“It’s him,” said Moog, reaching to graze his fingers across the basalt face. His voice was reverent and softened by sorrow. “It’s Ganelon.”
They had a saying up north: the coin that broke the dragon’s back. It was derived from the idea that a dragon hoarding one trinket too many might drown beneath the weight of its own avarice, and it meant—or at least Clay thought it meant—that even the mightiest of things (dragons, for example) had a point at which even the smallest detail could signify their doom.
They had a similar saying down south: the straw that broke the camel’s back—though why you’d put a piece of straw on a camel’s back was, to Clay, an utter mystery. They were a curious people, southerners.
Although Ganelon murdering the Sultana’s son wasn’t solely responsible for Saga’s disbanding, it was, in hindsight, the coin that broke the dragon’s back.
Not that Clay could fault him for doing so, of course. The Narmeeri prince, while visiting the town of Mazala, had forced himself on a woman Ganelon was exceptionally fond of, and Ganelon responded by killing the entire Narmeeri garrison. As a consequence, the prince ordered the woman burned to death in the town square, prompting Ganelon to visit a similar fate upon the prince himself, though not before hurting him so badly that death by fire was an act of mercy.
The Sultana was justifiably furious, and Ganelon’s bandmates, for one reason or another, were unwilling to bear the brunt of her wrath.
Months earlier, Valery had confessed to Gabriel that she was carrying his child. The augurs told her it would be a girl, and Gabriel had blithely remarked that she would grow up to be a big-time hero, like her father. Which was, everything considered, devastatingly ironic.
Moog’s husband, Fredrick, who was a renowned mercenary in his own right, had contracted the rot a year before, having forayed one too many times beneath the poisoned eaves of the black forest. The wizard was determined to find a cure, and had already requested a leave of absence from the band. By the time he heard of Ganelon’s arrest, Moog was too concerned with saving Freddie to lend his aid. Freddie, despite this, died a few months later.
In those days Matrick was receiving letters almost daily from Lilith, who hadn’t yet evolved into the merciless, sex-crazed harpy-queen she eventually became. The young princess was besotted with Saga’s rogue. She wrote to him that her father was gravely ill, and that Matrick should remain in Agria, marry her, and rule as king once the old fucker (as she so lovingly put it) was dead.
And as for Clay Cooper? He’d never dreamt of being in a band, nor wanted any part of the notoriety that came along with it. He loved the boys like brothers—even Ganelon—but although Clay was awfully good at killing things, the thought of doing so for another ten years while avoiding the ire of a vengeful monarch didn’t sit with him at all. He’d wanted to go home, to leave violence in his past, and, more than anything, to try and live up to the words he’d scratched onto the birch that marked his mother’s grave all those blood-soaked years ago.
So Ganelon took the fall alone. It wasn’t a betrayal—not really, since he was in fact guilty of murdering a prince, and several “innocent” men besides—but it certainly felt like one to Clay, who had borne the burden of that choice like a cloak of cast iron ever since. He wondered now if freeing Ganelon only because they needed his help might not be, as far as Ganelon’s forbearance was concerned, the straw that broke the camel’s—
Ah, Clay thought, as the meaning behind the metaphor became suddenly obvious, I get it now.
Gabriel’s desperate plan had come, at last, to fruition. Against all odds, the band was back together.
It would be just like old times, except that Moog was dying of an incurable ailment, Matrick was hideously out of shape, Gabriel—their proud and fearless leader—had gone meek as a newborn kitten, and Clay wanted nothing more than to go home, hug his wife, and tell his darling daughter stories of grand exploits that were all, thankfully, far behind him.
Ganelon, at least, would be virtually unchanged, as hale and healthy as the day the Sultana’s magi had turned him to stone nearly twenty years before.
As Moog searched his bag for a means to undo the southerner’s petrifaction, Clay found himself envisioning how the moments following Ganelon’s release might unfold. In almost every scenario Clay and his bandmates ended up dead at the warrior’s feet. Ganelon had always been Saga’s most skilled fighter; for him to end them now would be a simple thing, easy as an eagle killing its offspring.
Ganelon had been conceived, born, and bred to violence. He’d been an orphan by the age of eleven, a mercenary since fourteen. The southern warrior had no doubt undergone as many wild adventures before joining Saga as the five of them had in the ten years after. He claimed there’d been a bard around for most of them, but Clay had yet to hear a song or story about Ganelon’s youth that did not come from the warrior himself.
More so than most—Clay included—Ganelon was a man defined by his origins. His mother had been sold as a child to a brothel in Xanses. His father had been one of the Sultana’s prized Kaskar bodyguards, and the union of these two disparate souls had been in no way romantic, or loving, or even consensual, Clay presumed, since the Narmeeri whore had killed the Kaskar giant in his sleep immediately afterward.
From his father, Ganelon had inherited a northman’s green eyes and imposing height, an explosive temper, and an innate capacity for bloodshed. From his mother: ferocity, fortitude of mind, and a small voice in the back of his mind that served, when he was wise enough to listen, as his conscience.
“Ah, here.” Moog carefully withdrew a potted cactus from the void within his bag. “Hold this,” he said, handing the sack off to Matrick. He knelt and set the cactus on the floor before, very cautiously, plucking one of its spines and clamping it between his teeth. Then he motioned for his bag and swiped it over the cactus like it was a feral cat he feared might scratch him. Finally he took the spine from his mouth and used its tip to prick the hulking stone statue in the foot.
Standing, Moog flicked the spine away. “This should just take a minute,” he told them.
Clay wondered as the seconds ticked by how exactly one emerged from a state of petrifaction. Would the warrior rage and flail, his mind still trapped in the instant the spell of stone had taken hold? He took a cautious step back, flexing his right hand, ready to catch Blackheart’s grip should he need to shrug it free.
He examined the southerner’s statue as he waited. Ganelon wasn’t quite so tall as Clay. His arms weren’t as bulky, his shoulders not as broad. And yet Ganelon, to Clay’s mind, had always cut a more imposing figure. Whereas Clay Cooper was built like a great big bear—as adept at fighting as he would be at sleeping through a harsh winter in a cozy cave—Ganelon was lean as a wolf, sleek as a panther: His whole physique seemed formed by the brutal economy of nature for a deadly and singular purpose.
Clay watched, fascinated, as the spell began to fade. The dull stone became braided black hair strung with ivory beads. It became dark brown flesh and corded muscle laced with pale scars. Deep browed, broad nosed, black whiskered … Ganelon blinked dust from his lashes, and after a disoriented moment he seemed to realize he wasn’t alone. The warrior levelled his green-eyed glare at each of them in turn. His nostrils flared, and Clay started counting down the seconds until the bloodbath—their blood, his bath—kicked off.
Those seconds stretched on and on, until finally Ganelon cleared his throat, turned to Gabriel, and asked in a voice that cracked like old parchment, “How long?”