Page 44 of Witchcraft and Fury (Chronicles of the Divided Isle #1)

‘Stop!’ said Solar, wincing on his behalf. ‘You can’t tell me that this is how you usually do it?’

‘Well … no,’ said Cal awkwardly. ‘I’d normally take off my shirt, but …’

‘Oh, don’t be an idiot! It’s not like I’ve never seen a topless man before.’

Cal raised an eyebrow and began to unbutton his shirt.

Solar had seen topless men before, but she hadn’t seen anything quite like this, not anything that made the breath in her throat catch and her heart skip a beat.

She felt the heat rise in her cheeks as Cal’s fingers, long and elegant, undid the buttons of his shirt in a way she found both entrancingly deft and torturously slow.

The skin underneath was dark and smooth, his chest broad and strong.

She was close enough to count his freckles.

She averted her eyes, but still out of their corners she could make out each inch of skin laid bare to the starlight, and the ripples of lean, taut muscle revealed as he reached the lower buttons.

Finally, Cal shrugged off his shirt and let it fall to the ground.

Making a conscious effort to stop her fingers from trembling, Solar undid the bandages already in place.

She’d not made a noise as Cal had undressed, holding her breath as she’d used all her powers of self-control to stop herself from openly staring.

But now she gasped in shock at what lay underneath the bandages.

There was a long, wicked cut on his forearm and another two above the elbow.

‘How did you even manage to keep hold of your sword and fight your way to the trapdoor?’ she asked in amazement, finding her voice.

‘I don’t know myself, really. I just knew that I had to.

I suppose that all I could think of whilst fighting …

well, all I could think of was that, if my sword fell, I would be overwhelmed.

And then you and the others would be sold into slavery.

You, who are normally so fearless and full of energy, a slave for the rest of your life. I couldn’t let that happen.’

‘And you would’ve been killed,’ she said, placing herbs over the gashes. He had goose pimples on his skin. Above them a thousand stars shone, and she worked by their light and the glow of the campfire.

‘Yes, I would have.’

They sat in silence for a while, Solar busy with his wounds, her eyes determinedly fixed on her handiwork and not the gentle, almost imperceptible rise and fall of Cal’s chest.

‘Speaking of Pingot,’ she said at last, securing the final bandage, ‘he once said to me that you have an interesting story to tell, about your life before studying with Loveday, and how you came to study magic.’

‘Well, it’s a long story. I don’t want to bore you,’ Cal said, shrugging on his shirt again. He left it open to the heat of the flames, the light of the fire chasing the night’s shadows across his skin.

‘Try me. It’s not like I have anything better to do on guard duty,’ Solar said, her throat dry .

‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘But no interruptions, you promise?’

Solar nodded.

Cal looked into the fire for what seemed an age, remembering years gone by, and Solar was just about to prompt him when he began to speak.

‘I suppose it starts with my family’s rise to power.

I’m not like the others, Oswald, Wyman, Bear and Pingot, not really.

Or at least, I wasn’t always. My father is now one of the most powerful earls in Ashwood, but just nine years ago he was a middle-ranking lord, with his allegiance sworn to a nobleman named Earl Yewbrook.

‘You may not remember clearly – you would have been just eight years old, I suppose – but at that time there was a great civil war devastating the land.

King Ned had just died at the age of ninety-eight, and his two sons were fighting over the succession.

Prince Edric had the better claim, being older than his brother, Prince Galan.

Yet it soon became known that King Ned had been murdered in his bedchamber, and all the evidence pointed to Edric as the killer.

He had grown weary of waiting for his father to die, and at the age of sixty-six himself wondered if he would ever succeed to the throne at all.

The great lords of the realm flocked to the banners of the rival princes in equal number.

‘The night that Earl Yewbrook heard of the civil war, sitting in his castle, he declared at once for Galan. He had always been loyal to King Ned and refused to bend the knee to the murderer Edric. Yewbrook sent riders to all the lesser lords from the lands around his earldom, including my father, calling upon them to march in full strength and meet him on the road. Together, they would advance to join Galan’s forces.

‘These lesser lords had sworn oaths of allegiance to Yewbrook, and they kept them in his hour of need. Yewbrook himself had ten thousand men under his personal command, my father six thousand and the other lords combined a further five thousand. It was an army to be reckoned with, larger than that of any other great lord in the kingdom. With Yewbrook’s force Galan would win the war.

‘I rode with my father and his men to Yewbrook’s camp.

Yewbrook welcomed him like an old friend, and each night on the road my father sat at the great man’s right-hand side in the command tent.

As the only son of my family, my father bade me stand behind him at dinners and war councils, to learn how commanders planned and won battles.

It did not matter to him, an austere military man, that I was only ten. ’

‘Only son?’ cut in Solar. ‘I thought that only younger sons of great houses left home to study magic?’

Cal held up a hand. ‘Let me finish. You promised you’d listen without interrupting.

‘One night, a man grimy from the road entered the command tent where the earl and his sworn lords ate. He was a messenger sent by Prince Galan himself, with urgent news. Galan’s forces were just a morning’s march away, he said, and due to meet Edric’s army on a large plain when the sun reached its zenith the following day.

The messenger asked Yewbrook to approach the plain with his forces from the east, stopping just short of the field of battle and hiding behind a rise.

Galan and Edric would clash from the north and south, and when the two forces met Yewbrook was to emerge from hiding, charge onto the battlefield with all his force and deal Edric a devastating blow to his flank.

To my young ears it seemed like the perfect plan, and that victory was surely secure.

I thought my heart would burst with pride as I watched my father, sitting at the right-hand side of the earl who would win the throne for the rightful heir .

‘The messenger left to relay Yewbrook’s acceptance of the plan to Prince Galan.

Yewbrook and the other commanders retired to their tents to get what sleep they could before the coming battle.

As I went to my own tent, accompanied by a pair of guards, I was surprised to see another messenger dismount outside my father’s quarters.

Why would a messenger go directly to my father, I wondered, and not to Yewbrook?

‘I tossed and turned for what seemed an eternity that night, so excited was I by the approaching battle.

How would Earl Yewbrook reward my father and the other lords once the battle was won?

Would there be a tourney in their honour, or lands and wealth gifted?

Eventually I drifted off, but when I woke it was not to the usual sounds of the soldiers breaking their fast. It was still the dead of night.

The guard who had been posted outside my tent was leaning over me, shaking me awake.

‘“Come, boy,” he said gruffly. “Your father requires your presence.”

‘I left the warmth of my tent groggily, still in my nightshirt.

My father was astride his horse, resplendent in full battle gear and surrounded by his personal guard.

He looked glorious in the flickering torchlight, like one of those chivalrous knights that feature in all the stories of old.

He had no helmet, but over a leather jerkin wore a breastplate that shone red like a cloud tinged by the dying sun.

His sword was sharp enough to cut through armour, flesh and bone.

‘“Lift the boy onto my horse,” he commanded.

‘My guard obeyed, placing me behind my father. I wrapped my arms around him, scared that I would fall off.

‘“Tonight, I would have you see how a man earns his place in the world,” my father said, and I gathered that he was speaking to me when none of his men replied .

‘I first realised that something was horribly wrong when a man wearing my father’s colours and holding a sack ran up to us. He was a scrawny fellow with no teeth and wispy hair that fell down past his shoulders. I remember him quite clearly.

‘“It is done?” my father asked the man.

‘“It is, m’lord. The camp guards are all dead,” he said in a whiney voice. He opened the sack and tipped its contents onto the ground. They were severed heads.

‘I opened my mouth in a silent scream.

‘“Good,” replied my father, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. “Let the real work commence.”

‘The man nodded and ran off, gesturing silently to other men on the fringes of my father’s presence.

‘At some signal, I do not know what, the entirety of my father’s forces emerged from their tents.

Six thousand men. They were armed to the teeth, but barefoot and wore no armour that I could see.

Knives, swords, spears, axes … I lost count of the variety of weapons.

And then they dispersed silently throughout the camp, moving like ghosts.

‘A lone, agonised shout split the night air. A shout of terror and disbelief, of betrayal. That was the start of it.