His knife had fallen from his hand when I’d uncovered him. I picked it up, the blade small but sharp. A soldier’s tool, even in his unworthy grip. The boy had a pleading look in his tear-filled eyes. I leaned close enough to see the moon reflect on those green pools of despair and gently folded his hands onto his torn chest. I would help him the only way available to him anymore.
It didn’t take much, just the dagger the boy had been holding but a few moments ago, pressing against his neck. It was quick, it was painless, and he was so far gone already he barely saw it coming. I could have left him to die alone and in pain, crushed beneath the bodiesof the very men who should have protected him – their weight now pinning him down as he lay there, terrified of whatever was coming for him as his spirit was slipping away from his feeble body. I could have, but war wasn’t for children, and it was not by his own fault he was there. Giving him the gift of leaving whatever horrors he had seen behind him as he passed on from this world was the least I could do for bringing this destruction to his door.
And yet – had those responsible for him not decided to pull up their drawbridge and invite us to break their walls, their wills and eventually their bones, all this may never have come to be. The Sorcerer Queen would not be denied when she came to claim your lands, nor would her General who actually did the claiming.
But he was gone, and I was here, and I couldn’t linger any longer. The Captain awaited me, and the war demanded its pound of flesh – always more, always heavier. I let the boy’s hands slip from mine and used my foot to nudge him back beneath the pile of bodies.
As I stepped back, something caught my eye – a blackened scrap of leather sewn into the tunic of another corpse, its edges scorched but not yet surrendered to ash. An eye, crudely stitched shut with red thread, stared skyward from the dead man’s chest. A warding sigil. A prayer made thread. A desperate, superstitious hope to blind whatever gods or demons might come crawling through the smoke. Much good it had done – for him, or the boy.
I could already see some of the Acolytes of my Mother scattering about the dead bodies, checking them for any valuables, and they had been known to cut off fingers, tongues, eyes or other less savoury parts of the dead they could use for some dark magic. Maybe they would think a young boy would be a valuable resource for spells; maybe they didn’t, but the thought of them cutting away at his small frame didn’t exactly sit easy with me.
I found Captain Benjadir exactly where I thought I would. He stoodat the edge of the now-ruined harbour, framed by the dying embers of what had once been proud vessels. His tall, slender frame was silhouetted against the orange glow of the burning ships, and his hair, as dark as the night sky above, stirred faintly in the sea breeze. Behind him, the sea churned restlessly, its surface fractured with the reflections of flames, turning the water into a molten expanse of gold and crimson. The smell of salt, smoke, and death was thick in the air, but Benjadir seemed untouched by it all, as though the destruction of Haedor was nothing more than a passing storm. His posture was calm, hands clasped behind his back, as if he had merely come to observe the aftermath of the battle rather than lead our troops into it.
Because in this battle he had done the leading, while I had observed from a hill far enough to be out of reach of arrows or cannons, sending orders but missing the weight of steel in my hand and the raging battle around me.
But in this battle, we had not just expected resistance from an equally matched military force. We had expected something else too, and the risk had been too high for a General, let alone the Heir Apparent to come face to face with it on the battlefield.
And I suspected that the Captain had summoned me because either the threat was no more, or it had been subdued enough to no longer be a threat.
“General,” the Captain called, as I made my way toward the charred piers where he stood. He waved in my direction, then clasped hands with a few passing Sergeants, smiling at whatever they said. “You took your time,” he added, turning to me at last – his voice light, despite the weight of the carnage around us. “Enjoying the view?”
“Something like that,” I replied dryly, stopping a few paces from him. “I see you’ve been busy.”
The Captain clasped my hand, pressing it to his chest in a warrior’s greeting – but between us, it lingered too long, as though we were stillplaying at the same games we did as children, each refusing to let go first.
Then, his hazel eyes flicked toward the harbour and then back to me, that wry smile again tugging at his mouth, as though he found something amusing in the devastation around us. “Only the best for the Jewel of the Northern Sea. They’ll be talking about this for years.”
“They’ll be cursingyourname for years, Benni,” I said, though there was no real venom in my voice.
He smiled at the sound of it, and for a moment, the man before me faded, and instead, there was just the boy I had grown up with.
We had been raised in a world of steel, both of us carved into shapes our parents demanded. Day after day, we had bled and sweated in the barracks and the training grounds with the other soldiers. We had broken our small bodies every day, hacked and sliced and cut anything and everything sent our way until our blades were almost as much of a part of our bodies as our aching limbs. But in the stolen moments between the grind, when no one was watching, there had been laughter too—laughter akin to almost joy between two children who had found comfort in each other in the shadows of our parents’ expectations.
Though decades had passed since we first met, I could still see the boy in him – quick-footed, determined, always trying to outdo me. There was still that lightness in his step, the glint in his eyes, and the crooked smile that never seemed to fade. Not even in the bright light of flames he had lit.
“The harbour didn’t need to burn.”
“No,” Benni said, “but sometimes, General, a little fire sends a stronger message than a hundred swords.” He turned back to the flames, gesturing to them. “And it stopped the Haedorians from helping their guest to escape to the other side of the Northern Sea and perhaps beyond even your Mother’s grasp.”
“And that is why every single ship is aflame?”
Benni paused, his eyes searching mine, measuring my words and their weight. He’d been called reckless before – by me more than anyone – but this wasn’t that. He knew it from the small twitch at the corner of my mouth, the one I couldn’t quite hide, not from him.
He tapped his temple, then mine – a gesture that had once meant ‘use your head’ when we were but clumsy grunts trying to outsmart our trainers. “You always were the clever one out of us two.”
“So where is this ‘guest’, then? The one worth tearing down the walls of the Jewel of the Northern Sea and cutting down anyone who stood in the way?” I asked him, curious now.
“Held over there, where we set camp.” Benni pointed towards a part of the rampart that still stood.
The camp was close, not more than a few hundred paces away, but far enough from the smouldering city and its stench of death, and sheltered from the cold wind that now had free rein over the city. Torches flickered at the camp’s edge, casting long shadows that danced across the uneven ground, where tents had been hastily erected and the standards of our army, a profile of a dragon within a golden circle, fluttered in the breeze.
“Show me.”
Chapter Two: Frejara
Ihad watched my Mother pour the eerily glowing liquid into the hollow shells with a gentleness she had never shown to anyone around her, as she gave me her orders. The will of the Sorcerer Queen was that Haedor be brought to its knees for the insolence it had shown her—harbouring an enemy of Irongate, and more pointedly, an enemy of hers. Such an act was treachery, insult, and defiance against the future she envisioned for the continent of Eryndia and all who lived therein.
And as a dutiful daughter, the Heir Apparent, the General of her armies and a pawn in her game, I had brought the drums of war to Haedor and brutally broken not just her walls but her spirit as well.
