“I don’t think I can. Something has changed, Athryn.”
The magician leaned toward him, looked deep into his eyes. Khirro didn’t want to look back at him, but felt unable to move his gaze away.
“Yes, something has changed: now you have a child to fight for.”
He knows. Has he always known?
Khirro’s lips twitched with the question, but Athryn slapped his hand on his shoulder and spoke again.
“I have seen you defeat a dragon and a serpent, fell giants and save your friends from dire circumstances. The Khirro who last set foot on these plains exists no more. Your journey has not only been one of distance, but one of the soul.”
Khirro’s head nodded minutely, keeping his eyes on Athryn’s. In his hand, the hilt of the Mourning Sword grew warm; he felt its heat radiating, warming the winter air.
The sword’s glow cast on the ground in front of them was difficult to see in the falling snow, but became more apparent as it took shape, gained color. It swirled at first, a whirlpool of red and green and blue in the air, then a building spread out before them.
Khirro recognized it instantly as his parents' farm.
The vision changed perspectives, as though Khirro walked up to the door. It swung open. Inside, the dinner table lay overturned, shards of clay from broken dishes littered the floor, and he saw his father’s axe on the hearth, its handle snapped in two.
His parents lay amongst the debris, dead eyes staring at the ceiling above.
His father’s one arm was pinned beneath his torso, his waist wrenched so far the other way, his legs faced the opposite direction like he might rise and walk away from himself. Blood splashed his mother’s apron, each drop blossoming on the white material like tiny, morbid roses. Khirro stared, mouth agape, wanting to ask Athryn the truthfulness of the vision.
Does he see it, too? Does he already know?
The vision moved forward, approached his parents. He leaned back in his saddle instinctively, unsuccessfully trying to stop it as the scene moved closer to his father.
His eyelids fluttered open and Khirro’s heart jumped with hope. Maybe he wasn’t dead, maybe a chance existed that he would live through this the way he lived through the accident that took his arm.
The accident I caused.
The father in his hallucination turned his head, sat up. Glazed, blank eyes stared at Khirro. A trail of blood ran from the man’s nose into his mouth, another streak of it ran from his ear. His father climbed to his feet, his body still cranked at the absurd angle, teeth clunking together as his mouth opened and closed forcefully. He took a shuffling, awkward step toward his son, and Khirro saw his mother sit up, too, her head swiveling to look at him with the same dead-but-not-dead eyes.
“No,” Khirro whispered and the scene disappeared, the glow receding back into the sword. The warmth waned along with it, leaving him with a shiver rattling his bones.
He faced the magician, looking at him for a long moment. Every shred of happiness he’d felt at seeing his friend again, every ounce of confusion he’d felt at Emeline’s words left him like chaff blown before a stiff wind. Athryn didn’t speak.
“Has this happened?”
The magician shook his head. “You know what this vision is, my friend.”
Khirro inhaled a deep breath through his nose and scented an odor on the wind he hadn’t smelled before or since their visit to the Necromancer’s keep: brimstone.
“This is what will happen if I don’t take action,” Khirro said moving his gaze away from the magician to the spot on the ground the vision had occupied. There was nothing now, only a crust of snow collected on grass beaten flat by the passing of an army.
An army that would destroy his home and kill his family if he didn’t act.
“Nothing is certain, Khirro, but it is likely this or some version of it will come to pass if the Archon is victorious. And not just to your parents.” Athryn looked past Khirro at Emeline and Iana. “The witch will not stop until the world is hers.”
Khirro nodded and prompted his horse to a walk.
“Say goodbye to Graymon and Emeline for me,” he said over his shoulder. “Give my daughter a kiss from her father.”
He coaxed his horse into a trot, a large part of him hoping the magician would call out to stop him. He didn’t. Khirro breathed deep, filling his lungs in the hope of calming the apprehension and dread churning his insides. They didn’t help.
“Khirro!”
Graymon’s voice. He fought the urge to turn the horse around, return to the boy to protect him, to take Iana from Emeline and hold his daughter just one time. Athryn would take care of them, probably better than he could. He set his jaw and urged his horse faster.
“Khirro!” Emeline called. “I’m sorry, Khirro. I did love you in my way.”
He urged his steed to a gallop and didn’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The dragon reared back on its haunches, filling its lungs with the fuel its fire needed. The living men before it scattered, leaving the unknowing dead to stand before the beast.
The dragon came down on its front feet, neck extended and mouth open, and spat a column of fire thirty feet long. Dead men burst into flame like dry kindling in a fire pit, burning with no more sound than inanimate lumber. The living didn’t exhibit the same silence.
Therrador gritted his teeth and hewed through the neck of another dead man come back to life. He hated the sound of men suffering in the breath of the dragon; no man deserved such agony on the battlefield, enemy or not.
The king pushed forward on foot, his horse lying dead with an axe in its chest twenty yards behind him. Luckily, his foes around him were also fighting afoot, most of them undead soldiers knocked from their steeds in death.
Lucky I only have to fight men raised from the dead.
All the men he’d brought from the fortress had fallen, the last of them only a minute before. Therrador fought alone. He spied other living Erechanians not far away, but all of them were as engaged as he. He would receive no help.
A mace caromed off the side of his plate, knocking the wind out of him. He whirled around in time to catch the next blow with his sword, then insert its tip through the eye of the beastly soldier. Another of the undead swiped wildly at him, missing and throwing itself off balance. Therrador hacked his arm off at the elbow and the dead man stumbled away, fell among the other bodies littering the field. The king cursed to himself.
There’s another I’ll have to fight again.
He’d come to realize that, if the contents of any soldier’s head-living or dead-should remain intact, they would be back to fight again, so he wielded his sword with all his might, severing necks and cleaving skulls. His shoulder, unused to such work, ached and complained, but Therrador forced himself to fight through the fatigue.
He engaged two more, one a living Kanosee soldier, the other a dead Erechanian brought back by the witch’s evil. Parry, thrust, block, jab. A well-placed swipe removed the undead thing’s head, adding its limp body to both the pile of the dead and to the lengthening list of once-loyal soldiers for the king to mourn, should he survive. He spun toward the live Kanosee soldier as the enemy’s blade found space between the plates covering Therrador’s thigh, opening a wound.
The king cried out in pain and turned his full attention on the man. The Kanosee soldier was big-wide and tall. As the two of them eyed each other, his mouth tilted up in a hateful smile.
“You’re the king,” he said, panting. “You’re Therrador.”
Therrador’s eyes narrowed. Behind the soldier, he spied a horse galloping across the battlefield, plowing through the throng.
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. You know me, but I don’t know you.”