The duke and The Butcher locked gazes, and the world seemed to hang in the balance. Vera’s sword, simple in design and gleaming in the torchlight, looked bulky and unwieldy next to the thin delicate blades of shattered ruby glass that the duke conjured in the next moment, but I didn’t doubt for a moment that hers was the more dangerous weapon.

  Her words hung heavy between them, and finally the duke replied. “I thought you had left the Sunsets for good. I thought you were busy killing Lions on the other side of the Dragon-Spines.”

  It wasn’t even a question, both of them knowing full well now that he had been wrong in both assumptions.

  “The boy’s right, Rugal. You brought me back here. The fucking Lions and the gods-damned Ashkanian vault.” She paused for a moment, cocking her head to one side slightly, but never losing the tension that framed every inch of her. “I should thank you for that.”

  “The Sunset Court is coming, Butcher. They will never let you rule. And even if they did, you would be no better than I. You’ll be putting down your first rebellion within the year as they smuggle arms and support through from Escribar or the Lilyflower Consortium. You will make the same-”

  “Where would you like to die, duke?” Vera interrupted him, voice low and even. It seemed that now that vengeance was within her grasp, she had all the patience in the world.

  He scowled and spat, before turning to survey the wreckage of his castle. “Here is as good as anywhere, I suppose. Fitting that it should end where it began, all those years ago.”

  Vera nodded and turned to us, and I felt a tiny flare of mana from her as she said; “Back off. Out of the gate, and keep your distan-”

  “Watch out!” Nathlan and I screamed in unison as the duke slashed out at Vera while her back was turned. He moved so fast we could barely track it, but I saw one of his phantom blades bite deep into her back, cutting through her armour with ease.

  She was pushing me away even as she turned and swung, her punch connecting flush with the duke’s cheekbone, opening a thin gash that spurted blood immediately. He was forced back, but bore a savage grin on his face, his eyes alight in that same feral way I had seen below the earth.

  We scattered, but I worried for Vera as she drew herself up to face the duke, her back a red wound that dripped blood through her tattered armour even as I watched. This wasn’t good. It was a cheap shot but had damaged her significantly; I could see muscle moving below the torn skin and was sure that it would slow her down.

  I sensed another brief flare of mana though and a moment later the duke winced, sucking in a breath. I watched as the wound in Vera’s back abruptly vanished, as did the cut on the duke’s face.

  “Get them out of here, Lamb,” she called to me over her shoulder, no longer taking her eyes off the duke, and I nodded to the others and circled out to the gate. As I crossed in front of Vera, I was surprised to see a fresh cut across her cheek, identical to the one the duke had taken, and I frowned in confusion as I saw the duke roll his shoulders with another wince.

  Clearly, there was some complex skill at work here, but I had never heard of one that could swap wounds. Still, I wouldn’t underestimate the duke – either his skill or maliciousness – and so hustled out of the ruined gate with the barbarians and Nathlan, the rebels descending the wall and backing away from the castle wall at the same time, until we huddled outside the gate in a group, watching the coming battle.

  They exchanged more words, though I couldn’t catch them from here, while Fandar turned to watch the broken remains of Duke Ryonic’s house guard stumble though the muddy fields and towards the treeline far from the castle. I was glad someone was keeping an eye on them, because I couldn’t look away from the face-off between my friend and her hated foe.

  They each said something, and judging by the pause between the words it held the ring of ritual to it, and then they unveiled their paths to the world.

  The air around the duke buckled and twisted in on itself, shards of reality taking on a crimson hue and splintering into a hailstorm of projectiles that screamed towards Vera on the opposite end of the courtyard.

  Vera for her part simply stood there, broadsword in hand angled towards the ground out to her side. She didn’t move for a heart-stopping moment, and then the world lit up. The entire courtyard was enveloped in a blazing inferno, flames easily reaching as high as the barbican once had, and the heat was so intense that I felt it from near a hundred meters away. The air spilling from the courtyard and out the gate was hazy and shimmered as if a mirage.

  For some reason, I could still make out Vera and the duke through the flames, as if they were vaguely translucent. Their colour seemed to sway between violet and cadmium, vivid yellows and harsh whites struck through by tongues of red and purple. They writhed, seeming to convey emotion through their movement and ever-changing colour.

  That emotion of the flames was simple enough to understand though: Rage.

  The duke’s first volley of reality bending blades burned away to nothing the moment they appeared, and Vera’s retort was lost in a blur of motion. I lost sight of them then, no doubt fighting viciously within that blazing inferno. I heard a strange clanging sound, not dissimilar to the clash of steel against steel, but strange enough to be noticeable. I assumed it was the bite of Vera’s sword against the duke’s conjured weapons, but I couldn’t be sure, what with the vaguely opaque flames obscuring the view.

  I wanted to just watch, to strain my eyes for every blur of movement and try to piece together a picture of what was happening, but my perception was too low, and the night too dark for any real understanding. They fought, and I would learn the result in due course.

  For now, I half turned to my friends. Nathlan was clad in his armour, furs of mountain mammals donned to make him look a little more like the barbarian he had been pretending to be. With his long hair tied tight to his head, blood painting his face and splashed down his armour, he could have fooled me.

  At least, until I looked over to Jacyntha. She looked every inch the terrifying barbarian warrior of legend, great-axe propped over one shoulder and sculpted arms bare to the cool night air. Sadrianna seemed to tread a middle ground, and I could equally well imagine her advising the war-table of some great empire’s general or leading a raid of her people from the front.

  “Did we all make it through in one piece?” Nathlan asked as he saw my look, and the others seemed to shrug.

  “Nearly lost my hand,” I said, holding up the still bloody arm and pointing at a ragged scar bisecting it. Nathlan winced in sympathy.

  We turned as a scream split the air, but it didn’t come from a human mouth. I noticed all the rebels behind us, some two dozen I would guess – it was dark and hard to be sure with their black clothing – flinch and focus back on the castle from where they had been murmuring to one another. All except Fandar, anyway. He didn’t move a muscle, and I got the sense it was a sound he had heard before.

  The scream was born of fire, not a human throat, and it twisted through the night air as if with a mind of its own. Having captivated my attention once more, I watched as a beast of flame, shaped to mimic a serpent or perhaps an eel, writhed its way through the air above the castle before plunging back down into the inferno.

  The ground shook, and my companions and I shared wide-eyed glances. The power in that one skill was astronomical. It reminded me of how the giant in the Wandering States had shaken the earth with every step, and the speed with which that mana-forged apparition of fire had risen to the sky and then struck the earth was far beyond what we could hope to match.

  My heart sped slightly, marching in time with a rhythmic shaking in the air. I looked to my right, seeing the trees behind the castle wave in time with my heartbeat and frowned. Was this some new soul-attack that I had been hit with? Was shock and blood loss catching up to me and causing me to suffer from subtle delusions?

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  I pointed to the treeline. “Nathlan – you see that?”

  He squinted beside me, and then nodded. “The trees…” he breathed quietly. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or not by his agreement.

  Before I could follow up with another question, I felt the thumping from below. The grass waved in rhythm, each blade seeming to project itself forward and back in time to the siren song within my heart.

  “What is that noise?” Sadrianna asked, voice full of confusion.

  I looked behind us to the rebels, but they seemed enraptured with the fight and paid no mind to the surroundings. Fandar stood still as a statue though, head cocked to one side as if he could feel something too.

  Another boom shook the night from the castle, and a moment later, the duke came sailing out of the inferno. Or rather, his body did. He carved a furrow through the muddy plain before us, coming to a stop no more than a dozen meters away, though he couldn’t be said to have any true control over his trajectory. He was covered in blood, bruises showing on his face and mud now staining every inch of him.

  The cold, hard, pragmatic titan that had commanded the country from inside his unassailable fortress that I’d met not two bells ago now looked much diminished. Half of his hair was missing, and the lines of his face were covered by a shroud of dark mud and blood. Only his piercing grey eyes remained, fixed on the four of us as we stood vigil over his final battle.

  Vera stalked out of the fire, an avenging angel haloed in red and white flame. Her heavy broadsword was held in a loose grip out to one side, as if she wished to keep the blade, and the blood that flowed down its fuller, away from her body. The ground hissed as blood dripped from the tip of the blade, and each step caused a puff of steam to drift high into the chill night air.

  She strode evenly towards us, the fires abruptly winking out behind her, and I saw for the first time the damage their battle had done to the castle. There was no longer a wooden walkway bracketing the inner walls, just black ash marring the now pristine stone, the flames having burned away all moss, lichen, metal-marks and other stains.

  The keep had taken a battering, the door I had flung open when I’d made it to the surface now missing entirely, smoke still billowing out from that doorway. Smashed stone littered the inner courtyard from where heavy impacts had wracked the keep, and the walls to either side of the main gate had lost even more of their structural integrity.

  It was a castle no longer – more a ruin than anything now.

  I heard shuffling behind, and turned to see Fandar kneeling, one hand out and pressed to the ground. I watched the grasses continue to wave and dance in time to the percussive tune, and wondered at it briefly before my attention was once more stolen.

  The duke coughed, a harsh sound made from a throat that had born too much abuse to retain elegant speech.

  “You can’t hold it now,” he rasped, and I turned to see the duke looking up at Vera as she strode over. She was still fifty or so meters distant, but he seemed confident she could hear the words.

  “The Sunset Court is coming. Your rebels can’t hold this castle, or this country.”

  Her footsteps never slowed, and eventually she stood before the dying man. He stared at the floor, head lolling weakly on a neck that could support him no longer, but still he had the strength for a few final words.

  “You might hold it for a day, or a week. You can hide in the Marshes for a month…but sooner or later, they will take it back. The court will rip apart this country, like wolves-”

  He trailed off in a fit of coughing, and when he spat to one side, it was red and heavy. “Like wolves sharing a carcass. You’ve doomed this land with your vengeance, Butcher.”

  He looked up at her then, in his final moments. “Was it worth it?” he asked, grey eyes meeting those that still held dancing flames in their depths.

  The only reply she gave was her sword sweeping down from on high, severing his head from his shoulders. It was definitive.

  We stared in silence at the scene.

  My heart still pounded in my chest to a foreign rhythm, the world still echoed in time with it, and I looked to Vera, seeing her raise her head and glare at something behind us. I turned, watching Fandar stand from his crouch, hand leaving the earth and raising to grip the heavy bow that he had slung across his back.

  “Back,” he said, as he unslung the great weapon. “Back to the castle!”

  I looked beyond him, watching the trees shake and shiver in time to that strange sound, more a feeling than a noise. The tremors in the earth hadn’t abated. They’d grown in intensity if anything, and I felt an ominous feeling within.

  “What’s happening?” Jacyntha asked, and Vera grinned a vicious smile, even as the rebels around us started to peel away, loping back to the castle in a steady jog. They crowded around their leader and peppered Fandar with a barrage of questions, shooting shy glances back at Vera and the duke’s corpse every now and then.

  “Something looms on the horizon, Jacyntha,” Vera replied with something akin to glee in her usually stoic voice. “Something titanic and world changing. We will be here to greet it.”

  I ignored the strangely prophetic words and sent my stone-sense into the earth. I followed the cobbled road running from the castle out to the treeline, and then further still. The thumping in the earth didn’t abate, and soon I felt the clattering of wheels, the clip-clopping of hooves, and below it all like a continuous roar of thunder, I felt the marching tramp of boots on stone.

  I turned in horror to look at Vera, but she was waving the others back to the castle as well.

  “Come, let’s greet the new dawn from within the walls. It will be a fine view.”

  I followed along numbly, a mix of self-loathing and guilt roiling in my stomach at the devastation I had been party to. We had won, hadn’t we? We’d beaten the duke, fought off the Sultan even.

  But as I looked at the gutted and fire-ravaged remains of the once proud castle before us and thought of the army now nipping at our heels, it didn’t feel like it. The Sunset Court is coming. I thought of the people I’d seen in that tavern nearby, of Vera’s aunt asking to be left out of it, of Barrow-Under-Tine and the Riverlands…and I grew cold.

  Vera had been a berserker. She had spoken to me at length of the battle lust that would creep upon her and how she had made terrible choices, done things in the heat of violence that still marred her sleep at night. The light in her eyes as she beheaded the duke had been unmistakable, and the glee with which she spoke even now…did she want a final stand? Was she so caught up in the blood-fever that she relished the arrival of another army, simply because it meant more death?

  “An army is coming,” I said, voice flat and dull. “Cavalry, or horses at least. Chariots too, or maybe carriages. And enough feet to shake the earth for miles around...that is what’s coming for us.”

  “I have put my trust in Jorge for a decade now, and he hasn’t broken it yet,” Vera retorted, as we reached the crumbled walls of the former Castle Ryonic.

  “We can’t win, Vera.” I sighed. “There are hundreds of them. Even with a 4th tier at our back, we can’t win this fight, even here.”

  “We don’t have to win.”

  That statement, delivered by Vera with firm resolve, may have been comforting for some, but I detected the hint of joy there beneath the feigned stoicism. This was an outcome that she craved. I felt bile rise in the back of my throat, bitter and scalding. Visions of twisting roots growing through cracked cobbled streets bubbled to the surface of my mind. Choking weeds and millwheels that would never turn again.

  Fuck. I’d thought I could make this clean. Easy. Moral. All I’d done was doom an entire country to anarchy. “This will lead to nothing but chaos!” I found myself shouting, the words wrenched from my lips as if I’d held them in for a year.

  Vera turned to me in confusion, looking nonplussed. “Perhaps, but we had no part in this. If anyone is to blame, it is the powers at the peak of this world, the old-bloods and gods that stood by and did nothing while the world suffered. This is simply the consequence.”

  I looked at her aghast, and she seemed surprised by my outrage. “That’s Jorge’s view, anyway. I don’t much care, personally. I am just happy I was able to get my vengeance in the midst of it all.”

  “But what about your aunt? What about the people of the Marchlands? Barrow-under-tine and all the destruction? What happens to them now that we have destroyed the only structure they knew!?”

  “I don’t know, Lamb,” she said with a weary shrug. “I’ll do my best to protect them from what is to come, but I won’t deny it will be a bloody affair.”

  I looked at Vera like she’d grown another head. How could she be so callous?

  “So, all of this…you’re okay with it? You’ll just wash your hands of the blood and let the dice settle where they’re cast?” I asked, feeling my heart thump in rhythm with the world, growing louder with each moment.

  “Lamb – what…where is this coming from? It wasn’t me that started this game.”

  She had turned to face me fully now, framed on either side by the ruined walls of the former Castle Ryonic.

  My friends stood behind her, looking a mix of confused and distracted. Nathlan was listening with half an ear, but his eye was on the horizon, head cocked as if he could hear something just out of range. He was startled back to the present when I roared an answer.

  “You flipped the fucking board!” I shouted. “We did! We did this, Vera,” I growled, gesturing around at the destruction. “And now another gods-damned army is at our door and you’re talking about inevitability and who’s at fault. I don’t fucking care who started it, people are still going to die! I thought we learned this in the Riverlands. Of anyone, I thought you would understand,” I said the last bitterly, eyes downcast and feeling wretched as the seven hells.

  Her gaze sharpened on me then, and I felt like a mouse that had caught the attention of a hawk.

  “You don’t know, do you?” she said quietly, but it sounded rhetorical. “He didn’t fucking tell you, the bastard.”

  I floundered, lost in a sea of conflicting emotions and not able to piece together what I was being told, despite recognising its significance.

  “Lamb,” she began, “this isn’t the end. We don’t need to win this fight, we just need to hold out.”

  I looked up at her, finally recognising the Vera I knew. Compassion crinkled the skin around her eyes, and her auburn hair was framed by the blue-black sky.

  “Hold out for what, Vera? What could possibly help us defeat an entire army?” I asked, tired and desperate for some semblance of hope. She saw my desperation, and she smiled, warmth and comfort emanating from her once more.

  “For the end of the world.”