He stood there in the empty chamber, his stomach clenching at what this meant.His eyes scanned the straw that lay on the floor and came upon the filthy blanket she had been given in a token effort to keep Gwendolyn warm.There was no doubt about it.This was where she had been moved to.
"She's gone," one of his men whispered behind him, voice tremulous.
He was right.
They had been too late.They had been unable to save the queen.
He strode to the barred slit-window.Below, in the mist-veiled courtyard, all was quiet.Too quiet.It wasn’t just the queen who was gone.So were the nobles.Kellan had spent many hours of his imprisonment thinking of what it would be like to run the steel of his sword or dagger through the flesh of Aldrich and his band of traitors.
But he would not even have that pleasure.
Had he delayed too long?Should they have made their move as soon as the queen had been moved?
He would never know if that would have made any difference.What he did know was that somewhere out there in the dark night was his queen.On her own, bound for some unknown place, for an unknown future.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The wind off the northern marches carried the faint, acrid tang of smoke fires from the villages on the other side of the Shield.Desperate defense measures erected by worried villages and villagers to keep out the beasts that were slipping through the continued breaches.
Khan Vargul stood atop the Cragwatch, a jagged spur of basalt that thrust like a broken fang from the tundra's edge, his massive frame silhouetted against the bruised twilight sky.His breath fogged the air in deliberate gusts, each one a growl from deep in his barrel chest, as if the frost itself bowed to his command.At six and a half feet, with shoulders broad as a mammoth's yoke and arms corded like siege ropes, he was a colossus, but it was not his size that struck fear into those he turned his attentions on.
It was his ruthlessness and lack of mercy.His single mindedness to take whatever he wanted no matter what it was and who foolishly claimed to own and protect it.
His bearded face twisted into a sneer as he gazed southward.The Ring lay spread before him like a feast half-eaten, its borders frayed by the Shield's dying magic, its heartstrings plucked raw by the nobles' petty squabbles.
Fools.All of them.Aldrich, that simpering serpent in velvet, with his honeyed words and hollow promises.The alliance had been a necessary venom, swallowed to bide time and sharpen claws.Vargul had fed the nobles' ambitions like a nursemaid her charges—even the cloaked riders who'd sown chaos in the border villages to mask their own treachery and stoke fear.Proudlock's betrayal of the shepherd-king, Thorgrin?Vargul's shamans had scented that rot from afar, nudging it along with cursed talismans slipped into the traitor's packs.And now, with the queen chained and the boy-prince drowned in the deeps—or so the spies claimed—the realm teetered, ripe for the plucking.
But Vargul would not be their scavenger.He would be their storm.The double-cross had simmered in his gut since the first missive from Aldrich, that perfumed parchment reeking of ignorance and arrogance."Patience, warlord," it had read."The council secures the throne; your hordes shall feast on the northlands."Feast?Vargul spat over the crag's edge, the globule freezing mid-air before shattering on the rocks below.They offered scraps to wolves, thinking to tame them with chains of silver.No.The hour of reckoning dawned, violet-tinged like the aurora's poisoned veil, and Vargul's people—the true heirs—would reclaim what the south had stolen eons ago.
He turned from the vista, his fur cloak—stitched from the hides of three dire wolves, their fangs dangling at his shoulders—whipping in the gale.Below, in the sheltered vale of the Cragwatch's shadow, his army stirred like a beast rousing from slumber.Tents of bone-frame and mammoth leather dotted the snow-swept plain, their peaks crowned with totems of carved ice, snarling wolf heads, and skulls of fallen foes bleached white as the drifts.The air thrummed with the low thunder of voices—thousands strong, his hordes massed not as scattered raiders but as a tide poised to drown the south.Smoke from cookfires coiled upward, carrying the scents of roasting caribou haunch and fermented mare's milk, mingling with the sharper bite of whetstones on steel.Drums pulsed in the distance, their rhythm the heartbeat of the earth itself, calling the clans to heel.
Vargul descended the crag's flank with the sure-footed grace of a predator, his boots—reinforced with iron from looted southern forges—crunching through the crust of ice.His second, the lithe shamaness Ysra, awaited at the base, her antlered headdress casting elongated shadows in the dying light.Her skin, pale as fresh-fallen snow and etched with the same azure swirls that marked Vargul's own flesh, gleamed under a cloak of raven feathers.She held a staff of petrified birch, its tip crowned with a crystal shard that hummed with barely contained fury—the eye of a Titan's dream, harvested from a fissure two moons past.Her eyes, milky from visions, fixed on him with the unblinking stare of one who walked the dream-ley.
"The winds whisper of betrayal below," she rasped, her voice a sibilant wind through hollow reeds."The serpent uncoils too soon.His riders probe our flanks, seeking weakness."
Vargul's laugh rumbled like distant thunder."Let them probe.They find only teeth."He clapped a hand on her shoulder, the impact jarring even through her furs, but she did not flinch.Ysra was no fragile seer; she had spilled blood, gallons of it.Her hands were as deadly as her mind."Aldrich thinks us dogs at his table, begging for bones.But we will show him the jaws of wolves.Call the war-chiefs.The pyre awaits."
She inclined her head, the antlers moving as one with her skull, and melted into the camp's throng.Vargul strode onward, his presence parting the sea of his people like a prow through ice floes.Warriors paused in their labors—sharpening the curved tulwars that drank blood like parched earth, stringing the great bows of sinew and horn that could feather a man at three hundred paces—to bow their heads or thump fists to chests in salute.Women of the clans, no less fierce, with braids woven through with iron rings and bone beads, tended the sleds laden with provisions: barrels of black powder from eastern smugglers, crates of iron caltrops forged in hidden volcanic pits, vials of shadow-ink that could blind an army.Children, too young for the front but old enough to carry messages, darted like ferrets, their faces smudged with soot from fire-tending.
At the camp's heart loomed the Rally Pyre, a monolithic stack of driftwood and animal tusks piled high as three men, ringed by fur-draped stones etched with the ancient sigils of their bloodline.Torches sputtered in iron sconces, their flames unnaturally blue from Ysra's alchemical oils, casting the gathering warriors in an ethereal light.The war-chiefs had already assembled, eager for blood and chaos, the cornerstones of their existence.They knelt as Vargul approached, but he waved them up with a sweep of his arm, his voice booming across the vale.
"Rise, kin of the frost!Destiny calls, and with it, our birthright!"
The drums swelled, a thunderous cadence that set the ground trembling, as if the earth itself yearned to march.Warriors flooded the pyre's circle, a tide of fur and leather, steel and bone, their numbers swelling to near ten thousand—far beyond the "raiders" Aldrich's spies had tallied.Vargul mounted the pyre's base, a natural dais of frozen stone, and raised his arms.As one, the horde fell silent, breaths held, eyes locked on their leader.Even the wind seemed to hush, awaiting his words.
"Brothers and sisters of the Veilborn!"Vargul's voice rolled out like an avalanche, deep and resonant, carrying to the vale's farthest edges."For too long, we have skulked in the shadows of ice, branded as barbarians, as howling ghosts nipping at the heels of softer kin.Raiders, they call us—the south's venomous whisper.But I say unto you: we are no raiders.We are the Veilborn, the Dispossessed, blood of the First Wardens who wove the world's very skin!"
A murmur rippled through the ranks, fists clenching on hilts, eyes widening as the old tales stirred in their souls.Vargul paced the dais, his shadow stretching long and feral in the torchlight, drawing them in with the cadence of a shaman's chant."Hear me!Eons past, when the giants slumbered uneasy in their glacier tombs, our ancestors ruled these lands.All of them from the southern shores, over the mountains to the east, all of it bowed to our will.Danced to the beat of our drums.Us, not the druids of sun-warmed groves, nor the emperors of gilded halls, but we, the hardy sons of frost and fury!These lands—these marches, these fertile vales you spy southward—they were ours!The Ring?A stolen jewel, carved from our flanks by southern swords and lying tongues.The Empire that birthed your chains?It was our empire first, before the betrayers from the warm south twisted it to their greed."
He thrust a fist toward the horizon, where the faint glow of the Ring's border watchtowers flickered like dying stars.“But you won’t hear about that in stories around campfires in the Ring.”
An angry roar broke from those ranged before him.
“You won’t read about it in those fancy books in their spired houses and castles!”
The roar swelled.
"They have written us out of history.Forgotten about us.Ignored us.They pretend we don't exist.That we never existed.They pretend, in their ignorance, in their arrogance, that we are nothing.Barbarians.Savages not fit to lace their boots."He shook his mighty head, a terrible smile splitting his face.
