Page 63 of Fortune's Blade

“The Turl uh Talat,” Lord Rathen said, looking at us as if at a camera. “Or so it was until last night, when Lord Steen’s people descended upon it. They came out of nowhere, furious at their defeat at our hands, and determined to inflict the same on innocent people. We found a few locals who told us the tale, how they didn’t pause to plunder, or to take prisoners, or for any reason at all, but simply came in fast and low and burnt everything they found.

“And everyone.”

He said no more, but he didn’t have to. Louis-Cesare’s eyes had vampire vision, and kept zeroing in on pieces of the still-smoking carnage, giving us up close examples of Vitharr’s fury. They were needed, as the whole valley was a blackened mess, a pit of smoking charcoal with only a few pieces still identifiable: a little carved horse, a child’s toy, with a metal bridle winking in the sunlight; a banner on a leaning pole, red with some kind of flower on it, still snapping in the breeze that was blowing charcoal dust all around; a shiny copper pot.

There was even a gaily painted wagon, turned over and half burnt, with the other half showing a laughing troll girl with a mug of ale in her hand. It was an animated image, probably some sort of advertisement, but the damage was causing it to fritz. I saw her only intermittently as a result, with the smoking interior of the wagon visible in flashes, along with a skeleton still in place.

I wondered if it was hers.

I decided that I didn’t want to know.

Whoever it was appeared to have been taken unawares, perhaps killed in the first pass, but others had fought back. I could see what remained of them, huddled with blackened swords, staves and spears in their hands, behind whatever shelter they could find, waiting for a chance to counterattack. And maybe some of them had, fighting a rear-guard action to allow others to escape. Sooty wheel tracks veered off from the blackened crater and headed for the woods in numerous places, and I assumed that some must have made it.

But others hadn’t, as evidenced by the piles of burnt bones amidst the smoking ruins.

Lord Rathen stood up abruptly. He was in human guise at the moment, although he had partly transformed like Regin, with heavy, dull gold armor under a pure white tabard. He looked like a man out of time, a medieval knight surveying a blackened, smoking battlefield.

All he needed was a sword.

But then he started speaking and I decided that I’d been wrong; he didn’t need anything. The usually mellow voice was harshened by emotion, and the blue eyes were liquid with tears for the fallen that he wouldn’t shed. He wasn’t wearing a crown or even a circlet, but in that moment, he looked every inch a king.

“These were our people,” he said softly. “The so-called dark fey, the outcastes, the ones nobody wanted. I know that many of you don’t see them that way, that you view them as beneath us, as rude, unsettled vagabonds with little to offer. But they were our brothers, made like us, discarded like us, and like us, seen as failures worthy of no renown. Yet resilient, strong, carrying on despite everything that the world—several worlds—could throw at them.

“Now they are here, murdered indiscriminately by a monster who would do the same to us, given the chance. Yes, I know you think we are different; we are better; we are stronger. But the creatures the chieftain of Vitharr serves, and who protect him no matter how foul his deeds, don’t view us like that. They view us like this, like something to be used and discarded when no longer convenient, to be butchered like the animals they think us to be. Steen will find out about that in due time, should he live long enough, when they eventually turn on him as well, but I will not.

“I will not be a slave, not to him, who ignores all rules of conduct and invades my home, slaughtering my people within its very walls, not to the so-called gods he serves, not to anyone. If you are willing to bow the neck, to accept the yoke until your strength is used up and your life is spent, you are free to do so. But I will stand, alongside our new allies and every other one I can find, and I will fight. I have made my choice.

“Make yours.”

The images cut out, hard enough to leave me staggering. And then sitting abruptly and with no grace back on the log, which I had to catch the side of not to fall off. But nobody noticed. Everyone was too busy looking the way I felt, like they’d just been given a punch straight to the gut.

And that, I thought dizzily, is how you make a goddamned speech.

Chapter Twenty-One

Dorina

I awoke to a sush-sush-sushing noise that I couldn’t place. It sounded like someone throwing sand against glass, or miniature hail stones striking a windshield. I did not open my eyes to see which.

I had long ago learned to gain information before alerting anyone that I was aware, especially in dangerous circumstances. And in Faerie, that was essentially everywhere. Luckily, there were things I could see without eyes.

My senses were more acute even than most vampires, but on Earth I didn’t need them. I could throw my spirit outward, leaving my body and traveling partly in someone else’s, using their connection to the world to tether me to this life while I rode them about like a horse. If they were weak minded, I could even take control, suggesting things, clouding their minds, steering them where I wanted to go.

All I had to do was to reach out and grab someone—

Like that, I thought, when I accidentally snared a body that had been passing by.

That shouldn’t have been possible in Faerie, where my soul and body could not separate. That was why I, as a disembodied spirit, had manifested a corporeal form to begin with. Yet that seemed to be what had just happened.

It surprised me enough that I didn’t conceal my presence as I normally do, and this person was definitely aware, immediately screaming and flailing and hitting a wall. Before scrambling up and pelting headlong down a corridor, leaving me behind. And without a tether to tie me to this world.

I felt the usual lurch of panic as I spun around, preparing to rush back into my body’s embrace and save myself from dissolution, as I could not survive as merely a spirit for long. But I found myself hesitating, although not because another potential tether had come along. But because . . .

It felt different this time.

There was none of the usual sucking sensation, no pull of another realm that no living soul knew, no threat of dissolution. There was nothing except a dulling of the senses, as if something had been draped over my head, making everything slightly out of focus and indistinct. And leaving me with the disturbingly comical image of myself as a fake Halloween ghost bobbing about in her swishy sheet—

Was this what death felt like?

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