“I know. I know my role. I speak the words Amron taught me. I recall his lessons. But it is a double-edged sword. To guard the blade I must keep it close, and yet keeping it close…it makes me vulnerable. And now, with all this brewing dissent…” He blew out a breath once more and drank a gulp of wine. “We all know what happened to Janilah Lukar. Are they trying to make me do the same? Are they so desperate to see me fall?”

“That was different,” Ralf told him. “The Warrior King was following a dark path, and it led him to that dark day.” He had slaughtered dozens, it was said, when he went on a rampage through Galin’s Post in Ilithor. Not only men and women, but children as well, some as young as three or four if the rumours were true, cut down in their mother’s arms. It was the baying of the crowd that sparked him, they’d heard. The jeers and accusations and pelted fruit. They had scant stocks of fruit here in the ruin of King’s Point, and what they did was not to be wasted. Elsewise I’d have received my measure as well, the First Blade thought.

“My path is righteous,” Lythian said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“You know it is,” Sir Ralf told him. “Perhaps the most righteous of all.”

Lythian did not know how the old man had come to that. “I have the rule of a ruin, Ralf. Every scheme I try ends in failure and death. Tell me how my path is more righteous than the others.”

“Because you carry the blade only to protect it, not wield it. You bear it for a single function, and outcome.”

“Amron and Elyon walk toward the same outcome.”

“But by a different route. A route that takes them through battle and glory. You have no such outlet.” Ralf uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “The blade must yearn for blood and battle. It cannot be easy keeping those instincts in check.”

Like the gruloks, Lythian thought. Hruum had torn that dragon limb from limb even though he’d been told to restrain it. The same was true of the blade. Ralf was right, it wanted blood. And every day Lythian denied it that impulse, the blade’s grasp upon him tightened, swelling his rage.

“It may be time to put it back into the vaults,” he decided. “It can be protected there.”

“The armoury was protected as well. Yet those men gained access anyway.”

“They won a guard to their cause,” Lythian came back. “It would be my men on the door. Loyal men.”

But even that had its risks. A man’s loyalty could be unquestioned one day, and grow fractured the next. I wonder what it feels like, he would think. To touch it, just the once. For a while he would deny the urge, but before long it would grow too strong. Just the one time, just once, he would tell himself, as he took the stair down and unlocked the door, as he crept forward to the blade on its brackets, as he reached out, tentative yet eager, to close his fingers about the glowing, golden hilt. A smile would breach his lips, a wanton smile, desirous, at the sensation of power. It was unlike anything he had ever felt, molten steel coursing through his veins, and for a moment he would feel invincible.

But just this once, he would repeat in his head. I am loyal to the First Blade. Just this once, he would say.

Yet that very same night he would dream of it. He would toss and turn and awake in a cold sweat, his mind a fog of golden mist and urging whispers, and know that he needed to feel that power again. It could not be just this once. Twice, he would say. Just once more, he would promise. But soon once more would become twice more, and twice more thrice more, and soon he would be building a bond of his own, creeping down in the dead of night, hopelessly and utterly lost.

And one day I will open my tent and see him standing there with it, Lythian thought. He will curse me for a craven, for keeping it down there gathering dust, and he will cut me through with the blade I am sworn to protect. No, he told himself. No, it cannot be that way.

Ralf was watching him all the while. “You bear it easily now,” he observed. “Its weight is no burden to you. If battle comes here, by all means use it, but until that time, may I suggest you create some separation. When you sleep at night, leave it across the tent, not beside your bed. When you hold your councils do not rest it there, beside the table, but further away. When you walk the walls and do your rounds, you must wear it at your hip. There can be no helping that. But when in here, put it aside.”

Lythian considered it. It was a good suggestion, and perhaps the best he could do, though would have a limited impact. Even now, he felt his eyes drawn to it. Like an addict, checking to make sure it was still there. “I will do as you say, Ralf,” he said. “I thank the gods every day that Amron left you here with me.”

The old knight bowed his head. “I am honoured to offer you whatever wisdom I can, my lord. You have many friends here, please believe it. Let that thought strengthen you, when…” He cut himself off. There was shouting outside. As once Ralf was moving to his feet. “Excuse me just a moment. I will see what the commotion is.”

Lythian waited, brooding, as Ralf of Rotting Bridge slipped back outside through the door. His eyes moved to the Sword of Varinar. If it’s him…Kindrick, or any of his lickspittles…A part of him wanted to snatch the blade up and slay the lot of them. These were lesser lords and unworthy knights, rats and roaches feasting on the crumbs from the greatlord’s table. Lythian had sat at that table all his life, beside Amron. Amron…curse you. Curse you for leaving me here…

He was so entombed in his spiral of thoughts that he did not see the young man enter.

“Lythian, you look awful.”

He looked up. “Elyon.” He took in the sight of him, unsmiling. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

“I know.” Elyon moved to the table to fill a cup of wine. “Believe me, it wasn’t by choice. And I’m not going to be staying long.” He had a large gulp, looking beside himself with exhaustion. There was a leather bag strapped to his back, some sort of harness fixed about his chest. “Father’s gone, I’m told. To defend the western gate. How long did he…”

“I thought you were dead,” Lythian said, interrupting. “Where have you been all this time? It’s been weeks.”

“Figuring things out. Discovering the right path. Nursing an injured shoulder. Meeting a demigod.” Elyon smiled wryly. “How about you? The men…” He glanced back at the tent flaps. “They look miserable out there, Lyth. I suppose those four hanged men have something to do with it?”

“They earned it,” Lythian said.

“I’m sure they did,” agreed Elyon Daecar. He spoke in a way that said he didn’t care. Not of this little army here, and this broken ruin of a city, and the petty squabbles and disagreements of the men within it. Elyon was above all of that now. He soared higher than other men. “How is Walter Selleck? Does he still spend his time with the Eye?”

Lythian nodded sourly. “Every day. For hours. It’s a dull charge, Elyon, and I’m not sure…”

“I’ll give him a more exciting one.” Elyon drank down his wine and refilled his cup. He gave one of the straps of his harness a flick and said, “I’m going to show him how it feels to fly.”

42

It was as he’d feared. As all of them had feared.

Beyond the treeline, across the flat and open pass that formed the western gate, the two great strongholds of the Twinfort were burning.

Great roiling plumes of smoke poured up from the many high towers, billowing into the grey morning skies, black as tar and roaring. Flames in orange and red licked ravenously from a thousand windows. The Last Bastion - a towering wall two hundred feet tall that linked the two citadels - was pitted and battered and scarred by dragonfire. At the heart of the great bulwark stood an immense godsteel-plated gate called the Fists, five feet thick and impregnable. The gate comprised of two great doors, shaped like closed fists, knuckles locking tight as they punched into one another. No dragonflame could melt it. No ram could knock it through. But it stood open all the same, the fists parted, and the dead were thick about it.

“We failed them,” said Sir Harold Conwyn.

No, I failed them, Amron Daecar thought. He could only stare a moment from the edge of the Greenwood. Thousands lay dead across the field. Thousand of North Vandarians. Thousands of Daecar men. The Agarathi trick had worked; they had come out here, right here at the edge of the forest, and assaulted the Twinfort from the rear. They had engaged Lord Borrington’s host in battle and caught them unawares, opening the gate. And then the rest had come pouring through, from the south. An Agarathi horde that was said to be even bigger. Thirty, forty thousand strong. I failed them, he thought again. As I did at King’s Point. I have not yet earned the name.

“There’s still some fighting,” Sir Quinn Sharp called out. He pointed to where small pockets of men fought amidst the swirling smoke. “My lord, we must ride to help.”

“For Vandar!” bellowed Sir Taegon Cargill, and the Hammerhorse thundered away. Sir Quinn followed, and hundreds more, riding to the defence of their realm.

Amron did not go with them. The heat of the battle had cooled long ago and what skirmishes remained were minor. “Sir Harold, Sir Lambert, do what you can to help the injured,” he commanded. “Secure the pass to the north. It is possible the enemy will return.”

He wheeled Wolfsbane toward the eastern citadel and set off at a hard canter.

Lord Gavron Grave rode with him, and Sir Torus and Sir Bryce as well, Rogen Whitebeard following behind with a host of Grave men-at-arms. Amron scanned the battlefield as he went, trying to get a better read on what had happened. The dead were spread far and wide, filling the entire breadth of the pass between the forests. That pass was known as the western gate, a broad plain of gentle hills and rocky knolls littered with forts and goat farms and forester huts, some twenty miles wide at its broadest point and over a hundred miles in length. Here at its southernmost point where the Twinfort had been raised the Greenwood and South Banewood grew close enough to kiss, and between the two forts and forests the fighting had clearly been fierce. But for every dead Vandarian Amron saw two or three dead Agarathi, and there were dragon carcasses too, scattered here and there. That at least made him feel a measure of pride.

“My lords, movement on the walls,” came a shout behind.

Amron looked forward, saw the shapes appearing through the smoke. Men on the ramparts, hundreds of them; bowmen, crossbowmen, pikemen, spearmen, men with swords and men with axes. They peered over the broken crenellations of the towering Last Bastion, and from the smoking battlements of the two strongholds as well. Twins they were, and so the Twinfort had been named, one identical to the other down to the very last block of stone. Both stood behind the Last Bastion to the east and west, shielded on their other three sides by dual curtain walls cut with portcullis gates facing north into Vandar. Past the gates plunged moats deep and dangerous, armed with jaws of spikes and traps.

The gates into the eastern fort were raised. The king sighted a small host of riders approaching from the yard inside. They wore cloaks of Borrington blue, with the pickaxe-and-ore sigil of their house worked in silver thread. There were others moving in and out across the bridge, carrying stretchers and pulling carts, heaped with men cut and burned and dying. They were Borrington men, Rothwell men, Crawfield men, men of houses Gully and Blunt and Spencer and Brightwood and twoscore more, all men of North Vandar, all men who served beneath the power of House Daecar. And sprinkled among them, Olorans and Mantles and Flints from Sir Brontus’s five thousand swords.

The captain of the host reined up before him. Amron knew him as one of Lord Randall’s favoured knights; youthful, strong, devoted, the eldest son of Lord Hightree of the Downs. “Sir Reginald,” he called to him. “Where is Lord Borrington? I must speak with him at once.”

“He is inside, Lord Daecar, in Farwatch Tower.” Sir Reginald Hightree’s eyes were grave. “He took a wound…to the neck. You had best come at once.”

They swung about and made back for the fort, riding beneath the walls and across the bridge. Smoke eddied, black and grey, in the great yard beyond, and men moved about like spectres in the ashen mist. There were many of them; hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The yard rang to the sound of coughing, shouts and orders, the clatter of hooves, the moaning of men in pain. A field hospital had been set up to one side. The worst of the flames were being kept to the fort’s southern side, Amron saw, flames raging in the guts of the towers that looked out over the Last Bastion to the south. He could feel the heat of the fires in his face, fighting against the chill. One of the towers had toppled, crashing down over the walls.

“How is the west fort?” Amron asked Sir Reginald. They dismounted to let a host of sooty-faced grooms take their horses. They were young, frightened, but awed to see the rugged face of Amron Daecar before them, to see the Frostblade glowing at his hip.

“No worse than us, my lord,” said Sir Reginald. “Reports are coming across, but so far we’ve not had time to piece it all together. It’s been hectic. The enemy came from the woods in the dead of night and took us by surprise. It had been quiet before then. Too quiet. We’ve been dealing with raids and sallies from the south, but last night those all stopped. Then suddenly there was shouting, screaming, fighting. Before we knew what was happening, the men outside had been slaughtered and the gate was being opened. We rushed out of the garrisons to try to hold them at bay, but when the Fists were opened…” He blew out a breath. “They poured through like water from a broken dam, tens of thousands of them, wild and screaming. We assaulted their flanks and drew some of them into combat, but most just kept on going, right up the pass. I fear they will try to make for Varinar, my lord.”