David Dalglish - Dawn of Swords

She bit her lip.

“As certain as I can be,” she said.

He reached out and fanned his fingers over her eyes, closing them.

“Despite my appearance, I do know my way around a bedroom. If you’ve never been with a man, then let me guide you. Don’t look if you don’t want to. Think of Moira or your hope for a baby-whatever you need to do. Just let me know if I hurt you.”

“You’re still willing to do this?” asked Rachida in a faraway voice, keeping her eyes closed. “You do not find this an insult to your honor?”

Despite the bizarreness of the past hour, Patrick let out a heartfelt laugh.

“Trust me, Rachida, I’ve been insulted in far, far worse ways than this.”

A sentry patrolled the bridge in the deep of night, blocking any chance Crian had at crossing, as usual. He lingered at the edge of the Ghostwood, peering around the trunk of a giant spruce tree, waiting, hoping he might get his chance soon. The sentinel disappeared around the bend, offering him a brief opening, but a replacement soon appeared. He fell back into the safety of the woods, cursing to himself.

There was smoke in the distance, appearing over the sepia-colored grasses like a bulbous black snake. A cookfire, he assumed, lit by the unit that had been sent to capture him. He snuck back through the trees to the small camp he’d made untold days before. It was a rustic setup, nothing but a pile of clothes for a bed and a torn-apart nightshirt tied to a tree for shelter. He’d lost his candles while in flight, dropping them in the middle of the dark and confusing woods. Not that he minded too badly. These woods, and the lengthy river that ran through them, were all that had saved him from capture. All throughout Neldar, the Ghostwood was considered a haunted and evil place. Superstitions and legends abounded of how the ghosts of the dead resided there alongside the lingering specters of the creatures that Celestia had supposedly spirited from Dezrel to pave the way for humankind.

But Crian knew better. Of all his family, he was the only one whose relationship with Jacob Eveningstar had been amicable, and when he was younger-before the First Man had left the east to take up permanent residence in Ashhur’s Paradise-Jacob had taken pains to teach him the topography of all of Dezrel, disclosing what was legend and what was not, describing the many natural oddities that existed throughout the land’s four corners. Jacob had laughed off the legends of Ghostwood, which was known for its haunting murmurs.

At the center of the forest lies a bubbling hot spring. The heat creates gas that must escape, which it does through tiny gaps in the ground. When those gaps breathe, it sounds like moaning, or a steady, sinister whisper. But that is all there is. There is no such thing as ghosts, child, and if they once existed, they are as gone as the dragons are.

Crian slumped down cross-legged beneath his shoddily constructed lean-to and, reaching into his sack, removed the mirror he’d brought with him when fleeing Omnmount. He placed it in his lap and took a swig of stream water, which stung his throat with its odd, sulfurous tang. He stared at his reflection in the vibrant moonlight. Gently he touched at the silver strands of his hair, which were poking through more and more now that he lacked the means to hide them.

So be it , he thought. I’m never going back to Veldaren, and I will never sit at my father’s left hand again. When I take Nessa and Moira away from here, we’ll flee deep into the Paradise. I can grow old there.

He didn’t know if his plan would work, but he had heard that Ashhur was a loving and forgiving god, with an undying affection for the pathetic and downtrodden, and none were more pathetic and downtrodden than he. All he did know was that he could never return home again. Avila’s words were proof of that. If all of Haven were to be massacred, including his own excommunicated sister, there was no mercy to be found in Karak’s lands. Crian’s own hand had signed his death warrant with a flourish of blood the moment he brutalized Avila. It was an act he regretted. He truly did love his sister, even though their relationship was contentious. But for her to do what she did, to come on to him like that and then taunt him with promises of Moira’s and Nessa’s deaths.…

That was in the past, a different problem for a different day. If he wanted to survive, he had to focus on the present, and right now his greatest dilemma was finding a way to cross Karak’s Bridge and escape into the delta. Hardly an easy task. The soldiers chasing him were his own, men he’d trained, men he’d considered his brothers. They knew he lurked in the forest, and constant patrols hemmed him inside. Always their bows were at the ready. Crian couldn’t even risk wandering deeper into the woods so that he could jump into the river and bypass the bridge entirely. Should they hear him or spot him swimming along, he’d have no safety from their arrows. His only saving grace was time-and their superstitions.

“It’s a shame you’re not with me, Nessa,” Crian said, sighing at his exhausted reflection. “We’d have all the privacy in the world in here.”

A high-pitched whistle suddenly bit at his eardrums and made him wince. He glanced all around him, but there was nothing there. The whistle sounded again, again coming from nowhere. Something tickled at the back of his mind, and as if by instinct he glanced down at the mirror that lay in his lap. His lips quivered, and his eyes nearly bulged from his head.

The mirror no longer showed his own reflection; instead, a vaporous apparition fogged over the reflective glass. He could make out the shape of a face, or perhaps a skull of some sort, along with a deep red outline that shimmered when the smoke inside the mirror billowed. He wiped at it with his sleeve despite his fright and the pain of the constant whistle in his ears. Nothing. No change, just the phantom leering out at him. A paralyzing tremor froze his limbs and set the nerves behind his eyes to throbbing, as if invisible lightning had coursed through him.

Go.

The word entered his head much like the tip of an arrow, piercing the front of his brain and making him cry out in surprise. He collapsed to his side, the mirror sliding off his lap, now clear of smoke and haunting images. He rolled on the ground, over leaves and jutting roots, pain shooting through his entire being. Pressure built in his head, threatening to explode his skull, gradually becoming more and more awful until he let out a primal scream of terror. The pain began to dissolve, but that word kept repeating in his head, louder than before. This time he listened.

GO!

More screams, these not from his own mouth. He jerked his head up and looked around, but the forest was empty save for the chattering birds in the canopy overhead. He scurried to his feet, snatching his sword from its dry place beneath the lean-to, and stumbled down the path he had created. Branches tore at him, scratching at his face as he ran in the darkness. He made it to the path’s end, where he used to sit for hours, day and night, watching the soldiers safeguard the bridge. The screaming multiplied the closer to the forest’s edge he ran, and in his waking nightmare he imagined a parade of hideous monsters slipping out of the shadowed gaps of the world, lopping off heads and devouring entrails, turning the southern banks of the Rigon into a bloody form of the fiery underworld.

And then he reached the carnage at the edge of the forest. Soldiers, those still alive anyway, fled in all directions. Chasing them, almost lazily, was a formless mass of smoke that shimmered black and silver in the moonlight. It surrounded the men, gray tendrils whipping from its swirling center, knocking them aside as they shrieked in unimaginable terror, and then disappeared into the tall grass in a spray of red. The smoke was gradually moving away from him, progressing toward the opposite side of the Gods’ Road. Crian watched, his feet made of lead, his mind locking tight. What he saw-it just couldn’t be. Jacob couldn’t have been this wrong about the forest.