The recruits were awful. Each one of them, one after the other, became a blur of faces and trembling hands and training swords left discarded in the snow. They weren’t trained soldiers. They werefarmers and seamstresses and bakers, and would it be so bad to draft a butcher, someone withragein their bones, for this war?
This was why they were losing.
Because the Acolyte had people committed to the fight. People with souls stained with shadows, proud to bare their sins...people who had tossed aside everything they had ever known and loved to fight for his darkness.
And Lordach?
Lordach had sweet little sacrificial lambs, pulled unwillingly from the safety of their homes, sent weak and trembling right into their own slaughter.
Arawn barely had to pay attention as he went through the motions.
One after another, he defeated thenomagerecruits—if one could even call them that—and pointed out the ones that would be better suited for other jobs. Like helping collect the dead from the battlefield, come morning.
Every so often, the wind whistled past his ears, a painful reminder of the past. It tugged at the fringes of his pale braid, and he caught himself glancing north.
Into the distance, where the Citadel stood like a beacon in the night as it perched upon the cliffs. A shining castle on high, and beside it, the ancient temple...withherinside.
Ezer.
Ezer and the bloodthirsty beast.
Even her name had him swinging his blade harder, as the poornomagethat faced him unwillingly accepted his wrath.
Every hit brought her back to his mind.
Ezer and her smile.
Ezer and her scars, the ones that marked her as a survivor.
She was small as a mouse, and yet the woman had faced a pack of shadow wolves in the woods, days ago...and walked away unharmed.
She had stood, face to face with a raphon...and dared call ithers.
As if the beast that had most men soiling their pants was considered a cuddly pet.
Why couldn’t he get her off his mind?
You feel nothing,he told himself.You are as cold as the snow beneath your feet.
Something slammed against Arawn’s shoulder.
He blinked, surprised.
Thenomageactually got a hit on him. Arawn nodded his approval, then refocused and ended the fight in two slashes of his blade.
“Well done,” he said, helping the soldier to her feet. “But not good enough. Not yet. Go to the next ring.”
“Thank you, Your Highness,” the woman said, and she ran off to the next clearing, where the others, the ones more skilled with a blade, rather than the ones who swung them about like farmers with pitchforks, were practicing with other Sacred soldiers. Earning their best shots at surviving the war.
That infernal wind howled again.She’s dead,he told himself.She’s dead and she’s never coming back.And more snow danced down from the cliffs, sending a wave of muddled white over the dark stone temple.
Arawn was glad for its help in blocking Ezer out.
She was a curse sent to distract him.
Or perhaps she was a gift, meant to remind him he could stillfeelthings, like desire. But then he thought of Soraya again...and guilt overtook him, too.
How could he ever think of anyone but her?
