He felt himself lifted clean off the ground a moment later, then thrown into a rockface hard enough to crack his shield belt. Hugo advanced through a field of floating stone and gravel, every loose fragment suspended around him like debris in zero gravity. When Corvin tried to stand, red hot pain lanced up through what felt like several broken bones and torn muscle.
He dug down past it, drawing on every scrap of the mental discipline Halvorsen had ever drilled into him, and forced his mind to close the door on both the pain and the fear crowding in behind it.
Panic is a liar, Halvorsen's old lesson surfaced again, unbidden, right when he needed it. The moment you believe its lies, you're already dead.Corvin refused, flatly, to be dead yet.
He got his feet under him just as Hugo closed in to finish it. He turned aside most of the strikes that followed, until one slipped past his guard and found his left shoulder. Hugo pinned him to the rock and kicked the legs out from under him, and as he drew back to land the final blow, Corvin twisted on the ground and let a burst of purple lightning tear loose from his fingertips.
He climbed unsteadily to the edge of the ravine to find his first officer charred and smoking, and still, somehow, holding onto his rapier.
"How?"
Hugo managed, through a pained, wet grunt, before his fingers finally let the blade fall into the abyss below. His eyes rolled open, pupils blown blood red: the unmistakable mark of Red Mist.
"My real gift," Corvin said, "is that I keep whatever power belongs to the people I kill."
With proper medical care, Hugo might well have lived through this. Corvin knew with total certainty that if he lived, he would come back and try again.
Finish what you start, his old teacher's voice reminded him, cold and clean. Give an enemy a second chance and he will spend it undoing everything you built with the first. Corvin hesitated anyway, just for a breath.
He had never called himself a murderer. But Hugo would always, always be standing in the way of whatever came next.
"I intend to finish this mission," Corvin said, and hoisted Hugo's ruined body over the edge.
It struck the wrecked hull of the Lady Luck with a heavy thud, and together, ship and body, they slid into the dark below.
This is not how it was supposed to go.
The thought didn't feel like Corvin's own. It arrived from somewhere outside the memory entirely, threaded through the last of it like a hairline crack running through glass. Someone changed the shape of this.
Someone is still changing it, and it will not stop with him.
◆ ◆ ◆
Jon woke with a gasp that startled Aki awake below him and sent Yoshi scrambling deeper into the straw for cover.
For a long minute he just lay there in the dark of the hayloft, sweat gone cold against his skin, his heart hammering against his ribs like it was trying to get out and run somewhere on its own. The dream, if it even deserved that word, was already fraying at the edges the way real dreams do, but two things had survived the waking intact and refused to let go of him: a name, spoken more than once inside his own skull, Corvin Ashe, and a specific, bone-deep cold that had nothing at all to do with the mountain draft leaking in through the loft's cracked shutter.
He told himself it was just a strange dream, the kind you get from sleeping hungry and heartbroken above a tavern that smells like spilled mead and old sorrow. He almost believed it. He wanted to believe it badly enough that he very nearly managed it.
But he lay awake a long while after that, listening to the old miner's voice still looping somewhere in the back of his skull, right alongside that other, colder voice that wasn't his own at all. Something's wrong. Someone changed the shape of this.
Two different warnings from two different mouths, saying almost the same thing, and Jon had no earthly idea what either of them actually meant, or why his own straw idol under his childhood bed, the sword king he'd once worshipped without a second thought, had just shown up uninvited in the middle of a stranger's nightmare wearing a captain's coat and a rapier at his hip.
He decided, in the stubborn way of exhausted seventeen year olds everywhere, that it would all make more sense in the morning.
It did not.
I could never quite get used to waking up in the woods outside Fenholt. The fire I'd built the night before had died sometime past midnight, and if not for Aki's belly radiating warmth like a furnace, I'd have frozen solid before dawn. I don't know what I'd do without that beast.
Probably wouldn't have made it this far at all. The one real drawback to sleeping curled against a juvenile wyvern is the way his snoring rattles straight through your bones, and the truly heroic effort it takes to breathe through his breath, which smells approximately like something that died three separate times. I love him anyway.
I just wish he didn't insist on licking my whole face every single morning.
Walking into town, past the stronghold squatting on its hill, I passed the Lady Luck again and felt an odd little shiver climb my spine that I couldn't quite explain, given that I'd slept above it just two nights before. I told myself it was the morning chill.
By the time I actually got inside, my whole body was buzzing with the particular anticipation reserved for warm food after a cold night. Greta had softened toward me by then, in her way, which mostly meant she only looked mildly irritated when I walked in instead of outright hostile. I'd been earning my keep with chores: hunting rabbits, hauling barrels of reeking mead wherever she pointed, scrubbing rooms when someone was too drunk to do it themselves.
Sometimes I suspected she enjoyed bossing me around a little too much, given how often she found an excuse to hover nearby and personally supervise my suffering.