run home now, my Prince. Leave.”
“Let me see,” said Zumawi. The boy had forgotten she was there. She knelt down next to the knight, reaching her hand toward the wound, and pulled it back slick with blood. “Oh, Heights, this is... Prince Lucanh, back away.”
“I won’t! Tell me what’s happening. Is he going to be all right?”
“Help me get him onto one of the horses,” she said. Lucanh wasn’t sure how to go about it, but he soon realized she was speaking to her brother. “Gently. Give me your tunic.” The man tore off his overshirt and thrust it at her.
“Zumawi, what’s happening?” He watched her twist up the tunic and tie it in a knot around the wound. The knight winced and grunted as she went about her business.
“You have your mother’s eyes, my Prince,” said Sir Godwald. “Emeralds.”
Zumawi and her brother each took up one of his arms. “One, two, three!” They grunted with the extreme effort of hefting a knight in full armor, but Sir Godwald aided them where he could, bracing against the stirrup, grasping the reins for stability. The animal took a sideways step, whickered uncertainly.
“On her they are beautiful, on you, gallant and stark,” the knight went on, his voice growing softer and farther away. “What can I say of myself? Loyalty, perhaps. Honor, I hope. Pray to Triad you don’t grow to have my hair. Or my luck.” He chuckled once bitterly, half-choked.
“What do you mean?” Lucanh asked.
“Hold him steady,” Zumawi instructed her brother, who sat behind the knight and held the reins. “Don’t let him fall. Bring him to the infirmary in Castle Tern! Now go!” The horse set out at a gallop and soon vanished, swallowed into the dark. Zumawi lifted Lucanh onto a horse of their own and they galloped into the night after them, and as they rode, the truth pierced the boy like a broadsword through the belly, and it was such a bewildering horror that he could not even fathom it in the beginning, but the ride back to Castle Tern would change all that.
It would change everything.
***
“Where is he?” Lucanh demanded when he dismounted the horse.
“Sir Godwald is in the infirmary, Your Grace,” said one of the knights, who stepped aside obsequiously. “Where have you been? Prince Lucanh, I do know that he is your caretaker, and that you’ve grown quite close to him—”
“Out of my way,” he spat back. Zumawi followed close behind, inquiring about her brother, but it was all just noise spilling out into the world at the back of Lucanh’s head. It meant nothing to him.
“Prince Lucanh,” said Sir Stepan, standing in the corridor that led to the infirmary, his armored arms folded. “He is not well. I strongly suggest you let the chirurgeon and the healers do their work. The matter is now in the hands of Triad.”
“Where is she?” the prince demanded next.
But his answer came around the corner, as Queen Rhoda and her escorting knights proceeded down the same corridor that Sir Stepan blocked. His mother had a bleary look in her eyes.
“Lucanh!” she exclaimed. She loped down the hallway toward him, carrying fistfuls of her trailing royal gown, and the knights hustled to keep pace in their armor. “Lucanh, thank Triad you’re home! Where did you go? Have you been harmed?” She reached out to caress his face, thumbing through the warm streams of his tears. “The pauper said—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She drew back. “Tell you what, son? Oh, you’re worried about your friend, Sir Godwald. I know, Luke, I know. Listen, why don’t we—”
“He’s my father!” The silence that fell over them was so maddening that Lucanh wondered for a moment if he’d gone deaf, so still was everyone in the vicinity, and so utterly without reply was his mother. “I didn’t want to believe them. I knew you were too afraid to go to war, but I didn’t think you were a total coward in everything you did. But you are. You’re spineless! You told me my father was Zan! You told me he died before—”
“Lucanh, this is not how I planned—you’ll come to understand one day that things are not always so—”
“All those nights I spent wishing for my father, crying for him, praying to the God of Heights to deliver my greetings to him... you kept up the lie! And I learn the truth, only in time to watch him die myself? You are no queen! You aren’t fit to rule over your own family, let alone this nation. I hate you! Freeze in the Hells for all I care!”
She reached out a trembling hand toward his shoulder and he bucked it off as though poisonous. He heard her sobbing as he stormed past the High Knight, but it gave him neither pause nor satisfaction. He made a straight line for the infirmary.
His mother. His father. What it meant to be a hero. What it meant to kill, and to die. He knew not what was a falsehood and what was true anymore. Sir Godwald lay on a stone slab, tended to by healers, pale as a ghost, sweating, his eyes barely open, his breathing shallow.
Lucanh prayed to Triad for a miracle. He was unsure if the three-headed god was another one of his mother’s elaborate, cloying lies.