Harbinger

It hurt a little—even in their current predicament—that Aachon felt he could not unburden himself.

“My friend,” the Young Pretender finally spoke up, finally unable to take the silence between them, “we are surely heading toward a conflict we have little chance of living through. Even Sorcha”—he gestured futilely to where the horizon streamed with green and red light—“realizes this. I know something has been weighing on your mind since we left the citadel. I really need to know exactly what it is.”

Aachon looked at him with dark eyes from under his furrowed brows, and his hands flexed around something that had not been there for some time: a weirstone. “My prince,” he finally spoke after a few heartbeats, and his voice was heavy with guilt, “I fear I must break my oath; the one that I made before your father, so many years ago.”

Raed would have had to be a fool not to hear the pain and effort it took to wrench out those words. “You mean the oath to protect me?”

A muscle flexed in his friend’s jaw. “Yes, that is the very one. It has become obvious that if every man, woman and child with an ounce of ability does not take up the runes, this realm and all that live in it will be lost.”

Deep within Raed the Rossin stirred, listening with real interest, Raed knew, to the next words. “Go on,” the Young Pretender urged.

Aachon held up his hands, looked at them for a long moment and then held them before Raed as if they were sacrificial offerings. “I have that ability, my prince. I am in fact fully trained in its use, so I am asking your permission to join Sorcha’s Deacons.”

Raed blinked at him. Ever since he had known Aachon he had heard nothing but how corrupt and blinkered the Order of the Eye and the Fist was. His friend had even finally revealed why and how he had been turned away from them, for his love of Garil and the weirstone power. Now, here he was standing before him, asking for Raed’s blessing to go back and serve. Things were in a pretty state indeed if it had come to this. The Young Pretender was at a loss as to what to say.

Aachon must have taken it as a slight. He cleared his throat. “You, more than anyone, know what the geists will do if the way to the Otherside is opened. You have faced the Murashev, the Wrayth and Hatipai. The Beast inside you still gnaws at your soul, my prince, I know that.”

Raed raised his hand and shook his head a fraction. “I am sorry, Aachon. Please—my silence is not a judgment on your decision. I am just . . . surprised . . . but you are right. Sorcha will need every person that can wield a rune in the coming days.”

Aachon opened his mouth, as if to say something, then closed it with a snap. He looked once more over the devastated streets, to where the red and blue lights had now subsided. “I will go to her then, ask to be marked and take my place among them. It is time to forget old grudges.”

Now it was Raed that clapped him on the back. “I feel the geists lifting from the city, but I must wait until they are all clear. Still, go with my blessing.” His eyes drifted to the flaring lights on the horizon. “I don’t know how she did it, but there you are. Perhaps we have some hope after all.”

“Indeed, it is a strange world in which I find hope in the Deacons,” Aachon commented. “I will see you there, my prince . . . and thank you.” They clasped each other’s forearms, and then Aachon began to pick his way down the hillside to the road.

The Young Pretender watched and felt a heaviness descending over him. Aachon had always been there, always watched over him, and now he too must be lost to Raed. Just like Snook. Just like Fraine.

Maybe that was the best way to be; hollow. When the end came, perhaps it would not hurt as much if there were only a shell where Raed had once been. And yet . . .

Raed sighed. “I have been reading far too much poetry,” he whispered to himself. She was still there. Sorcha. As twisted by all these events as he was—he still loved her.

All the rest was burned and floating away on the winds of circumstance, but that remained.

Not much to hang your life on, the Rossin muttered. A Wrayth-Deacon half-breed just clinging onto her sanity.

Raed determined not to listen. The Beast was not to be trusted—least of all in this chaotic time. “Don’t worry,” he replied lightly, “there will be plenty of blood for you to feast on before this is all over.”

The Rossin became ominously silent.

Raed was just about to climb down and make his way in Aachon’s footsteps, when he spotted someone else moving at the edges of the city. Merrick had told them there would be a gathering at the town square—one that no surviving human for miles would be able to resist. However, as Raed watched, a gray-cloaked figure was picking its way through the ramshackle and smoking houses. The way it kept to the shadows, and hurriedly crossed streets made it immediately apparent it did not want to be seen.

A Deacon—but not one of hers.

The Rossin’s vision was laid over his, a new development that he had previously been too worried to tell Sorcha about, but which he was very glad of now. This figure gleamed in the moonlight; the aura around it flickering silver.

The Circle of Stars had shown its hand with the destruction of the Order and the Mother Abbey, but it had not been seen since. Like Sorcha, they made use of weirstone portals to travel about Arkaym and even the more distant continent of Delmaire. Yet now, here was one scuttling around this devastated city.

The Circle had been responsible for twisting his sister’s mind, thinning the barrier between worlds and tipping the Empire into civil war. It was not just the Rossin whose anger had begun to kindle, yet he hesitated for a second to go after this creature. He glanced once more toward the center of the city and thought of her there. Alone.

She is never alone, the Rossin snarled in Raed’s head. She has much to do, and not much use for you. You know that.

The Beast’s barbs were getting sharper and more accurate—as if he was really making an effort. However, there was inescapable truth in the Beast’s words and one fact: they did share a hatred for the Native Order that had caused so much destruction.

Without consulting each other they had reached an accord. Raed started walking down the hill toward the cloaked figure, but within moments he was running. The black smoke that still hung over the city would have made it impossible for any mere human to keep track of this fleeting figure, but he had the Rossin’s sight, smell and other geistlord senses at his disposal.

The thought crossed his mind that if it were not for the horror that the Beast had inflicted on his family, and the blood of countless others it had spilled, then it would have been a useful alliance.

It was meant to be an alliance, but I was tricked. You hate the pain I have caused you, but your family has become a prison for me. You cannot understand all that I am.

Raed would almost have preferred not to hear the curse of the Imperial family speak. His words of late had become confusing and more terrifying than his former blood rages—so that the Young Pretender almost wished he would go back to that. As he stumbled through the wreckage of a city torn apart by geists, he tasted soot and smoke in his mouth, but none of it could distract from the fact that the Rossin was becoming more real to him.

He did not want to feel an ounce of sympathy for the geistlord. He was far more comfortable with the Rossin he had grown up fearing; one mad for blood and with no shred of desire for anything more than that. The changes in the Beast of late had made no sense, and yet he feared if he could figure them out they would not be terrifying.

You let me in.

Another uncomfortable truth. The deal he had made with the Rossin after the incident with Hatipai had been one he’d made for survival’s sake—not his own, but his sister’s. However, he was growing more and more sure it had been a mistake.

Concentrate! the great pard snarled in his head, flooding his body with heat. The Circle of Stars is not to be underestimated. Derodak, the first Emperor, the first Deacon, is the one responsible for you and I.

Raed slid to a stop behind a burned-out building on the intersection of a ravaged street. He peered cautiously around the corner. Not far off, the cloaked figure was striding quickly out of view.

If that was a Sensitive of the Circle of Stars, then he or she was the worst in the Order.