A hoarse voice shouted orders, and he distantly realized it was his own. Desperate commands to protect the king. To defend their position. Even as he leaped toward the king, pulling him into his arms and out of sight, fumbling to press his fingers against the wound and stop the pumping blood that poured, hot and sticky, down his hands.
Horror mingled in his blood with the violent red haze of battle rage as his inner beast roared to the surface. His scales swept over his skin in a gleaming green-and-pewter armored wave.
The primal surge of bloodlust sang through him. The savage drive to run, screaming, into battle. But he kept himself under iron control. His first duty was to the king.
Arrows flew all around him, thudding into the pavilion, hitting the ground with sharp sprays of dust and stones. The king’s page screamed as he was hit, falling to the ground beside them.
Sharp whistles and screams filled the air with chaos as hundreds more arrows flew toward them. Everywhere, men were shouting, cavalry mounting, pulling out swords. And everywhere men were dying. Cut down by the relentless flights of arrows from some unseen enemy, hidden in the nearby woods and swooping down from the soft hills. Men in brown leather, but no other markings. No tabards or pennants.
Beside him, the pageboy gave a last choking gasp as he drowned in his own blood. Tristan couldn’t reach him. He had to stay with the king and accept that there was nothing he could do to save the boy.
He looked up from his huddled crouch over the king to see Val, in the distance, throw himself onto his destrier behind Alanna and gallop away. Leaving everyone else behind.
He turned, glad to find Reece and Tor crowding behind him, swords drawn and shields up. Between the three of them, huddling over against the blinding fall of arrows, they carried King Geraint back to the carriage.
Desperately shouting to retreat, he whistled again, calling the Hawks to him. Calling all the squads to follow—those few men that had survived.
Around them the fall of arrows slowed as the vicious attacking force melted away, back into the long grasses and the distant woods. Was it a decoy? He didn’t know. Still frantically protecting the king with his own body, Tristan called the order for all men to fall in and withdraw.
The frantic ride back to safety was a blur of thundering hooves, clenched muscles, and sweat dripping down his neck as they fled with the king.
As soon as they reached a defensible rocky outcrop, he sent half his men back under Mathos’s command to the pavilion to hunt down the cowards that had ambushed them.
He arrayed the rest in defense around them and then turned to Rafe where he knelt beside the king. His friend looked up, purple-blue eyes dark and sorrowful. It was too late. King Geraint was already gone, his life bled out on the stony ground.
They stood together, shocked and silent, waiting for Mathos and the men to return.
It was a grimly furious group of men that returned. The meadow and the woods were empty once more. Their attacker had known exactly where they would be and when they would be there. They had swooped in from a distance, their lethal assault perfectly timed, perfectly coordinated for maximum destruction. Then, in minutes, they had melted away again.
But they had left evidence. The soldiers carried some of the enemies’ arrows back with them. All carved with small runes and fletched in black.
Verturian. Just like Princess Alanna.
Someone had betrayed them. Shared the details of a meeting so secret that only four people knew the venue before the day. Someone who didn’t want the treaty to go ahead. Someone who hated the Brythorians. Who repeatedly rejected their culture and disdained their court.
A cold certainty filled him. They had been set up. Lured into a trap by the northern bitch and left to die.
Where was she now? And what had she done with Val?
He sent a messenger ahead, carrying the arrows back to the palace. Then, with the king’s blood still drying on his tunic, he gave the order to retreat.
The ride back to Kaerlud passed in silent horror. Mourning their friends and carrying the body of the man they had sworn to protect, they reached the castle in the middle of the night, in a stampede of clattering hooves and clouds of dust, powered by grief and fury.
Tristan carried the king’s remains himself and laid them gently on the covers of his state bed as the court healers and physics rushed around him.
He knew, and they knew, that there was nothing that they could do. But they tried anyway. No one wanted to be the first to admit the truth. The king was dead.
Slowly, as if he carried all the stone of the castle on his back, he backed out of the king’s rooms and, still wearing his blood-soaked Blues, made his way to Prince Ballanor. His new liege.
He knocked heavily, and Prince Ballanor called a loud, “Come.”
The room was filled with polished tables and crystal. King Geraint’s favorite greatsword, with its intricate gold and black pommel, hung over the mantelpiece. Everything sparkled in the red flicker of firelight—the fire far too substantial for summer—as sweat beaded on Tristan’s forehead.
The prince was sprawled over a chair, dressed only in a half-open burgundy robe revealing a muscular chest, the typical heavy build of an Apollyon in his prime. Ballanor’s chestnut brown hair curled damply as if he had just bathed, and his black eyes glittered as he drank from a silver goblet.
In the corner of the room sat the impeccably dressed Lord Grendel, the High Chancellor. Another Apollyon and the prince’s favorite. His hair darker, skin a little paler than Ballanor’s, his frame only slightly less muscular, but with the same refined features of the upper nobility.
Handsome, the palace women thought them, flocking to watch them at their daily sword practice. But their black eyes were as cold as the ice crust on the banks of the Tamasa in winter.
