All his focus had narrowed to one spot on that wide and bristling chest. The bearskin had fallen away from it. He could hear the heart beating, hammering within its cage of blood and bone.
The whole world throbbed to that relentless rhythm. Euan’s blade thrust up through the wide-sprung ribs, twisting as the Mordante tried to fling himself away from it. But it was already lodged inside him.
Again it was not enough. The man was too big, his body too heavily padded with muscle. His long arms dragged Euan in once more, his hands groping for Euan’s throat, to crush the windpipe and break the neck.
Euan had no defenses left. All he could do was keep his waning grip on the knife’s hilt and let the Mordante’s own weight thrust it deeper.
The pounding went on and on. It was coming from outside now. The tribes were stamping their feet, beating on drums and shields, roaring the death chant.
It was very dim and far away. With the last of his consciousness, Euan felt the knife’s blade pass through something that resisted, then gave way. The hilt throbbed in his hand, leaped out of it and then went still.
Euan spun down through endless space. Pain was a distant memory. Fear, desperation—only words. Sweet darkness surrounded him. Lovely death embraced him.
It was warm. He had not expected that. He could almost believe it had a face—a woman’s face, a smooth oval carved in ivory, with eyes neither brown nor green, flecked with gold.
He knew that face, those eyes, as if they had been his own. He reached for them, but they slipped away.
The thunder of his pulse had shaped itself into human sense. Voices were chanting over and over.
Ard Ri! Ard Ri Mor! Ard Ri! Ard Ri Mor!
They were acclaiming the high king.
The Mordante was dead. Euan had felt his heart stop. He was dead, too. Then how—or who—
A sharp and all too familiar voice filled the world. “Up now. Wake. I’m done carrying you.”
Purest white-hot hatred flung Euan back into the light. More hands than he could count lifted him up. He rode on the shoulders of his warband, his most loyal companions.
The sun had died in blood, pouring its death across the sky. The royal fires sprang up around the killing ground and along the hilltops. They would be lit from end to end of the people’s lands, leaping across the high places, declaring to all the tribes that there was a king again in Dun Mor.
Euan looked for the man who had dragged him back from the edge of death. All the faces around him were familiar and beloved, his blood brothers and his kin. He had to look far into the shadows to find the slight dark figure with its terrible weight of magic.
By the One God, he hated the man—but there was no denying that Euan owed him a debt. He had brought Euan out of the dark. Euan was awake again, alive and aware.
Euan straightened painfully. The strongest men of his warband lifted a shield and held it high. The rest reached to lift him up, but he had a little strength left.
He snatched a spear from the hand of a man who was shouting and brandishing it. All his aches and wounds cried protest. He ignored them.
A path opened before him. He sprinted along it, grounded the spear and launched himself toward the shield.
He hung in air, briefly certain that he had failed. He would fall. If he was lucky he would break his neck rather than suffer such an omen against his kingship.
His feet struck the shield with blessed solidity. It rocked under his weight but steadied. He stood high above the people, dizzy and breathless, grinning like a mad thing.
He spread his arms wide as if to embrace the world. He had done it. He had won. He was the Ard Ri, high king of all the tribes.
“Now you have what you wanted,” Gothard said. “Only remember. Glory always has a price.”
“I could not possibly forget,” Euan said.
He had danced and drunk and feasted from night into morning, then slept a little and woke to Gothard’s face staring down at him. It was not the sight he would have liked to see on his first day as Ard Ri. He would have given much never to see it at all.
But there the man was, squatting in this still unfamiliar tent. Neither the warband nor the royal guard had managed to keep him out.
Nothing in this world could, maybe. Gothard was a dead man, a sorcerer who had been destroyed and his body unmade—but he had come back through the power of his magic to walk among the living. The peculiar horror of his existence was not that he was terrible to look at or speak to, but that he seemed so mortally ordinary.
Euan sat up carefully. While he slept, he had been bathed and salved and his arm newly bandaged.
Except for Gothard’s presence, Euan felt remarkably well. His head barely ached and his wounds were no trouble. Even his badly abused throat was less raw than he might have expected.
He would have been smiling if anyone but Gothard had been watching. As it was, his frown was not quite as black as it could have been. “What do you want?” he demanded—rude, yes, but the two of them were long past any pretense of civility.
“It’s tradition, you know,” Gothard said. “When the new king first wakes, his most loyal servant admonishes him against excessive pride and bids him remember the price of glory. It’s usually a priest who does it. Aren’t you glad I came instead?”
“No,” Euan said. It was hard not to growl, the state his voice was in, but this was intentional.
“I do smell better,” Gothard pointed out. For him, that was rollicking humor. “You’re given three days to enjoy your elevation. Then the reality of it comes crashing in. I’m to remind you that these aren’t the tribes your predecessor ruled. They’ve suffered a monstrous defeat and great loss of life and strength. The winter has been brutal and the weak or wounded who did not die in battle are dead of starvation and sickness. It’s a raw, bleak spring with a grim summer ahead, while the empire strips us of what little we have left and crushes us under the heels of its legions.
“You are high king of the people, and that’s a great thing—but it’s also a heavy burden. Even if they were victorious, you would still bear all their ills as well as their triumphs. Now in defeat, it’s all on your shoulders. You bear the brunt and you carry the blame.”
Euan’s shoulders sagged as if they were indeed loaded down with all the horrors of a disastrous war and its even grimmer aftermath. But he was no mage’s toy, whatever Gothard might hope to make of him. He shook off the spell with a snap of contempt. “You don’t think I know all that? This is mine and always has been. I was meant for it.”
“Surely,” said Gothard, “but are you prepared for the bad as well as the good?”
“I’ve ridden out two great defeats,” Euan said. “There will be no third. You are going to help me make sure of that.”
Gothard’s brows arched. “A new plan, my lord?”
“Maybe.” Euan rose carefully from his blankets. “Maybe the same one, with refinements. We don’t need to destroy the imperial armies if we destroy its leaders. We’ve known that from the beginning.”
“But war is so much more glorious than conspiracy and assassination.” Gothard’s tone was mocking but his eyes were deadly earnest. “Will the tribes understand, do you think?”
“The people won’t be going to war again for a long time,” Euan said. “It’s not a choice between glory and practicality. There’s no glory left.”
“You want revenge.”
“Don’t you?”
Gothard’s smile showed an edge of fang. “What do you have in mind?”