wafted through a round window, and curtains of rainwater fell from the eaves. A face peered out the window, silhouetted by the glow of a hearthfire. Then the door opened slightly, a young girl barely visible in the crack.
“Yes?” She was no more than fourteen, a peasant, not especially lovely or comely. Brown hair in braids, small brown eyes.
“Can you help me?” he asked. His teeth chattered. “So cold…”
The girl turned away but did not shut the door. “It’s a man,” he heard her say. “A beggar. He has no shoes.”
Now the jowly face of an older woman peered out at him. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I am lost,” he told her, “and hungry. May I sit by your fire for a little while?”
She eyed him suspiciously but relented. “Come in,” she said. “Take off that filthy cloak.”
“I am naked underneath,” he said. The woman and her daughter exchanged a look of shock.
“Gods of Earth and Sky, you are a poor one,” she said. “Nellea, fetch a dry robe for this poor man.”
He trembled in the doorway until the girl returned with a simple robe of white linen. Mother and daughter turned away while he slipped off the wet cloak and pulled the smock over his thin body. His stomach growled. His lips twitched.
“Thank you for this hosp foy whileitality,” he said.
The hovel featured a table, a hearth, some blankets spread on a wooden floor, and a small back room, obviously a shared bedroom.
The woman picked up the purple cloak and wrung it with her hands just outside the door. The girl scooped broth from a boiling kettle into a stone bowl and set it at the table.
“What is your name, sir?” the girl asked. She sat across the table from him, some part of her still afraid, even in the midst of her overwhelming pity. Her mother hung the cloak on a peg next to the fireplace.
“Gammir,” he said. He stared into the steaming broth.
“Well eat, Gammir,” said the mother. “You may stay with us until the rain lets up, then you must go.”
He did not touch the bowl, or the wooden spoon she gave him.
“Ah,” the mother said, as if she had forgotten something. “You’ll need some water to wash that down.” She got up to fetch her bucket.
“No, thank you,” he said.
The woman smiled, her face pink and heavy with an old sadness. “I suppose you’ve gotten enough water out there this evening…”
“Call me Nellea,” said the girl. “My mother is Naomi. Please eat, Gammir. It is all right.”
“What is the name of this village?” he asked. Still he did not touch the broth. He stared at the fire. The warmth made his thirst grow, and the dancing flames made him think of the Red Dream. He no longer needed the bloodflower to enter that special place.
“Vod’s Way,” said Naomi. “You’ve seen the statue? They say the Giant-King once slept here, in this very spot, when this place was still a desert. That the stream sprang up to quench his thirst when he woke.”
Gammir laughed. The irony was delectable.
Naomi stood behind her daughter, hands on her shoulders.
“Where do you come from, Sir Gammir?” she asked. A cooking knife lay on the shelf at her right elbow, just below the circular window.
“From the south,” he said. “And the north. Do you believe the legend of your village?”
Naomi shrugged. “It’s what they say…”
Gammir nodded. “Yes, they say so many things about Vod, don’t they? Such a hero, such a legend… The truth is that Vod was a liar.”
Mother and daughter looked at one another. “You’d better go, sir,” said Naomi. “You are frightening my daughter…”
Gammir smiled. He smelled the blood pulsing in their wrists, necks, and thighs. His nostrils twitched. His stomach roared. The flames in the fireplace raged like the fire in his blood. r w'0em' width='27'› “I told you I was hungry,” he said.
“Then eat and go!” said the mother. She grabbed the cooking knife and pointed it at him. Nellea wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, one eye still focused on Gammir, wide and white-rimmed.
Gammir nodded. “Oh, I will.” He lunged across the table, a white panther in the shape of a man.
Beneath the wind, rain, and thunder rang the screams of mother and daughter. If anyone heard they chose to ignore the sounds and stay warm inside their cozy huts.
Presently the white robe was stained to brightest red. The uneaten broth grew cold in its bowl. Gammir rose from his feast, took up the cloak of Tadarus, and walked into the storm once again, following the main track out of the village, then turning back into the tall grasses.
Lightning danced in the sky and in his veins. He laughed at the chaos above. He spread his arms, and the winds swirled about him. The Red Dream rose into his eyes, and he called for his grandmother. She came to him wreathed in vines of orange flame.
“Sweet Prince,” she cooed. “Now you see the truth of the blood. You know its power.”
“Yes.” He told her of the destruction he had wrought in the mountains, of his great triumph, and the exaltation of slaughter.
“Now you must learn not to waste your power,” she told him. He already knew this, but he did not mind her guidance. She doted on him as a mother on her favorite son. “Use it as you need, call upon the shadows when you must, but do not squander the gifts of the blood. I have much more to teach you.”
“I will come to you now,” he said. “Across the Golden Sea… to your black palace and your crimson jungles… to your soft bosom, warm as a hearthfire.”
For a timeless moment she held him in her arms, his head against her bosom.
This is what it was like to be loved.
“No,” she said. “Not yet. Go first to Shar Dni.”
“Why?” he asked, a petulant child.
“To spread terror and death among our enemies,” she said. “To drink more royal blood and harness its power. When you come across the water, you will come to me as a true Prince of Khyrei, with a legion of shadows at your back. Then our war song can truly begin.”
“I understand,” he whispered into the wind, and opened his eyes.
The moon and stars were lost in the upper dark, and the night poured down upon him. He must go east now, and he must not walk. He must ride.
He spoke an incantation, eyes blazing, and shadows raced toward him from the mouth of night. Down from the mountains they flowed like floods of dark water, converging among the grasslands at his feet.
“My children…” he said. The shapes of shifting s odth='27'darkness sniffed at his bare heels, wolvish, serpentine, ever-changing, and eager. They worshipped the blood in his belly, in his veins, spilled across his chest.
The shadows flowed into a shoulder-high form, an ebony stallion, snorting and stamping, digging razor hooves into the wet earth. Its mane flowed upward from its neck, like black seaweed waving in unseen waters. Wisps of dark smoke trailed from its nostrils. He pulled himself up onto its back, a saddle of shadow-stuff forming beneath him. The dark flow continued, wrapping about his body like slithering eels, shredding the stained robe. He wore a suit of darkness now, black mail like that of a Khyrein warrior, and the purple cloak of Tadarus flapped at his back. There was another non-brother to kill… but that would come later. A pleasure rushed and not savored was a pleasure wasted.
The black steed galloped across the plains. A horde of shadows followed in its wake, dark plumes trailing after a thunderbolt. Gammir laughed, breathed in the wet freedom of night, the cold air of liberation. The scent of ancient darkness. Faster and faster the phantom horse carried him across the Stormlands.
The blood lingered on his tongue, in his throat. He would not waste this power. Not as he had done at Steephold. He would conserve it, use it sparingly to satisfy his whims and the justice of his impending throne. The power was his and no matter how much of it he drained and swallowed and poured across the earth, there would always be more.
Always more ruby liquid flowing hot and luscious in the veins of the living.
Across an interval of darkness lay Shar Dni. An entire city filled with red blood, ripe for the taking. He threw
