The Black Prince: Part I (12 page)

“Welcome.”

Once again, he recognized the accent.

His eyes met those of a man who’d once been his fellow. In another lifetime, long ago, when Hart too was a Southron. But those afternoons in the practice yard, evenings spent with Rose and nights spent lying in the hay of an abandoned horse stall with his pig, thinking, seemed more like a series of dreams than true things remembered. Hot, fevered dreams from which he was glad he’d awoken.

Still, his tone was cool as he addressed the scum. “The leader of this band, I presume?”

“And you must be the Viper.” He paused. “Or are you the Warlock?”

Hart held the man’s gaze evenly. “You address the first.”

Where
was
Callas?

“Or should I call you oath breaker.”

Hart said nothing. He refused to allow himself to be baited.

“You are a child of Morven.” The man took a step forward, but made no move to draw his weapon. Whatever scant warmth the sun outside might have brought with its rising, none of it touched this place. Which, more and more, felt like a tomb. Hart steadied his breathing.

“The kingdom bleeds. And yet you forsake us in our time of need, turning against the light.”

You have no idea
, thought Hart.

“Against all that is good, and right.” The man paused. “All men know that the king—or queen—is divinely appointed. He is subject to no earthly authority, answerable only to the Gods. When you go against him, when you go against your rightful ruler, you go against the Gods.”

“Then the king must acknowledge himself ordained for his people,” Hart countered, “having received from the Gods a burden of government. Your Maeve would destroy her so-called
people
, ruling over a graveyard so long as it means ruling. And she picks henchmen like you, who cowers inside, declaiming on philosophy rather than joining his men.”

Hart turned to go.

“Two more—nary three, if you count the dog—will make no difference.”

Hart turned. “What?”

“You’re surrounded. There are a thousand loyal soldiers outside, making short work of the Necromancer and your Northern scum.”

Bjorn spat an oath.

“You lie,” Hart hissed.

“Join us.”

“What?”

“Your reputation precedes you. The most skilled among the duke’s war leaders, and the most trusted. Both revered and feared among the local populace, soon they’ll be frightening their children at bedtime with stories of your exploits. If they aren’t already. In Ewesdale, before, you near singlehandedly controlled the bandit population.” The man’s eyes were dark in the low light. “You weren’t, ah…appreciated at home. This is true. But that can change,” he urged.

“You’re insane.”

“Outside, battle rages. By noon this day, all your men will be dead. And then we will sweep down into Barghast and depose the traitor.”

“Never.”

“The traitor…and his bride. Granted, she’ll find things a bit…rougher among my men. But I’m sure she’ll survive. In some fashion.”

Hart forced himself to breathe deeply, and exhale. He wouldn’t take the bait.

Take the bait and lose control, playing right into this man’s hands.

Beside him, Bjorn growled.

“Of course, were you to join us…return to us, really…she could be paroled into your care.” The man smiled slightly, the merest quirk of the lips. “We are a pragmatic sort, those who’ve sworn to Maeve. We’re prepared to overlook your penchant for torture, and whores. Indeed, your penchant for torture might actually prove useful. I understand that you’re quite skilled at…extracting confessions.”

At that moment, the only thing Hart wanted to extract was the man’s liver. A man who hadn’t yet given his own name, but who seemed to know a great deal about Hart. And he was keeping Hart talking…why was he keeping him talking?

Pausing now, Hart
could
hear the clash of steel on steel outside. Still. A din far louder than accounted for by his paltry band—or by the hundred or so defenders that he’d been promised.

“If I die this day,” he replied, “then I die. I am prepared to meet my God.”

He swept his sword up. The time for talk was over. “But if this room be the last thing I see, then it be the last thing you see also.”

A bleak sorrow weighted him down. The bleakest of bleak sorrows, a weight under which he could scarce move. He’d been charged with a task, and he had failed. Through overconfidence or sheer stupidity, he didn’t know. But he’d led his men into certain death, a fact which bothered him far more than his own demise.

He prepared to die.

Then Bjorn spoke for the first time. “How?”

Hart felt the world slow, an eternity stretching between each heartbeat.

“You know how.” The stranger’s tone was condescending.

“We’ve been betrayed.” It wasn’t a question. Bjorn’s tone was pitched low, his words laced with hate. He understood, in that moment, as Hart understood, what had happened.

And now they were here, in this accursed hut, with this man…it all seemed so surreal.

Almost from the first moment of their arrival in Molag, Hart had felt as though he were dreaming again. Caught in a nightmare from which he could not awake. Now he wondered if he hadn’t died in the passes and been sent to the underworld. Had he been here, facing this man, for ten minutes or ten thousand years?

“Silverbeard understands, as you should, that resistance is futile.”

But Hart wanted only for the man to stop stalling, so he could either die at his hands or kill him, and then join his brothers to die outside. He’d prefer to die outside, he thought, in the snow. Under the open expanse of steel gray winter sky. In sight of the mountains, which he so loved.

“I ask you once more: join us. Spare yourself, and me, this folly.”

“Fight me like a man.”

“If you die, you die for nothing.”

But if he lived, he’d live as a traitor. Hart could imagine no worse fate. Letting loose a cry, half of defiance and half of despair, he charged.

Freed of the snow, Hart’s footwork was sure and nimble. Far more lightly than his frame suggested, he pirouetted as he engaged the man. One foot behind the other, for balance, and to spring right as the opposing blade came scything down. Right, left, back, he danced the dance of death with this stranger. His own blade glinted in the low light as it moved, darting in and out with lightning quick movements like the viper for which he was named.

Capable of striking a distance equal to that of its length, the black death, as it was most commonly known, gave a picture of being lazy. It basked in the sun, warming itself, or slept curled up in an unassuming little ball. The snake was rarely more than three spans long, and near as slim as a garden snake. For which it was often mistaken, by fools.

The only mortal snake in the mountains, its bite caused death. Or, in the luckier cases, the mere loss of a limb. The snake’s venom, as Hart had learned from Callas, brought acute pain. Which was severe enough on its own that sufferers had been known to beg for death but was nothing in comparison to its later effect. Within hours, the flesh around the bite began to swell and discolor, turning the black of grave dirt. Until the flesh itself, before the next sunrise, became that of a corpse. A dead arm attached to a living man. And if the arm wasn’t removed, the pestilence would spread.

This was the name that Hart had earned: for the speed and precision of his sword, for his single-minded focus on his enemies. The black death was said to track its intended prey for leagues and leagues, waiting for the lesser creature to tire. Hart the forsaken. Hart the torturer. Hart the man alone.

Bjorn came at their opponent from behind, screaming a torrent of blind and hopeless rage.

The man was good. Very good. Hart was accounted a blade master and had been named such by Tristan, but hadn’t let himself grow stale. Too many did, continuing to believe themselves the best until they died at the hands of one barely trained.

Hart continually pitted himself against those who bested him: Brom, Callas, and even Tristan himself. Tristan’s skill with the sword was preternatural, and Hart had never seen better; it was as though master and blade were truly one. But this man…this man was good. As good as Hart himself. Perhaps as good as Callas.

Where was Callas?

Was it as the man said: that Callas was gone?

Hart couldn’t let himself believe. Couldn’t let himself be distracted. Pirouetting again, narrowly missing a downward strike, he thrust his own blade out. He and Bjorn together should have made quick work of this man, but he held them off. Hart’s brow was slick with sweat, his breath coming in labored gasps, but there wasn’t a mark on him.

He looked…almost bored.

Lord
, came the silent prayer,
help me now
.

The din outside was growing, absorbing the longhouse. Absorbing the world. A maelstrom that would sweep them all into oblivion.

“It’s not too late,” the man taunted. “Join us.”

His blade swept up in an arc. Hart blocked it. There was a shriek of steel sliding on steel.

“Kill me, and die outside.” He parried Bjorn’s thrust, as easily as swatting a fly. “There can be no victory, this day. The rot goes deeper than you know…into the very bowels of the black keep you call home. The men you sup with…how many are sworn to Maeve?”

Traitors…within Caer Addanc? Such a thing was impossible. Tristan’s retainers were loyal.

And yet….

The thought made a horrible kind of sense.

But if there were traitors within their ranks, who would tell Tristan? Hart had complete faith in his master, and more than suspected that Tristan already knew. Could list each traitor by name, if such people even existed. And yet…
what if he didn’t know?
What if Tristan, like Hart, like Callas, like Bjorn fighting beside him, had been duped?

Who would remain alive to share this news?

Traitors within their ranks, one traitor who’d betrayed them into the hands of Maeve’s henchmen. Hart would live to revenge himself on Owen Silverbeard, or his shade would haunt the failed chief throughout this life and into the next. With a renewed strength born of rage, a rage more powerful than any he’d felt before, he attacked.

The man staggered back, stunned before the renewed onslaught.

With every sweep of the blade, every thrust, Hart gained another step. And another. And another. Even Bjorn stepped back, in awe. Hart felt a strange kind of laughter boiling up from deep inside and, as he let it forth, his lips pulled back in a rictus. He was as a man possessed, and possessed with one thing.

There was no talking now.

His opponent, having lost his appearance of cool, stared at Hart with open fear.

Hart struck.

It was over. The man fell to his knees as, with a thud, his head hit the ashes and rolled. Cutting free a piece of the man’s tunic, Hart cleaned his sword. He did so slowly, and with deliberation. He’d never even learned the man’s name. Nor who’d sent him.

Bjorn’s eyes were wide. “Truly brother,” he breathed, “you are a werewolf.”

Raising his gaze, Hart’s eyes on his were bleak.

Was Callas, his blood brother, gone? Hart had to believe that, had Callas died, he’d have known it. Have felt the phantom pain as the sword entered his own vitals. He and Callas…to call them friends mistook the point. Callas was his partner in all things. If they were to die, was he to be robbed of the chance to die alongside his partner? Fighting for the glory of the North?

To die for a principle was better than to die for nothing and if one had to die, then at least one deserved the solace of dying alongside one’s comrades. He didn’t want Callas to have died alone. Couldn’t believe that Callas
was
dead. And yet…and yet…where was he?

“I intend to take as many with me as possible.”

Bjorn absorbed this news in silence. Then, “I am proud to die beside you, brother.”

“And I you.”

He wished he’d been able to see Isla again. Perhaps, from the nether realm, there would be some means of passing a message to her. And Callas and…and he found himself, in that moment, thinking of a downturned gaze and a small but competent pair of hands.

“Then let them toast us in Hel!”

Together, they strode toward the door.

B
jorn threw the door wide, onto a scene from the underworld.

Hart’s adopted religion taught that death was a sexual embrace: between the dead man and the goddess who ruled the afterlife. Hel, of her eponymous kingdom, or in some sagas her nine daughters received him from life into her cold and lifeless body. Hart had never bedded a corpse and didn’t intend to start now, but thought almost anything might be better than what was now before him.

There had to be a thousand men, churning what had once been hard earth into blood-drenched mud. A thousand. A thousand thousand. He’d never seen anything the like. Had never imagined such a thing. Even the most vivid descriptions of Ullswater Ford had failed to capture the truth of pitched battle, he now knew: the blood, yes. But the sounds. The
sounds
. And the smell.

He could scarce tell friend from foe, scarce see beyond the wall of packed humanity in front of him. If
humanity
could even be a term rightly applied. He’d fought before, against groups of armed bandits two and threescore large. But this…this was the shore of Hel’s kingdom, a shore created from corpses where the water lapping against them was bile.