His black leather armor covered in blood, Arko felt a great emptiness at his core. This small success only served to remind him of the many failures he had suffered, was still suffering. The memory of his father’s strength—the strength of his love, the strength of his courage, had done the opposite to his son. It always made him feel a lesser man. Koren, after all, had lived to survive the Priory. For all his life Arko wished he could say the same.
Ten years ago Arko had delivered his only son, Ren, to the Priory. He had no choice, he told his wife. He was not Koren, he was not his father, and he did not aim to be. Sarra had complained bitterly, she’d told him to fight, told him to stand up for his family, but Arko possessed neither the funds nor the fighters to wage war against the emperor, and even if he had, the people of Harkana still had painful memories of the last campaign, an entire generation of young men lost. He felt it when he walked among the people, their accusing eyes, their resentment. How many had lost a father, a grandfather, to keep him out of the Priory?
But money and manpower were only excuses. Arko knew that if his father had been no match for the imperial forces, no one was. Your father did not send you, yet you will send your own son, Sarra had said, holding their baby in her arms. My son will never go to the Priory. You are a coward. And coward he still believed he was, even if he knew he had done the right thing, that one man’s life, even a king’s life, should never be worth more than any other one.
Now Ren was ten and three, and his emissaries in the capital had heard rumors that the boy had been released from the Priory hidden inside the great city of Solus that Arko himself had never seen. A boy returning from the Priory before his father’s death was unheard-of; it had never happened before, and why it had occurred, and what Ren would do when he returned, was anyone’s guess. For all Arko knew, his son was coming to kill him and take the throne. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.
He was within earshot of the camp when he saw riders approaching fast from the south. Two were soldiers on horseback, carrying a third, smaller figure before them in the saddle. Arko drew his dagger. Even on Harkan land, he had learned to be cautious: the emperor and his agents were nothing if not unpredictable.
The riders drew close enough that he recognized their Harkan uniforms—black leather emblazoned with silver horns. The third was a stranger. A young boy. When they came close enough the soldiers dismounted, one of them helped the boy slide from the horse’s back and come unsteadily to his feet. “Sir,” they said, and bowed, their chins touching their chests. “We found him.”
The stranger with his father’s face.
He was the right age, though nothing about the boy seemed Harkan. He was too slender, scrawny even, with an expression of suspicion and arrogance that made Arko feel a stab of contempt. His tunic too was thin, impractical for horseback and hunting, made not of the heavy weaves worn by Harkan tradesmen nor even the leather of Harkan soldiers but a flimsy silken texture. The clothes were plenty dirty, though, and it seemed they’d been recently torn. Spots of blood stained the front of the gray cloth, and his skin was red.
“So, this is my son,” Arko said, studying the boy, who was almost as tall as he.
“We found him in the border towns looking for a drink. He’s lucky we arrived first.”
Lucky indeed. Arko had sent out his soldiers as soon as he had heard reports of Ren’s imminent return. He gave the boy another look.
His son.
The one he had given up.
So this is my heir. The boy who will lead Harkana. He hadn’t seen Ren since he was a child, fair and unsteady and sweetly charming, still a baby in many ways. He had clung to Arko that morning when they sent him to Solus, and he had been forced to pry his son’s arms from his neck. He recalled how the boy had held out his arms and called, “Mama! Papa!” as the imperial soldiers had taken him away. How Merit, then fifteen years old, had glared at Arko as if he had sent the boy to die—as if he were a failure as a father and a king. She looked at him that way still, sometimes.
This boy was nothing like the child he remembered, with none of his son’s easy smiles and sunny looks. Darker now, sullen with fear, the boy in front of him was doing his best to pretend to be brave. If Arko had raised him, he would have taught the boy to mask his feelings. The stronger the emotion, Arko would have said, the stronger the need to hide it, or risk giving your enemy too much power over you. But he had not raised this boy. He had not had a chance to teach him anything yet. He has no father, thought Arko. No one has ever cared for this boy.
“Why are you here?” His voice was louder than he meant it to be, more brusque than he had intended. He took a heavy step forward. “Who sent you?”
Ren did not reply. He did not move, did not flinch. Arko saw the ring upon his finger.
“Do you remember your family at all? Do you remember your mother, or your sisters? Your home?”
Foolish questions. The boy had been only three years old. He had spent most of his life locked up belowground. God knows what had happened to him there. He had heard the same stories about the Priory that everyone had—the beatings and abuse. Pain makes the man—that was the rule of the Priory. But only the ransoms knew what it meant and even Koren never spoke of his time in the emperor’s house. He said the hardships he’d suffered there had taught him a bit of humility, nothing more.
The king’s shoulders slouched when he looked at his son. If only I could have been a father to you, if I had raised you.
“You remember nothing of your kingdom?” he asked again, but his questions seemed to embarrass his son, so Arko let it go. The boy carried a pair of scrolls in his hand. “Is that for me?” the king asked.
“Yes, sir,” Ren spoke at last. The boy looked down at the scroll as if he had forgotten what he carried. It was sealed with the insignia of the Ray of the Sun, the emperor’s mouthpiece.
“Suten gave this to you?” Arko took it from him and broke the yellow seal carefully, with more respect than he felt. Inside was the parchment that Arko signed ten years ago when he agreed to send Ren to the Priory. The signature was faded, and the blood and wax he had sealed it with had dried and flaked away, but this was the paper that had shamed him for almost a decade, that had led to the end of his marriage, such as it was. He resisted the urge to crumple it.
I should not have signed this parchment.
The second scroll was not as weathered as the first; it bore a newer seal with a slightly different design. This seal showed only a ring with a star shape at its center. He cracked the wax, studied the brief text, suppressing a bit of rage as he read.
When he finished, Arko looked up at the boy and asked, “What about me? Do you remember anything at all about your father?”
The boy shook his head.