Chapter 42 The Rogue
The Rogue
RADVEN
Pluck off the petals
Slice off the wing
Peel off the skin
From the pitiful thing
The song had come up from my bones, from somewhere so deep I couldn’t remember where I’d first heard it.
Carve out the poison
Sever each piece
Suck out the bones
And then we will feast
I’d peeled off men’s skin before. Sliced them down to the bone. Relished their screams and their whimpers and their pleading. Picked them apart piece by piece until only the part of them that felt pain remained. And I’d do it again.
This time, though, I realized that I was the wretched, peeled thing. The one who’d had a piece carved away.
The Circle had taken that piece from me. From me and my brothers. And I wanted that piece back. I’d paid for it. Bled for it. And the Circle would bleed for it, too. For everything they’d done—to us and to Therador.
Pluck off the petals
All around us, the jeweled flower of Ring-Around-the-Hill was in shambles.
The worst devastation was at the Hill, but the rest of the town had not escaped the attack.
Chunks of stone and debris littered the streets, and an entire section of the central market had been crushed by one of the tree’s larger branches.
There were also a number of fires, some of which were spreading quickly.
Slice off the wing
People were wailing and shouting in fear and pain. More than once, I saw Oak pause, fighting the instinct to go to their aid. But he always caught himself and soldiered on, leading the way through the streets toward our quarry. Towards the man responsible for this.
Mordren had killed innocents tonight. Women. Children. Families who’d come here to celebrate, who’d done nothing to deserve the fates they’d been delivered by his madness.
Peel off the skin
I did not judge Mordren or the Circle for believing that Therador would be better if my brothers and I were dead—we were not good men. We were no strangers to violence and lawlessness and even cruelty. Me most of all.
From the pitiful thing
But I never hurt innocents. A man who killed innocents, even in the name of what he believed to be good, was the vilest of creatures, worse than the monsters that roamed the mountains.
A man who killed innocents was a man who would end up beneath the point of my knife, begging for his life as I separated pieces of him from the whole.
Carve out the poison
I checked my weapons as we moved toward the southern gate. It was a ritual of mine, any time I found myself heading into something I knew would turn bloody.
Six daggers in the baldric across my chest.
Two up each sleeve.
One inside each boot.
Plus a longer one hanging on my belt, and of course my narrow sword on the other side.
With some luck, I’d get to use all of them—eight to pin Mordren to a tree in all the important places, and the rest to make him truly suffer for what he’d done. Both to this town and to us.
Sever each piece
I wanted to be whole again. I’d managed to distract myself in that other world, but now that I was home, the loss of my power was more acute.
It was an endless gnawing at my gut, a ravenous hunger that never abated.
I’d known true hunger for years, nearly died of it more than once, and yet somehow this was worse.
This was insidious. A jagged-edged void that was slowly driving me mad.
Suck out the bones
We’d been gods. Or as close to gods as men could be.
And now we were nothing. At least until we claimed what was ours once more.
And then we will feast
Despite the hysteria and panic around us, people were quick to scramble out of our way as we marched through the streets. Oak had that effect on people.
With me, it was the opposite—they didn’t notice me until I made them notice. And most of the time, I preferred it that way. It made my work easier.
But even if I’d learned how to make people ignore me, I never spared myself a single detail of them—their physical features. Their voices. Their gestures.
Tonight, their screams wriggled down into my bones, echoing deep. Waking up the memories I’d taken great pains to bury down in a place where they couldn’t be seen or heard.
Screams everywhere. Far away—strangers' screams.
But also right beside me—her screams. Screams of fear and agony and grief and suffering.
Screams that told me—even then, when I knew so little of the world—that if they didn’t kill her, she would do the job for them.
She already had a knife in her hand. A blunt thing, barely sharp enough to slice through a radish. It would hurt going in.
She’d try to kill me first. Try to spare me from what I’d suffer at their hands.
It was her voice that sang to me, her voice that clung to the inside of my skull and trilled about all the terrible things they would do.
A word from Oak drew me away from that dark, clouded memory. We’d reached the town gates.
They were closed, the guards gone. Hopefully they were off helping the injured instead of seeking out Mordren.
The extra patrols and mercenaries in Ring-Around-the-Hill could certainly help against any beasts that wandered in from the surrounding wilderness, but they were no match for one of the Circle. Especially him.
Mordren couldn’t match Laitha’s raw power, nor her cunning. He was dangerous in a very different way.
If Laitha was devious and deliberate, Mordren was unpredictable, with a tendency toward anarchy and even madness. We’d long suspected that it was only the tight rein of the Circle that kept him in check. But with the Circle fractured…
Pluck off the petals
Slice off the wing
We escaped the town through the guards' door next to the gate, slipping out into the night.
The land surrounding Ring-Around-the-Hill was quiet. Too still after the chaos within. It was as if the night was holding her breath, afraid to make even a whisper lest she draw the attention of the man responsible for this destruction.
Now it was my turn.
Peel off the skin
From the pitiful thing
This was my domain.
With a look to my brothers, I slipped away from them, keeping to the shadows, sliding through the dark toward the trees, slightly to the east of where Talon claimed Mordren was hiding. That friend of Oak’s was insufferable, but I had to admit that his feathered spies had their uses.
When I reached the forest, I released a breath, long and slow. My eyes darted down the line of trees, distinguishing shadow from shadow, until I spotted the one I was looking for—an ancient wild oak with a fallen limb on its left side, offering the perfect den of darkness.
Carve out the poison
Sever each piece
I had no doubt that Mordren was there this very moment, tucked into the darkness beneath the tree.
He’d need to recover between blasts of power, and he wouldn’t let us catch him completely spent.
He was a reckless fool, yes, but if he’d come here for us, to draw us out to him, he’d be ready. Waiting.
It was unclear how he’d tracked us—he had no skill with zhespers like Laitha, and even those would have been of little use in the crowds of Ring-Around-the-Hill.
Maybe he’d kept a remnant of us from before—dried blood on a shirt, or some hair—but honestly, I didn’t believe Mordren capable of such foresight.
Suck out the bones
I moved through the trees, as silent as the night around me.
Oak and Alastor would be falling into place on the other side, but the first move was mine—it was always mine, in situations like this.
A slash in the darkness, a stab in the silence.
Often a quick, quiet attack from the shadows could prevent greater bloodshed.
And then we will feast
There’d be no quick death tonight. Even if I thought I could end this with a single slice of my blade, I didn’t want Mordren’s end to be swift or easy. Not after what he’d done.
And we needed information from him—about what was going on with the Circle, and what threats we faced in the Therador we’d returned to.
I risked a glance to my right, back toward the town. The lingering fires lit up the great fallen tree with hellish, dancing light that was as red as the blood that I knew flowed beneath it.
There’d been fire on that night, too. Lighting up the dark sky with red and orange and raining sparks down on me.
I couldn’t feel its heat where I huddled in the dirt, but I could feel the burn of those falling embers.
Feel the smoke invading my lungs with every breath, sinking down into my body. Choking me.
She was dead by then. A cold corpse beside me.
But her voice was still in my skull, in my bones. Determined to haunt me.
I gritted my teeth, chasing those memories away.
They’d been worse since we’d come back. Like they were trying to plug the void where my power had been.
Distractions helped—like playing delicious little games with Marigold, or losing myself in the sweet taste of her—but only temporarily.
The memories always seeped forward again when my blood cooled once more.
The return of that voice was almost worse than the absence of my power. And I intended to do whatever it took to ensure that neither would grieve me for much longer. To keep myself from the grip of madness for as long as possible and restore that missing piece of me.
And it started with Mordren.
The moment had come, and I paused only long enough to clear my mind for the task ahead before disappearing among the trees.
I’d spent years learning to move swiftly and silently. Years perfecting the art of sneaking through the shadows, fading into the spaces of consciousness that people ignored.
The wild oak was just ahead. The broken branch Talon had mentioned had split away from the trunk about ten feet off the ground, creating a natural arch as it fell.
Beneath it, waiting in the shadows, was a tall, dark figure that I recognized instantly as Mordren.
My fingers tightened on my dagger. And I moved.
He was ten paces away.
Six paces.
Three paces.