“My magic could have you weeping on your knees!”
“Oh?” said the chancellor, not hiding his yawn. “Could it?”
A poisonous look crept over the man’s face. “Would you like a sample?”
“That’s more like it.” The chancellor sat up and beamed at the Elder, who had turned an interesting shade of maroon. “Shall we see a spell, Elder?”
Before she could respond, several figures stepped forward from the queue, their motions stuttering and faces blank. The knights paused—they had clearly readied themselves for a day of sweating monotony—but the figures showed no such hesitation. Accelerating to a run, they crashed into the line of knights, mouths gaping into splinter-lined cavities. Allillusion vanished as they fought. It wasn’t men the knights grappled with, but sickly, twisted trees, given a freakish semblance of life.
The Elder rose, whipping out a wand of carved ivory. She spat an incantation at the sorcerer, and gleaming ice swords condensed out of the air, leaving the chamber dry and staticky. They encircled the black-robed man, stabbing inward—only to shatter into a cloud of refracting droplets at a single barked word.
“Damn.” The chancellor sat back. “He’s good, eh?”
The sorcerer’s next word sent the Elder sailing backward in a billow of white cloth, like a giant swatted dove, to crash against the tapestry-draped rear wall. The chancellor winced in sympathy, but made no move to assist.
“You understand, then?” shouted the sorcerer, panting not from exertion, but from what seemed to be anxiety. “I’ll kill God. Destroy the magic. Yes? I anticipate a timeline of”—he ducked a thrown dagger, one of his wooden servants dashing forward to maim the source—“five years, give or take, so if any infrastructure changes are required—Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
A burly knight had broken through the wooden monsters with great rending sweeps of his axe. He roared, lunging at the sorcerer, who hastily flicked his pale fingers—and the knight collapsed in a clinking heap. The crowd screamed, trampling each other in their rush to escape through the great double doors, forcing the sorcerer to shout at an ever-higher volume.
“Look, you’ve been warned, yes? This is a warning? I have twenty-three more stops to make and can only hope thatother rulerstreat me with moregrace. Goodbye, your Royal . . .” He trailed off. “Why are you shaking your head?”
“Your mistake is flattering, but I’m the chancellor. Felix Noor, advisor to the king. I’ll pass on the bit about infrastructure.”
The sorcerer settled for grimacing in response. Looking somewhat defeated, he muttered a portal into existence, an unfurling hole in reality through which he stormed with an imperious flap of his robe. His wooden servants followed, crawling and leaping, the portal folding shut behind them like the closing petals of a flower.
“Well,” said the chancellor, taking a sip of his wine. Then again, “Well.”
Bodies jammed the double doorway. Too lost in their panic to notice the sorcerer’s departure, the crowd pushed and shouted, worsening the clog. Trampled citizens lay scattered through the room, dead or unconscious, alongside a number of prone knights, while pieces of shattered monstrosities lay twitching in their desire to follow their master. Blood speckled the tiled floor and smeared the tapestry where the Elder had slid down it.
The chancellor took another deep draught from his goblet. “He’s definitely mad,” he murmured, pulling thoughtfully at his beard, “but good show, nonetheless.”
CHAPTER 1
In Which Forty Years Have Passed and We Meet a Handsome Knight, the Hero of Our Story, Who Is Over Six Feet Tall and Has Straight Teeth and Nice Hair and Wonderful Musculature and Who Is Only a Little Bit Frightened. Not Even Frightened, Really, Just Reasonably Worried. Or Rather, Alert. Yes, Let’s Go with Alert.
Itried to keep my grimace on the inside, and very nearly succeeded.
In a miraculous act of stupidity, the last scouting group had caught a construct and brought it back to the Order outpost. They’d cleared out a pen of unicorns, locking the peevish mounts into their stalls, and tied the thing to a stake typically used for breaking yearlings.
It glowered. Its eyes spat green flames. Hopping on its remaining leg, it swung the stumps of its wing-arms and seethed at us all.
A crowd formed about the pen, men sitting atop the bars to laugh and throw stones. With ale dispersed and skewered rabbit sourced from the kitchen, the scene had a carnival atmosphere.
I was the only one not caught up in the mood. The construct’s wooden beak jabbed at the air in sudden, unnatural movements that accentuated the artifice of the thing, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the way it quieted all of a sudden and looked at us—really looked at us, one by one, as though memorizing our faces. For what purpose, I couldn’t say—it would be dead and burned by sundown, and had no means of communicating with its comrades. Still, as those flame-eyes flicked from knight to knight, I found myself shrinking. And when its eyes met mine, the boiling hatred in them made me cry aloud.
Maybe I fell back a little. Maybe the knights behind me provided support until my knees regained their solidity. Who can say? By the time I was paying attention again, those terrible eyes had moved off me, while the eyes of nearly everyone else turned my way.
“Perhaps Vaillancourt can give it a try?” a voice called out, and cheers rang about me.
“Eh?” I said—and then hands shoved at my back, propelling me toward the pen gate. Finally, my brain translated the crowd’s babbling; they’d been talking about fighting the thing, for sport!
My legs locked, and my heels dug channels into the soil, but my fellow knights were all shouting my name now: “Sir Cameron! Brave Sir Cameron! Cameron the lionheart!”
Warmth bloomed in my chest. I could hardly disappoint my peers, who—doubtless in awe of my size, and my flawless golden curls—had elevated me to a status that frankly, I wasn’t so keen on. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, flashing teeth I knew to be a dazzling white. “But I haven’t a sword!”
Something jabbed at my gut, and reflexively I flinched from it. “Take mine,” said the grinning knight, offering the sword again. This time, I accepted the hilt before he could poke me with it.
“Ah.” Sweat was gathering on my forehead. “That’s so generous, really, but what if I chipped it? I really can’t—”
