It was clear that the aristocrat had cobbled together the stories from the village and seen the trailheads for what they were. Meanwhile Sahvage, who had supposedly been the closest to the female, had missed the trajectory.

She needed not his protection.

She needed no one’s.

“We shall go our separate ways, Cousin.” Now her voice changed, returning closer to that which he had known. “You have discharged your service unto me, the vow unto my sire, your uncle, fully met. And as I know you shall not leave me, I shall leave you—”

“Rahvyn, where is Zxysis. What did you do to him?”

The smile that pulled at the corners of the female’s mouth terrified him. “What he did unto me. No more, no less. I repaid his attentions by getting inside of him.” Rahvyn limped over to where a black cloak had been thrown over one of the banquet seats. Pulling it around herself, she faced him. “You shall not find me. Do not even try.”

On a reflex, he protested. “My duty unto you is sacrosanct—”

“And I hereby release you of the burden.” Abruptly, her eyes softened. “Sahvage, you are free. Of it all. No more worries concerning me that distract you from your true calling. You shall be the most powerful fighter that e’er have served the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Glory shall be yours, for the race shall ne’er have seen such a protector as you.”

“No! My defense of you is more important than—”

“Not anymore.” She blinked away tears and lifted her chin. “Be well, Cousin. I have so much faith in your future. I urge you to join me in this optimism, even as I depart from your life. This era is over.”

“Rahvyn!” he yelled as he rushed forward.

But she dematerialized from the great hall, leaving naught except her scent . . . and the bloody carnage she had caused.

“No!” he yelled. Even as he knew not what he was denying.

Dragging his hands into his hair, he paced around. And around. And around in a tight circle. But naught changed. Not what his charge had done, not what he had seen with his own eyes. With a curse, he released the hold upon his head and went to stand over the dead. The tangle of bodies and unhanded weapons were layered in a mess, blood glistening on leather togs, on flesh, on stone . . . on bright steel scabbards and gunmetal-gray rifles.

“Rahvyn,” he whispered, “what else have you done?”

Except there was no Rahvyn anymore, was there.

As the realization struck, an urgency called unto him with the clarity of a brass bell, and he took care to arm himself with the weapons of the dead before he hastened down the broad thoroughfare that marked the way unto the drawbridge. As he jogged in silence and with speed, there was much to surmount. A field of debris marked the stone pavers: clothing fragments, foodstuffs in their nettings and pouches, pages from diaries and books littering the way unto the exit.

A flurry of people, fleet of foot and panicked of mind, had of recent rushed forth upon this very route, their objects of secondary import to their very lives.

What had scared them so? ’Twas a question he feared the answer to.

When the fortification’s grand entrance presented itself, Sahvage slowed.

Then he stopped.

The view through the vast opening provided a ready vista of the cleared field surrounding the castle. Trampled rivulets through the grasses illustrated the scatter of the inhabitants who had fled, and the drawbridge, which had remained lowered, was likewise covered with the same detritus trail.

“Whate’er did they know,” Sahvage whispered as he stepped through the great iron-and-steel gates. “Whate’er did they see whilst they abandoned this entirety.”

Drop. Drop . . . drop.

At the soft sound, Sahvage glanced down beside the fall of his robing. There, on the old, worn surface of the drawbridge’s wood, a puddle glistened in the moonlight.

Red. Brilliant red.

Sahvage turned and looked up—“Dearest Virgin Scribe.”

Up above the grand and formal entry, speared upon the iron stanchion that carried the silks of seat’s the bloodline, was . . .

Zxysis the Elder.

And it went without any question that he was deceased.

As if the impaling wasnae a clue.

Verily, his skin had been stripped from his bones and muscles: Everything that had once bound his corporeal form was gone, his intestines drooling out of his pelvis, organs seeping free from under his rib cage. His face had been preserved, however. Those features that defined his identity within the glymera and this household and village had been left untouched, his expression one of utter horror, his lips stretched wide over his bared teeth, his blind eyes staring in terror out over his landed estate.

“Rahvyn—”

A brilliant light exploded into the sky, so bright that it readily outshone the moon, so painful that he groaned and lifted his arms to shield his eyes. Stumbling back, Sahvage sought the protection of the stone walls of the castle, and when he was under their cover, he attempted to sight what he could withstand of the celestial being.

Whate’er it was traveled across the velvet heavens, eclipsing the twinkle of the stars, seeming to suck up all illumination from overhead. And as it reached the horizon to the north, there was another brief intensification—and then it burned out to nothing.

In its departure, all was as it had been before.

Except no, that was not true upon the earth. None of what was around him was as it should be.

And Rahvyn was wrong.

She had not freed him with her departure. She had framed him for the killings she had wrought against her abductors.

None would believe that he had not dispatched Zxysis and his guards as they had been: His reputation within the Brotherhood not only justified the nomenclature he had been given upon his birth; it preceded him where’er he went.

The bodies in the great hall. Zxysis’s o’erhead, skinned as an animal, pierced as a carcass. And whate’er else had been done to whome’er else had hurt Rahvyn. All would be accorded unto Sahvage, and thus the glymera would come looking for him, demanding explanations he would not be able to provide. And the Brotherhood would be put in an untenable situation, for they knew what he was like in the field—and they knew what his charge had meant to him.

They would also know the whispers of the village around the castle, the old females and young who spoke of magic in the forests and inexplicable happenings in the town.

To protect his charge, Sahvage had been content to accept the curse of being called warlock when he was as far from being one as any mortal. And besides, Rahvyn’s magic had been harmless . . . or at any rate, naught to be afraid of.

He closed his eyes and pictured Zxysis.

No more for the harmlessness.

Thus, nay, Sahvage was not free, no matter what his cousin maintained. Her actions had condemned him to death—

With an abrupt pivot, he turned to the way he had come.

And then he set off at a run.

As he came up to decapitated guards, he leapt over the bodies and the blood. Onward, still, he went, unto the steps he had at first ascended . . . and past them farther into the castle’s lower levels.

When he came upon the storage room he had awoken in, he took a torch inside and placed it in a mount just within the door. Going over to his coffin, he put his weapons down and replaced the lid as it had been—and it was then, courtesy of the torch’s frothing light, that he noted the warnings that had been carved into the wood. A cursed dead was herein, the symbols announcing it on all sides.