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The loss was incomprehensible—not only to her but to all in the ghetto. Her mother and father’s blazing personalities had eclipsed all who encountered them, including their own daughter. She’d grown up in their shadows, content with her place there, assisting by logging supplies and organizing shelves, working for hours. Tucked away in the hushed peace of the medical storage room, she’d wondered how two people whom everyone noticed could have had a child as invisible as she, whose only adventures were confined to the storybooks she read.
And now they were gone, taken suddenly and brutally, leaving her reeling in a world she’d never imagined facing on her own.
Beside the burning bonfires of their funeral pyres, she rocked on her knees, weeping. King Xim had done this, a madman sitting on a throne. The memory of his soldiers’ uniforms danced like flames behind her eyes. Could the wearing of those uniforms legitimize crimes committed in the king’s name? Never. She’d not let the slaughter of her parents be forgotten. She’d not let their deaths be in vain.
She stared into the blaze until the searing heat dried her tears and cauterized her grief. Then she lifted her gaze, following the trail of glowing ashes skyward, her parents’ final journey. She, too, was reborn, finding new purpose in a vow forged by the heat of their funeral pyres.
By the holy arks of Uhrth, if it took her the rest of her life, she’d see the king responsible for the deaths of her parents and for violence against a peaceful people removed from the throne. Xim and all his cronies banished, forever and ever.
CHAPTER ONE
THROUGH A SPYGLASS, General Uhr-Tao peered at a row of lookout towers whose sentries surely were looking back at him. The spires of the palace they protected glowed like newly forged spearheads in the glare of two suns. Four full cycles had passed since he’d last ridden inside those massive fortified walls to attend the wedding of his sister to the man who was now king. Then, he’d been in the company of only a few horsemen. Today, it was the thousands he’d earned the right to lead.
Though well defended, the eastern walls were not as thick or tall as the other three. He’d plan his breech there. Once inside, his army would overwhelm the home guard. The gates would open, and the city would fall.
But of course, none of that would be necessary. Tao lowered the spyglass, holding it to his chest. Satisfaction filled him knowing he’d never have to fight such a battle, and he reveled in it, realizing he could finally put away the mental trappings of war.
The spyglass went back in his saddlebag, perhaps for good. Even at this distance he could smell the city. Scents of incense and roasting meat mixed with the dust churned up by the men and beasts surrounding him. He breathed deep, remembering. Then, faintly, above the grinding and clanking of his army, shrill horns of welcome pierced the air, signaling the opening of the gates.
Home.
All told, he’d spent more than half his life away in the Hinterlands, battling the Gorr, going out on his first campaign before he’d shaved his first whisker. He’d never dreamed he’d see this day, his triumphant return home for good; he’d never allowed the fantasy of it to tempt him for fear it would have distracted him with hope in the face of impossible odds. But here he was, in one piece, all his limbs attached and working, a fate he owed as much to being in the right place at the right time as he did to blood and sweat. Or, he well knew, to not being in the wrong place as so many others were.
Thank you, Tao thought as the moment hit him, for sparing my life when so many others perished.
Uhrth rest their souls.
Then, a slow smile as he lifted his head. “Gentlemen!” he belted out. Blinding sunlight struck his helmet and leather armor as he raised a gloved fist high. “Today, we will bask in glory. Our victory, our peace. Final, decisive, hard-won. This is the last march of the last war, and we are the last warriors!”
The men’s whoops and howls made his heart pump with joy. Their grins blazed beneath the shadows of countless helmets. Tao laughed out loud as Chiron pranced and blew, sensing the fever of celebration, long overdue. It had been a grueling slog from the blood-soaked killing fields of the Hinterlands, the days dusty and monotonous and the nights interrupted by tortured dreams. Not all battle scars were visible. Survival, however sweet, came with a cost.
Along the way, the army’s depleted state had left them vulnerable to not only roving bands of Gorr stragglers but to the Sea Scourge as well. Burned in his mind was the memory of the Scourge’s shadowy ships mirroring the progress of his army across the southernmost land-bridge. Part human, part Gorr, the treacherous pirates were the offspring of humans who’d mated with the “Furs”—by choice or by force, no one knew. Human at first glance, they were said to have inherited Gorish eyes capable of charming a man’s soul right out of his body, if he was careless enough to stare.
Sea Scourge pirates kept the waters off-limits. This time, however, they’d stood down and let the Tassagons pass. Did they fear him, or did they approve of what he’d done to the Gorr? Perhaps it was a little of both.
Even after entering human territory, Tao had been forced to keep up his guard. The Riders of the sweeping central plains considered the grasslands theirs. They saw nothing wrong with stealing horses and leaving a careless Tassagon without boots or a mount on the open plains.
And then, there were the Kurel. The people living in self-imposed exile in the Barrier Peaks had allowed his army to use the passes through their mountainous home, saving many weeks of travel, yet they’d never once lifted a hand—and certainly never a weapon—to help stave off the Gorr. Not since their scientist ancestors in the days of the Old Colony had caused the near extinction of human civilization. Not scientists. Sorcerers. Dabblers in the banned dark arts of science and technology. Many emigrated to the capital to live, serving his countrymen through teaching, tallying figures and writing, the tedious chores Tassagons either didn’t want to do or couldn’t do for themselves. But, they wouldn’t join the army. Conscientious objectors? More like cowardly freeloaders. The Kurel accepted the benefits of the peace Tassagons won without being willing to pay. What did they want for that sham? A halo, claiming they were Uhrth’s favored children.
Privately, Tao wondered if it were true. After all, the fever that had killed so many in the capital had spared everyone in K-Town, even those who’d sickened. Uhrth rest their souls. He made the circular sign of Uhrth over his armored chest plate in memory of his parents, victims of the plague. It would soon be ten years since they had passed on to the other side.
He lifted his gaze to the brutal glare of morning once more. No matter the differences between the Tassagon, Riders and Kurel, they shared the most fundamental bond of all: they were of Uhrth. They were human. Any discord between them could cause their own downfall. The complete extermination of the human race had always been the goal of the Gorr. The furred muscular bodies, rows of needle-sharp teeth, the strange pale slitted eyes, designed to “charm” and then kill… Tao braced himself against an onslaught of unwelcome images. How many nights had he heard the Furs’ eerie caterwauls upon their taste of first blood? How much sleep had he lost, wondering how many of his men would be killed in the attack? The idea of the Furs emerging from hiding to strike at the heartland chilled him to the core.
Tao set his jaw. They will not. I have defeated them.
Pounding hooves dragged his attention to a group of horsemen galloping to meet them. The leader brought his horse to a graceful and expert stop, raising his visor to reveal a relieved, if disbelieving, smile. It was as if Tao’s very presence and the circumstances surrounding it were a wish that not even the most optimistic of Tassagons had expected.
“General, Tassagonia welcomes you. I welcome you.” Field-Colonel Markam seemed to hunt for the exact words he wanted, then finally shook his head, laughing. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”
Tao chuckled at the man’s wondering expression. “Back from the dead, I am.”
“And to a welcome worthy of your miraculous return. Wait until you see, Tao. It’s completely spontaneous.”
“That’s the best kind of celebration.”
“Most of the time.” Markam turned his horse to head back toward the city with Tao. “Xim wanted to declare a national holiday—for next week—centered on him. Him giving speeches, him handing out a medal or two to you and your officers, him granting awards of land for your men, out in the countryside, where they can be put out to pasture with wives…but the citizens made their own plans, as you’ll soon see. Xim’s been stewing about it all morning.”
When their beloved monarch, King Orion, had died unexpectedly three years earlier, leaving control of the realm to Crown-Prince Xim, Tao hadn’t hesitated to give his fealty to the new ruler, his brother-in-law, despite his inner doubts about the man. It was his duty, his calling as an Uhr-warrior, to do no less. Still, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine the king’s petulant expression at not getting his way. Tao had seen it many times before on the younger, smallish boy he and Markam had known as children. But they were men now, the leaders of their people. Above such childish reactions. Or so they ought to be.
“I won him a war, Markam. The war. If he finds no pleasure in that, I can’t help him.” Tao shook his head, muttering, “Already I miss the no-nonsense laws of the battlefield, where a man says what he means, and there is no time for hurt feelings.”
Markam’s dark eyes twinkled as he rode at his side. “You haven’t changed a bit. You still have no patience for politics.”
“Never will!” Tao turned his focus toward the city. “Politics is the pastime for men who can’t fight.”
The rumble emanating from behind the walls became a wild roar of cheering as his army’s point guard preceded him through the gates. Tao sat taller in the saddle. Pride swelled in his chest as he marched his army into their beloved capital city to the boisterous love of the crowds—and soon, he was certain, despite everything Markam had said, the thanks of the king himself.
“UHR-TAO, UHR-TAO…”
The incessant chanting. It had been going on since before sunrise. Elsabeth had dressed for her job as royal tutor while listening to it, the distant sound carrying into her parent’s tidy row house next to their old clinic in the center of Kurel Town. The chanting had persisted like distant thunder all through her solitary breakfast, keeping her from concentrating on the book she’d intended to read with her morning tea.
At her front door, she stopped to sling a messenger bag over her shoulder and fill it with storybooks she’d purchased for the prince and princess: Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales; Green Eggs and Ham; The Starry Ark. As soon as she arrived in the nursery classroom, she’d lock them away as always. Having such things in the palace was her secret, and the queen’s. Queen Aza had been adamant that Elsabeth not breathe a word of it to anyone.
Anyone meant Xim. In the capital, adopting Kurel ways could get a person killed by order of the king. No one was safe anymore. Not even his wife. “Uhr-Tao…Uhr-Tao…Uhr-Tao…”
Before leaving, Elsabeth reached for a chunk of charred wood she’d kept on a shelf since saving it from her parent’s funeral. Worn smooth over the years, the piece sat clutched in her hand for longer than usual. Today, especially, on General Uhr-Tao’s homecoming, it paid to remind herself of her vow. Now that the general had spent himself slaughtering Gorr, would he cast about in search of new prey? What if Xim unleashed Tao to finish what he’d begun—the violence, the raids, the Kurel arrested and never seen again?
I will not fear. I will never give up.
She replaced the piece of wood and left.
“Uhr-Tao…Uhr-Tao…Uhr-Tao…” The chanting grew louder the closer she got to the ghetto exit, where her usual morning routine would intersect quite inconveniently with the general’s long-awaited arrival. The streets outside Kurel Town were packed. Never had she seen so many people gathered at once. The army kept pouring in from beyond the walls, thousands of soldiers. The city seemed too small to hold them all. Leading their slow, measured advance was General Uhr-Tao himself.
She slowed to see. For all his alleged exploits, he looked far younger than she’d expected, and storybook handsome. She had to agree with the Tassagons that the man fulfilled every expectation of what a legend should look like: his bare, golden arms corded with sinew and muscle, his thighs thick as tree trunks as they gripped the sides of his mount. Even the armor he wore across his shoulders and torso somehow fit him better than it did other, mere mortal men.
Look at him, so high and mighty on his horse, a man celebrated for the lives he’s taken. Elsabeth wrenched her attention away. She’d been fully prepared to not like Uhr-Tao. Nothing about his flashy return changed her mind.
With the bag of books snug against her hip, she walked briskly out the ghetto gates and into the crowded streets of the capital.
ADORING CITIZENS LINED the road as far as Tao could see. The faces and voices extended in all directions, filling and overflowing the main square. A band of minstrels cavorted alongside him, singing ballads in his honor. Tao waved, soaking in the moment: the spontaneous celebrations, the music, the flowers and confetti flying, all under a sky empty of burning arrows and smoke.
A world finally without war.
A flower sailed up to him, thrown from a group of pretty women. He caught it and stuck the stem in his armor, causing them to shriek with glee. One tried to climb up to Tao’s lap to kiss him. He laughed, making sure she landed safely back on the road. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed, as if his mere touch were magic.
“It is safe to say you have reached god status, my friend,” Markam said, grinning. Tao followed the sweep of his friend’s hand across the throngs lining the road for the celebration of his victorious return. “Why, today even Uhrth himself would stand and offer you his chair.”
Tao snorted. “Blasphemy!”
“The truth! Look at them. They worship you.”
“They’re celebrating our victory.”
“Your victory, Tao. You’re the most successful military commander of all time, a hero of mythical proportions.”
“Mythical,” Tao spat. “Ask my ass if it feels mythical after weeks spent in a saddle.”
“They love you, Tao, and not their king. Just say the word, and the Tassagonian throne is yours.”
The throne? Tao looked at Markam askance. The conversation had pitched off course as abruptly and perilously as a wagon with a broken wheel. “Your mouth is moving, but only nonsense is coming out of it.”
“Are you sure of that? You have what Xim doesn’t—the people’s love and the army’s respect. Two keys to lasting power.”
“Legitimacy being the other key—the missing key.” The implication that he’d use the momentum of victory to launch a coup was disquieting. Tao couldn’t overlook the fact that Markam was Xim’s chief adviser for palace security. To remain in such a position took Xim’s trust—a slippery fish of a thing, Tao imagined—but it wasn’t inconceivable that Xim had put Markam up to seeing what Tao’s intentions were. “I can’t tell if this is a joke, a test or a warning.”
“Perhaps,” Markam said, “it is a little of each.”
A prickle of unease crawled down Tao’s neck. He might not care much for politics, but he recognized its dangers. Tread carefully. Everything he said could go right back to the king. “No one need gauge my ambition. Once I’ve had my fill of feasts and parties, I’m stepping out of the public eye for good.”
Tao conjured a favorite, infinitely pleasant dream of tending the ancient vines on his family’s estate in the hills, and the simple satisfaction of adding his own vintage to the rows of dusty bottles in the wine cellar, a task he couldn’t wait to steal from the hands of estate caretakers. He would grow old with his family around him. It was the kind of life his military father and grandfather had dreamed of but never lived long enough to realize. A life no one seemed to believe he desired. “I’ll retire as soon as the king grants me permission.”
“General Uhr-Tao—retiree? At twenty-eight?” Markam threw back his head and laughed.
“My officers had the same reaction. I’ll remind you as I did them that a soldier’s life ends in only two ways. Retirement is a far better fate than the alternative.”
“Don’t be so sure. Retirement requires a wife. If that’s not life-ending, I don’t know what is.”
Just like that, they fell back into their usual banter in the way of men who’d been friends since practically infancy, as if four years hadn’t passed since they’d last spoken.
As if he didn’t just offer me the throne on a platter, Tao thought, squinting in the glare of the suns. “Life-ending? Only if one doesn’t go about the process of selection properly. I simply won’t settle for a female incompatible with my desires.”
“The process of selection?” Markam lifted a skeptical brow. “Courtship you mean.”
“That is how some describe it, yes.”
Markam’s teeth shone in the sun. “Since when did you become an expert on the subject, General?”
“Courtship requires a sensible plan and the discipline to stick to it. I’ll acquire a wife the same way I’ve conducted my military campaigns—with logic, careful consideration and without emotion getting in the way.”
Markam laughed. “Good luck.”
A flash of long, bright coppery hair caught Tao’s eye. A pretty young woman navigated her way through the crowds, a blue skirt flapping around her ankle boots, a bag slung over one shoulder. Kurel, he thought in the next instant, watching her devote more attention, and certainly no less distaste, to the steaming mounds of horse manure in her path than she did to him and his army.
Well, that’s one female I can comfortably remove from any list of potential mates, he thought with an inner laugh.
As he rode past the simple Kurel gates, more of her kind emerged from the ghetto, their faces just as cold, wary, even downright hostile. K-Town was a city within a city, stretching out to the distant southern wall, a teeming warren of people and buildings that had for generations served as a haven for immigrants from the Barrier Peaks.
A people as frosty as their cuisine was hot, it was said. The biting spice of their cooking hovered in the air, a tantalizing whiff of foods he’d never tasted and likely never would, just as he and that woman would never speak. He’d visited nearly every corner of the known world, but he’d never once set foot inside K-Town. No Tassagon in his right mind would, lest they fall under a spell.
Shouts dragged his attention back to the streets. A pair of home guards on patrol blocked the redheaded woman’s path. One was swaggering a bit as if to flirt with her while the other guard pulled open her bag for inspection, spilling a book as he rifled through the contents. She crouched to retrieve it, brushing off the cover as if the thing were more precious than gold.
More Kurel formed a bottleneck behind her. Their agitation made the air crackle with sudden tension, a needless escalation of the situation. Tao put his fingers to his mouth and blew out a quick, sharp whistle. The home guards jerked their focus to him, and he shook his head, motioning at them to move on. They had better things to do than pick on Kurel women, especially today, his homecoming.
The redhead’s slender arms hugged the bag closely and protectively. Her cheekbones turned pink enough to cover freckles that were a scant shade darker than her skin. Tao gave her a jaunty wave in advance of her gratitude at his aid. But the look she gave him contradicted all delicacy in her appearance. Those contemptuous blue eyes could have ignited stone.
“Are you all right?” he called.
She blanched at his attention and wheeled away without a word. Chiron clip-clopped along the same path, but the redhead kept walking, her attention fixed straight ahead as if he were a stray, possibly vicious dog she mustn’t provoke.
He pulled Chiron back, setting the horse to prancing on the cobblestones, their enormous shadow looming over the other ghetto dwellers who had gathered around. As soon as they saw him looking their way, they, too, averted their eyes—as if afraid he’d single out one of them next. Ridiculous. He wasn’t going to hurt them. Nor would his men. The idea of their thinking so annoyed him even more.
“The Gorr are the monsters, but in Kurel eyes I’m a monster,” he snarled at Markam. “Distaste, I’d expect, but fear? Guards stopping innocents in the streets? That’s not the way it was when I left.”
Markam’s gloves tightened around the reins. “Xim initiated a crackdown on K-Town as soon as King Orion was buried and you were back to the front.”
“Your messengers mentioned nothing of the sort. Why?”
“Distract you when you held the fate of all humanity in your hands? I refused.”
“Do you think I would have gotten this far if I didn’t know how to prioritize?”
They glared at one another. Markam broke ranks first. “Xim fell ill, a fever. He refused treatment by a Kurel physician, fearing sorcery, and relied on a Tassagon healer. In his delirium, he fretted that the Kurel thought him weak, that they liked his father more and had therefore created a spell to make him sicken and die like so many did in the epidemic.”
Tao clamped his jaw against an image of his parents’ fevered suffering. “Go on.”
“When Xim recovered, he said the current laws against sorcery were too vague and too lenient. He had the Forbiddance redone to his liking.”
“The entire oral code?”
“Yes, all of it. He had everything transcribed into writing by Kurel and for them. Orders were given to shoot on sight any Kurel practicing the dark arts. Uhr-Beck’s regiment was given the job of enforcement.”
Old one-eyed Beck. Tao had sent him home five years ago, gravely wounded, never expecting he’d walk out of the Barracks for Maimed Veterans. But Beck had regained sight in one eye. Sidelined ever since, the old warrior chafed at having to serve inside Tassagonia’s walls, training recruits instead of fighting at the front. It was a valuable contribution to the war effort in Tao’s view, but not Beck’s apparently. He acted as if Tao had sentenced him to the worst kind of hell. The Uhr’s resentment had turned into an obsession to prove he was still a potent warrior. Xim’s handing Beck an order to quell Kurel would have been like pouring fuel on a long-smoldering torch.
“A few violent incidents occurred inside the ghetto gates,” Markam continued.
“He sent his men inside?” Aghast, Tao wondered how Beck had convinced his green recruits to dare it. Even experienced soldiers were leery of risking a sorcerer’s curse.
“Not very far inside, I assure you. A few Kurel came forth to reason with them. Stories vary. We’ll never be sure what happened, but at the end of it, there were casualties. I did what I could to restore calm. There hasn’t been a repeat, but the Kurel haven’t forgotten.”
The redhead’s reaction to his homecoming confirmed it. Xim wasn’t the man his sire was, anyone would agree, but it seemed the kingdom had fallen into the hands of a boy who didn’t ponder the consequences of his deeds. Tao was only a few years older, but he’d acquired a lifetime of experience compared with the king. It was clear Xim needed support and guidance in a more sensible direction, but it would have to be done tactfully. Markam’s insinuation that Xim had lost the respect of the public was a warning that others might see Tao as a candidate to usurp the king.
Politics. Was there no escaping it here in the kingdom?
“Ah, no frowning, my friend,” Markam cried. “Not today. Look at the people. Feel the love. This is your day!”
Tao couldn’t fault Markam for changing the subject. This moment of triumph had been many hundreds of years in the making. He was once again aware of the crowd crying out for him, but his thoughts inevitably returned to the angry Kurel woman and Markam’s words. Had he returned from battle only to find war brewing in his own backyard?
CHAPTER TWO
