Harren had waited for dawn to administer his punishment on Fiasco, dragging her to a large open garden to make his display. He’d gathered a crowd of hundreds to watch her be tied to a pole of iron, her shirt ripped open to expose her bare back.

  He branded her a traitor, claiming she had betrayed Vatanil by not battling with everything she could muster.

  “I will take the punishment!” Quinn yelled. “Prince Harren, the king was willing to give me death in her stead; I can take the lashes, my prince, let me take them!”

  “I don’t see King Godwin about, do you?” Harren smirked. “I am a prince. I decide the punishments in my brother’s absence. She will get the lashes; the bitch will learn that one must fight until their death in our service. Maybe I’ll let you take a few if I get bored painting her back red.”

  The crowd threw rotten vegetables at her, furious that she’d let the prisoner escape justice—Prince Harren made sure to spread this word as far as he could. He wanted Fiasco to suffer.

  “My prince, please!” Quinn begged. “Take your anger out on me, not her!”

  “Me, angry?” he scoffed. “I’m calm. How dare you accuse the prince of being angry. One more word and I’ll triple her lashes.”

  “It’s okay, Quinn,” Fiasco sniffled. “I can take it.”

  Zishang stood idly, overlooking the punishment with a look of pity for his friend. At Harren’s command, he placed a whip into the prince’s grip.

  Quinn reluctantly moved to Zishang’s side. He felt the need to thank him for saving Fiasco from Death but couldn’t find the right words to do so.

  The first whip split open her back from shoulder blade to hip. She cried out in anguish as the watchers cheered, throwing stones and apples at her head.

  “You failed your city!” Harren yelled. “You let a prisoner free on your watch! Thank your king for his mercy!”

  Quinn’s fist curled into a tight ball.

  “You mustn’t act,” Zishang whispered. “Prince Harren will only do more if you interrupt.”

  The second whip cut her from shoulder to shoulder. She almost bit off her tongue trying to fight through the sting. Blood dripped down onto her pants.

  “A killer walks free because of your weakness!” Harren yelled. “You deserve to be hanged, but King Godwin is merciful! Friends, cast more stones to teach her a lesson!”

  The third whip brought her to tears and made her weep. She whispered Quinn’s name in begging cries, cowering and hiding her face from Harren and the spectators. The pain had proven too much for her. She felt ashamed, vulnerable, small.

  After hearing his wife call for him, he ordered Prince Harren to stop whipping her.

  “You dare speak to your prince in that tone?” Harren pressed his sickle against Quinn’s upper pec. “You impede justice. I will punish you too. I shall make you like me, a reminder, use the last of her lashes to choose which arm you’d like me to take off you.”

  “My prince, forgive my cousin,” Zishang begged. “Please allow his rudeness to go unpunished. Finish your lashes.”

  “Finish my lashes,” he scoffed. “Are you giving me orders now? The day I take orders from any beneath me is the day I die.”

  “I will not let you harm Fiasco more than you have,” he said through gritted teeth. “Where is Bianca? She is who Fiasco answers to. Find her. Look her in the eyes and tell her that you’re torturing her friends, see if she’ll stand idle!”

  “She would stand idle,” Harren scoffed. “This is the order of my king brother. Lower your voice when you speak to me, chimp, or I’ll take both of your arms instead of mercifully leaving you one.”

  “You cannot do this.”

  “I can and I am. You forget how far below my rank you are, I am the prince of Vatanil. I will carry out the rest of my whips with the power of the God Arm for your disruption. I only had one more whip left, but now I have twenty.”

  “You are a prince of Vatanil,” a voice corrected. “Not the prince of Vatanil.”

  The crowed turned in awe and shock to see stroke cut Fiasco free from her pole. He comforted her as she fell to her knees, bidding the once hateful crowd to cover her back in cloth.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Harren took the sickle off Quinn’s chest and used it to threaten his brother. “Tie her back up. This is the command of Godwin himself.”

  “Not entirely,” said Stroke. “The king said the front courtyard; this doesn’t look like a courtyard to me. You weren’t there to hear his words so I’ll repeat them exact for you: Harren will punish her accordingly, for all to see.”

  “This is accordingly.”

  “Taking the arm of Captain Quinn and giving her twenty lashes more than necessary doesn’t sound like a command, it sounds like a poor little prince who has no power.”

  Harren brought the power of the God Arm to his whip with an angry growl.

  Stroke felt no threat or fear from Prince Harren. He’d trained every day since the age of seven, sparring with swordsmen and his own personal guard whilst Harren and Godwin cared little. Upon ten, he was trained by his father, paying close attention to each lesson taught. He sought strength through countless trials, hardening his resolve and hammering his determination into an iron will. He was the only one of the three who’d seen real war and a battlefield, the only to slay powerful foes and force his enemies to submit in fear of death. If he could make Kan Snuff yield in his own castle, the young prince feared no opponent.

  “Your voice and actions speak like Mara’s,” Stroke mocked. “She’s on you at all times, your scabbard with no sword.”

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  “Hold that tongue or be lashed yourself.”

  “Like you lashed my cambion all those years ago?”

  “I would rather let this city by flattened by a dragon’s fire before allowing a filthy demon to live with us. We are humans. Humans come first. You should be thanking me for making an example out of her.”

  “Fiasco is a human.”

  “She is an abomination.”

  Stroke tossed his godsteel sickle to Zishang’s feet. The prince cracked his knuckles, then neck. “An abomination, human, demon, this is still no way to treat a lady. I saw the battle. A cambion ambushed her.”

  Harren narrowed his eyes with a smug smile. “Watching, were you? Why didn’t you a do a thing?”

  “King Godwin told me not to interact with the person. Which did you want me to do? Listen to the king, betray the king’s order?”

  “Act on instinct. You’re a Valan.”

  “Am I? Feels my name only matters when someone else decides it matters.” An owl settled in a tree above Stroke. “Ah, the Voiceless One.” He pressed four fingers to his lips and blew the owl a kiss. “I knew you’d be here for this. I will take the lashes.”

  “You will not,” Harren growled. “Put her back up.”

  “No. You will whip me, but not while I am bound to a pole. Did you say twenty? Let’s call it ten. If you hit three on me, I’ll even take Quinn’s punishment, I’ll let you take my arm, brother.”

  Harren felt his mouth watering at the thought of revenge for his stump. He accepted his little brother’s challenge and missed two reckless whips against Stroke’s speed. The cracks were deafening with the power of the God Arm. Zishang pushed the crowd further away to avoid any accidental causalities.

  The third lash caught the back of Stroke’s hand. He let out a laugh, squeezing away the pain with a clenched fist. “That’s all you can muster with to power of a God Arm? You should’ve taken off my hand if you knew how to use the power properly.”

  Harren missed the next six lashes. On the final one, Stroke allowed it to catch his forearm, the whip wrapping around his skin and tightening on it. He disarmed Harren with a yank and tossed it into a bush.

  “There you go,” Stroke said, clapping. “The punishment has been dealt. You barely broke my skin. Almost felt nice.”

  “Twenty,” he snarled. “Twenty more. Give me the whip.”

  “How about sickle against sickle?” Stroke called for his weapon from Zishang. With permission from Prince Harren, the captain tossed the weapon to Stroke. “Wrists versus stump.”

  “To what? To the death?”

  “Hm… you hate me that much?” Stroke flashed his fingers to his brothers, showing two godsteel rings on each ringer finger. “I made these with my own coin. I plan to marry Runaya when she returns—I don’t need Godwin’s approval. Godsteel can be broken by the God Arm, so here is my offer… I will break your skull with these rings, punch after punch, or you cut off one of my arms. That’s how we decide. Deal?”

  Without accepting, Harren dashed for Stroke and swung with his stump, sickle clashing against sickle, a smile like a mad dog.

  “I’m going to take more than your arm,” he hissed. “I’ll take one of your legs too!”

  The ring connected with Harren’s jaw from a low blow. Stroke’s punches were heavy even ungifted. The prince hit a tree, uprooting it and crushing a few unfortunate watchers.

  Quinn picked Fiasco over his shoulder and fled the garden. His cousin stayed to evacuate the civilians from the battle.

  Harren clicked his jaw back into place and punched the corpse of the oak with the power of the God Arm. Stroke slid underneath it, dropping his sickle and sweeping his leg for Harren’s ankles.

  The prince jumped over the kick, but Stroke kept on the offensive. He kept swinging for Harren’s face, missing by inches each time. “What’s wrong?” Stroke taunted. “Can’t find an opening to strike me? You’re slow, brother, the God Arm is wasted on you.”

  Harren swapped to the God Arm to his stump and went for the throat. Stroke dodged, narrowing his eyes in amusement. When Harren went for a second attempt, the littlest prince blocked it with his hand, the edge catching against the raised edge of his ring. The power of the strike, however, whacked Stroke into a nearby Sentinel and sent a crack up the stone from bottom to top.

  Stroke limped away from the tower with a pained moan, then received a blow to his stomach from Harren. He smashed into the same Sentinel, nearly toppling it.

  “In the weak one?” Harren snarled. “You are inferior!” He grabbed Stroke by the throat and pushed him into the stone. “Go on! Say something now! I’ll gut you like a pig.”

  Stroke gave a smile. “Your hits aren’t as hard as I thought they would be,” he groaned. “I’ve been hit by Godwin before. Yours are like being hit by a toddler. How did my hits feel? Mine were far stronger than yours were, had to purposefully miss just so I didn’t take off your head.”

  “And now I will take off your head.”

  The Sentinel remained blue. Stroke noticed this, Harren didn’t.

  Stroke began to laugh. “If you think I’m taking this fight serious, you clearly don’t know me well enough, everything I said was to get you to hit me as hard as you could,” he taunted. “I wanted to see how well you fight. We will need you when your actions start a war with the Kans.”

  “War with the Kans?” he repeated. “My actions? What are you on about, you imbecile?”

  “You conspire to create chaos with the whore Godwin let you marry. I’ve never found a better time to tell you this—I saw the letter you tried to write to the Kans on the night our parents died. You tried to claim they fell fighting cambions; had I not spread the truth that they fell from illness, who knows what wars you would’ve made with your lies.”

  Harren’s sore jaw hung open, speechless. He smacked his lips together with a dry laugh. “You think you know a thing about what goes on in this city? They’ll never rescue Runaya. I hope they never find where she ran off to… I bet she’s laid in bed right now with a wide-shouldered man, taller than you, handsome… I bet she gives him everything he wants. She’s forgot about you, Stroke, move on.”

  The words struck the little prince deeper than any blade could; in his years of torment from Harren, he’d mastered a flat smile.

  Harren skidded across the grass after received a strong palm to the centre of his torso. “Doesn’t matter if they do,” Stroke said. “The wench you parade around the council has already offered to be my whore… but I think you know that… fill a hole to fill a hole, fill it with a whore… isn’t that what you told me to do the day she went missing? When she has your child, I hope it has our blue hair, I’ll enjoy seeing your fear when you realise it looks like me.”

  Harren saw a crowd of hundreds gathering. “Damnit,” he said to himself. “I can’t kill him in front of all these people. I’ll kill him another day.” He called out for Zishang in the crowd. “To Hell with this fight. Fetch me the other guards that were on duty during the prisoner’s escape. I will whip them instead.”

  To Harren’s surprise, Stroke was nowhere to be seen. He had travelled to the other side of the city in the blink of an eye, sitting atop a Sentinel with a smug smile on his face.

  Idiot, Stroke thought. He took his eyes off me while the rest of the crowd couldn’t see me. He always ridiculed my gift… I bet he feels stupid for doing it.

  Stroke pulled a letter from his pocket, one he’d stolen from his brother whilst being pinned against the Sentinel An owl landed next to him, he gave it a pat on the head. “I am a man of faith,” he told the owl. “Bring me to Runaya, Voiceless One. I cannot go another night without her kisses.”

  He unfolded the letter and read it in silence. The handwriting was Harren’s own, but the words themselves could only come from the mouth of Mara. It detailed a war against the cambions, a request of alliance to Kan Lumi to find a way to open the portal of the Naveen Hell Oasis and slaughter the demons.

  “Naughty Harren,” Stroke whispered. “Plotting under Godwin’s nose… that’s not very nice.” He tossed the letter into the flame of the Sentinel and sat watching the busy streets of the city from above, satisfied with himself.