Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

Cardew was Boult’s accuser and the object of the dwarf’s hatred for years. At its core, every action Boult had taken for a decade was a calculation on how to slay the man who had doomed him to a life in the Vankila Slab and had ruined his name. Boult must have figured out that Tresco was the mastermind of the Children’s Massacre. Harp had no idea what Boult was about to do, but unless something shifted in their favor, it was unlikely that a dwarf on a rampage would accomplish much except another dead body on the floor.

“Your skin has healed since last I saw you …” Tresco began to say to Harp.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” Harp interrupted. “I can’t quite keep it straight. Practitioner? Ermine? Treecow?”

“Murderer?” Boult asked.

“Scum?” Kitto offered.

“Coward?” Liel suggested.

“I prefer that one for Cardew,” Boult said.

Cardew stirred angrily and opened his mouth to speak, but Harp cut him off.

“So that is Cardew,” Harp said, nodding toward the tall man. “Liel, you could have done so much better than him.”

“I did,” she said, smiling at Harp again. “You.”

“You have no idea what’s going …” Cardew began.

“Cardew,” Tresco warned. “I insist you keep your mouth shut, or I’ll have to kill your whoring wife.”

With his shoulder down like a battering ram, Harp launched himself at the cloaked wizard. But several of the masked soldiers intercepted him. They surrounded him, grabbing his arms, while one of the men punched him in the stomach. As they forced Harp to his knees, Liel slammed her elbow across the face of the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his nose, blood gushing between his fingers, while another man swung his sword at Liel. She sidestepped and knocked his hand away, then kicked the man’s leg above the knee, forcing it back unnaturally, before two other soldiers grabbed her from behind.

They dragged Liel over by Harp and pushed her down beside him. Harp really wanted to stand up and gut Tresco. He really, really wanted to see Boult cut off Cardew’s head with a meat cleaver.

“Hand it over, Harp,” Boult said grimly. “There’s not much you can do about it.”

“Yes, Harp,” Liel said in a monotone voice. “Give him the Torque.”

Harp looked between Liel and Boult in surprise, trying to see if there was a hidden message in their acquiescence, but he didn’t hear anything but defeat. He looked at Kitto, who shrugged noncommittally. Harp held out the Torque to the nearest soldier, who carried it to Tresco and bowed slightly as he handed it to his master. Tresco took an audible breath and accepted the Torque, his face lighting up as he touched the curved band.

“I did it, Evonne,” Tresco said, cradling the Torque against his chest. “I did it for you.”

When Tresco fit the Torque around his neck, the air yellowed and seemed to settle around him, as if it had tangible weight and definition. Tresco’s body became indistinct, the way an object appears through a grimy window. He looked down at Liel and Harp like they were nothing but ants beneath his feet.

“You have no idea how powerful I am,” he said to no one in particular. “No one will ever underestimate me again.”

Tresco turned his back to his prisoners, and a dark shadow formed in the air in front of him. Wisps of smoke appeared, and an acrid smell wafted across the air, as if the shadow were burning the air as it materialized in the stillness of the hall. The shadow elongated and took the shape of a rusty doorframe with a barred metal door that looked like it belonged on a prison cell.

Through the open bars of the metal door, they could see a windswept moor and a castle on a hill in the distance. A cool breeze swept in from the desolate countryside bringing the scent of autumn to the sweltering ruins. The familiar smell made Harp long to be in the cool quiet of a real forest and not that hot, fatal jungle. He glanced at Liel’s profile, but her attention was focused on Tresco and his portal back to Tethyr.

“Cardew, you have your instructions,” Tresco said, turning his head slightly and speaking over his shoulder. “Bring me flesh tokens, and I shall embrace you. Ysabel may have given up on you, but I have not.”

Tresco pushed on the door, which made a harsh grating sound as it opened onto the field of gorse and purple heather. Without a glance behind him, the old man stepped through the door, which closed with a metallic clang and dissolved into nothingness. With the ringing sound still reverberating off the walls, everyone looked at Cardew. Cardew looked vaguely surprised at the sudden attention, and then his shoulders slumped.

“Liel,” he said, walking in front of where she kneeled on the ground. He stood in front of her and leaned down so he could look down at her face. “I’m very sorry to have to do it.”

Liel looked up at him. When Cardew’s eyes locked with hers, he took an involuntary step back, the fear evident on his handsome features. Liel’s palms were open to the sky, her head tipped back to the sunlight, and from her lips tumbled the words borne of all the power the jungle had to offer.

“Idiot,” she snarled at him. “You forgot that when the Torque left, my magic came back.”

As Liel rose to her feet, her body quivered with ferocious energy and her presence dominated the hall. Cardew and the husk-soldiers shrank away from her presence, and she swung her head around to look at her friends.

“Get behind me,” she commanded them, and they scurried to obey. Above the hole in the roof, the swatch of blue sky darkened into a vortex of black storm clouds. The soldiers on the edge of the hole lowered their bows and looked up in confusion as a volley of lightning cracked out of the sky. It slammed into one of them, scorching his body into a burned slab of flesh. The impact knocked the other archers off the edge and sent them tumbling down into the hall. When their smoking bodies hit the ground with a sickening thud, the soldiers on the ground turned and ran.

Before they could scramble up the debris pile and out of harm’s way, gusts of air spun down from the sky and formed a wall in front of Liel. She rammed her arm straight out from her shoulder and, at her command, the currents of air swirled across the hall in an unavoidable torrent. Catching men both dead and alive in its wake, it tossed them across the hall as if they were no weightier than fallen leaves. Bodies slammed against columns, their spines breaking on impact. The stained glass cracked inside the window frame. As the wind died down, the loose glass fell from the frames and rained down into the hall in a cascade of red and blue fragments that smashed onto the rubble-strewn floor.

Unmolested by the wind, Harp, Boult, and Kitto gawked at the extent of the destruction wrought by Liel’s spell. The rush of wind stilled, leaving only white currents of air that eddied around the bases of the pillars. Liel pressed her hands together, and the white currents joined together to form the links of an ethereal chain. One end of the chain wound itself around the leg of a body slumped at the base of a column. Liel jerked her arm backward. As if pulled by an invisible hand, the chain dragged the limp body across the expanse of broken glass where it came to rest in front of her.

“You’ve gotten some serious power since I saw you last,” Harp said in awe, staring down at the broken body of Cardew lying at the elf’s feet.

“He’s not dead,” Boult said as Cardew moaned and blinked his eyes.

“Liel,” Cardew whispered, his blood-splattered lips barely moving. “Please help me.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Boult insisted. “After that display of magical prowess, healing the bastard would be anticlimactic.”