“No…” the man finally gasped out. “It cannot be.”
Still, he took a tentative step toward her.
She retreated, running into Kanthe and Jace.
“I’ve got you,” the prince whispered behind her.
“We both do,” Jace added.
With their support, she stood her ground. Her shock turned to something colder. If any of this were true, here was the knight who had left her for dead in the swamps.
As he approached, he studied her, first with one eye, then another. His steps suddenly faltered. He slipped down on one knee. His voice cracked when he tried to speak.
“Y … You look just like her. It’s unmistakable.” His gaze tried to consume her. Tears welled, seeming to rise from both sadness and happiness. His lips thinned with agony. “By all the gods … I know you must be Marayn’s daughter.”
Nyx took her first step toward him, drawn by his grief and guilt, which matched her own heart. She searched his face, trying to find a similar match in his features, but she only saw a hard, broken man.
“I … I’m sorry,” she whispered to this stranger. “But I doubt any of this is true.”
Her words wounded him, but she felt no satisfaction in it, even as much as she had resented him for most of her life. There were angry words trapped in her chest, long turned to stone. She didn’t know what to make of this fallen knight. She had tried to prepare for this, but she had never truly believed it would happen. She dared not even hope it.
And now that it was here …
She realized a hard truth.
He means nothing to me.
As if hearing her private thought, a growl echoed across the courtyard. Then another. From one of the stables to the right, a large striped shadow bounded over a half gate, followed by a twin. They looked somewhat like wolves, only each stood as high as her chest. They stalked back and forth, crisscrossing one another, heads lowered, with tufted ears held high.
Jace gasped, and Kanthe swore.
Frell tried to herd them back toward the door. “They’re vargr,” he warned, his voice both scared and awed.
Nyx ignored him and stood firm, captured by the dark chatter behind the beasts’ growls. She listened to the underlying high whine. The pitch shivered the hairs on her neck.
Graylin, the man who could be her father, turned to the pair. “Aamon, Kalder, back to your den! Now!”
The vargr ignored him, sweeping wide to come around either side of the man. They passed him and squeezed back together in front of him, filling the space between her and the knight. The pair of vargr growled, lips rippling, baring teeth, challenging her.
She remembered Xan’s warning: There are beasts who will be drawn to your trail. They will seek to kill anyone who risks bridling them.
Still, she faced down the pair. She picked out the thread buried in their whine. It sang of dark forests under cold stars, of the fire of the hunt, of the rip of flesh off bone, of the warmth of the pack in snowy dens. She let those wild strands inside her, to entwine through her. She accepted the vargr’s feral nature, their savage lusts. She had no desire to bridle any of that, but she also refused to be cowed by them.
Instead, she gathered all the anger, grief, and guilt inside her, even her loneliness and shame, until it demanded to be loosed, to burst forth in a wild scream. She remembered unleashing that storm after her father was murdered, leaving many dead in the wake of her rage.
Not again.
She focused all that raw power onto one image. Of a small bat fighting to save her, of dying because of it. Of milk and warmth shared. Of a brother tied to her heart. She closed her eyes and keened that kinship, fueled by all that was inside her. She sang it back along the twin threads to the two wild hearts crouched before her.
As she did so, she exposed her own heart, welcoming them to it.
Slowly their two songs merged. Her keening transformed into a silent howl inside her chest. She shared their haunting cry to icy stars framed by frosted branches and brittle needles.
After a seemingly endless time, Jace gasped again behind her.
She opened her eyes.
One vargr bowed before her, then the other. Their chins lowered to the cobbles. Amber eyes glowed up at her. Tails swished in greeting. Two throats flowed with quieter mewls of reunion, welcoming a lost pack member back to the fold.
She stared at her new brothers, then lifted her gaze over their haunches to the man behind them. She offered him no kinship like she had these beasts. She faced his bewilderment, the awe in his face.
She had only one message for him.
Here is what you abandoned in the swamps.
TWELVE
BLOODBAERNE
So it is written: Magi im Rhell, First of the Klashean Dresh’ri, cut his heart out before his brothers & heald it forth as proof of his superiority. He gave it unto the Second of his ordre before finally succumbing to deth. It is claim’d, for centuries, the Imri-Ka kept the sacred talisman in a consecrat’d vault—where it still beats to this day.
—From Baskal’s History of Arcana and Thaumaturgy
39
THE KING’S BRIGHT son stood in shadows.
Mikaen paused on the dark stairs that delved through the ramparts of Highmount. He stared out an arrow slit that afforded a view to the north, to the smoldering ruins of the city’s mooring docks.
It had been three days since the craven attack on the defenseless sprawl of wyndships. Still, a pall hung over the field, like a shawl of mourning. Hundreds had burned to death, thousands more maimed. Innocents all. Past the smoke, the towering warships loomed high, waving flags of the sun and crown.
At least those ships had been spared, and thankfully so.
Mikaen settled a palm on the pommel of his sword.
War is now certain with the Klashe.
His anger stoked higher. It was not the homecoming he had hoped. He still wore the ceremonial garb from his celebratory nuptial parade. The procession of knights, nobles, and servitors had traveled from Azantiia to the Carcassa family estate in the western stretches of the Brau?lands. He had left his new wife, Lady Myella, at Hold Carcassia, a sweeping manor that spread across green hills. Its rolling low roofs were sodded in the same grasses that fed their vast herds. Rumors of war had been the pretext for securing Myella at the ranchhold, to shelter her out of harm’s way. But in fact, the sojourn had already been planned, to help mask how quickly her belly grew with the prince’s child, the future heir to the throne of Hálendii.
He closed his eyes against the pall outside and thought instead of holding his child in his arms. He pictured a crown of curled blond hair to match his own, and the bright emerald eyes of his beloved Myella. Already a paternal protectiveness warmed through him. He would let nothing happen to his child.
“We should not tarry,” Liege General Haddan urged from a few steps below. “The king awaits. And fury has quickened his temper.”
Mikaen nodded his understanding. After hearing of the Klashean attack, he had ridden hard back to Highmount, arriving with the dawn bell. His polished black boots were scuffed by stirrup and horsehair, his dark blue cloak carried half the road’s mud on it, and his body stank of sweat, both his and his steed’s. As soon as he had stabled his horse to be curried and cooled, he had climbed toward a cold bath and a welcome steam in the Legionary’s bathiery, ready to rid the trail from his pores and cracks.