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Cyrene sighed. “True, and yet politics and borders are not a question of truth, are they? Andrus will no doubt be there by daybreak. I would come, but the girl here… requires careful tending.”
“Ah. Good luck to you, then.”
Cyrene snorted, her face begi
She vanished entirely, and Wyn lowered the mirror, staring into the flames.
Visca draped her arm over her shoulders. “Two days, then, at the most. Our legions will be with us, and all the fiends.”
I shook my head, ready to refute the idea of waiting, but my bloodwitch did exactly what I paid her to do and scowled at me. “Kindly keep your mouth shut, Bane. I still need to repair these damn golems, and you’re better off with the other fiends at your back.”
It was difficult to hold still, but I looked at my most trusted advisors, really looked at them: despite the blood she’d drunk, her fresh youth, Wyn’s eyes were bloodshot, and Visca was lacking her usual energy.
They were tired. Nobody had slept in days; nobody had truly stopped to feed and replenish themselves. I had already burned up a severe amount of the blood I’d glutted in my headlong flight towards Foria, and there were no prisoners to feed from here.
And Wyn’s work wasn’t over, nor was mine. I would not be able to close my eyes until Cirri was safe at home, but if I wanted all my people to come home alive, I needed them to be functional.
“Very well.” I settled into the grass where Cirri’s scent was thickest, trying to shove aside the voice screaming in my mind that she was dying right now, she was bleeding, she was hurt…
She was valuable, and I needed every weapon at my disposal to find and retrieve her.
Wyn handed the mirror to Visca and stood, blade and box in hand. She returned to the golems, frowning down at their mutilated forms, and began rummaging through vials of ingredients in the box.
“Powdered bone of a virgin goat… tears of a dry river,” she muttered, selecting vials as she knelt. “A thorn plucked from the paw of a lion, and the sole of a wanderer’s shoe.”
She sprinkled dust and thorns into their bodies, and finally set aside her box, opening her wrist again with a soft hiss.
“Come here, Bane,” she gritted out. “Your blood is required for this, too.”
I offered my wrist, hardly feeling the cut of the blade, and watched as my blood dripped black into their forms.
“Lovely. Now go away,” she said, leaning over her work.
Her mutterings followed me back to the fire; I watched sleeplessly, taking the first watch as Visca curled up for a nap and Wyn whispered to the golems deep into the night.
I didn’t move a muscle until dawn rose. The fire was burned out to cinders; Wyn was curled in the grass beside the golems, sleeping soundly, her head resting on her pack as Visca circled the camp, her eyes fixed on the empty plains to the north.
When the first rays of light pierced the sky, I crept to the golems, lying in repose like corpses, the only sign of life the faint stirring of their component parts. Rose’s petals ruffled, shifted; Thorn’s body was like a nest of black snakes, the vines slowly creeping as they grew, splitting into newer, thi
They were almost skeletal in appearance, their arms long and thin, their torsos withered. Rose’s petals were bruised so intensely that most of her was a purplish-black color. Only a few tattered petals retained their bright crimson edges.
In this state, they were a risk to hang all my hopes on, but they were all I had. Months might pass before I caught Cirri’s scent again in the vast, unpopulated expanse of northern Foria.
Patience, I told myself, watching as Rose’s body ca
I knew I would go mad with the waiting, so I turned to watch the mountains instead.
The sun was creeping over the mountains when the first two figures came into view. They descended the mountain path, each moving at the rapid pace of a fully-fed fiend; both ran on all fours, bolstered on blood into the same forms they wore the last time we were here on these plains, ten years ago.
Bone spurs rose from Wroth’s spine and shoulders, his limbs thickened into powerful pistons, carrying him yards with a single leap; Andrus, his rack of antlers spreading six feet on either side of him into a forest of sharp points, still hiding his deadier attributes.
They had always been the fastest of us; no horse or carriage could hope to compete. Either of them could cover the span of Veladar in a night when gorged with blood.
I waited patiently until I heard the soft tread of footsteps.
“It’s been too long.” Andrus rose from the grass; one might think he took the qualities of a stag, but his long, skull-like face had a disquieting seam from forehead to throat, cutting directly down his snout and chin and under his cheekbones to his ears; the tips of his fangs were needle-like, thin. The rest of his body was nearly that of a muscular human, but for the legs that bent backwards, and the feet ending in two sharp claws that resembled cloven hooves. “I regret only that I came in your time of need, and not earlier.”
“I’m grateful you’re here at all,” I said, and Wroth wordlessly clapped a paw to my shoulder.
Of my brothers, I had always been closest to Wroth, just as Voryan and Andrus seemed to be twins from different mothers. But we were all four entwined, from long years in the Below, of fighting in the Forian War before parting to our separate thrones, and I was glad they had answered the call.
The three of us looked down at the golems, slightly less skeletal than they had been at dawn, and Wroth frowned.
“These Fae things are u
“Not a single warg?” she asked, frowning even as Visca paused in her incessant strolling to plant a kiss on her forehead. She gripped her wife’s hand hard for a moment.
“Nary a one.” My commander continued on her path, a trail already worn in the grass.
Wyn exhaled, then got to her feet, dusted off her robes, and knelt right back in the dirt by Thorn’s head. “Progress is slower than I’d anticipated. These are not ideal laboratory conditions by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d hoped for a little more vigor.”
“But when will they be able to track?” I interrupted. My skin itched all over, my muscles quivering with the need to move, to run and hunt.
The bloodwitch bared her teeth in a snarl, pulling one of her many blood-letting blades from her sleeve, and exposed a wrist. She spoke as she cut, letting her blood drip into their bodies.
“I’ve given them strict instructions to rise as soon as they’re able, so they’ll get up when they can. We won’t have time for any field tests, but I’m concerned they may develop some of the more common afflictions of Fae constructs. Basically, we’ll have to hope for the best. Give your prayers to the ancestors now.”
Wroth growled low in his throat as he eyed the golems, but Andrus looked them over without any signs of discomfort. “We should have Voryan here to put them down,” he said mildly. “He has the most experience of us with dismantling the Fae’s leftovers.”
Voryan, before enthusiastically flinging himself into my idea of becoming fiends, had spent some two hundred years in the Below, walking alone in those darkened halls and killing anything he came across. I thought that perhaps two centuries of wandering alone in pitch darkness had contributed to his murderous tendencies in the world above, but the fact remained, a serial killer turned monster made a very effective deterrent to anyone who wanted to invade Veladar while it was recovering.
“Speak of the demon…” Wroth had turned his back on the golems, his arms crossed over his chest as he glared at the mountains.
Visca’s legions were just now descending the switchback trails, burdened by horses, supply wagons, and their own hefty armor. The creature that bypassed them moved with supreme surety, climbing over the rock face with all six limbs.
Once he met flat earth, it took Voryan a mere half hour to join us. He rose from the grass, a tall, jackal-headed monstrosity. Four arms, each ending in a human hand covered with gold rings, extended from a lean, muscled torso. He possessed a sheen of short, soft black fur all over his body, carved with shadowy whorls, but the most salient and off-putting aspect of his being was the wide, bloodred eye in the center of his forehead, rolling wildly as it searched for enemies.
“Brothers.” Voryan gri
His voice was a howl and a roar mixed into one.
“As soon as the abominations rise.” Wroth glared at the golems, and Voryan hesitated for a split second as his triple-eyes landed on them. For him, it might as well have been an eternity.
“Are they his? Do we kill them?”
“No, they’re mine. They contain my wife’s blood; they’ll lead us to her.”
At the mention of blood, Voryan’s tongue, as black as his fur, slicked over his teeth with anticipation.
“Soon,” Wyn said. She had just awoken, but she looked exhausted, pale; new lines had carved themselves into the corners of her eyes with every drop of blood and iota of energy she expended. From past experience, I knew she would be a crone come nightfall. “I think they’ll rise soon.”
I swallowed my impatience, grateful for the energy, the youth, the vitality of her own she was sinking into my compasses.
Voryan gave the golems another narrow look, then shrugged. “So long as I get to bleed something today.”
Though I was grateful for my brothers’ presence, I wondered if they had come not to give aid, but because they missed the freedom of the fight, the hot pulse of blood, the pure and simple ambition of the battlefield—to kill or be killed.
And I could not fault them if that was the case. I, too, felt constrained by the life I’d taken, the everyday trappings that belonged to a nobleman, a human, not a creature that lived on blood. And they were trapped in far worse situations, pretending to be things they were not, with women who loathed the things they were.
From our fearsome faces to our warped bodies, this is what we were: creatures designed for slaughter, not sitting on thrones. This was their true home, forever and always, where the earth was red and the nights were long, and there were no guarantees of living to see the next dawn.
Let them fight here and die here, if they chose; so long as they helped me fight for her.