Page 13 of The Hollow King

I did not remember choosing to forget. I only knew that I had.

My knees did not want to hold me. I stood there anyway, because some part of me understood that if I sat down in this room I might never stand again.

Beneath the windows, something waited under its own sheet.

I crossed to it before I had decided to move.

I yanked the fabric away. Dust exploded into the grey light, hanging suspended, and through it I saw the shape beneath.

A cradle.

Carved oak, dark with age. Empty.

My claws found the wood before I knew I had reached for it. I dragged them along the grain—the deep, careful lines some craftsman had cut by hand, rounded corners worn smooth by nothing, because no small hands had ever gripped them, no child had ever been rocked to sleep inside. Black claw against pale, honey-coloured wood. The contrast should not have mattered. It mattered more than anything in the room.

Something that should have held a son. Something that had been built for a boy who never had the chance to become the thing I now was.

I felt it in my chest before I felt it anywhere else—a pain that had no shape, that spread hot and sharp beneath my ribs until I could not tell if my heart was breaking or my body was. My breath would not come right. My vision blurred, black at the edges, and the empty cradle rocked once, twice, though nothing had touched it.

I staggered back. My shoulder struck a crate and it toppled, and I did not care.

“Borin!”

My own voice did not sound like mine.

“Borin! Lock the door! Lock it—lock it now—”

I did not remember crossing the room. I did not remember my hands, shaking, closing the door behind me, or Borin's frightened face in the corridor, or the sound of the lock turning under fingers that were not steady enough to hold a key.

I only remembered that I could not go back inside. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever.

✛ ✛ ✛

My breathing was still ragged when I found myself in the courtyard, dust from the locked room still clinging to my throat, but even as I looked at the stables and where the garrison once stood, the past rose to meet me uninvited. The great hall where I once feasted with my men.

Morana's laughter. Her kind smile. The love in her eyes.

My wife.

My love.

I tried to breathe, but the cruel fates had me inhale the scent of burning flesh. It took me back to the carriage. To the night they burned my wife and child.

The night they cut her head off.

I flung my head back and roared with unfettered rage, staring at the fickle moon that witnessed it all.

I cursed gods and mankind alike before I turned to the stables.

One measly sacrifice was not enough.

The creature did not question me. He never did. He threw the saddle over the nearest horse with hands that shook, and I mounted before he had finished with the last strap.

I rode hard, the night air tearing cold against my cheeks, my claws biting into the reins until the leather split beneath them. The horse did not need direction. It knew the road to the village as well as I did. It had carried me there before, on nights such as this.

The village slept, or pretended to. Firelight still glowed behind a few shuttered windows, and somewhere a dog began to bark and then thought better of it.

I dismounted and smiled at the first scream. Then another’s cry joined in, alerting others. Chaos erupted.