At the dawn of their second week of travel, the Helat envoy left the foothills and started up into towering, jagged red granite mountains like Kelena had never seen before. Waterfalls, still icy at the edges, sent smoking spray tumbling from vast rocky peaks. Cedrion’s highway narrowed, forcing the mounted guard to divide itself and file in twos and threes in front and behind the wagons.

  In places, the path became so steep that ropes were tied to the vehicles and wound around outcroppings while all hands heaved to help the straining draft horses pull them safely up or lower them down the opposite side without destroying the wagon’s brakes.

  It was after such a day that Kelena went to her Thorn. Alaan’s hair and shirt stuck to his dark skin, damp with drying sweat after that last round of winching and heaving to get their wagons up to a wide rocky plateau for the night.

  “I need blood,” she said.

  “Go to your husband.” He hauled her sleeping trunk from amidst the baggage and headed for the pavilion.

  She followed him. “Please, Alaan. You’ve heard Clarencio struggling to breathe of late…”

  The mountain air was thin enough that at times even Kelena felt as if she couldn’t get enough. For her husband, the toll seemed much greater. He had told her that House Mattius was plagued by failing lungs—he’d lost multiple siblings in infancy to the disease. The higher up the caravan traveled, the grayer his complexion became and the harder for him to catch his breath. Worse, the opal sap troubled his lungs further, until he stopped taking the medicine at night for fear it would still his breathing for good. Instead, most nights he lay awake, sweating and writhing in pain.

  “I’m afraid that drinking his blood would weaken him too much to recover,” Kelena told Alaan. “Clarencio doesn’t have blood magic to aid him as we do, just some tinctures and dried leaves.”

  “It is his blood, and you are his wife.” The pirate’s stubbornness was a stone wall in the grafting. “Let him decide whether to take the risk.”

  Kelena didn’t like it, but she wouldn’t force her Thorn and she was getting desperate. With the evening’s meal sitting in her stomach like a stone, she retired to the pavilion with her husband and told him.

  Explaining the hunger to Clarencio was much harder than it had been to Alaan. Her husband had never felt the teeth tearing at her insides, had never seen her drink wine and eat bread only to feel more ravenous than before. He hadn’t felt Death dragging her away or smelled the Life beating through the hearts around her.

  “It has to be living blood?” he asked.

  They went through all the same questions and scenarios Alaan had while trying to find a way around the feeding, only to arrive at the same conclusion. They couldn’t go looking for an outlaw deserving of death in these mountains. Moreover, when they settled in the Helat imperial city, they couldn’t strain relations with the Empire of Day by asking to feed on one of their citizens, even if that citizen was condemned to die. Warning them of the Night of Judgment would jeopardize things enough without making the Helat believe that all Children of Night were monsters.

  Clarencio met her gaze when she pointed out that last. “You’re not a monster, Kelena. You’re a product of your blood. I have a friend who looked into the matter for me after you left Blazing Prairie. Your father has to maintain the Blood of the Strong Gods with regular feedings and… well, other things… Do you—I mean, you said you didn’t have to slaughter the person you drank from. You don’t have to worship Teikru to satisfy the hunger as well, do you?”

  “Oh!” Her face burned. “No, it’s not like the king’s ceremony. I-I don’t have to-to couple with anyone.” Mother had always called Kelena a coward for not doing so, but the fear and the pain and the screaming…

  Despite the risk, Clarencio wanted to try it.

  “No man wants to say he can’t feed his wife,” he joked as he removed his doublet and shirt.

  Between the hunger and the fear of hurting him, Kelena wasn’t in a laughing mood. Her heart thrummed in her throat as Clarencio sat on the edge of her sleeping chest, his bad leg stretched out.

  She knelt between his knees. The veins in his leanly muscled arm stood out bright blue beneath his pale skin. Her mouth watered and the ravening beasts inside shrieked and clawed at her. Fear and concern fled.

  Clarencio flinched when she bit into his flesh, but he didn’t struggle. That was good. Some ancient instinctual part of her knew that struggling prey would trigger something even stronger and more deadly within her. He might not think her a monster now, but if that beast broke free, he would realize she was a monster in truth. As the pub girl in that little village outside Thornfield had learned, and the boy in the Lord of Siu Augine’s kitchens.

  His blood was hot and thick, alive with power. It poured down her throat, making the ravening beasts purr with satisfaction as they gulped it down.

  Kelena didn’t realize she was nestling closer to him until she felt tender caresses tracing her cheek and ear.

  Panting, she broke away from his arm and climbed into his lap. He tried to stand and carry her to the pallet, but between the blood loss and his bad leg, only made it half a step.

  They spilled onto the floor of the pavilion. Blood smeared across his jaw and cheek and lips when she kissed him. He grunted when he tasted himself on her tongue, but didn’t push her away.

  She wanted more. She wanted closer. She wanted everything. And unlike her Thorn, her husband didn’t deny her.

  ***

  Alaan was sparring with the purple-eyed Isshoni when the first arrow sailed into camp. It thudded high in the Aspen’s shoulder, the hawk feather fletching catching a falling tangle of wet spring snowflakes on its tail before her motion knocked off the melting white crystals.

  “Ice and ashes!” she cursed in Helesene. “How did you get around back there when—”

  “It wasn’t the pirate. You’re shot.” Nashon whipped his bow from his back and filled his lungs. “Slaughterers! To arms! Slaughterers!”

  Then the arrows fell on their plateau as thick and heavy as the snowflakes. Screaming savages in fur and boiled hides swarmed from the boulders that covered the mountainside opposite the narrow roadway. They carried stone axes, stone-tipped spears, and jagged stone knives. The Sun Guard met them with steel.

  Alaan had only a moment to study the scene before a stone ax streaked toward his head in a heavy downward arc. His swordbreaker’s black steel teeth bit into the wooden haft. The force of his block and the weight of the stone snapped the wood. The falling head scraped off Alaan’s jaw and thudded painfully sidelong against his collarbone.

  Alaan swung his cutlass and chopped the arm from the ax wielder at the elbow. The Slaughterer roared through gapped, yellow teeth. He grabbed Alaan’s shirt with one hand and mashed his stump against Alaan’s throat as if he did not yet know he had no hand at the end.

  Hot blood spouted, soaking Alaan in gouts. Steam from the liquid and their ragged breaths filled the air between them. Alaan hacked through the man’s throat and shoved him off with a twist of his body.

  A stone arrow from high on the cliffside sliced through the place where his liver had been a breath before, catching the falling dead man in the chest.

  “Slaughterers!” Nashon cried as he loosed arrow after arrow at the shadows surrounding the boulders, though his fellow legionnaires were already engaged. His fletching sprouted from the eye of one oncoming savage, but the fray was closing around him. He drew his longknives, still raising the alarm. “Protect the horses! Slaughterers!”

  It was too late for one horse already. A big bay draft had taken dozens of stone-tipped arrows and fallen. The creature’s death throes sent a bucket of grain spinning beneath the wagon, and its blood pooled on the stone of the plateau. The horses tied near it shied and screamed, many of them catching arrows in the backside and legs.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Wolves fought alongside the Slaughterers, growling and tearing at Sun Guard limbs and throats. A line of Helat warriors was forming between the enemy and the horses.

  The grafting cared nothing for the horses, and Alaan even less. He had to get to the princess’s pavilion at the north side of the plateau. He felt her terror, her desperation.

  A wolf leapt at Alaan as its master charged him. He smashed the wolf’s muzzle aside with a blow from his cutlass’s cup hilt, then stabbed the swordbreaker into its neck and yanked it out again before the wolf could regain its balance.

  Its master had a beard hoary with melting snowflakes. As his wolf fell, the Slaughterer arched a longknife with chipped enamel at Alaan’s throat, two-handed, as if the blade were a greatsword.

  Sidestepping, Alaan sliced through the back of the man’s thigh. The Slaughterer stumbled past and crashed into the back of Isshoni, who had traded her violet enameled longknives for the bow. Brackwater finished the savage, and Alaan jerked the Aspen back to her feet. She nodded her thanks as she nocked another arrow.

  Across the plateau, a woman screamed in pain. The grafting tried to claim it was the princess, but Alaan shoved the lie from his mind. He knew her voice to his bones. It was not her.

  Wet clumps of snow fell on a camp aboil with flashing stone and steel. Fur-clad Slaughterers and their wolves crashed into disciplined ranks of legionnaires. The Sun Guard roared Helesene battle cries. Sun and glory! and Kill the heathens! and Reign forever!

  At heart, Alaan was still a raed commander. He gave no war cry as he cut through the storm of man and beast. It was for raedrs to intimidate; it was for the raed commander to win the ship.

  He spilled the entrails of a Slaughterer swinging a warclub with a huge animal skull lashed to the end. He laid open a wolf’s head from eye to throat, and hacked the foot from another Slaughterer armored like an animal in hide everywhere but his legs. And with every step he won, Alaan closed on the princess’s pavilion.

  “With me, sword and ax!” Brackwater bellowed, sprinting past Alaan. The old legionnaire and a band of his warriors charged the mountainside. “The sun and the glory!”

  The rain of arrows faltered as the enemy archers broke and fled.

  The pavilion door flapped loose in the wind. Slush and mud had been tracked across its floor, but the interior was empty.

  In the mountain road, a shirtless Duke Clarencio fended off a Slaughterer wielding a stolen sword and wearing a dented helm. The crippled duke propped himself on the walking stick scabbard as he cut and stabbed with his rapier, but a glance showed he could not remain upright for much longer. His face was haggard and pale, his chest heaving. The tip of the rapier trembled.

  Shaden Second-Son fought alongside the failing duke, protecting his back. His enameled longknives were a whirlwind of fiery color as they chewed through a spear-wielding Slaughterer and a snarling wolf.

  Clarencio spotted Alaan through the fray.

  “She’s there!” he wheezed. “In the boulders!”

  Alaan knocked aside a stone dagger and gutted the man swinging with it, then searched the boulder field.

  One of the shadows on the mountainside carried a bone-white form over its shoulder.

  The princess’s terror rose to the surface of his mind. She was so frightened that her voice had frozen in her throat. The cold wind cut her bare skin like a knife of ice. Through the grafting, Alaan felt every sensation as if it were his.

  He sprinted, dodging a thrown ax. The firelight receded as he crossed into the shadow at the edge of the boulder field. Outside the reach of the flames, the cold bit deeper.

  The rearmost savage rammed a stone spear at Alaan’s chest. Alaan turned, his spine grating along the weathered granite of a boulder. The cutlass swung. The spearman tried to smack it aside, but by then Alaan was inside the reach of the haft. He clamped his cutlass arm around the spear and twisted with all his weight. The spearman crashed sidelong into another boulder. The rough stone opened a gash on the man’s brow. Alaan yanked the spear forward, pulling the bewildered savage onto his swordbreaker with a crunch of parting ribs.

  A thin hiss escaped the Slaughterer, hot breath dissipating into cold night. Alaan jerked the swordbreaker free and shoved the corpse aside.

  He gave no shout of warning to reveal his approach, but the princess saw him. Heart leaping, she thrashed in her captor’s grasp.

  The Slaughterer who carried the princess was a huge man wearing a hollowed bear skull in place of a helm, its eye holes and snout hung with strings of glittering beads. All dirters were taller than the Ocean Rovers, but this one towered head and shoulders over his fellow savages. Beneath his furs and hide armor, the man rippled with muscle and fat.

  On the giant’s wide shoulder, the princess struggled and kicked. With a hand the size of a buckler, the giant gave her a stinging slap on the bare back that knocked the wind from her. Through the grafting, Alaan felt startled tears burned the princess’s eyes as she gasped for breath.

  Alaan cut down the last man between them and leapt over his corpse.

  The Slaughterer in the bear-skull helm swung to meet him. The princess’s legs hung over his shoulder, bright white against the black of the hides.

  This giant was a warrior used to cowing men with his size; Alaan saw it in the beady, laughing eyes that shone beneath the yellowed fangs of the bear. Big, strong, but slow and cumbersome as well. The giant pulled a tawny stone dagger from his fur belt. The blade was as long as Alaan’s forearm, its facets knapped to keen razor edges.

  Alaan kicked off the boulder closest to him and landed atop a shorter one at an angle from it. He sprinted across the rocks, jumping at angles when he had to.

  The giant grinned and pulled back his huge dagger, muscles rippling in his meaty arm as he readied a sidelong slash that would gore Alaan from rib to opposite lung.

  Alaan feinted. The giant’s stone dagger whipped through the air. As it whistled past, Alaan leapt.

  A brutal slanting blow from his cutlass chopped through the giant’s neck and severed his spine. Alaan arrested the swing with a scrap of skin to spare—any farther and the cutlass would have exited the dirt-encrusted brown skin and laid open the pale flesh of the princess’s hip.

  He crashed into the giant’s chest, a fang from the bear-skull helm tearing open the bridge of his nose as they tumbled into the corner made by boulders. Pain flared as rough stone abraded his ear and jaw. The giant’s stone dagger snapped, the point clattering away to disappear in the darkness.

  Breath steaming ghosts into the sky, Alaan pushed himself up and climbed to his feet. The giant’s startled face lay cheek-on-shoulder, hanging from a flap of skin. The bear-skull helm was pinched in place by the weight of the nearly severed head.

  The giant had dropped the princess before his knife, and she lay pinned beneath one huge leg. Shivering and shaking, she tried to push it off.

  Sheathing his blades, Alaan bent down and lifted the dead limb. The giant’s leg alone weighed nearly as much as a grown man.

  The princess scrambled free. Alaan dropped the giant’s foot.

  She ducked into Alaan’s arms, hugging his neck.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she breathed, her words hot in his ear.

  The cold blood of the dead men that soaked his shirt raised goosebumps on her already chilled bare skin. He could feel her in perfect detail through the wet fabric. His hands came up to hold her.

  He made them push her away instead.

  “Take this.” Alaan pulled his shirt over his head and gave it to her to cover herself.

  Gratefully, she tugged it on. The shirt hung only to the tops of her thighs, its wet fabric clinging to her.

  Would that he had worn his cloak or the heavy uniform jacket to train that night—anything warm and concealing. But they would soon return to the encampment, and she could wash and dress and warm herself there. Until then, he would keep his eyes averted.

  “Come,” he said. “We must return to the encampment—”

  A prickle of alarm in the grafting was all the warning he had.

  Then pain exploded in the back of his skull.

  ***

  Kelena didn’t think when the savage clubbed Alaan. As her Thorn crumpled and the savage raised his club to crush Alaan’s skull flat, she reached out. Her palm came to rest against the savage’s greasy, pimpled cheek.

  It sounded like someone else speaking when she snarled, “No.”

  Gouts of blood erupted from the savage’s eyes and nose, dark in the moonless night. Red gushed from his ears and his working, bewildered mouth. He collapsed on top of the Thorn, gave a twitching shudder, then lay still.

  Crouching, Kelena rolled the dead man off Alaan.

  She turned her Thorn over, hand flitting to the bloody gash on his temple. It didn’t look deep. Just a scrape from the rocks. Clouds of steam drifted into the air from his nose and mouth. He was alive.

  Thoughtlessly, she licked his blood from her fingertips, then slid her hand beneath his head and probed the place where the savage had hit him with that stone club.

  His skull seemed solid, but what did a mortal wound feel like? Would she sense through the grafting if he were dying? No blood wet his hair. That must be good. A lump was growing, though, which must not be.

  Kelena stood and cast around for help.

  The last of the savages had disappeared up the mountain. Down the mountain, she saw the Helat camp, but it was so small, the fires so far away.

  “Clarencio.” The shout came out a squeak. She was shivering so hard she could barely draw breath. “Help.”

  No one would ever hear her like that.

  “Hold on, Alaan,” she whispered through chattering teeth.

  She grabbed the unconscious Thorn under the arms and pulled, leaning her weight down the mountain for leverage. Sharp rocks cut her bare feet. His bootheels and blades scraped the ground, sending more chips of stone skittering. It felt as if every one of them landed beneath her bleeding soles.

  It was no good. She could barely move him.

  Movement far to her right. Kelena froze, then let out a sob of relief. The shapes picking their way through the snowy boulder field were clad in the handsome fur and feather cloaks of the Helat, not the rough patchwork hides of the savages.

  “Here,” she croaked. “Over here.” Her mouth and throat were dry and tacky from fear and cold, but she made herself swallow anyway. Her next shout was almost loud enough to qualify for the name. “Over here! Please, someone help me!”

  A female head turned, and Kelena recognized Fell Heather’s smile. She waved her arms and tried shouting again, but her voice was lost as the wind picked up.

  No matter. Fell Heather said something to her fellow legionnaires. Three of them broke off from the group and threaded through the stones toward her.

  A soft groan made the hair prickle down the back of Kelena’s neck. She knelt beside Alaan and pulled his head into her lap. His lashes flickered, parting now and again to show flashes of eye. Her Thorn was bloody and battered and unconscious, but through the grafting she felt him fighting to wake, fighting to rise.

  Kelena brushed her fingers across his forehead, then softly pressed them to his twitching eyelids.

  “I’m safe now, Alaan,” she whispered. “You saved me. I’m safe.”

  The struggle melted away. He relaxed and sank into oblivion.