“Don’t you normally take him to the woods?” It was Caenis, slipping from the shadows cast by the gate house. Vaelin was a little annoyed at himself for not sensing his brother’s presence but Caenis was unusually skilled at remaining hidden and took a perverse delight in appearing apparently from nowhere.

“Do you have to do that?” Vaelin asked.

“I’m practising.”

Scratch came scampering up with the ball in his mouth, dropping it at Vaelin’s feet and greeting Caenis with a sniff of his boots. Caenis patted him uncertainly on the head. Like the other brothers he had never lost his basic fear of the animal.

“Nortah still sleeping?” Caenis asked.

Vaelin shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about Nortah; his brother’s tears had left a hard knot in his chest that was taking a long time to fade.

“The coming months will be hard,” Caenis went on with a sigh.

“Aren’t they always?” Vaelin hurled the ball towards the river, Scratch hurtling after it with a joyful yelp. “Sorry you didn’t get to see the king.”

“No, but I saw the prince. That was enough. What a great man he’ll be.”

Vaelin gave Caenis a sidelong glance, seeing the familiar glint in his eye. He had never been comfortable with his friend’s blind devotion to the king. “He… was a very impressive man. I’m sure he’ll be a fine king one day.”

“Yes, he’ll lead us to glory.”

“Glory, brother?”

“Of course. The king has ambitions, he wishes to make the Realm even greater, perhaps as great as the Alpiran Empire. There will be battles, Vaelin. Mighty, glorious battles, and we will see them, fight them.”

War is blood and shit… there’s no honour in it, Makril’s words. Vaelin knew they would mean nothing to Caenis. He was knowledgeable and often frighteningly intelligent but he was also a dreamer. He had a mental library of a thousand stories and seemed to believe them all. Heroes, villains, princesses in need of rescue, monsters and magical swords. It all lived in his head, as vital and real as his own memories.

“I think we have different notions of glory, brother,” Vaelin said as Scratch came bounding back with the ball in his jaws.

They waited for another hour but the boy didn’t come.

“He probably sold the knives,” Caenis said, after Vaelin had told him the story. “He’ll have tanked up on grog in a gutter somewhere, or gambled it away. Likely you’ll never see him again.”

They walked back to the stables, Vaelin tossing the ball into the air for Scratch to catch. “I’d rather believe he spent the money on shoes,” he said glancing back at the gate.

Part II

What is the body?

The body is a shell, the cradle of the soul.

What is the body without the soul?

Corrupted flesh, nothing more. Mark the passing of loved ones by giving their shell to the fire.

What is death?

Death is but a gateway to the Beyond and union with the Departed. It is both ending and beginning. Fear it and welcome it.

The Catechism of Faith

Verniers' Account

“It was Blood Rose, wasn’t it?” I asked. “The Lord Marshall at the Summertide Fair.”

“Al Hestian? Yes,” the Hope Killer replied. “Though he didn’t earn that name until the war.”

I drew a line under the passage I had just set down, finding myself nearly out of ink. “A moment,” I said, rising to open my chest and extract another bottle and some more parchment. I had filled several pages already and worried that I might exhaust my supply. I hesitated before opening the chest, finding his hateful sword propped against it. Seeing my discomfort he reached for the weapon, resting it on his knees.

“The Lonak have a superstition that imbues their weapons with the souls of the enemies they kill,” he said. “They give names to their warclubs and knives, imagining them possessed of the Dark. My people have no such illusions. A sword is just a sword. It’s the man who kills, not the blade.”

Why was he telling me this? Did he want me to hate him even more? Seeing his scarred, powerful hand resting on the sword hilt I recalled how Seliesen, after the Emperor formally named him as the Hope, had submitted himself to months of harsh tutelage under the Imperial Guard, becoming proficient, even skilled with sabre and lance. “The Hope must be a warrior,” he told me. “The Gods and the people expect it.” The Imperial Guard had taken him in like one of their own and he had ridden with them against the Volarians the summer before Janus sent his armies to our shores, winning plaudits for his courage in the melee. It had availed him nothing against the Hope Killer. I knew the moment would come when the Northman would relate what had happened on that terrible day, and, even though I had heard many accounts of the event, the prospect of hearing it from Al Sorna himself was both dreadful and irresistible.

I sat down again and opened the ink bottle, dipped the quill and smoothed a fresh sheet of parchment on the deck. “The Dark,” I said. “What’s that?”

“Your people call it magic, I believe.”

“They might, I call it superstition. You believe in such things?”

There was a moment’s pause and I formed the impression he was considering his next words carefully. “There are many unknown facets of this world.”

“There are stories told of the war, stories that ascribe great and powerful magic to the Northmen, and to you in particular. Some claim it was with magic that you clouded our soldiers’ minds at the Bloody Hill, and that you stole through the walls of Linesh with sorcery.”

His mouth twitched in faint amusement. “There was no magic at the Bloody Hill, just men possessed of a mindless anger hurling themselves at certain death. As for Linesh, a shit stinking sewer in the harbour hardly counts as sorcery. Besides, any Realm Guard officer who even suggested use of the Dark would most likely find himself hung from the nearest tree by his own men. The Dark is believed to be integral to those forms of worship that deny the Faith.”

He paused again, looking down at the sword resting in his lap. “There’s a story, if you’d like to hear it. A story we tell our children to warn them against the dangers of the Dark.”

He glanced up at me, eyebrows raised. Although I consider myself a historian and not a compiler of myths and fables, such tales often shed some light on the truth of events, if only to illustrate the delusions that many mistake for reason. “Tell me,” I said with a shrug.

When he spoke again his voice had taken on a new tone, grave but engaging, a storyteller’s voice. “Gather close and listen well to the tale of the Witch’s Bastard. This is not a story for the faint at heart or the weak of bladder. This is the most terrible and frightful of tales and when I am done you may curse my name for ever having given it voice.

“In the darkest part of the darkest woods in old Renfael, long before the time of the Realm, there stood a village. And in this village there dwelt a witch, comely to the eye but with a heart blacker than the blackest night. Sweet and kind was the face she offered to the village, but mean and jealous was the soul behind it. For it was lust that drove this woman, lust for flesh, lust for gold and lust for death. The Dark had taken her at an early age and she had surrendered to its vileness with willing abandon, denying the Faith and winning power in return, the power to possess men, inflame their desires and have them commit dreadful acts in her name.