Battle Born (Dagger of the World Book 2) Read online

  Battle Born

  Dagger of the World, Book 2

  K. L. Reinhart

  Jada Fisher

  Copyright © 2021 K. L. Reinhart

  All Rights Reserved

  Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Radovan Zivkovic

  Contents

  The Message

  1. Light in the Dark

  2. Falan Brecha

  3. Asai Juice

  4. Banquet

  5. Thorogood

  6. The Lady of the North

  7. Alarms

  8. Green and Red

  9. Who’s Fastest?

  10. Battle Magic

  11. A Strange Sort of Ally

  12. The White-Faced Legion

  13. The Importance of Brother Menier

  14. Expedition

  15. The Estreek

  16. Aldburg

  17. The Path of Honor

  18. The Traitor

  19. The Right Side of History

  Epilogue: The Amulet

  Thank You

  The Message

  The figure ran down the stone steps as if his life depended on it.

  It did, and so did the lives of many others.

  He wore a cream-white tunic, belted with green-stained leather and trousers that were of soft orange-ochre. They weren’t his preferred attire, and not for the first time that night, he wished that he wasn’t wearing such ridiculously obvious colors—or that the shoes on his feet weren’t the fine, soft-soled things popular at the court of the northern kingdom of Brecha.

  The man had sharp features, making him look younger than the thirty-something years he’d had so far—ten of which he’d spent here in the city of Aldburg, wearing those ridiculous clothes.

  Pheet! Something shot from the corner of the city avenue he was racing down, past the curve of the brick wall to shatter on the cracked steps beside him.

  “Ixcht!” the man swore. They were getting close. He’d thought that he had lost his pursuers.

  The man’s ridiculous shoes hit the final step, and he could see the tall-walled avenue of the Queen’s Nursery on his left. It was night, but the First Moon was high in the sky, and he could see the silvery fingers of the nursery’s trees crowding over the edge. And the distant light of the large brass lantern that hung over the nursery gate, where Olaf the guard would doubtless be huddled in his small hut, smoking his pipe and trying his best to sleep.

  Olaf will let me in, the man thought as he forced himself to run faster. He had built up a good reputation with select guards around the Palace of the Lord General of Brecha. It was one of the first tasks he’d set himself to when he had been dispatched to the city.

  Through the nursery, there was a wide path that led straight to the kitchen gardens of the palace itself. He would be able to sneak back in and deliver his message.

  “Hss.” A gasp of angered breath from behind him as the first of his pursuers skittered down the steps. The running man risked a look over his shoulder. Black-clad, with heavy cloaks, the figure’s face was obscured by a similarly dark half-mask. In one hand was a small hand bow, a miniature crossbow that could be fired single-handed. His pursuer skidded against the far wall and slammed another of those nasty little bolts home into the mechanism.

  “Olaf!” the man shouted. The Nursery Gate wasn’t far. Only fifty feet or so . . .

  “Hgnh?” The running man thought that he heard a distant snort from somewhere ahead as the old guard awakened from his slumbers. Another light flared from inside the gatehouse.

  “Olaf, get up!” the he gasped.

  Something slammed into his right leg, a little above the knee. He hadn’t heard the screech of air this time. For a moment, he didn’t feel any pain, it had all happened so quickly.

  In the next heartbeat, he was seeing the silhouette of silver-leafed trees against a starry sky, before he hit the cobblestone street of the city of Aldburg, capital of Brecha. Pain surged through him in waves. It felt like his entire right-hand side had been doused in snowmelt.

  “Who goes there!?” he heard the gruff voice of Olaf call, as a silhouette cut across the glow of the lantern light in the street.

  “It’s Menier . . . Courtier Menier . . . Help me . . .” the man breathed, but his voice was too soft and breathy, and the running feet of his first attacker too loud.

  Courtier Menier felt light-headed and dizzy. The pain was excruciating. In that fevered moment, he realized that the bolt had been laced with poison. His enemies weren’t going to take any chances of the truth leaking out.

  He managed to flop his head to one side to see the large, bearded Olaf appear from the gatehouse, a lantern held up in one hand and a bare blade in the other. For a second, Courtier Menier’s vision doubled so that there were two Olafs standing there, side by side.

  Pheet! Another bolt slammed into the guard, and Olaf fell backward with a grunt of pain.

  No! The courtier attempted to crawl, pushing himself up on one hand, gritting his teeth. Menier couldn’t feel anything below his chest—anything but pain.

  “To . . . to walk . . . the Path . . .” he hissed through his teeth as he forced his resisting fingers to dig into the cracks between the cobbles and drag his body forward. Olaf had a sword. And a guard’s horn, the man thought desperately.

  But it was already too late for the courtier. Heavy footsteps slowed as they reached him, and another pair of feet moved past him toward Olaf’s body.

  A shadow fell across his face, but Menier’s eyes no longer obeyed his mind. He couldn’t see anything but blurred patches of darkness.

  “First Maxim, Book of Corrections,” he heard a man’s voice sneer. “To walk the Path of Corrections, you must first walk through pain,” his murderer quoted proudly. “I guess that means you’re happy for some more, then?”

  There was a lance of white-hot agony as his attacker pushed his boot onto the bolt embedded into the back of his thigh.

  “Grragh!” Menier fell back to the cobbles, a snarling whisper escaping his lips.

  “Ha! I thought not,” the figure lifted his foot from the injury, raising his voice just slightly to his colleague.

  “The guard?”

  “Dead, sir,” came the reply.

  “Good, I suppose,” the black-clad killer said with a sigh. “When they find his body in the morning, all hell will break loose, but I guess it’ll be too late by then.” The black-clad killer crouched down beside Menier’s face. Not that the courtier could see him, with all the toxins that were racing through his body and making his heart thunder.

  “You see,” the man whispered, “one thing you learn when you leave the Enclave is that for all of their Maxims and sacred duties, the Black Keep is just another gang, like all the rest. They used you, Menier, and got you to throw your life away for a hopeless cause.”

  “Da . . . damn you!” the courtier managed to force the words through his shivering lips.

  His killer chuckled. “Well, I probably am already damned. But at least I’m alive.” His voice lowered. “Your secret dies with you, Brother,”

  The next act would probably count as a mercy, given the state that courtier Menier, undercover Brother of the Enclave-External, was in. Luckily, the youngish man didn’t feel the blade that took his breath away, and he saw no more.

  1

  Lig
ht in the Dark

  Terak hung from the coarse hemp rope and tried not to think about the incredible drop below his feet. Usually the elf was good with heights, but apparently that didn’t go as far as being halfway up the Eyrie Tower, in the middle of the night, and in the teeth of a Tartaruk storm.

  Ixcht, the elf swore silently, as the soft leather of his shoes—designed to be silent and to give him as much flexibility as possible—once again slipped on the stones of the Black Keep.

  The Eyrie Tower was the tallest of the Keep’s tangled forest of turrets, and stood at the back of the looming snarl that was the home of the strange order known as the Enclave. From where Terak was suspended, he should have been able to see the rising gorges and rockfalls of the Tartaruk Mountains north of him, ending in their sharp peaks. But tonight, the night sky was so overcast that he could only make out the glow of the Black Keep’s own lanterns from its battlements below.

  “Eleventh hour!” The wind snatched at the voice of one of the Enclave’s Wall Brothers, sending it up to him. Looking down, he spotted the small figure, robed in traditional black but with a fur-lined hood, stalking quickly between the peaked wooden guard huts that straddled the battlements.

  Eleventh hour of the night, Terak thought. He was already late with the mission that the Chief External, the human known as Father Jacques, had given him.

  But at least I haven’t been spotted, the elf thought, yet.

  It had been a long and grueling six months since Terak’s experiences in the Loranthian Shrine—and beyond it in the near wilds.

  And with the orcs, he remembered. His pale, smooth brow furrowed in anger. An orc warband had captured their contact, Mother Galda, an elvish elder. He and Ella, an older member of their order, had been sent to find her by the secretive, clandestine arm of the Enclave known as the Enclave-External. Mother Galda had survived—barely. But Ella had not.

  She died while giving me a chance to escape. Even now, Terak could hear the cruel sounds of gasps, hisses, clashing weapons, and thumps of flesh. But it didn’t make him scared.

  It made him angry.

  So much about that night seemed unreal to him. Like the sudden arrival of the maddened and magically-empowered Big Mendes, a fellow student at the Enclave, one whom had been hell-bent on killing him. And then his second salvation at the hands of the Mordhuk, a terrifying living statue, possessed by a spirit of the nightmare realm known as the Ungol.

  I should have been quicker. Better, stronger . . . He gritted his teeth as his arms shook with the exertion of climbing the rope. If I had been smarter, then maybe Ella wouldn’t be dead. Or Mendes. Or Torin. Not that the elf had much remorse left in his heart for the two acolytes. Mendes and Torin had both tried to kill him for being an elf, and worse, for being one of the only non-magical ‘nulls’ in all of Midhara.

  If he could only have found a way to save Ella, then he wouldn’t wake up to this knot of dark and ugly feelings sitting at the top of his chest every morning. Guilt, shame, and anger plagued him for the choices he’d made.

  But these are the sorts of things they are teaching me to do in the Enclave-External, Terak knew. And he was determined learn them, to be able to travel where no one else could, and to secure, by any means necessary, the means to save the world.

  That was what Father Jacques had said, anyway. Not that what I am doing right now has anything to do with saving the world at all! Terak channeled his anger into his current task, one that amounted to him hanging by a rope, his fingers scrabbling at the mortar of the Eyrie Tower and his feet slipping every few heart beats. This was the third time tonight that he had been up and down this tower, removing all the pitch oil and lanterns from guard hut number 4 on the battlements below, to place them up here—through the open window of the Eyrie Tower. This was to be is last climb. He had no idea why he was doing this, unless it was Father Jacques’s way of keeping him in shape.

  Terak gripped the rope and hauled himself upward another few feet as his back and shoulders screamed in agony. He wasn’t wearing the customary black robes and cloak of the order, but instead the far more comfortable—and subtle—jerkin, shirt, and trousers of the Enclave-External. He was supposed to finish this entire mission by the eleventh hour of the night, and he cursed himself for being late.

  Not that anything’s going to happen if I’m late anyway, Terak grumbled to himself as he pulled his body up another yard. The pack on his back, heavy with lamp-oil pouches and the last of the heavy iron-and-glass lanterns, felt like it was filled with boulders.

  He was almost at the top. Almost. He could see the sill of the window above as the winds flurried and howled around Eyrie Tower.

  Come on, come on, come on! He took one hand off the rope and stretched for the window ledge.

  “Gah!” The wind sent a sharp brace of hail and biting rain into his face. He flinched, and his feet to slipped from their place on the wall.

  The rope burnt through the soft wrappings intended to protect his palm and his wrists. It felt like he was holding onto solid fire as he resisted the urge to let go.

  Thump. His now-bloody grip caught and held, and his entire body slammed against the austere stones of the tower at the top of the world. Terak let out a low, cat-like hiss of pain and prayed that no one had heard his mistake.

  His arms were shaking as Terak froze, his back aching from the heavy pack, as its straps dug into his shoulders. But he held on. Thankfully, the spring storm had hidden his cry from the watchful Wall Brother somewhere below.

  Just great. Outstanding. He said to himself, not wanting to move his hands but realizing that he had to, sooner or later. His foot slipped once again as he tried to push himself up the slick wall. On the second attempt, he wormed a cloth-covered toe into a crack between the stone blocks and used it to lever himself up, pulling with hands that felt like they were on fire.

  Another step, another handhold, he told himself, hissing through the pain. The men and women of the Enclave followed the Path of Corrections, after all—which was also known colloquially as the Path of Pain.

  Let the pain sink into the marrow of your bones and teach you from there . . . Terak thought irritably, Second Maxim of the Book of Corrections.

  All the pain seemed to be teaching him was that he shouldn’t be given such pointless pranks to perform. He should be out there, doing the real Enclave-External work! Terak focused on his anger and pain until it melded into one ball of white-hot energy.

  Like closing the Blood Gate, he growled inwardly. The ancient ruin that he had never even seen, but which the Loranthian Scroll supposedly talked about. Some sort of magical portal, built by the elvish Sorcerer Kings in a different age of the world—that led straight to the nightmare realm of the Ungol.

  Terak hissed through his teeth with the exertion of his climb. Another step. Another handhold. Focusing on the larger goal helped him to use the pain. The Blood Gate was due to become active soon, from what Father Jacques had said. Although, he didn’t know when.

  And when the worlds align or the stars match up, then a tide of terrifying creatures will pour over the face of the world again, Terak remembered. Which was why the Enclave preserved and protected and hunted for lost knowledge.

  Terak reached up, but his hand flailed in mid-air. There was no more rope left to climb! It was tight against the wall as stretched across the window ledge and into the open window to the column that Terak himself had tied it.

  I’ve done it! A sort of relief and pride filled the elf. He moved faster now. Then he was reaching over the open window ledge, grasping the wood of the shutters and hauling himself into the topmost room.

  “Sweet Stars . . .” Terak groaned as he thumped on the flagstones of the Eyrie Tower floor. The pack slid to the floor beside him with the clunk of the last lantern amidst the oil pouches. At the back of the room was quite a large pile of jumbled lanterns and oil pouches that Terak had stolen already.

  Gingerly, Terak peeled off his arm bindings to inspect his hands. His
usually pale and long-fingered hands were badly grazed, but he knew the wounds weren’t serious. The elf carefully pulled from a pouch at his belt a small pot of Heal All salve, with meadowsweet and lavender, bone-knit and blood-wort root. It stung going on, but after a moment gave a cool, soothing sensation.

  “Of course, now I have to get back down somehow . . .” Terak leaned back over the window ledge to see the line of rope that he had climbed. Not that way, clearly. The rope would be left behind him and would be hanging there for all to see when the Dawn Watch took over.

  The top room of the Eyrie Tower had a door that led to a small staircase. Terak knew that it went to the much wider and grander staircase of the tower proper, past observatory rooms and down to the main body of the Black Keep itself. Fathers would be in those rooms, Terak thought grimly. They would be studying their old scrolls or making their calculations through the night as they worked. Terak would have to ghost past them without being seen.

  I’d rather sneak down a set of stairs than have to climb that monster again, Terak thought as he looked down the tower that stood a hundred feet higher than anything else in the Keep.

  Then his eyes saw something. A flash of light in the darkness.

  It shouldn’t be there. Terak realized that he was looking north-eastward, beyond the confines of the Black Keep’s walls and into the rugged foothills of the mountains.

  Another flash of orange-yellow light, before it blinked out just as quickly. It looked for all the world like the lights of a window lantern being covered.