Page 19 of Bound By Blood
That choice demands an answer. The only question remaining is whether I have the courage to provide the right one.
The torches have burned to stubs when I finally leave the council chamber, but sleep won't come. Instead, I pace the stone corridors of our stronghold, boots echoing against walls carved by my grandfather's generation. These passages have witnessed three centuries of clan decisions, victories, defeats, and the slow erosion of everything we once considered permanent.
Trust is fragile.The phrase repeats in my mind like a war drum's rhythm, carrying me back twenty-seven winters to a battlefield that taught me the true cost of misplaced faith.
The morning mist clung to Thornfield Valley like burial shrouds, and I was seventeen winters old with my father's war-axe heavy in untested hands. First battle. First real test of everything the clan elders had taught me about honor, courage, and the sacred duty of protecting our people.
"Stay close," Korvak whispered beside me, his breath visible in the cold air. My blood-brother, chosen family bound by ritual scars and childhood oaths sworn over stolen mead."Watch the eastern slope. Humans like high ground for their archers."
We'd grown up together, trained together, shared every scraped knee and bruised pride that marked the journey from boys to warriors. Korvak was everything I wasn't, quick with jokes, gentle with wounded animals, able to find friendship in the most unlikely places. Where I saw enemies, he saw potential allies. Where I demanded absolute loyalty, he offered forgiveness.
"Remember what Father taught us," I replied, adjusting my grip on weapons that still felt foreign despite years of practice. "Honor above survival, clan above self."
Korvak's grin flashed white in the dim light. "Easy words before the blood starts flowing. Let's see how they taste with steel in our bellies."
The human forces emerged from the tree line like ghosts taking solid form, mounted knights in burnished mail, foot soldiers carrying the banner of House Redmere, and behind them the glint of steel that promised death for the unwary. They'd come to claim disputed hunting grounds, to push Stoneborn boundaries back another mile toward the heartland.
"For the clan!" my father's war cry echoed across the valley, and three hundred voices answered with the roar of an avalanche given voice.
The charge began.
I remember fragments—the thunder of hooves against stone, the wet sound of steel finding flesh, the copper taste of blood and fear coating my tongue. My axe bit deep into a knight's shoulder, sending him toppling from his mount in a spray of crimson. Korvak fought beside me, his twin blades dancing through human ranks like silver lightning.
Then the trap closed.
House Redmere had hidden reserves in the eastern woods, exactly where Korvak predicted their archers would nest. Fresh troops poured down the slope while we were committed to the valley floor, caught between hammer and anvil with nowhere to retreat.
"Ambush!" someone screamed, but the warning came too late.
I found myself separated from the dominant force, surrounded by five human soldiers who moved with the coordinated precision of veterans. My father's training kicked in, parry, riposte, use their numbers against them by forcing them into narrow approaches. But training couldn't account for everything.
The knight who flanked me wore House Redmere's colors and carried a blade that sang as it cut air. He was older, experienced, scarred by battles I could barely imagine. When our weapons locked, I saw something in his eyes that terrified me more than death—pity.
"Yield, boy," he said, voice carrying absolute authority. "You've fought well, but this ends here. Yield, and you'll be ransomed back to your people unharmed."
Honor demanded I refuse. Clan law forbade surrender while strength remained in my limbs. Every lesson drilled into my skull since childhood screamed that death was preferable to the shame of capture.
But those weren't the words that came.
"I yield," I gasped, my father's axe clattering to bloody stone.
The knight stepped back, lowering his weapon with what looked like relief. "Smart choice. Wars end, boy, but dead men don't see peace."
That's when Korvak appeared.
He came from behind like fury given form, both blades seeking the knight's unguarded back. Honor demanded he rescue his blood-brother, loyalty required he fight until breath left his body, and love—the deep, unshakeable love between brothers who'd shared everything—left him no choice but to attack.
"Drokhan!" he roared, and for one impossible moment I thought we might actually escape.
The knight spun faster than seemed possible, his blade finding Korvak's throat with surgical precision. Blood fountained across my face, warm and thick, carrying the metallic taste of betrayal.
Korvak fell to his knees, hands clutching the wound that would steal his voice forever. His eyes found mine, wide with shock and something that might have been forgiveness.
"Brother," he whispered, the word barely audible through the blood filling his mouth.
Then he died.
The knight who killed him cleaned his blade with mechanical efficiency, expression never changing from professional concentration to satisfaction or regret. Just another battlefield necessity, another problem solved with steel.
