“Queen Saoirse didn’t want to leave. But the king wanted her safe across the sea, far away from the birdmen.”
“I wanted to go to Kilmorda and plead for an army to come against the Volgar, but King Aren was convinced that if the birdmen had no prey, they would move on, and lives would be spared. I saw the battle, and I knew he was right. If we tried to fight the birdmen, many would die and Caarn would fall,” Sasha explained, her voice hollow and helpless.
Kjell realized his muscles were tensed, his eyes fixed on a forest he wasn’t seeing, listening to the story he didn’t want to hear. He understood duty and hopelessness. He understood trying to hold a kingdom together when it was falling apart. He understood having no solutions and no answers and charging forward anyway.
“We thought the water would be enough to keep the birdmen from Jeru’s shores. But there are islands in the Jeruvian seas, and the Volgar Liege continued to create new monsters,” Padrig added.
“I told myself I would return with help,” Sasha said. “But I never did.”
“You are returning now, Highness,” Jerick reassured, and Kjell could picture him patting Sasha’s hand with the familiarity that came so easily for him. “We will help you. There is no greater warrior in all the world than Kjell of Jeru.”
“What if there are still Volgar in Dendar?” someone asked, and Kjell pushed away from the tree he stood beneath, stepping deeper into the forest, suddenly desperate for distance.
If there were Volgar in Dendar, the party from Jeru wouldn’t even get off the ships. Kjell would throw Padrigus overboard, bodily restrain the queen, sail back to Jeru, and never look back. Kilmorda needed a lady as badly as Dendar needed a queen, and Kjell would gladly spend the rest of his days rebuilding the province if he had to. In the blackest part of his soul, he hoped there were Volgar in Caarn, and he knew that made him a bad man.
He whistled, calling to Lucian.
The horse had bolted during the rockslide and had not returned. Kjell picked his way through the trees, whistling and listening. There were wolves in the woods, and if Lucian was injured, the wolves would find him.
He heard a snapping and a whinny and followed the sound, knowing he should bring two of his men, knowing he wouldn’t go back to the skittish gathering to get them. The darkness lay heavy in the trees, the forest licking its wounds beneath the cover, waiting for dawn to expose her injuries. The moon had sought shelter on the horizon, and the stars had all retreated to a safe distance.
He whistled again and listened.
Then, to his left, a shadow became a shape, and he breathed in relief, distinguishing the drooping head of his longtime companion amid the trees. But the horse moved and disappeared again, lost in the dense copse, and Kjell whistled once more, confused by the horse’s refusal to come.
He changed course, his eyes peeled, his steps careful.
It wasn’t Lucian.
The horse moving in and out of the trees was dark like Lucian, sooty-maned and chocolate-haired, but Lucian’s flanks were dappled in white, his feet rimmed in the same color. Lucian was huge, bred to carry a man in full armor into battle, but the horse shifting through the shadows was much smaller, almost dainty, and she moved away from him, coaxing him to follow.
He didn’t.
He held his ground, drawing his blade from his boot, waiting.
The horse paused as well, turning toward him, partially hidden, partially revealed.
It nickered—the sound almost a laugh—and suddenly the dark horse dissipated, drawing Kjell’s eyes downward as the mane became fur and the long equine nose retreated into a narrow snout. The change was soundless, seamless—a momentary unfurling accompanied by a sense of arrival—and Kjell recognized the fleeting vulnerability that always accompanied Tiras’s change.
But it was only fleeting.
An instant later, a wolf crouched where the horse had just stood, transformed and wholly aware. The wolf stretched spasmodically and lifted its head, its gaze challenging, and Kjell realized it was the same wolf Sasha had predicted would return. It yipped, a mocking come-hither, and turned, darting away into the undergrowth, leaving Kjell behind.
He froze in indecision, not foolish enough to follow yet needing to understand. Then his gaze narrowed on the shadowed undergrowth just beyond where the horse had become a wolf. The Changer had wanted him to see what was there.
A horse of Lucian’s size wasn’t easy to hide, but a dead horse was silent.
Lucian’s reins were caught in the brambles as if he’d run helter-skelter through the brush, and in his fright, become ensnared. But there was too much blood for a mere entanglement. His throat was ripped out.
Kjell fell to his knees beside him, pressing his hands to the gaping wound, moaning in distress.
“No, no, no,” Kjell begged. “No. Please, no.” But Lucian, faithful in life, could not obey him now. His body was cold, his eyes wide and staring, and Kjell could not cure death.
When Kjell straightened the wolf was there, sitting quietly by, eyes gleaming, watching him. The hair stood on Kjell’s neck as he rose to face it. One moment the wolf was looking at him, the next instant the wolf fell away, contorting and convulsing into something entirely new. Limbs unfolded, shoulders widened, a torso elongated, and a woman straightened from her hands and knees, the long coils of her hair undulating around her naked body. She was far enough away to shift before he could reach her, but close enough not to be mistaken. He could only stare, his hand on his sword, his lifeless horse at his feet.
Her hair was not the elaborate spill of gemstones and waves it had once been. It was wild and tangled as if she’d morphed from one beast to the next, never remaining human long enough to tend to it. She was beautiful in the way freshly-turned soil was beautiful. Dark and supple, uncultivated and cold. But he had no desire to bury himself within her. The earth would claim him soon enough, and when it did, she would not be the one he returned to.
“You have become very powerful, Kjell of Jeru. But even you can’t bring back the dead,” Ariel of Firi said, her voice echoing oddly in the silent wood.
“Yet the dead still follow me,” he answered, not trusting his eyes.
“I am very much alive and very much in control,” she murmured, and without warning, changed again, her naked limbs becoming wings, her flesh dissolving into feathers. With a scream that sounded eerily like a haunted child, she lifted up and above the trees, a Kjell Owl, mocking him with her power and her presence.
Without hesitation, Kjell turned and began to lope through the forest toward the river where he’d left the group, not attending to the horse he had loved, not removing the saddle or the bags, not burying the carcass so the forest could not continue to feed on Lucian’s flesh.
Lucian was dead. Ariel of Firi was here, and no one was safe, least of all Queen Saoirse of Dendar.
***