1: A Dream of Vines & Flames

Far away in an autumnal wilderness, surrounded by old friends and new enemies, a man twitched in uncomfortable slumber.

Rising in a dream, he entered a room and stood before a silver chair and the man sitting within it. The man was no king or prince, yet the dreamer knew it was a throne in which he sat. Vines twisted through the silver spindles and around the arms, choking out the light glimmering from the metal. To either side, tapestries hung tattered from the walls, the tales they told of an ancient people lost. Smoke hung like fog in the surrounding air.

Silently, the man on the throne gestured him forward, and the dreamer went, kneeling and bowing his head. His senses strained to detect the slightest movement. His hand itched to seize the sword at his side.

“You disappoint me. I expected more of you, Skaldurak.”

The dreamer did not look up, did not rise, did not speak. He listened. He plotted. He waited.

The man’s robes rustled as he rose and stood over him. “By confounding my comrade, you raised my expectations. Yet here I come, entering your own mind, only to find no resistance.”

He had no response. The dreamer’s senses strained toward the man, waiting to catch his every word, fearful of missing a single one.

“How did you overcome him, I wonder? I shall not be able to ask him for many years now, thanks to your efforts. But there are other ways of discovering.”

The man stepped closer.

Now! the dreamer urged himself. Rise! His hand fell to his sword’s hilt, and he loosened the blade in its scabbard. But he did not draw it, and he did not rise.

The man’s voice was a harsh whisper above him, like a snake’s skin rubbing against bark. “I shall flay your mind of its secrets, Skaldurak. I underestimated you once before. But never again.”

His hand touched him. 

Flames lanced through the dreamer’s body, burning lines where his veins should have been. He tried to rise, tried to draw his sword, but his blood boiled, his skin beginning to split—

Tal twisted free of his bedroll and sat up, panting. 

The sweat that beaded his skin grew cold as the night’s air touched it. Shivering, he huddled back down into the thick, woolen covers and stared out over the darkness of the camp. One small campfire burned, a shadow huddled before it, revealing the poor chap who had drawn the short stick for the midnight watch.

A dream. Or a memory. Had it happened like that? He rubbed at his eyes, wishing the thought would leave him, but it needled him like a pebble in a boot. He’d been there, knelt in that room before that man. But those words, that word. Skaldurak. Even now as he formed it in his mind, it twisted like a viper threatening to bite.

Stone in the Wheel. 

And that man—he knew him, too. But he’s gone from that place; I drove him out. Unless...

Tal drew out his right hand, and despite the cold, held it bared to the night. Even in the darkness, the milky-white crystal band on his middle finger glowed gently.

Shaking his head, he hid it below the covers again, muttering, “What has the World become?”

He stared across the silhouettes of the wagons, gathered in a circle for protection of the caravan. Littered among them huddled other folks who, like him, slept outside on the ground, their wagons too full of articles to fit themselves inside. None who could avoid it enjoyed the chill, autumn air on their skin.

My friends. Despite his clouded mind, he smiled into the darkness. It had been a long time since he’d traveled with the Dancing Feathers, a long time since he’d been surrounded by friendly faces.

Or mostly friendly.

He didn’t know where the monk Causticus slept, but his gaze wandered over to where Garin lay. Before Hunt’s Hollow, the youth and Wren had often curled up together at night. But much had changed since they’d left their hometown behind. Now, the youth slept alone, and spent much of the days on his own, staring sightlessly ahead of them. 

Listening to the voice in his head? Tal wondered. Or plotting his revenge? Garin had never struck him as the vengeful kind.

Much had changed, indeed.

Tal closed his eyes against the old memories, but still they came, reminding him of the betrayal that had come between them.

Flashes of light in the dark tavern. Velori dancing and cutting. The black spray of blood.

His oldest friend dying on the ale-stained boards.

I killed him. He didn’t know if it had been his sword or one of Jin’s soldiers who had struck the killing blow in the sorcerous darkness. But it didn’t matter. That truth couldn’t erase the stain upon him.

His hands trembled, and he clenched them, the bones clicking. He had no time for weakness, no time to show the countless flaws running through his foundations. He had to remain Tal Harrenfel, legendary soldier and sorcerer. Or pretend to be.

Red Reaver. Magebutcher. The Man of a Thousand Names. 

“No more,” he growled to himself. Each name was only a facet, a single side of him. Somehow, some way, he had to put the fragmented pieces together.

But if five years of a quiet life hadn’t healed him, he doubted anything could.

* * *

He dreamed of fire and wind.

Garin floated above a burning forest, held aloft on invisible wings. The bones of a town lay below him, blackened and smoking.

A shadow swept over the land.

“Come.” 

Even in his dreams, he knew the Nightvoice, the Singer, though its sound had shifted. When it had first broken into his thoughts, it had been thin, little more than a whisper. Now, it held the rumble of thunder and stone, deep and sonorous, filling his mind with a single word.

“Come, little Listener. Come and see what we have become. Come and fulfill our final purpose.”

He nearly fractured under the Singer’s words, his tenuous consciousness threatening to fall as rain to the burning woods below.

“Come and see all we will make of you. Come and witness the power of our Song.”

Only then did he notice a figure among the inferno, their arms raised, slowly spinning in a clearing. The flames did not touch them, and where the tongues of fire neared their hands, they flared up all the greater. By a stray thought, Garin found himself floating down toward the shadow, and the dancing orange light fell upon the face.

Garin’s own face grinned up at him, eyes wide with a wild ecstasy.

“Come.”

“NO!”

Garin jerked upright, fighting the constraints on him, only to realize it was his bedroll, tangled around his flailing limbs. He paused, panting for breath. No burning forest. No manic mirror-image of himself spinning among it. 

All of it, a dream.

A shadowed form shifted a few feet away. “What is it now?” Wren groaned. “Another dream?”

He settled back down. His heart still pounded, but he was too embarrassed to move. Only then did he realize he’d shouted aloud. “Yes. Sorry.”

“Try to have quieter dreams,” she advised snidely. “Of sheep and pastures and all that pastoral bilge.”

She turned her back on him.

He barely registered her grumpy comments. His mind was full of the burning forest in his dream and himself at its center. 

I caused it, he realized. In the dream, I am the one who starts the fire.

The Singer only spoke to him in dreams now. While awake, he could almost forget a devil inhabited him at all. He could almost forget why they traveled to Elendol.

But the truth always found him in his sleep.

Garin turned toward Wren and stared at her outline. The dreams made them sleep apart now. He’d woken her one too many times with an errant flailing limb or a shout. A distance was growing between them, and though the cause of it remained unspoken, he had a feeling they both knew what it was.

I’ll get rid of this demon, he promised her. And then, nothing will stand in the way.

He willed his oath toward her, urging her to hear it, until his eyes drifted slowly, inevitably closed.

* * *

Tal rose from his bedroll, eyes gummy and head aching with the lack of restful sleep. Yet, no matter the troubles that the night brought, a smile always found his lips.

It was another day on the road.

They’d been traveling the High Road for a month since leaving Hunt’s Hollow. It had been a varied three weeks, full of long days of riding and walking, longer evenings of music, revelry, and dancing, and unending nights of chilled sleeplessness. In southeastern Avendor, autumn was giving way to winter, and the cold had swept in the first of the frosts and snowfalls. Leaves, newly fallen from trees, crunched under feet, hooves, and wagon wheels as they inched along the packed dirt road, always moving east.

Toward Gladelyl, and all the elven queendom would bring.

The going was leisurely, if not outright lethargic. Not only were they burdened by the numerous implements of the trouper’s trade, but the members of the Dancing Feathers rebelled against anything resembling haste. They took frequent breaks throughout the day, and they rose late. Though Tal had gently urged Falcon to end the evening activities earlier, it had little noticeable effect on their habits. Eventually, Tal had resigned himself to the pace. 

You brought this on yourself, asking Falcon along, he’d thought to himself more than once, always with an indulgent grin.

Slowly, the troupers drew him back into the lifestyle he’d once occupied many years before. On more than one occasion, he’d obliged to sing by the fireside with the actors, and though his scratchy, unused voice appalled him, it drew enough applause and laughter from the others to placate his smarting pride. He took part in their mock fights, giving pointers on how to make them more realistic, while they gave him dubious advice on how to make it more dramatic. 

Mikael endeavored to teach him the ways of goblin humor. Ox showed him the ropes of the backstage overseer. Despite his supplications, Yelda refused to teach him how to act the leading lady. And Falcon reacquainted him with the finer points of poetry, high and low, in Reachtongue and Gladelyshi alike. Some of it was old knowledge learned again, and some of it new, for the Dancing Feathers had not been idle in perfecting their art in the intervening years since he’d ridden with them. Tal delighted in all he still had to learn, and even when he floundered, he rose from it with a grin and renewed resolve to try again.

Not since his time in Hunt’s Hollow had his life allowed him to fail without consequences.

But as his days lightened with levity, his nights grew ever more burdened. Then, his guilt seeped back in and infected his dreams. How Garin avoided him, spending time among the troupe only where Tal was not, and how much longer their estrangement might continue. How he’d done next to nothing with all of his hard-won knowledge and experience.

And, most of all, what Aelyn had bound him to when they arrived in Elendol.

The morning after his dream, Tal accepted a breakfast of porridge from Hilly, an actress with a talent for the harp and juggling knives, and wove his way through the camp until he found the mage. The elf often made his camp at the periphery of the others, and with no wagon to duck into, he shaped his own shelter from dead wood and sorcery.

By the time he found him, Aelyn was already sitting on top of his wooden shelter, his porridge half-eaten, his expression of distinct dissatisfaction growing sourer when he looked up to see who had arrived.

“So you decided you’ve frivoled away your time long enough, pretending to be princes and poets, have you?” the mage observed with a smirk.

Tal grinned as he sat next to him. “I doubt I’ll ever have enough of acting the prince. It fits me just as the curmudgeon fits you.”

Aelyn snorted. Lifting a spoonful of porridge, he dripped it back into his bowl. “Peer to the Realm, Emissary to the Queen, and a Master of the Onyx Tower,” he griped, “and I am forced to eat this.”

“I don’t remember you complaining about our fare on the way from Hunt’s Hollow.”

“Then, we made speed, not dragged on each interminable day to its breaking point.”

Tal clapped Aelyn on the shoulder. “Patience, my traitorous friend. We’ll arrive at your beloved Queen’s capital soon enough.”

“Traitor, am I?” He irritably shrugged off his hand. “Because I chained a stray dog to his hunt?”

Tal felt the smile leave his eyes, even as it remained perched on his lips. “I don’t know what you chained me to, Aelyn. But I’m very interested to find out.”

The mage’s gaze lingered on his, then he looked off into the snow-dusted woods, his spoon stirring in his bowl. “I am no traitor, Harrenfel. Not even to you. Before long, you’ll understand that.”

Tal ate and let the silence speak for him.

The day passed much as the others had. Tal rode his horse, whom he’d named Loyal in a fit of self-pity, for the morning saunter, then used his own legs during the afternoon to let his mount rest. Long before dusk, they stopped again and set to the long task of setting up camp. Hilly, in her informal capacity as the troupe’s chef, cooked their dinner of stew, filled with onions, potatoes, and salted mutton, and Tal gave her the sincerest false gratitude he could manage before sitting down to the dissatisfactory meal.

After an evening passed exchanging ribald jokes with Mikael and Falcon, Tal found his bedroll as the light faded completely to a moonless dusk. As with every night, an anxious vigilance rose in him as soon as everyone else became still. He didn’t know if it was the dreams that caused his insomnia or some long-latent awareness of danger lurking ever near. It didn’t matter that Ox sat at the watch. He was a good man and responsible in his duty, but at his core, he was still a trouper.

He hadn’t seen or shed the blood that Tal had.

Long into the night, he breathed in deeply to calm himself. The air was crisp with a cold that stung his nose, but underneath it, the scents of the night came to him. Hoping it might lull him to sleep, he made a game of identifying them.

The stink of his long-used bedroll.

The smoke of the sputtering watch fire.

The animal smell of the horses and mules.

A hint of sulfur.

Tal stiffened. A prickling of heat had started in his veins, familiar in its portent. Sorcery. He knew its stench, knew its touch upon his blood. And unless Aelyn were up to something this late at night, it could mean nothing well.

He extracted himself from his blankets and rose. Already clothed to keep out the cold, he drew on his boots, belted on Velori, threw on his heavy cloak, and seized his bow and quiver. Most likely, they’d be useless in the darkness, but as his old commander had often told him, We’re all morons for being out here, but we’ll be dead morons if we don’t come prepared.

As ready as he’d ever be, Tal crept out into the night.

* * *

“Awaken.”

Garin sat up, coughing, his heart racing. The flames of his dreams left white afterimages against the darkness pressing against his eyes. His throat felt raw, like he’d been breathing in smoke. A clashing din filled his ears. Screams, the harsh ring of metal, manic laughter—the Nightsong was unrelenting.

Another dream, he despaired. But just as he lay back down, he saw something that made him stiffen in terror.

A shadow stalked through the camp.

For a moment, he could do nothing but watch while his mind flitted through the possibilities. It’s just a trouper looking to relieve their bladder, he thought. Or to pay someone a late-night visit. Such liaisons weren’t unheard of among the Feathers, free-spirited as they were. More than once on their trip to the elven queendom, Garin had woken to sounds that made him feel both uncomfortable and shamefully intrigued.

But this shadow didn’t move like someone innocent. They moved furtively, like a cat through a cellar scrounging for scraps of food. They moved as if they wished to remain hidden.

As soon as they’d passed out of sight, Garin rose, his hand clasping his belt knife. He shivered as the late autumn night rushed over his exposed skin, and he quickly drew on his boots and cloak before he followed.

He caught sight of the shadow as soon as he peered around the wagon that sheltered Wren and him from the wind. They had paused at the outside edge of a wagon and seemed to look into the woods. 

Perhaps giving a signal to others? 

Garin knew he was probably overreacting. In the months of travel, those on watch had never glimpsed anything more suspicious than a squirrel. But as his eyes adjusted to the fire-limned darkness, he made out the unmistakable shape of a longbow in the shadow’s hand, and the glint of a notched arrow.

Before he could decide what to do, the sneak moved away from the wagon and toward the woods, silent and half-bent. They disappeared among the trees.

Tal. He suddenly knew it was his old mentor who had been warily watching the shadows. But what had he seen that alarmed him? What did he now mean to do?

Shivering, Garin stared out after him and waited.

* * *

Tal ghosted around the closest wagon. Without the light of the moons, he could see little, and he lacked the ingredients for a spell to improve his vision. So he contented himself with listening.

A snow-hushed forest surrounded them. The birds, squirrels, and deer had already departed before the coming winter months. An almost deafening silence filled the air, broken only by snores or the faint singing of Ox as he sat the watch.

Then a branch snapped from deep within the dark woods.

Tal withdrew behind the wagon and notched an arrow. Despite the cold of the night, a faint warmth coursed through his blood, unwelcome in what it signaled. He crept forward again, stepping carefully to avoid crunching any fallen leaves or twigs, but his footfalls remained loud in his ears, even above the blood hammering in his temples. He strained his senses forward, breathing in deeply, eyes wide, ears perked—

Crunching footsteps sounded ahead.

Tal crept closer, positioning his approach so that the small fire from the caravan didn’t reveal him. He heard the footsteps constantly now, many pairs of them. Five? Ten? As he continued forward, their muttered speech became audible, though it was in a language he’d rarely heard.

Darktongue. 

His blood burned in his veins now as he stared at the blackness where he knew they must be, steadily approaching the caravan of the Dancing Feathers. His mind spun. What were Easterners doing here within Gladelyl’s borders—their western borders, no less? The road was supposed to be safe from Halenhol until Elendol, or so King Aldric and Queen Geminia claimed.

But, like so many promises from kings and queens, Tal was finding they were less than certain.