A Darkness Forged in Fire Read online

  Sergeant Lorian didn't look as if he believed Konowa, but he finally shrugged and motioned to the unseated troopers. "All right, you lucky buggers, double up on the mare, the officer and his lady will ride the gelding. Now be quick about it."

  Konowa walked over to the gelding, remembering to mount from the left. He placed his musket muzzle-down in the leather container strapped to the side of the saddle that had only moments before held a trooper's musket. Visyna walked over, her face flushed with shouting. He decided to be a gentleman and offer her his hand.

  "Thank you, no. I think of the two of us it's you who needs assistance," she said, holding out her hand to him.

  Konowa decided the snickers he heard were from the horses, and reluctantly took Visyna's hand. With his left hand he grabbed a chunk of the horse's mane, then placed his left foot in the stirrup, said a little prayer, and jumped. As it was, he barely got up into the saddle, his ribs crying out in protest as he swung his right leg over. Visyna had no such trouble, hopping up behind him with delicate ease. She chose to ride sidesaddle on the rolled blanket strapped to the saddle.

  The elves of the Hynta were not known for riding, staying mostly within the confines of the Great Forest. Still, they had an affinity with horses, as they did with most things in the natural order, and took to it with grace and ease when required. Konowa, on the other hand, found riding a horse as enjoyable as sitting on a rockslide at the top of a very steep cliff. Horses were huge, all steel-shod hooves and sharp teeth, and worst of all, had minds of their own.

  He gave the one beneath him a good long look. To his surprise, the horse appeared thin, its ribs showing from beneath the shabraque. Tufts of hair seemed to be falling out, too, but then Konowa knew military life was never easy on horses, or any other living creature. Still, he'd remembered the Duke's mounts as being among the finest in the army.

  "Easy now, easy, it's just a short trip," Konowa said, slowly gathering up the reins that had fallen to the ground.

  The horse started stamping its hooves and tried to back up, tugging hard on the reins in an effort to unseat Konowa. "I know, I know," he muttered, "but you'll just have to get used to the smell." He pulled back on the reins and leaned forward, almost falling. The horse swung its head around and nipped at him with a set of huge yellow teeth.

  "Problem, sir?" Sergeant Lorian asked, riding up to a few feet from where Konowa was struggling to keep the gelding in check.

  "No," Konowa lied, noticing that the sergeant seemed to be looking more at Visyna than at him. The horse jittered to the right and Konowa reached down to pat its withers. He pulled his hand back a second later as the horse's head whipped around again. "We're just getting to know one another," he said. The horse shifted about beneath him, perhaps hoping he might fall off if it kept trying, but Konowa squeezed his knees to its sides and pulled back hard on the reins to show the animal who was boss. There was the stamp of a hoof and a few swishes of its tail and then it calmed, ceding, at least for the moment, superiority to Konowa. Visyna said nothing the whole time, but he could feel her stare on the back of his neck.

  It was a strange sensation to be on a horse again—the feel of the leather in his hands, the rhythmic breathing of the horse beneath him. Konowa slackened his grip on the reins and forced himself to look up. Everything seemed different on top of a horse. He was struck by how remote and distant the last year of his life had suddenly become, and all that from gaining a few feet of perspective. Things were clearly changing. He was beginning to allow himself to imagine that they might even be changing for the better when the horse swung its head around and managed to nip him on the knee.

  The more things changed, the more they hurt like hell.

  EIGHT

  The cavalry troop wheeled about, placing Konowa and Visyna at the front of their formation. Konowa turned his head slightly to speak to Visyna.

  "I thought I saw the air shimmering back there," he said, turning around a bit more. "If I didn't know better, I'd say it was some kind of mag—" He didn't get to complete his sentence as the horse suddenly shifted underneath him, knocking his left foot out of the stirrup. He started to slide off, then felt her hands wrap around his waist and pull him back.

  "You should pay more attention to your riding," she said. Her hands stayed around his waist even after he had his foot back in the stirrup, and he decided keeping his mouth shut was the better course.

  Movement far off to the right pulled his eyes away, and Konowa caught a glimpse of black and red fur. He smiled. Jir could trail them from a safe distance and had the speed and stamina to keep up, as long as he didn't try to mark too many trees along the way. Konowa was still watching the forest when the sergeant steered his horse in front of Konowa's, causing him to pull up.

  "Um, it's a bit dangerous out here, sir, m'lady, and I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking the rear of the column? It would ease my mind to know we had an officer of your caliber back there watching out for us, sir." He doffed his helmet to Visyna and smiled.

  "You think that's necessary?" Konowa asked, puzzled by the request. Visyna gave his waist the smallest of squeezes, but it was enough to lighten his heart. "Good idea," Konowa said before the sergeant could change his mind.

  He was in such a good mood he decided he might have misjudged the cavalry all these years, their most recent attempt to kill him notwithstanding. To be fair, that was everyone's reaction until they got to know him. He was thinking of telling the Duke how impressed he was with his men when he overheard one of the troopers talking to a mate.

  "Bloody hell, I thought the sarge would never get that bugger downwind."

  "You there," Konowa said loudly, startling the man who had just spoken. "Yes, sir," he said, reining in his mount to ride alongside them.

  "I've been away from the civilized world for a while, perhaps you'd be so kind as to catch me up on what has transpired in the Empire this past year."

  The man's eyes widened even as his nose twitched. Before the trooper could answer, Visyna whispered in Konowa's ear. "Sergeant Lorian has a rather large horse, I could always ride with him if you'd prefer."

  "On the other hand, I'm sure Ms. Tekoy will be able to fill me in. Dismissed," he said, finding that giving an order after all this time wasn't so hard after all. The trooper saluted and quickly cantered up to the front of the column, leaving Konowa and Visyna alone.

  "You really do have a way with people, don't you?" she said.

  Konowa tried turning again the saddle, but gave up when more pain lanced across his chest. "It started at a young age. The point is, or rather, was," he said, waving at the lost point of his own ear, "that if you were born with a black tip, Her taint was believed to run deep in the blood. To the elves of the Hynta, especially the Long Watch, it doesn't get much worse than that. Not that long ago, they just abandoned a marked baby on the plains beyond the forest to die. So no, if I don't get along well with others, it might be because most have always wanted me dead. It tends to make one a little…antisocial."

  "But why mark babes? Why would the Shadow Monarch do such a thing?"

  Konowa shrugged. "Only She knows, and She isn't saying. All I know is that's the hand I and the other Iron Elves were dealt, and we've played it as best we can."

  "I was dealt a different hand," Visyna said, moving her hands underneath his shirt and resting them on his ribs. "Perhaps I can change your outlook on things in some small way."

  Konowa raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Her hands probed along his rib cage with care, but it still hurt.

  "Easy, woman, they're bruised enough already," he said.

  She pulled her hands away from his chest and began rummaging in a small cloth bag she carried. "Your name, Heer Ul-Osveen, it sounds Calahrian."

  "One of the finest in the Calahrian Empire," Konowa said. He shifted his behind in the saddle, trying to find the right up-and-down rhythm with the horse. "Lieutenant Osveen held off a force of a thousand orcs with only ten men at the battle of Yacat Gorge. T
hat was during the Border Troubles a century ago."

  "Is there a time in the Empire's history that it didn't have border troubles?" Visyna asked.

  Konowa let the barb slide. "The orcs could have gone around the gorge and taken the small outpost the lieutenant and his men were guarding, but the hairy buggers were compelled to fight, and Osveen and his men slaughtered them."

  "Compelled?" Visyna asked, leaning forward to rest her chin against his right shoulder.

  "Osveen had been a playwright before joining the army. His greatest claim to fame was creating amusing limericks for his plays. Ah, but you're the daughter of the great Almak Tekoy. Perhaps your ears are a bit too tender for something like that."

  Konowa swore he could feel the skin of her cheek turn hot.

  "My ears are in fitter shape than yours," she said.

  "You wound me, madam."

  Visyna went back to rummaging. "So tell me one of these limericks."

  Konowa readjusted again in the saddle and gave it some thought. "Let me see…

  A witch had a useless new suitor.

  His device was unable to suit her.

  So she went to her potions,

  set a new spell in motion

  and inserted a newt instead of a neuter."

  Visyna stopped what she was doing. "And this would make orcs want to fight?"

  Konowa shook his head. "No, Osveen came up with a bunch of limericks and other insults to draw the orcs into a fight."

  "Newts have no intrinsic magical properties, you know," Visyna continued. "I don't understand why a witch would have any around in the first place."

  "It's just a—I mean it's supposed to be funny," Konowa said.

  "But it isn't, is it? Ah!" Visyna exclaimed, patting his arm, "now I understand. You chose his name because like you, he's not very funny either, right?"

  Konowa tried to remember why he'd hated being alone in the forest and was having a hard time doing it.

  "I chose it because Osveen was a rogue, taking on overwhelming odds with little more than a sword and his wits. Besides, I had to. Elves who leave their tribe and are rejec—who choose not to join the Long Watch must leave behind their pulchta, their dream-name."

  "Not really funny at all," she said, completely ignoring his explanation. "Raise your arms again." A pungent smell filled the air, at once musky and acidic.

  "What are you doing back there?" Konowa asked, doing as he was told nonetheless. A moment later something wet and cold attached itself to his chest. He opened his eyes and, looking down through the wide neck of his shirt, saw Visyna plastering leaves over the broken rib, a brown goo holding them in place.

  "Not so tight," he muttered, but the feeling was surprisingly good. "You're very good with your hands," he said, closing his eyes as the pain began to subside.

  "Not just my hands," she said, beginning to squeeze the leaves tighter against his skin. The wet poultice on his chest grew fire hot, and he began to sweat. His breathing slowed and he felt himself falling off the horse.

  "What the—" was all he managed before she pulled him upright as if he weighed no more than a baby. The air shimmered as his vision blurred and every muscle in his body flowed like water. A moment later, Konowa was standing in the birthing meadow of the Wolf Oaks, which meant he was dreaming, which annoyed him no end. I know how this goes already, he told himself, frustrated that his own mind would betray him by making him relive the first great humiliation of his life. He tried to race through the scene so that he could move on to something else, but the view before him refused to change.

  Accepting the inevitable, he walked to the center of the birthing meadow, brushing past the young sapling cubs stretching themselves skyward. The sun was high overhead, yet with each step the air got noticeably colder, and the grass beneath his feet began to crackle. Strange, he thought, remembering his time in the meadow as quite warm. Now, however, frost was spreading out to cover everything. Most of the sapling cubs were big enough that the frost had no effect on them, but one tiny Wolf Oak began to bow, its slender trunk slowly curving toward the earth as its leaves started to blacken.

  He walked toward the little sapling cub and then stopped short. It was silver. Only once in many decades was a silver born to the Wolf Oaks, and not without cost. Even as he recalled that there had been no silver when he had gone to the birthing meadow, another elf entered the meadow and walked toward the sapling cub. She was young, and beautiful, her eyes filled with love and concern for the little tree. A voice sounded in his head then, a scared, weak voice begging for help. It was the sapling cub, and it was dying.

  Konowa swayed on his feet, overcome with the power in that small, fragile voice. It yearned for life, for the chance to grow its roots deep into the earth and stretch its branches high into the open sky. Never in his life had he felt such need, such desire to live.

  More elves filled the meadow, and it was clear that unlike the elf before Konowa, the silver Wolf Oak's pleas would find no solace with them.

  "Pwik tola misk jin—to life the strongest," said the elves of the Long Watch, turning and leaving the birthing meadow.

  Tears of sorrow and rage welled up in the elf woman's eyes as she stared after the departing elves. Konowa understood her anger and her grief.

  "We must save it," he said, hoping there might yet be a way. "We have to save it."

  The scene before him suddenly changed, and he was now standing on top of a black, bare mountain, the wind tearing at his clothes. He shivered with the cold, his breath coming in painful bursts. The little sapling cub was now a full-grown Wolf Oak, but twisted and jagged, its roots stabbing the rocky ground beneath it while its branches flailed at the sky. Thick, black ichor oozed from its trunk, staining the once-silver bark, and the voice that had cried out for life now raged with an insane, consuming fury.

  The elf from the meadow was there, too, stepping between the slashing branches, which parted for her. She rested a hand on its trunk, uncaring of the ichor that ran over her skin, lighting it afire in a blaze of black frost. She was no longer young and beautiful, age and something more having carved great lines into her features. Her eyes, however, were still filled with concern and love, but with an intensity that froze Konowa to the bone when he looked into them.

  "Now, I will save you, too," the Shadow Monarch said, reaching out with her burning, cold hand and touching the tip of his left ear.

  In his nightmare, Konowa burned.

  NINE

  A steward entered the throne room and quietly placed a cup of evening tea before the Viceroy. Gwyn clasped it prayerlike in both hands, curling his fingers around the cup. He had changed from his traveling clothes. The light from the lanterns bounced crazily off the coronet that now rested on his head, a delicately worked crown of white gold studded with jewels representative of every foreign land he had visited as part of the diplomatic corps, and incorporated into the Empire.

  Protocol demanded that the crown be smaller than Her Majesty's, and it was, barely. No fool though, he wore a second, much smaller and more modest coronet when traveling to Calahr, or on the rare occasions the Queen ventured forth to survey Her lands.

  The light also highlighted his exceptionally pale skin, stretched taut across a delicate bone structure that bespoke his pure heritage, something many in the High Court were sadly lacking. That was the problem with empires—the bloodlines of the conquered lands mixed with that of their masters, polluting everything. In time, he would deal with them. For now, though, he focused his thoughts on his immediate situation.

  Within the starched precision of his uniform, he forced his body to relax until no outward sign of movement could be detected. It was a trick he'd picked up early in the diplomatic corps and had used to great effect on many occasions. Without need of a mirror he saw himself perfectly: velvet-green jacket with gold facings, his slender shoulders made larger by two wide epaulets, blood-red aiguillettes of fine silk braid hanging down from each, gold-plated buttons in double rows running t
he length of the jacket's front, and around his waist a brilliant white belt from which a thin rapier hung in a scabbard of wrought silver. It was like looking at a painting, an effect Gwyn desired, for under the table his legs shook nervously in their riding breeches and calf-high leather boots.

  He had scheduled a meeting with the commander of the cavalry forces in Elfkyna to commence an hour ago, but the Duke had not yet arrived. Gwyn knew it was deliberate. Why the Queen had allowed a despicable lower-caste peasant to rise so high in her army escaped him, but it was indisputable that the bastard knew how to fight.

  Gwyn sipped sparingly at his tea until the voice of a retainer telling someone "this way" signaled the arrival of the Duke. The Viceroy turned slightly in his chair to offer a chiseled profile to the scoundrel.

  "Good evening, my dear—" Gwyn started to say, then stopped. A green-uniformed corporal wearing the distinctive "Crown and Wagon" patch from one of the Outer Territories Trading Company's regiments stood just outside the ring of lanterns.

  The elf came to attention and saluted.

  "What is the meaning of this? Who are you?" Gwyn demanded.

  The corporal lowered his hand. "Corporal Takoli Kritton, part of the piquet detail, your grace. There was a disturbance in front of one of the posts tonight. A rakke, sir."

  "Are you drunk, Corporal? I've always found a firing squad a quick cure for that." So, the rumors about the last Viceroy were perhaps not the idle chatter he'd once thought.

  The corporal didn't blink. "I am not drunk, your grace."

  Gywn considered the elf. His voice was soft, his movements slow and deferential, but something told Gwyn you wouldn't turn your back on him. It was the eyes, or more precisely, the fact that they revealed nothing at all, and Gwyn prided himself on being able to plumb the depths of souls and learn their weaknesses.