John Fultz - Seven Princes

General Tsoti looked at him with a grave face and ordered men to bring a litter.

“No, I will ride,” said D’zan. “I am… fine.”

Lyrilan looked at him in horror. “You are delirious. You are white as death. You must rest! You have won, but you must rest!”

“I have won,” said D’zan. He looked about him at the elated faces of the Yaskathans in their smeared silver mail and torn cloaks, some wounded and barely standing.

“I have won,” he said again, bringing his horse close to that of Lyrilan. He reachlan. He ed out a hand and pulled his friend close to him. Close enough to whisper in his ear. “I have won, Lyrilan. But he has killed me.”

Lyrilan looked into his eyes and understanding dawned on his lean face. The Scholar-Prince pulled his horse away, his eyes still staring at D’zan, speechless.

Now Tyro saw the mortal wound in D’zan’s chest and turned to Tsoti, who also saw it. His friends stared at him with a strange aspect now. Their joy had turned to sympathy and worry. And now to something else entirely.

It was fear.

“Assemble a vanguard to take the city,” said D’zan in his croaking voice. “I will not rest until I sit the throne again. Let the wounded stay and be tended. All who can ride, come with me. My own legions will aid us.”

He swirled away from them on his demon mount and guided it into the midst of the Yaskathans, who knew nothing of his terrible wound and hailed him with a banging of shields, and prayers lifted to the Four Gods.

“D’zan!” they cried. “King D’zan! Long live King D’zan!”

The Yaskathans followed him, seven thousand strong, as he rode toward the city of his birth, and they chanted long life to a King who was already dead.

Living… dead… What does it matter?

They ride alongside their rightful king.

Thousands of Mumbazans followed with General Tsoti at their head, and the men of the other nations rode behind Tyro and Lyrilan.

After a league or so, the sweet smells of orchards and salty sea air replaced the battlefield stench of blood and death. D’zan marveled that he could still smell such things with his decaying nostrils. His hand wandered again to the gaping fissure in his chest. A numb red crevice.

Four Yaskathan Generals rode at his side. He pulled his torn cloak close to hide his death-wound. They congratulated and praised him. They told him of assassins and rebels who had tried several times to slay the usurper, all meeting with horrible deaths. They told him the people had never given up hope that he would return and set the kingdom to rights. Only one who was blessed by the Gods, the ordained ruler of the realm, they said, could slay the demon tyrant.

D’zan nodded and smiled, and said nothing.

Elhathym was not dead. By the sorcery they shared, the same sorcery he had turned against Elhathym, D’zan knew the tyrant lurked still in the House of Trimesqua. He had won back his people, but not yet his throne.

As the sun-gold spires of the city grew near, D’zan felt the sorcerer’s presence seething inside the Palace of Trimesqua, where he must go to face it one more time.

There was no trace of fear left in D’zan’s cloven heart.

He has already killed me.

Iize="3"›n death, I have defied him.

In death, I will defeat him.

Now let him fear me.

At the top of the Great Earth-Wall, overlooking a sea of churning stormclouds, the three riders stopped at midday. They shared a meal of mangoes from the orchards of Mumbaza. The northern half of the world stretched away from the precipice, hidden beneath a blanket of mist and thunder. Gold sparks of lightning danced across the cumulus, yet here at the top of the continental cliff the air was warm and dry. The rising echoes of distant tempests reached their ears. They traveled the narrow strip of mossy ground between the sudden lip of the cliff and a dark wall of dense forest. To east and west the precipice reached as far as the eye could see, a dividing line between the lower world and the wilderness of the High Realms.

A fourth horse stood riderless, its flanks heavy with provisions. The four steeds nibbled at the green grass while Vireon, Alua, and Andoses stretched their legs and enjoyed the sweet southern fruits. At times the clouds below the crag parted, and vast swathes of green plain shone through, only to be obscured a moment later by the next bank of scudding clouds. The two Princes looked north across the roof of the Stormlands, but Alua’s eyes searched the shadows between the red-barked trees and tangled skeins of undergrowth. There were no mighty Uyga trees here, but some of the rust-hued and black-boled hardwoods grew nearly as high, if not as thick in the trunk. The songs of birds and insects flowed from the deep thickets. Occasionally the growl of a hunting panther shook the foliage, or at night the far-flung howls of wolves.

Vireon turned from the precipice to Alua. She chewed the flesh of her mango while staring into the forest. It called to her, the wild freedom of its deep hollows and unseen groves. He felt it too. Yet while he could easily ignore the call of the hunter, she heard a more urgent call. He did not quite understand it, but he recognized it. She longed to roam the wildwood as an eagle longs to fly.

“The forest is haunted,” Andoses had said on their first day up from the steppes. After three days crossing dry grasslands and two more scaling a series of escarpments, they had reached the western rim of the Earth-Wall. Their course now lay directly east, atop the cliff all the way to Allundra on the Golden Sea.

“Haunted by what exactly?” Vireon had asked. This was his first sight of the High Realms.

Andoses shrugged in his saddle. “Ghosts, spirits, the restless dead, I suppose,” he said. “Legend says a proud people once lived there under the protection of a Forest God, but some plague or destruction fell upon them. The Mumbazans will not hunt there, nor the Yaskathans at its southern edge.”

“It is beautiful,” said Alua, already under the spell of the spreading trees.

“Nearly as fair as the northern woodlands,” said Vireon. “Perhaps even more fair for its mysteries. What splendid gam›e must lie within.”

“Perhaps we’ll snare a wayward hare, or take a quail with this Mumbazan bow,” said Andoses. “But we’ll do well to stay clear of those branches.”

“Worry not, Cousin,” said Vireon. “We’ll move hastily across this high trail and get you to your crown. There is vengeance waiting for us. I am as eager as you are to grasp it.”

“Twelve days should put us in Allundra,” said Vireon. “Then a fast ship from its port is only a few days to Shar Dni. Would that we could fly there instead.”

Six days of riding between precipice and forest had brought them here, where the Wall curved northward for several leagues. “This region is known as the Promontory,” said Andoses. “A kind of peninsula that stretches north a while before doubling back to its eastward course. Here we must hold steady and cross a league or so of treacherous woodlands. However, there is a path here used by Royal Messengers. It should bring us safely through if we cross the stretch of woods by daylight.”

Vireon fed the rest of his mango to the packhorse and rubbed its nose. He looked east into the thinly wooded peninsula of Wall. It was not the forest proper, but its shadows were no less murky. Alua wrapped her arms about his neck and laid her head upon his shoulder. The sunlight sparkled on her golden hair as it fell across his chest.

“Your cousin fears the wild,” she whispered.

Vireon pursed his lips. “He is a city-bred Prince. Walls and towers give him comfort.”