He still feels pain.
Erida looked on, filled with fascination.
“When you first came to me, I wondered if this was all a trick,” she murmured. A few drops of blood welled up in Taristan’s cuts, falling to the grass before the skin knit together again.
He tested his fist. Not even the glimmer of a scar remained. “Does this look like a trick to you?” he rumbled, glowering.
The ground muffled her footsteps as she moved, skirts wheeling around her legs. “A con man and his pet wizard,” Erida said, turning his fist over in her grasp. The blood was still there, but nothing else. “Using petty magic to ensnare a queen.”
“Petty magic,” Ronin spat, his scarlet robes like a gown around him. He rose smoothly to his feet, his face flushed like his clothing. “You know not of what you speak.”
Erida glared, her gaze like a volley of arrows. Very few upon the Ward would dare speak to her with such a tone. “Then enlighten me, Wizard.”
It was Taristan who answered, raising the sword in his other hand, the hilt clutched in his fist. It reflected his face, the scratches below his eye turned to pearly white scars. “I took this sword from the vaults of Iona, winding deep beneath an Elder fortress. They called me a thief for retrieving what was mine, wielded by my ancestors, even when my own brother carried its twin.”
He ran a finger down the strange steel, etched with runes in a language Erida could not read. She tried to picture the Elder enclave, hidden from the world, surrounded by mist. And ruin crawling within, a Corblood mortal with a deathless grudge and iron will.
“That day was long in coming. It was Ronin who found me, told me what I was. The red wizard pulled a mercenary from the mud of a Treckish war camp and made him a conqueror,” Taristan continued, his voice low but strong, reverberating in Erida’s chest. He passed the sword through the air errantly, without thought. “I knew in my bones I was not the same, not a man like the ones beside me, content to fight and fuck and farm, drinking their money and pissing their lives into nothing. I wanted the horizon more than I wanted any cup or coin or concubine.”
Ronin raised his chin, looking on Taristan as he would a beloved son. He passed by him, brushing a white hand over his shoulder. “Such is the way of Old Cor. Of all your like,” the wizard said, moving on. “It’s the Spindle in your blood.”
“You are children of crossing,” Erida offered, remembering her lessons as best she could. As the heir to Galland, she had been taught the tales of Old Cor as much as any other part of her birthright. Her father used to tell them at night, like any other bedtime story. Children of crossing, children of conquest. Destined to rule every corner of the Ward, but they fell. They failed. We are their successors.
And I will prove it, the Queen believed.
Taristan turned, silhouetted against the broken window. He stared into the ruins of Castle Vergon, but Erida knew he looked farther. Backward. Into his own past.
“The Elders took my brother, older by minutes, chose him for nothing but a few seconds of life. He would be their champion, their emperor, their dog, their sword to cut a path back home.” The words ripped from him, and color rose in his pale cheeks. The son of Old Cor cut a vicious line in the moss, splitting the green like flesh. Though he stood tall and whole, a prince of Galland, a prince of Old Cor, immune to harm, unbothered by pain, Erida could not help but feel pity for him. No, not for Taristan today. But for the boy who grew up alone, abandoned, with nothing but the road beneath his feet. “They left me screaming in the wilderness. And I became someone else’s sword, someone else’s beast.”
Her heartbeat sputtered. Mine, she thought too quickly.
Taristan met her eyes again but said no more, a muscle working in his jaw. Some part of him hesitated, holding back. Her gaze trailed down his neck. White veins stood out at his collar, visible beneath the ties. They had grown since last she’d seen him, like the roots of a tree.
Ronin moved, passing between the royal pair. He leered at Erida, showing small teeth.
She swallowed back a burst of revulsion. Get away from me, you rat, she thought.
“You serve your gods, your silent judges in their stained-glass prisons, dead but for their priests speaking for bones long turned to dust,” the wizard said. “If they were ever bones at all.”
Her body ran hot, a sweat breaking along her neck like fever, like sickness. The Queen chewed his words, turning them over and over.
“And who do you serve, Taristan?” she asked, her voice shaking.