Mount Viridis Rafael Mondragon
King Rafael Mondragon was standing at the window of his throne room when a shiver of unease passed through him.
A terrible cold seeped in from the walls, the stone quarried by his ancestors over a thousand years ago, the entire palace carved out of Mount Viridis and perched so high upon its slope that nothing living or dead could sully his view of the horizon.
He watched it darken now. Not with night, but the ending of a war he had not won.
To the east, Strix streamed over the border mountains, massing low and black across the sky. Ash gathered on the wind, the taste bitter and familiar.
Death.
His heart vaulted into his throat, gaze scouring the sky as he counted his returning Stargrazers.
So few.
Too few.
Oh holy gods. He pressed his forehead to the stone. What have I done?
Behind him, the throne room yawned, vast and hollow. A marbled tomb filled with blank-eyed statues. The faces of every king who had come before him.
Men who refused to retreat.
Men who did not lose wars.
It struck Rafael – far too late – that he should have retreated long ago. Or perhaps never have granted Andreas an audience in the first place, when his cousin had come to him with golden eyes and stirring words, desperate for an alliance.
A deep groan echoed as the doors heaved open.
A servant burst inside, breathless, still running. ‘Your Grace!’
Rafael turned, his burgundy robes sweeping around him as he strode to meet the boy. ‘Speak.’
‘Irina has landed in the outer courtyard!’
He blinked, frowning at the name of his brother’s Second. What was Darius thinking? It was a breach of order. No Strix set foot on Urnican soil before its general, and certainly not at the king’s own seat.
‘Where is Darius?’
The servant faltered. ‘I— He has not come.’
Rafael was already stalking past him, driven by frustration and something darker – a dread he refused to name.
He left the throne room, striding into the main body of the palace. Here the world intruded once more, servants rushing about in a panic, soldiers sweeping through the halls, consuls clustering along the colonnades, casting fearful glances at the sky.
Onwards, through pillared terraces cut straight into the rock, then down wide sun-bleached steps he took two at a time.
The courtyard opened before him.
Beyond, the olive groves of Urnica rolled down the slope in waves of green, leaves silvered in the dying light.
The Strix circled overhead, screeches tearing across the sky. A ragged, broken chorus. The famed war birds of Urnica stripped of their feathers and their fight.
The largest had already landed, its rider still in the saddle.
At a wave of his hand, she slid down, moving unsteadily towards him. Rafael did not look at her face. His gaze fixed instead on the helmet tucked beneath her arm, the golden tail feathers at its crest marking the rank of its wearer:
War general.
Prince of Urnica.
Darius Mondragon.
His brother.
Dead.
Revulsion pooled in Rafael’s gut, as thick and dark as oil.
Irina stood before him, head bowed, arms outstretched in offering. He took the helmet, the metal still gleaming, reflecting the fury in his eyes.
One word, clipped. ‘How?’
‘A saint,’ said Irina, her eyes downcast.
His hand twitched for the sword at his hip.
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I barely made it out alive.’
‘And my cousin?’
A pause.
‘Andreas is dead.’
Lucky for him. Rafael had a harsher fate in mind for the Silver-tongue Saint, the man who had promised him riches unlike anything he’d ever known – not just power but magic – and who had instead cost him his sister Talisa. Half his war mounts. And now his favoured brother. His general.
Darius Mondragon, Terror of the Skies, was no more.
Rafael lifted his chin, his face gilded by the waning light as he glared towards the mountains in the east and the unseen kingdom beyond. Valterre.
The courtyard had gone utterly still, all eyes turned on him.
‘Get Silas,’ he said through his teeth.
Servants scattered.
Footsteps broke the ensuing silence. Fast and light and all too familiar. ‘Brother!’
Rafael briefly closed his eyes.
Lavinia, his youngest sister, running hard, her pale blue tunic bunched in her fists, sandals skidding across stone.
She faltered when she saw the helmet in his hands, a terrible wail tearing out of her. It echoed across the darkening sky, and the Strix there, still wheeling, threw back their heads and answered, screeching.
Rafael looked at Irina, an unspoken command passing between them as he tugged his brother’s helmet roughly over her head.
She stiffened. ‘Your Grace—’
His hands settled firmly on her shoulders. ‘General,’ he said. A single word, and in it a world of responsibility.
She bowed her head. ‘It is my honour.’
‘Go,’ he said, and she turned, lifting her fingers to the sky, to the Stargazers still circling there, before returning to her mount.
Lavinia’s mouth twisted as she moved in, her dark crown of braids coming loose, strands dipping into her eyes. ‘You brute,’ she hissed. ‘That was his helmet!’
‘You cannot bury a helmet, Lavinia,’ he said stiffly.
She struck him.
He caught her fist. ‘Sister,’ he growled. ‘Control yourself.’
‘Get it back. I want it back!’ She stamped her foot. Ever the child.
Rafael sighed. Gods, strengthen me.
‘It’s all we have of him,’ she said, wrenching herself free.
‘You have your memories,’ he said. ‘Seek comfort in those.’
‘How can you be so cold?’
He didn’t answer. He would rather be cold than weak.
He did not have the luxury of grief, least of all here, before his decimated legion, their spirits dashed, wings clipped.
What would a weeping king do for them but sow more dread in their hearts?
Signal to the Saints of Valterre that Urnica was on its knees, ripe for the taking?
Lavinia, young and free, in her silks and finery, raised among music and poetry and sunlit groves, could spend herself on sorrow.
There was no place for it on the throne of Urnica.
No place for it in him.
Lavinia drew herself up, her fists bunching, but he was spared her next outburst by the arrival of his grand imperator.
Rafael knew he had come by the look on his sister’s face. Her gaze slid over his left shoulder, her pupils flaring, a rush of colour flooding her cheeks.
‘Silas,’ Rafael said, turning on his heel. ‘You are quick.’
The imperator dipped his chin in greeting. ‘I saw the Strix descending over the ridge,’ he said, his voice as deep as gravel. ‘I came at once.’
Rafael summoned a grim smile for his last remaining war general. Where Darius had commanded the skies, Silas was a storm upon land: brutal in battle, precise in strategy and unyielding to the last.
Grandson of the legendary Tiberon, once the supreme commander of Rafael’s father’s army, Silas had inherited both Tiberon’s crushing strength and his calculating mind, marking him out as his natural successor.
Though he was the youngest grand imperator in the history of Urnica, and not long in the position, Silas was already impressing the king.
Rafael could see he had come direct from the training ground; his leathers were dark with sweat, his damp silver hair pushed back and bound at the nape.
He lowered his voice, aware of prying eyes – and of Lavinia, hovering too close, straining to be noticed by Silas.
‘I want a full report on what happened in Valterre,’ he said. ‘Send your best spymasters. If we have ceded the war to these saints, I would know what we are up against.’
Silas gave a short nod, his flint-like gaze already turning west.
‘My brother. Darius,’ Rafael added, clearing his throat. ‘He has… gone on ahead.’
A muscle ticked in Silas’s jaw. ‘May the gods receive him.’
‘Yes,’ said Rafael distantly.
There was a tightness in his chest. He thought, suddenly and fervently, that he would like to be alone.
As if sensing the shift, Silas stepped back.
For a man of his size, he moved like the wind, departing as swiftly as he’d come.
Lavinia hovered like a ghost, staring at the place where he’d been standing.
‘Close your mouth, sister,’ Rafael said, striding past her. ‘He is not for you.’
‘He would take care of me,’ she protested, hurrying after him. ‘Especially now that Darius is gone. He’s strong and brave and—’
‘He would stain you with blood,’ he cut in, refusing to even entertain the notion. ‘All those pretty dresses, ruined.’
‘Silas never bleeds,’ she shot back.
‘Not his blood.’
That silenced her. She drew back, her arms tight. He walked on, deep into the carved heart of Mount Viridis, that ache in his chest spreading, tunnelling deeper.
By the time the first traitorous tear slipped free, he was alone.
Thank the gods.
Hours later, with midnight draped across the kingdom and sleep evading him, Rafael went alone to the Aster, the open-air temple that sat like a crown atop Mount Viridis.
Minerva, his augur, sat by the stone brazier, her gaze fixed not on the stars but on the journal in her lap.
She was drawing again, the quill scratching as she worked.
He’d known her since childhood, had lived by the rule of her prophecies long before he was made king.
She had foretold his birth, just as she had seen his father’s death a year before it came to pass.
‘Raffe,’ she said, without looking up, ‘you are unsettled.’
‘My brother is dead.’
She lifted her quill. ‘Destiny has its own will.’
Grating words. Ordinarily, he prized her forthrightness, but tonight her unadorned brevity rankled him. Could she not offer even a modicum of regret?
‘The war is lost,’ he said.
She hmm’d, returning to her sketch.
His fingers itched.
‘The war,’ he repeated through his teeth. ‘The one you said we would prevail in.’
That, at last, drew her gaze to him. She looked up, a fog moving in those ancient milky eyes.
He did not know how many years Minerva had lived. Only that she was old – older than some of the olive groves on Mount Viridis, older than his grandfather who had died on the battlefield a half-century ago. Old in a way that unnerved him.
She’d spent much of her life in this temple, craggy and wind-burned like the rock under her feet, high enough to keep company with the Strix when they wheeled overhead, as if they, too, were seeking their own fortunes.
‘I said no such thing,’ she told him now.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘You promised me power. You said it was coming to me.’
She set down her drawing. ‘Power, Raffe,’ she said as she rose, knees creaking, from her bench, ‘is not the same as victory. And it has nothing to do with war.’
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
Minerva was of the old line of tellers. A soothsayer descended from Oriel Beauregard of Valterre, a Saint of Destiny. Her words carried a weight of their own. They were precious. And dangerous.
‘The power of the saints,’ he said tersely, ‘is the power of which I speak.’
‘Then you misunderstood my meaning,’ she said, as if he were a simpleton. ‘Urnica has no dealings with saints. It answers to the gods.’
‘Our gods are long gone.’
Her eyes flickered, some unknowable secret working there. He hated how she guarded her visions, measuring them out like oil, slow and dripping, always so careful with what she said.
And what she didn’t say.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, his voice roughening, ‘if you had been more forthcoming with that detail, I would not have cast my Stargrazers into a war they could not win.’ Flames licked at his ribcage, his rage gathering fast and bright. ‘I would not have sent my only brother to die.’
She looked through him, as if he were not her king but another piece on her chessboard, and said, simply, ‘You did not ask.’
Her indifference worsened his rage.
‘The Saints of Valterre may fade,’ Minerva said, as if she could sense the ire gathering in him, ‘but the power of our old gods cannot be dimmed. Only buried.’ She came to him, her bare feet whispering on stone. ‘You must be patient, Raffe.’
‘Patience.’ A hollow laugh. ‘I have never been good at patience.’
‘Then perhaps this can be your lesson,’ she said, her eyes shining with amusement.
‘If only I had time for it.’ He reached for the blade at his waist.
The augur’s eyes were still gleaming when her head rolled from her body.
He stood back, wiping his sword on his tunic, and sighed. ‘I’m going to need a new teller.’
The flames in the brazier hissed and crackled, their light reaching for the journal left open on the bench, the drawing there, freshly inked.
A serpent uncoiling.
Beautiful. Deadly.
King Rafael Mondragon turned on his heel and walked right past it.