Page 6

Chapter five

Aldric

“ F ather,” a voice greeted him from his blind side, and Aldric jerked a sharp glance upward to find Calix looming in the darkness. The other man thumped his fist over his heart in salute.

Aldric narrowed his one good eye at his half-Kunishi Son.

Calix had been the one to start the "Father" and "Mother" nonsense. But he supposed he’d rather his Sons call him Father in jest than continue calling him Your Highness.

He hadn’t been a prince for many years.

“The camp is quiet,” Calix continued his report. “Any bird stupid enough to fly within my line of sight is dead. I don’t think they know we’re here, sir.”

Aldric huffed a quiet sigh through his nose and returned his attention to sharpening the edge of his glaive. When he was younger, his peers had laughed at his preference for wielding polearms. A sword would have been a more proper choice. A sword was the preferred weapon of a gentleman.

But he was no gentleman.

He knew they needed to move before they lost the advantage of surprise. But the knowledge that a battle awaited him out there in the darkness no longer thrilled him as it once did. He wasn’t a young man anymore. The fire was warm. Outside their cave lay a cold mist waiting to gnaw its way into his very bones.

But this was his lot in life. His one purpose. He was the Crow of Drakmor.

It was his duty to hold the border against the Kunishi horde.

“Good,” he finally rasped to Calix. At last, he set aside his whetstone.

There was no point in delaying the slaughter further.

Aldric lurched to his feet and made for where the horses waited, hidden deeper within the cave. “Beck,” he called to his second-in-command and oldest friend. “Make ready. We’re moving.”

The rising tide of excitement was a nearly palpable thing. Even Calix had a visible spring to his step when he bounded off to find his mare.

Sliding his polearm through the harness strapped across his back, Aldric stepped toward his own horse, Mourn, and greeted the great brute by tapping his fingertips against the destrier’s shoulder. With a snort, the stallion responded to that nonverbal command by lowering his bulk to the cold dirt so Aldric could mount more easily.

Luck had been the only thing keeping his well-trained boy alive all these years. He didn’t know what he would do when he finally lost him.

Aldric’s gauntlet-clad fingers skimmed across the many scars ridging his stallion’s neck before he finally hoisted himself into the saddle. With a nudge of his heel, he urged Mourn into rocking back up to his full, towering height.

What Aldric lacked in vertical presence, his destrier more than made up for.

While his largest Son, Rakon, doused the campfire, his eldest, Leif, led a few of the others in a quick prayer to the Lord. Aldric curled his lips at the sound of it. But he wouldn’t deny his men their freedoms. They could pray to a god who never listened all they liked.

On their own time.

“Mount up,” he barked to his loitering Sons, and they hurried to obey.

Mere moments later, their band of thirteen rode out in silence. Only the thud of their horses’ hooves against the earth as they picked their way out of the cave disrupted the mist-drenched stillness of the night.

It was a quiet ride toward the valley where the Kunishi had made their ill-fated camp—uneventful yet rife with tension. Aldric rode at the front of the pack next to his second, Beck, with Calix and the others just behind.

They were drawing close now, close enough that he could smell them. A Kunishi camp always had a distinct sort of scent to it: the scent of horse coupled with the exotic spices they always burned during their prayers.

Reining Mourn to a halt, Aldric lifted his left hand in the air to signal his men to hold. But they lost their element of surprise when a whinny from one of their own horses pierced the night.

Aldric cut a glance to the side and hissed at the sight of his youngest Son, Sven, losing control of his gelding. The horse jerked against the boy’s reins and thrashed its head wildly from side to side. The whites of its eyes gleamed in the darkness.

Sven struggled to rein the beast back in.

“Shut him up,” Calix snarled.

“I’m trying, I’m trying—”

Beck warned, “He senses your fear.”

“It’s not me. I swear—”

“Shut him up, or I will,” Calix warned one final time while raising his bow and drawing taut the string.

Aldric’s nostrils flared as he suddenly caught the whiff of another strange scent on the wind. Something musty and edged with a tang of the other . Magic.

The reports had been true. The Kunishi had a Fangtalker.

And the Fangtalker had a pet.

“Warg!” Aldric shouted in warning before the monster in question shattered what was left of the stillness with its heart-rending roar. From the mist, the great beast emerged, its eyes aglow like smoldering embers in the darkness. It was coming in fast, surging forward in a flash of shadowy fur and dripping fangs .

Another of his Sons, Eisway, shouted, “The villagers reported a large dog, not a warg .”

Beck snarled, “If that’s a dog, then I’m a duke.”

Aldric ripped free his glaive and barked out another order of, “Archers!”

Arrows rained from his Sons’ bows like hail. Three slammed home into the warg’s throat.

But the warg didn’t falter.

It just kept coming, its powerful legs devouring the ground with each long stride. It was close enough now he could see the malicious gleam of its eyes and the rivulets of drool streaming from its fang-filled jowls.

It was close enough now for him to see it was heading straight for Sven.

“Go!” Beck yelled as he positioned himself in between their youngest Son and the monster. “We’ll handle this.”

Tightening his jaw, Aldric nudged Mourn into a hard canter and flew toward the Kunishi camp. He didn’t bother arguing with Beck. He didn’t waste precious moments hesitating.

Hesitation was what would get a man killed on the battlefield.

He didn’t need to glance behind him to know the rest of his vanguard, minus Beck, were close on his heels. Where he went, Calix, Rakon, and Eisway were always quick to follow.

The commotion had clearly summoned every Kunishi in the vicinity. Like disturbed hornets, they poured from their tents, blades flashing. Screams exploded all around.

Screams of terror. Screams of warning .

One Kunishi warrior even survived long enough to recognize him and cry out to his brethren, “It’s the Little Demon,” in their native tongue before large Rakon and his warhammer laid the raider low.

Aldric didn’t have to bark orders to his men now. They had done this time and time again over the years. The countless skirmishes all blended together into one tangle of blood and sweat within his memories.

As a single, silent beast, the four of them rode hard through the camp, cutting down any Kunishi who dared try to stop them. Famed warriors though they may be, the Kunishi were all the same at their core. Predictable. Yoked by their traditions and their rituals.

It was easy enough to defeat them, once one learned their ways.

And Aldric had been studying those ways for fifteen years.

He made for the paddocks—the makeshift enclosure they would have built to hold their prized horses before even erecting their own tents. They always built the paddocks at the very back of the camp, close to a water source.

And sure enough, there they were. The herd was smaller than he had expected, though.

And the horses were far from alone.

A lone Kunishi stood before the pen, his arms crossed over his chest, waiting for their approach.

At first glance, he would have seemed unarmed had Aldric not recognized the dark tattoos inked across his face. The markings on his right cheek denoted his clan. His lineage .

But the twin fangs inked on the left were the ones that set him apart.

A Fangtalker was never unarmed so long as there were animals about.

“Your pup is already dead, wildman,” Calix taunted the Fangtalker as they all drew their horses to a halt before the pens.

But the Kunishi didn’t bother glancing Calix’s way. The other man’s eyes were only for Aldric when he answered in stilted common, “Yes. But at what cost to your own?”

Aldric frowned at that. But he didn’t have time to consider the Fangtalker’s words further. The bitter tang of the Kunishi’s magic rippled through the air. Off to his left, Eisway’s horse screamed and bucked. An owl descended from the heavens to slash at Rakon’s face with its talons outstretched.

“Calix,” Aldric barked, though the command was needless. His Son’s arrow was already arcing through the night. But Calix clearly hadn’t been aiming for the Fangtalker himself, given that arrow’s trajectory.

He had been aiming for one of the Kunishi horses within the pen.

The horse’s cry of pain when Calix’s arrow sank into the meat of its shoulder matched the one which ripped forth from the Fangtalker’s own lips, though the Kunishi himself remained untouched. The eeriness of it all was still enough to make Aldric’s skin crawl, even after all those years.

But he didn’t have time to wallow in his own discomfort .

While the Fangtalker reeled, Aldric nudged Mourn back into a canter. He rode hard straight for the Kunishi, his glaive lowered, as Calix launched himself from the saddle and ran for the paddock. A dagger flashed in his Son’s hand.

A mere second later, the plant fibers lashing the planks of the makeshift paddock together snapped. The pen clattered to the ground, freeing the herd of now panicked horses.

Wild-eyed, the Fangtalker lunged at Calix with a howl bursting from his throat. But before the barbarian could ever reach his Son, Aldric speared the Kunishi clean through, back to front, with his glaive.

Calix was quick to dive out of the way of the blood spray. And Eisway, now on foot, stalked over to rip the dead Kunishi off the end of Aldric’s polearm. The Fangtalker pitched to the earth and disappeared within the mist swirling underfoot.

“It sounds like we may have lost a brother,” Rakon rumbled when he rode up to rejoin them, his face now streaked with blood and fresh cuts. “If the Fangtalker’s to be believed.”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Aldric snapped, wheeling Mourn back toward the camp.

Tendrils of smoke traced the sky. One of his other Sons must have already set the tents ablaze, as was protocol. But a sudden sense of unease stirred at the back of Aldric’s mind.

That had been easy. Too easy.

Where were the Kunishi shieldmaidens? Where was their warlord? Why weren’t these people truly fighting back?

No Kunishi warband would yield so swiftly.

A sudden cry of, “Oi! Father!” from Leif pierced the night. “Looks like we got a bit of a problem here!”

Aldric thinned his lips and urged Mourn deeper into the smoldering ruins of the encampment, following the sound of his eldest Son’s voice. Calix and Rakon joined him.

Eisway hunted for his wayward horse.

The smoke was thick, and it choked the air with its acrid sting. But the camp was quiet now. The screams were gone. All save for one.

The scream of a child.

Aldric’s blood ran cold when he drew Mourn to a halt before the one tent left untouched—the tent around which all the rest of his Sons gathered, save for Beck, Sven, and their medic, Kyn. When Leif looked up at him, the confusion written on the older man’s face matched the unease churning his own stomach.

Never before had a raiding party brought children with them.

Harnessing his glaive, Aldric swung his right leg off of Mourn and gripped the side of the saddle to carefully lower himself down.

Hobbling over, he asked Leif, “What is it?” But he could see well enough for himself what it was the moment he looked past the tent’s flap.

Within it huddled many women and children—too many for him to count. Some quietly sobbed. One wailed so loudly, his ears buzzed from the pain of it all. Quite a few simply glared. One even babbled at Leif in rapidfire Kunishi, too quick for Aldric to understand .

There was only one man there to protect the lot of them, and he stood between the Sons and the group of women and children. He was an old man, his hair more silver than black.

An old man wielding a spear that looked more fit for fishing than killing.

Aldric’s frown deepened. Many of the clan tattoos he saw differed from the others. Yet more strangeness. The Kunishi clans rarely mingled except when they warred against each other.

“Speak slower,” Aldric implored the babbling woman. His brow furrowed. “I can’t understand you.”

The woman’s eyes blazed a trail straight for him and she peeled back her lips to snarl, “You may imitate our tongue, Little Demon, but you will never truly understand us.”

The old man stepped between him and the woman. The spear in his hands shook when he stammered, “Please, Little Demon, forgive my daughter. She knows not what she says—”

“I know exactly what I say,” the woman shouted over the old man’s shoulder.

Behind Aldric, Calix demanded, “Drop your weapons and yield. Now.”

“Calix,” Aldric snapped, though his eyes remained upon the Kunishi before him. “What are you doing here? You do not look like raiders—”

The Kunishi woman laughed. “The foolish demon cannot tell the difference between a refugee and a raider. ”

“Silence, Akemi,” the old man pleaded. To Aldric, he continued, “We flee from the one called the Bonesinger. Please, Little Demon, let us go and we will trouble you no longer.”

That was a strange word he had never heard before. Bonesinger.

At his side, Leif dug a finger into his ear and asked, “What was that about bones?”

“I don’t know,” Aldric quietly admitted.

Behind him, Eisway asked, “What are we going to do with them, Father?”

Aldric didn’t know that either. He had killed his fair share of women over the years. Countless Kunishi shieldmaidens. Women armed with blades and bravery.

The only shieldmaiden he saw before him, though, was the woman the old man had called Akemi.

And he wasn’t about to kill her in front of the children.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Aldric suddenly snarled to the old man as a hot wave of irritation burned its way through him. Now he was faced with an impossible decision while all his men watched, waiting to see what he would do. “If you are mere refugees, why have you been raiding our villages?”

“Lies,” the woman named Akemi hissed. “We have raided nothing.”

A brief wink of steel was all the warning Aldric received before the shieldmaiden suddenly dove out from behind her father. She lunged for him, a dagger drawn.

Time seemed to slow .

“No!” the old man screamed and dove back between them with his spear. A bowstring twanged. The elderly Kunishi dropped like a stone with one of Calix’s arrows now piercing his chest.

And Akemi came for Calix, with all the rage of a Kunishi shieldmaiden, to claim her family’s blood debt.

“Murderer,” she shrieked.

Gritting his teeth, Aldric barreled straight for her. The woman was taller than he was, as all women were, and he ducked easily beneath the swing of her blade.

But not quickly enough.

His cheek burned in the wake of her dagger’s passing. “Stop,” he commanded her as he dove out of the way of her next strike.

But she didn’t stop.

“You’re just another of the Bonesinger’s puppets,” the shieldmaiden accused. The strange word made even less sense in that context than the first. “Where you go, death and darkness follow.”

Steeling his jaw, Aldric punched the woman’s midsection in a sharp jab that lured a breathless gasp from her lips. “Rakon!” he shouted, bringing the large man to his side.

Looking grim, Rakon wrapped his arms about Akemi and lifted her clean off her feet. With her arms now pinned, Aldric pried the dagger from her fingers.

But still, she struggled.

“May the Underworld swallow you whole,” she screamed at him over the sounds of the other women within the tent, desperately trying to shush their crying children .

“Easy there, little wildcat,” Rakon rumbled to the woman caged within his arms. The big man leveled a tired look down at him. It was an exhaustion Aldric felt all the way down to his bones. “What are we doing with her, boss?”

“Let her go,” Calix suggested from where he lingered in the entrance to the tent, his bow freshly drawn. “And I’ll make quick work of her.”

“No,” Aldric commanded over his shoulder.

“But she drew blood,” Calix protested.

“I said no ,” Aldric roared and the children’s cries grew all the louder for it. Turning his attention back to the shieldmaiden, he demanded over the sickening sound of their sobs, “Tell me more about this Bonesinger.”

She answered by spitting in his face.

His right cheek stung when he swiped it clean, his blood joining her spittle on his gauntlet. Blood for blood. The Kunishi way demanded a life for a life.

The shieldmaiden wouldn’t be satisfied.

But he wasn’t ready to die just yet. Nor would he sacrifice Calix to her blade.

“Let her go,” Aldric dully commanded. He tossed the woman’s dagger on the ground between them. “We’ve done enough here.” He wanted out of that tent. Away from the sting of the smoke and the reek of their combined fear.

He still had questions, but clearly the shieldmaiden wasn’t going to answer any of them .

“Turn around,” Aldric advised Akemi when Rakon set her back down on her feet. Jerking his chin toward the tent flap, he directed, “Make north for the lands of Lothmeer. The Church will protect you. But you’re not welcome here.”

She frowned at him. Her chest heaved. Her eyes darted to where her dagger still lay on the ground between them.

But Aldric growled a simple, “Don’t,” before he finally turned and stalked back out into the night with his men slowly following him. He could nearly taste their uncertainty on the wind. This wasn’t the way of the Crow of Drakmor and his Twelve Sons.

Burn it down. Leave none alive. That was their way.

But never before had he had children for an audience.

“Where’s Beck? Where’s Sven? Where’s Kyn?” Aldric asked when he returned to Mourn’s side and hooked his fingers through the stallion’s reins. “I want a count of the wounded.” When no one answered him, Aldric swiveled a slow glance up to Leif.

But his eldest Son avoided his gaze.

Dread settled itself heavily within his stomach when he asked, “Where are they, Leif?”

“Beck’s dead,” Leif whispered, a sudden rasp to his voice. “Lost him to the warg.” After clearing his throat, the old man added, “Kyn’s with Sven. The lad won’t leave Beck’s side.”

Without another word, Aldric turned away from Leif and led Mourn away from the smoldering camp and out into the night. In silence, he made for the dark forest beyond, where he had last seen Beck alive.

Where he had left Beck to die. Without him .

Beck .

Beck had been with him from the beginning—the captain of his guard, when he was still the Crown Prince of Drakmor. His best friend. His only friend, until Beck had suggested they start the Sons.

The Sons had all been Beck’s idea. It had been Beck who had wanted to build their dysfunctional little family. A place where the bastards of the nobility and all the other unwanted sons of Drakmor just like him could finally belong.

And now Beck was just…gone?

A sudden screech was all the warning Aldric received before a familiar weight tangled itself about his shoulders in a glide of sleek scales and soft feathers. Soot.

The black-scaled usuru had been shadowing him for the past year. Some wild little thing he picked up one day during a raid. He had thought it was a Fangtalker’s pet at first. But no.

No matter how far along the border he patrolled, the creature followed. Leif said it was a sign of good things to come, to have an usuru following one about.

Aldric thought it was just one more nuisance, though. One more mouth to feed. One more life to protect.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, he continued to crash through the underbrush. It didn’t take him long to find the body of the warg. That great lump of fur and fangs was hard to miss.

But amidst the torn ground and spattered blood, he only found Sven crouched next to what was left of his dead horse. Kyn hovered over him .

But there was no Beck.

“Where is he?” Aldric asked, his voice thick.

Even with the question, Sven remained a mere tear-streaked statue. But Kyn lifted his ashen face and whispered, “He’s there, Father.” His Son pointed at the warg’s corpse. “I can’t…I can’t move it.”

Aldric squinted at the great mass that was the dead monster. Finally, he noticed what he hadn’t before: Beck’s lifeless form pinned under that of the warg.

Behind him, horses snorted and brush rustled underfoot as the rest of his Twelve Sons—or rather Eleven Sons—drew in closer to see their fallen brother.

“Eisway. Rakon,” Aldric rasped as he turned away from the sight of Beck’s glassy eyes and missing throat. “Get him out from under there. Kyn. Sven rides with you. We make for Blackrun as soon as we have Beck.”

“You’re hurt,” Kyn observed with a frown after he had straightened from his crouch. “Let me clean it, at the very least, before we ride out.”

But Aldric shrugged his Son away. “I’m fine,” he insisted. His medic could fuss over him later, after they returned home to Blackrun—their cold fortress in the mist.

And after they buried Beck.