CHAPTER 2
The Watchtower Yard
The slope was a traitor's gift: slick with dew, littered with loose shale and hidden roots. Kael took it at a dead run anyway, boots skidding, one hand clawing at trunks to keep from pitching headlong. Branches whipped his face, tore at his wool shirt, drew blood he did not feel. The column of black smoke rising from Briarholt's eastern edge clawed at the sky like a living thing (thick, greasy, carrying the unmistakable stench of burning flesh).
He burst from the tree line at the bottom of the ridge and hit the old cart road that skirted the barley fields. The smoke was closer now, boiling up from the abandoned watchtower that crouched on its low hill like a broken tooth. Figures moved against the flames (small, frantic, human). Someone was screaming, a high, tearing sound that rose and fell with the wind.
Kael's lungs burned. His legs burned. None of it mattered.
He vaulted a low stone wall and sprinted across the stubble. The stalks whipped at his thighs, releasing their dusty summer smell. Ahead, the watchtower gate hung open on broken hinges. The screaming stopped as suddenly as a snapped neck.
Silence rushed in, worse than the scream.
Kael slowed, iron knife already in his fist. The blade felt suddenly childish.
Four bodies lay in the yard.
The first was old Harlen the gatekeeper, throat opened ear to ear, blood still steaming on the frost-rimed ground. His eyes stared up at the sky as if surprised to find it still there. The second and third were town guards Kael had known since boyhood (Jorin and little Micah), both gutted, entrails steaming in the cold. Their swords were still sheathed. They had died without drawing.
The fourth body wore a long coat the colour of fresh snow.
A woman.
She lay on her back amid the carnage, one arm flung wide, the other folded across her chest as though she had tried to shield her heart. Her hood had fallen back, revealing hair the colour of midnight spilled across the dirt. Blood soaked the front of her coat, bright arterial red against the white. Her eyes (dark, almost black) were open and fixed on the smoke overhead.
Kael's stomach lurched. He had never seen her before, yet something in him recognised her the way a wolf recognises the scent of another predator.
He took one step toward her, and the world exploded.
Four figures dropped from the watchtower's broken roof like red-winged hawks.
They landed in perfect silence, knees bending to absorb the impact. Red leather cloaks snapped in the wind. Black scarves covered the lower half of their faces. Each carried a short, curved sword in the right hand and, in the left, a weapon Kael had only heard whispered of in Corvin's darkest lessons: veil shards (rift-crystal forged into talons that drank light and gave back only hunger).
Red Talons. The Veil Lord's assassins. Here, on the wrong side of the Pale Rift.
Kael's mind tried to reject the sight, but his body was already moving. He dove sideways as the first blade hissed through the space his neck had occupied. The second Talon was on him before he hit the ground, veil shard stabbing for his ribs. Kael twisted, felt the crystal bite deep into the meat of his left side (hot and cold at once). Pain flared white.
He rolled with it, came up inside the man's guard, and drove his iron knife into the soft place beneath the jaw. The Talon made a wet sound and folded.
The remaining three spread out, moving in practiced unison. No wasted motion. No sound except the whisper of boots on frost.
The lead Talon spoke, voice muffled by the scarf but thick with an accent from the far side of the Rift.
"Step away from the Confessor, woodsman. She is marked. You are not."
Confessor.
The word struck Kael like a slap. Corvin had told stories (whispered over dying fires) of the Confessors of the Third Circle, women who could unravel a soul with a touch. Women the Veil Lord feared above all others.
Kael's gaze flicked to the woman on the ground. Her chest rose once, shallowly. Still alive.
He shifted his grip on the knife. "Then you'll have to go through me."
The Talon smiled behind his scarf. "That was always the plan."
They attacked.
Three blades and three veil shards came at him in a red storm.
Kael parried the first sword with his knife (iron rang against curved steel, sparks flying). The second blade slipped past his guard and opened a burning line across his left forearm. He hissed, spun inside the third man's reach, and slammed his elbow into the Talon's throat. Cartilage collapsed with a wet crunch. The man dropped, choking on his own blood.
But the leader was faster.
The veil shard punched into Kael's right shoulder, just below the collarbone. Agony exploded outward (white-hot, then ice-cold as the crystal began to drink). Kael felt his strength pouring out like water through a cracked cup.
He roared (rage, pain, grief, everything that had been building since his father's blood soaked the study floor) and head-butted the Talon. Nose cartilage burst. The man staggered back, but the shard stayed lodged in Kael's shoulder, pulsing hungrily.
Kael dropped to his knees. Vision blurred. The world tilted.
A bowstring sang.
An arrow took the leader through the right eye. The fletching was white, the shaft carved from pale wood almost like bone. The man dropped without a sound.
The last Talon spun, searching for the archer.
The woman in white was on her feet.
Blood soaked her coat, but she stood steady, a recurve bow in her hands that had not been there a heartbeat ago. Her midnight hair whipped in the wind. The teardrop gem at her throat (her echo prism) blazed crimson.
She nocked another arrow faster than Kael's eye could follow.
The final Talon raised his veil shard. Mist answered his call, coiling from the ground in thin, whipping cords that lashed around the woman's ankles and yanked her off balance. She hit the dirt hard, bow skittering away.
The Talon advanced, blade raised for the killing stroke.
Kael surged up from his knees, ignoring the fire in his shoulder. He seized the dead leader's fallen curved sword (perfectly balanced, lighter than it had any right to be) and brought it across in a two-handed arc. The blade took the Talon at the junction of neck and shoulder, cleaved through leather and bone, and buried itself in the ground.
Silence.
Only the crackle of the burning watchtower and the wet sound of Kael's own breathing.
The woman pushed herself to her knees, blood dripping from her side. She looked at the four dead Talons, then at Kael.
"You are either very brave," she said in a voice low and clear, edged with that same unfamiliar accent, "or very stupid."
Kael swayed. The veil shard still jutted from his shoulder, drinking steadily. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision.
"Little of both," he managed.
She rose, steady despite the wound, and crossed to him in three fluid strides. Her hand closed around the shard's hilt.
"This will hurt," she warned.
"Do it."
She yanked.
The world went white, then black, then white again. Kael screamed (he would deny it later, but he screamed). When his vision cleared she was pressing a folded strip of white cloth against the wound. Her touch was cool, clinical, but her eyes (those dark, ancient eyes) were not.
"You should be dead," she said quietly. "Veil shards drink emberfire. Most men last ten heartbeats."
Kael laughed, a raw sound. "Been a bad month for most men."
She studied him a moment longer, then glanced at the burning tower. "More will come. The Red Talons never travel in less than three quadrae. Sixteen more, at least. And a Caller with them."
She retrieved her bow, moving with the fluid grace of someone born to forests, yet her boots left no prints in the frost.
Kael forced himself upright. Blood soaked his side, his arm, his shoulder, but the pain was a distant thing now, muffled by whatever strange clarity the fight had left in him. He kept the curved Talon sword; it felt right in his hand, hungry.
"Who are you?" he asked.
She slung the bow across her back. "Lira. Confessor of the Third Circle." She paused, dark eyes searching his face as if looking for something specific. "And you, Kael of Briarholt, are the reason the Pale Rift is bleeding."
He barked a short, humourless laugh. "Lady, three weeks ago I was just a woods guide who argued with squirrels. The only thing bleeding is me."
Her expression did not change. "The sweet-rot creeper that grows where your father died does not cross the Rift by accident. Something has chosen you. Something older than the Rift itself."
A cold deeper than winter settled in his bones.
From the ridge above came the distant howl of a horn (three rising notes, sharp as broken glass).
Lira's head snapped toward the sound.
"Caller," she said. "We have perhaps a hundred heartbeats."
She started toward the tree line without looking back. After a moment Kael followed, curved sword in one hand, iron knife in the other, because the alternative was dying in the watchtower yard with four corpses and a woman who should not exist.
As they ran (side by side through the crimson iron-oaks, blood soaking both their coats), she spoke without turning.
"Tell me, Kael of Briarholt… do you believe in destiny?"
"No," he panted. "But I'm starting to believe in bad luck."
This time she truly smiled, fierce and bright as a drawn blade.
"Good," she said. "Because destiny is a lie tyrants tell. Luck, on the other hand… luck we can use."
Behind them, the horn sounded again (closer).
And the forest began to scream.