The Winds of Crowns and Wolves (17 page)

There was no response, as Tyrin’s question
echoed through the trees of the forest. He creeped forward, slowly,
toward the mossy tree that stood near the bank of the lagoon.

You could hear the birds above singing a
much more melodramatic tune as the night grew darker. Their tunes
transitioned from comforting to a sense of unease, as the two young
men stood near the water behind them.

“I ask again, who is there?” bellowed Tyrin.
His voice was as intimidating as his stature. The voice which
emanated from his body sounded like it originated from a full grown
man, not a boy of less than twenty.

Once again, silence. This time, however, the
silence was total. Even the birds above stopped singing, and all
was still within the Forest of Light.

Tyrin inched forward again, circumventing
the base of the thick tree he was now standing in front of. As he
arrived at the other side, he only had seconds to react. Out of the
foggy darkness, a blade came slashing down, aimed at his neck.
Tyrin swung his own blade to meet it and parried it away before
surging forward with a ferocious two handed swing. He grazed the
leg of the attacker, and blood began to seep out of the wound. With
a noticeable limp, he hurdled forward before Tyrin landed another
blow across his arm.

He fell to the ground, defeated.

Tyrin grabbed him by the collar and shouted
in defiance.

“Who sent you? Tell me and I may spare your
life!” His shouts boomed across the dark forest.

The man looked up with a brazen smile, blood
dripping from his mouth, as he must have taken a blow from Tyrin in
the heat of the battle.

Without a word, the man laughed and whistled
five notes that called the fairies to his side.

Purely out of anger, Tyrin looked down at
the man who refused to speak, and swung his sword. With one fell
swoop, the man was dispossessed of his head, and it rolled into the
tree behind his limp body.

Neach could only look on in horror.

A peaceful night had been transformed into
one of blood and treachery.

Around his arm, a band was worn which bore
an orange circle with a yellow and green diamond in the center of
it. Neach recognized it immediately as the crest of someone who was
very well known within the communities of Duncairn: King
Henrig.

“We must go, they will know where we are,”
Tyrin said coolly. His steely resolve was not tested, as the man
whom he had just killed was undoubtedly not his first.

He picked the head and body up and threw
them into the lagoon. The fairies hovered around the man’s remnants
for a few seconds before flying off into the darkness again.

Without a word, Tyrin headed off in the
direction of Jorwel, expecting Neach to follow. Though he said
nothing, Neach felt cold inside. The chill was not derived from the
drop in temperature outside, but rather, from the hardening of his
soul. If he wished to survive, he would need to get used to this
reality: people live and people die, many times at the hands of
each other.

In the depths of the Forest of Light that
night, a whippoorwill sang a song of mourning. Its hymnal grief
brought gloom to the site where a man was killed in cold blood.
Though the chill ran deep and the fog was thick, the cold ran
further than that. For the glowing entities which resided inside
the Forest of Light, the first drops of malicious blood were
spilled by a man who wanted little more than to be alone.

Oh, the blood of one, the blood of all, runs
cleanly through the veins. Ironclad and bladed crowns, the blood
flows all the same.

“
He may be the first, but he
isn’t the last.”

Tyrin wiped his blade with a rag inside the
safety of his home. The only light which shone was a single burning
flame, a few feet from where he stood. It was as if his face had
aged thirty years in a few hours; long lines drew taught below his
eyelids and it look as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“They have been hunting down our House for
weeks now, but this is uncanny,” Tyrin said quietly. He appeared to
be subconsciously acting in his stealth training. The journey back
to the home involved a heat run around the village, past various
partying locals.

“We must act quickly. Though Henrig no doubt
knows of my existence, he will not yet be aware of you. This is why
you are crucial to the plan, Neach, you are a hidden agent in the
fabric of our bloodline,” he said this with a growing admiration
for the young man who he had scorned upon his initial arrival to
Jorwel.

He threw his rag to the ground and slipped
his sword back into its sheath. The blade was crafted of the finest
steel, probably from the coastal community of Cyll. Cyllian steel
was said to be the strongest in the Kingdom, and the unique
proximity of the mines to seawater provided an exponentially more
rigid metal.

Along its hilt, there were various
inscriptions made in their language. Goedish was an aesthetically
pleasing language, with each letter looping together to form a
cohesive linguistic unit. Neach’s proficiency was still limited,
but he could read the phrase that was directly below the blade.

Frillo dirry nervos tun

Translated, it meant “only the righteous can
rule”, but Neach was only aware of that because he had seen it
before on the blade which Fenris had gifted him. Though much
smaller in size, the phrase was encrusted just the same, directly
below the blade.

He must have admired the exquisite piece of
craftsmanship for an elongated period of time before Tyrin scolded
him and regained his focus.

“That blade is like mine,” Neach said.

Tyrin nodded, his mind elsewhere as a
terrible plot was being unfurled across the Kingdom.

“It’s tradition in our bloodline to gift new
initiates a token of our appreciation, for the oath of our
brotherhood is not something which should be taken lightly,” Tyrin
spoke as he looked toward the door, his mind already on the road to
Leirwold.

“We must go now, through Endal to Leirwold,”
Neach proclaimed.

The renewed spirit in the young man, who had
rarely spoken since arriving at his door step, brought a smile to
Tyrin’s face. He nodded in agreement, and the two men headed out
the door.

In ordinary circumstances, they would not
have risked travelling by night; however, the circumstances were
indeed far from the usual. The aid of darkness would provide cover
for their escape from the village toward the capital.

Rine remained tied up outside Tyrin’s home
as Neach removed his bind. He mounted the trusty steed and handed
him a carrot to gnaw on for the next few minutes. If they were to
make it to Leirwold by morning, he would need all of the energy he
could gather.

Tyrin brought his black horse round from the
back of his house and kicked at his side urging him forward. The
horse resembled its rider strikingly. Both held the same chiseled
features and angered posture.

Tyrin kicked on toward the southern road
which was located only a few hundred yards from the entrance to the
spot where Neach had entered the village earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the road was barren. Not a
single person was seen for the first few minutes as they headed
south toward the village of Endal. Along the road, there were small
communities, but nothing of organized stature. The clusters of
homes littered the dark night with small, flickering fires that
seemed to be burning on embers. There was no doubt in Neach’s mind
that the people who inhabited these homes had been fast asleep for
a long time. He wished to accompany them in their spring slumber,
but the issue at hand required immediate attention.

They rode for what must have been near an
hour before a dark, looming structure came into view to the west.
Not visible from the village, it seemed that a large wall had been
erected just east of Jorwel. Perplexed, Neach moved alongside Tyrin
and asked about the monstrosity.

“What is that wall?” Neach asked
tentatively.

Tyrin did not break his gaze from directly
forward. He seemed to understand at this time that Neach had not
been exposed to much as a child, and was generally uninformed about
the Kingdom.

“That there is what the locals call the Gate
of Flaws,” Tyrin responded.

“Hundreds of years old, it was erected by
the late King Rillod in an effort to keep his enemies at bay,”
Tyrin continued, “these days, no one knows what lies beyond the
wall. In the past it had been manned by an army, keeping out what
must have been a real threat. Today, it stands solitary and
undefended, a relic of times passed. The ground remains perpetually
scorched in front of it as a testament to the struggle which ensued
at that place in the distant past,” Tyrin concluded with a sigh. It
seemed he had drawn the parallel between the time he told tales of
and the time which they were moving toward. The conflict on the
horizon could result in much more scorched earth at the cost of
human life.

Hours passed before the village of Endal
appeared in the distance. Along the southern road, the only light
that existed was that of the moon above. Luckily for the two young
men, a full moon illuminated their path and provided a reassuring
breadth of vision on their dark and mysterious route.

The sun would not be up for yet a few more
hours, but the men proceeded at the same pace. Rigorous enough to
make good time, but not so much that it would wear the horses out,
they galloped into the village at a brisk pace and spared no time
for niceties. Though it was Neach’s first time entering the eastern
village, he lacked the attention and energy to take in his
surroundings, as his mind was transfixed elsewhere.

Endal was a smaller version of Leirwold, in
that it served as the hub for the eastern half of the Kingdom.
Though its edifices were less impressive than those in the capital,
deeming it a village seemed a little unfair to the craftsmanship
which had erected such an organized community of thousands.

On its northern, southern, and western
borders, it sat along the Forest of Light, which Neach and Tyrin
had spent time in earlier that day. A great stone wall had been
raised in an effort to keep any wildlife from interacting with the
townspeople on a regular basis. The forest was a beautiful sight in
the nighttime, as it seemed to glow from the inside, permeating out
into the darkness, and acting as an explicative form to comprehend
the delineation of its given name.

Before long, they were headed west out of
the village, directly toward Leirwold. Their path would not deviate
much until sunrise, as they headed on a direct route through the
heart of the forest toward the capital.

The forest cocooned the two weary travelers
in an embrace of mystique. On either side of the road, trees rose
as high as the eye could see and acted as a natural barrier for
Neach and Tyrin. They spoke little in the hours preceding, but as
they entered the depths of the forest, Tyrin slowed to a trot and
began conversation with Neach again.

“Amazing that this place exists, isn’t it?”
he asked Neach. The answer he sought was obvious, but he seemed
willing to hear Neach’s take on the natural beauty of the wooden
fortress that was the Forest of Light.

Neach nodded in agreement and looked to his
right. Tyrin’s chiseled face was illuminated by the moonlight and
he looked the part of a stoic military leader in the current
atmosphere.

“When this is over, I hope to see more of
it,” Neach rebuked.

Tyrin vigorously shook his head in
concurrence, and appeared to appreciate Neach’s desire to return
one day to his oldest haunt. Since he was a young boy, he had spent
countless days exploring the interior of the forest, learning it’s
every crevice.

As a child, Tyrin was brought up by his
father, who was an active member of the House Goedwig. He sent him
into the wild on his own from the age of eight, in order to allow
for the growth of a relationship with the nature that their lineage
hearkened back upon.

In one specific instance, Tyrin had entered
the forest from the northern edge, close to where he and Neach had
entered earlier in the day. After wandering deep into the grip of
the woods, Tyrin found himself lost and alone. A common occurrence
for those who spend their days in the forests of Duncairn, he
gambled on a direction and headed that way with conviction. Night
fell, and he was forced to take shelter in the forest for the
duration of the evening. This was the first time that Tyrin had
fallen in love with its ethereal beauty. While he lay at the base
of a tree, the fairies had come out and greeted him with their
song. They saw that he was not hostile, and cradled him in their
glow to remove any sense of fear from the young boy’s mind. It was
on that night that Tyrin grew fond of the otherworldly beings that
inhabited the land. Their benevolence in the face of his adversity
created a soft spot in his heart for everything that lived within
the wood.

After emerging from the forest that next
day, Tyrin never forgot the grace of the fairies, and made it a
small objective in his mind to protect them from any imminent
danger. Unfortunately, in the current circumstances, the fate of
his House and himself appeared to be in much more peril than that
of the tiny angels of the forest. He learned every inch of the
area, and as he and Neach hurdled across the western road, it was
as if he were doing it with his eyes closed. Tyrin had developed a
form of muscle memory from the previous journeys to the capital
along this path, and knew to avoid the various holes and dangers
that lie along it.

The young men neared their destination as
the first inklings of sunlight crept over the tree line. The
vibrant reds and purples of the early morning sky showed the stark
difference between their current tranquility and the task that
loomed off in the distance.