Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Arc 3: Chapter 9: Winter Lingers

Arc 3: Chapter 9: Winter Lingers

“It shouldn’t be this cold still,” Maxim said, pulling his fur cloak tighter. “Spring should have come by now.”

I blew out a frosting breath into the morning. “It’s not the first time we’ve had a long winter.”

The old knight shook his head, his gray face contracted into a deep frown. “I… feel it. You’re too young, but the oldest of us were able to sense these things. When spring arrived, it filled us with strength. When the leaves began to turn, the onset of winter would sharpen us. I felt spring come two weeks back…”

He waved a hand to the white woods. “But the cold just won’t let go. It feels like a fist, gripping tight.”

I glanced at Oraeka, seeing my worry mirrored in the elf’s eyes. Maxim had been getting better, but he still dipped into these bouts of manic melancholy and prophetic doom on occasion. Every day, we watched for another violent fit.

Without Rysanthe, I wasn’t certain I could bring him back from another one. There’d still been no word from the other Doomsman.

“It’s an ill sign,” Maxim murmured, pulling his cloak tighter around himself. “All ill. All sick.” He turned around and stalked back into the cottage, muttering to himself.

“He may be right,” Oraeka said once the knight had closed the door behind him, leaving us in the snowy yard. She glanced down at me from her near seven feet of height, her lips pressed tight to hide her wolf's fangs. “This winter has fangs.”

I sniffed and turned to face the hillside leading down to the shrine. “You’ll find evil omens anywhere you look for them, Oraeka. The happy man sees roses, and the grim one sees thorns.”

The Sidhe warrior fell into step next to me, stooping slightly as she passed beneath a low hanging branch. “Lillian Crath. I did not think you read the works of philosophers.”

I paused as we reached the bottom of the hill, folding my arms to bring the folds of my cloak more tightly together. “Fidei used to read to me. Crath was one of her favorites.”

The words had slipped out without thought. I saw Oraeka’s frown, the concern she’d shown for Maxim now directed toward me. Annoyed with her expression and with myself, I turned my attention forward as we passed into the fountain circle. The frozen pools glittered under the pale sun, and snow crunched beneath us as we moved into the main shrine.

Oria’s Fane is mostly wilderness, save for a few scattered abodes. There is the small cottage on the hill where Maxim and I sleep — Emma too, and if I had any doubt to her dedication to being my disciple, it had ended after several weeks of her sleeping under the same roof as two curse-burdened soldiers troubled by frequent bad sleep and night terrors.

We’d have the second cottage finished soon enough, and that would give both Maxim and Emma more privacy. Until then, however, we were all forced to rub elbows.

Besides the cottage, the Fane had the ancient shrine, an open-air building consisting of a raised floor and ceiling connected by a ring of sixteen pillars. Rose vines and other greenery would crawl across the shrine and the fountain circle during warmer months, but in winter it all stood cold, crystalline, and clean.

Somewhere in the near distance, the sound of a great hammer striking an anvil rang like metallic thunder through the woods. I turned in that direction, leaving Oraeka to return to her endless vigil over the sanctuary. I passed into the woods beyond the shrine, delving deep into a sprawl of high trees and shadowed groves. Huge, silvery webs woven into complex and frankly beautiful shapes circumnavigated the forest. I’d long ago learned to use them as guides, keeping to safe paths.

An intruder would find the subtle labyrinth much less helpful.

The clangs of the hammer grew louder as I went, soon enough drowning out all other noise, even most thought. I paused, took out two plugs of wax, and pressed them into my ears. The sound muted, though I still felt the clamor, a concussive echo which made every branch in the woods shudder.

Soon enough I approached the edge of a cliff dropping fifty feet or more into an even denser wilderness. Smoke rose from cracks in the rock, mixing darker shades into the veil of winter white. I picked my way down the cliff, using a series of shallow switchbacks and jutting roots to guide my way. I’d have to offer thanks to the wisps for keeping it free of ice. I could see their lights in the darker parts of the woods below, winking in and out like big fireflies.

At the bottom of the cliff I found a cave, a wound in the rock stretching thirty feet high and descending steeply down. The sound of hammering became a truly physical thing here, quivering through the rock around me. I passed beneath arches and other supports of stone, metal, and wood, like the kind one might find in a mine — only these shouted with artistry, made for aesthetic as much as function.

As it always is with dwarves.

I stripped out of my cloak and winter coat as I delved further into the wave of heat billowing out from the depths of the cave. A dull ember-colored light guided me deeper underground, until I reached a section of the tunnel that widened sharply into a cavernous chamber. A forge lay inside, the center of the cave dominated by a huge kiln. Stern faces carved from the rock, each taller than a man, stared down at me, and a chimney carved into the domed ceiling devoured the forge’s smoke.

Hunched over an anvil taller than I was stood a gray-skinned behemoth of a figure. More than twenty feet tall, powerfully if squatly built, his storm-cloud beard smoldered with the same fire that burned in his forge. Caim lifted his hammer once, then brought it down with a speed and precision that belied his size.

I could not see the thing on the anvil. Whatever it was, it must have been very small in comparison to the smith, yet that blow clanged off it in a shower of sparks and teeth-clenching force as though it were the side of an iron gate.

Emma, stripped down to a tunic and trousers in the heat of the forge, watched Caim’s work intently from the side. I moved to stand near her. Her amber eyes, so reminiscent of a bird of prey in their unblinking largeness and color, flickered toward me. I felt a surge of satisfaction at that — even deafened, the same wax plugs in her ears as in mine, her reflexes had become keen over months of training.

Placing my winter garments down on a jut of rock, I moved my hands through a series of complex movements, signing at her.

How long has he been going?

Emma furrowed her brow in thought a moment, then signed back.

Thirteen hours? Longer yesterday.

I signed back, seeing the concern in the sharpness of her gestures. He doesn’t need as much sleep as you or I.

We both went still then, watching the dwarf giant work for a time. After perhaps half an hour, the hill-trembling hammer went silent. I could still feel its after-echoes, and not just in the thunderous silence which tends to follow great noise. Caim worked aura into his craft, weaving Art into metal and stone, and his power hung like the stink of ozone in the air.

Emma and I both removed the wax from our ears as the dwarf plucked something off the anvil. It was too small for me to see, pinched between a thumb and forefinger thick as my chest. He turned his back on us, hunching over a stone table. A while later, he turned toward us with all the slow, deliberate gravitas of a moon cresting over a horizon.

With eyes smoldering like dull blue embers, the dwarf beckoned. Emma took a deep breath, then stepped forward. Caim’s deep voice, its volume carefully modulated, filled the cave.

“Where a Doomsman walks, the shadow of Death’s wings fall. It is best to be prepared. May this begin you on the path you seek to walk, Little Hawk.”

He presented what he held, letting it unfurl as he pinched each sleeve in the thumb and forefinger of a separate hand. It was a shirt of chain mail with short sleeves, fashioned of a pale metal — no doubt it had been steel, until Caim had started introducing other, stranger elements in with his Art.

Emma studied the armor a moment, her expression unreadable. She stepped forward on long legs, closing the distance in two assured strides at odds with the sudden hesitance she showed as she reached for the shirt. She took it from the dwarf, letting it hang from her own grasp.

She glanced at me uncertainly, and I nodded.

“What are you waiting for?” I gave her a small, rare smile. “Put it on.”

She did, sliding the pale steel links over her neck after a moment of awkwardness. Though she’d been trained in swords, I guess Brenner Hunting hadn’t thought much of the idea of giving a teenage girl a full education on the ways of war. When done, she turned to face me, spreading her hands out and quirking a dark eyebrow in an almost challenging way, as though daring me to make fun.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I had no intention of doing so. Emma was tall, her youthful lankiness having gone to assured leanness over the winter, her dark hair secured in a pragmatic ponytail to leave her face, more striking than traditionally pretty, starkly bare. She’d had a preference for androgynous clothing since I’d met her, pushing the masculine.

The armor almost seemed to complete her in a way I couldn’t fully articulate. Falling down to just above mid thigh, with its short sleeves and the pattern-woven leather sewn around its shoulders, it made her look hard and dangerous. Caim had gone more elegant with this piece, and the chain seemed to hug the girl like a second shirt, accentuating her height and slim build.

She looked like something between a particularly martial page and an assassin.

“Well?” Emma asked. The casual way she said it stood at odds with the slight tightening at the corners of her lips. She cared what I thought, what I’d say.

“You look half a knight,” I said, nodding once. Turning to Caim I said, “it warded yet?”

“Every link,” the dwarf rumbled. “She is armed just as the pages of Seydis were before its fall.”

Emma’s eyes widened at that. “You didn’t tell me.”

I shrugged. “The Alder Table didn’t really do squires — we were all seasoned fighters of one sort or another before swearing our oaths. Closest I could think of were the Goldfinches — the pages of Seydis. They tended to go about armed with light swords and chain mail beneath their uniforms, running messages and the like. There wasn’t anyone in all the realms of Urn better at navigating the Wending Roads, and we worked closely with them.”

Seeing Emma’s thoughtful expression I added, “you’ll be clanking around in full plate soon enough, kid, don’t you worry.”

“Why don’t you?” She asked, eyeing me. I didn’t wear my armor then, having been at the Fane for some time with no expectation of immediate violence. “You only wear that chainmail coat with some light reinforcements.”

I shrugged. “Not a knight, remember? Besides, all the walking around I do? It would kill my legs.”

She snorted at that, then turned and dipped into a martial bow to the dwarven smith. “Thank you, Forgemaster.”

Caim only grumbled and turned back to his tools. “Delicate work. I prefer stone. Stone supports. Stone lasts and remembers. Metal bends.”

Emma glanced at me, looking concerned at the smith’s sudden change in mood. I just shrugged and signed. He gets like this sometimes. It’s the cold. He hates it.

She smiled and nodded, pressing a finger to her lips.

Donning our winter clothes, we went back out into the woods and the biting cold. Emma moved stiffly, occasionally stretching this way or that, getting used to the unaccustomed weight.

“I thought it would be…” she winced. “Lighter? Magic armor and all that.”

“It will need some time to attune to your aura,” I told her. “Was the same with the armor I got from the elves last year. Even worse with the set I wore with the Table. Caim is a dour fellow — he puts a lot of thought, a lot of weight into everything he makes.”

I rapped a fist against one of her shoulders, feeling the metal beneath her coat. “Caim uses Art for his smithing. Some of his own soul is in this steel.”

Emma nodded slowly. “I can feel it. He’s very…” she glanced back at the cave, as though worried the towering smith could hear. “Intense.”

“Rysanthe told me he once spent five centuries working on a statue deep underground,” I said. “When he finally finished it, the queen who’d commissioned it had been dead so long you could hardly trace her ancestry. He’s… dedicated to his work.”

Emma’s eyebrows went up. “Ah. I suppose I should be glad this only took him three months.” She placed a hand over her lower chest.

“It’s one step,” I told her.

“And the next?” She asked, as we began ascending the cliff, me taking the lead. “Has there still been no word from the Choir?”

I paused at the top of the first turn in the switchback. “No,” I said. “It’s been quiet. I haven’t even seen Donnelly since that last job.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened,” Emma said as we began ascending again. “The last time you went out on Their orders, I mean.”

I glanced back at her, seeing the curiosity in her eyes. “You want to be a knight, Emma Orley, not a Headsman. No need to worry about my work.”

I went another ten feet before she spoke again. “You’ve been worse since you got back. Sleeping badly, angrier. We all see it.”

She said this flippantly, her prim and proper noble’s accent rearing its head. It annoyed me, and I clenched my jaw.

“Why do you do it anyway?” She pressed from below, having fallen behind a ways. “What made a Golden Knight of Seydis an executioner?”

I didn’t answer, and I heard her scoff below as she gave up on her questions. I waited until we’d both reached the top of the cliff, then paused and looked out over the white woods. Emma positioned herself next to me, adjusting the winter coat she’d put over her new armor. When I didn’t move, she went still.

“How much do you know about the Table?” I asked.

She thought a moment before replying. “Only the stories. They say the Knights of the Alder Table were the greatest warriors in all of Urn, or even the whole world. They say…”

She trailed off a moment, then finished in a less assured tone. “They say some of the knights betrayed the elf king, that they were working with the Recusants, or were Recusant…”

“Some of them,” I said, after a long silence. I closed my eyes against a sudden gust of wind that set my cloak aflutter, clutching at its collar. Did I feel some of the fangs Oraeka had mentioned in that gust? I could hear clashing steel and the screaming music of Art beneath the wind. When I closed my eyes, I could see the blood of men and worse things smoking on my sword.

I saw Alicia and the rest gathered in the audience hall, their hands empty. All their blades were in the Archon.

“To this day, I don’t know why the High Captain did it. I don’t know what it was for, what she and her followers hoped to gain. Power? Revenge?” I opened my eyes, letting the serene coldness of the Fane chase the images away. “So many of the other paladins had been what they were for so long. The older ones, like Maxim, they became more like elves over time. They saw things I didn’t, understood things I couldn’t. I was the newest member, the youngest. I wasn’t inducted to all the order’s secrets.”

I looked out toward the setting sun, feeling very tired. How long had I dwelt on these things? When had I stopped trying to come up with answers?

“The Archon… the elf king, Tuvon, he wasn’t just our leader. He was the lynchpin of the realm’s magics, the lock to a number of seals. It’s why the weather’s been strange ever since he died, why the ghosts and other magical beings are all acting half mad. Our job was to protect him, and help him keep those seals strong and secure. We were his hands, his eyes. Sometimes we were his punishing fist. And the magic the Sidhe put in us… it changed us, and not all for the better.”

I turned to face Emma, letting her see the gold in my eyes.. “It wasn’t about honor, or justice, or chivalry… our job had just as many ugly secrets and half-truths as anything else. Being what I am now might not be pretty, but it’s at least honest. When the Headsman arrives, you know what he’s there for.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed. “Nonsense.”

I lifted my chin. “Come again?”

She met my eyes squarely, showing no trace of contrition. “Nonsense. When you arrived at my manor, you could have passed judgment on me or my great-grandfather. You might have been ordered to execute me if that trial had gone differently. You promised to protect me instead. You risked your life on my account. Is that not knightly?”

I scoffed, turning my eyes from hers. “That was… different. I wasn’t there as Headsman.”

“Even if you had been, would you have made different choices?”

“…Maybe not,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with oaths or codes. Anyone could have made those choices.”

“You try very hard to twist everything you do into something less than it is,” Emma said. “You want to know what I think?”

“Do I have a choice?” I asked her tiredly.

“No. I think you have something like a moral compass beneath all that surly callousness you exude, and you try very hard to find justifications for following it. Why not just do as you please?”

“Because that’s a dangerous road,” I said, hardening my voice. “It can lead down dangerous paths, and I can’t afford that. It might be withered, but I still have some holy fire in me. I have a responsibility to keep that out of the wrong hands. I can’t…”

I let out a frustrated hiss and began walking back toward the shrine.

“Can’t what?” Emma asked as she fell into step beside me, relentless.

“Why do you care so much?” I snapped. “You and Catrin both. I don’t understand why it matters to either of you.”

“Who’s Catrin?”

I flinched. I hadn’t told Emma, or anyone at the Fane, about Cat. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I have to be careful, Emma. I can’t just do as I please — the immortals might not all be perfect or benevolent or all-knowing, but they’ve been around a hell of a lot longer than me. I’d rather trust they know what they’re talking about when they warn about supernatural calamities and dire consequences, because I…”

I sighed. “Every time I’ve taken matters into my own hands, it’s gone to shit.”

“That’s a very convenient justification for letting others make your decisions,” Emma said primly. “Do you let them take on all the consequences too? The guilt?”

I’d forgotten, during the last few months, that the nobleborn girl I’d taken under my wing could be a bit of an annoying little brat.

“You see what’s happened to Maxim,” I said, my voice cold as the surrounding air. “You’ve seen his night terrors, his fits? You see how he talks to himself all the time?”

She fell quiet at that, though she still had sullen defiance glittering in her eyes.

“Outside this sanctuary,” I continued without slowing my pace, “it would be worse. You’ve seen it when we’ve traveled outside these woods.” I waved a hand at our surrounds. “I attract ghosts. I have to wear this to keep them out of my head.” I gestured violently at my ring. “We’re haunted because of our failures. That’s a consequence for screwing up when you walk alongside divine powers, Emma, and we’ll suffer it our whole lives. There’s a damn good reason for everything I do and everything I’m afraid of.”

I stopped suddenly, wheeling on her. “So, if it’s all the same, I’d appreciate it if I could stop getting all these fucking opinions about how bad my mood is.”

I hadn’t realized I’d nearly shouted toward the end until I all but felt the weight of the ensuing silence. Emma glared at me, her lips pressed tight.

Before either of us could say more, our attention was drawn by a rustling in the branches overhead. I glanced up, and found eight shining glass eyes returning my gaze. A spider the size of a large dog crouched amid the lower branches, watching us. The liquid patterns across its perfectly round abdomen were reminiscent of marble, shaded all in deep blue and gray.

“Farfin.” I nodded to the Cant Spider, recognizing his patterns. “What is it?”

The enormous spider quivered, and some of the glinting webs strung between the branches produced an eerie, musical sound like plucked lute strings. Its mandibles split open, revealing a delicate mouth shaped very like a human’s. It spoke in a beautiful, sibilant voice. “I was asked to tell you, Headsman. Lady Rysanthe has returned. She requests your presence.”

I drew in a long breath, then let it out in a frosting exhale. I let go of a good deal of my tension with that breath. I looked at Emma, seeing she still had anger writ on her face, evident in her clenched jaw and stiff posture.

Time to deal with that later. Turning back to Farfin I said, “I’ll speak with her.”