Bastard

Taren parried Edrik’s first blow almost easily.

The second—already a beat too late.

Their swords crashed together over the silver line, and the impact numbed Taren’s fingers. He stepped back, forcing himself not to look at the black altar behind him. Ordrik, Mereina, Rodgar, Kassian, and the witnesses chosen in advance stood around the edge of the circle. No one intended to interfere.

That was how it had been arranged.

“What’s wrong?” Edrik was smiling. “Stableboy tired?”

Taren said nothing.

He saw every mistake his brother made. Elbow too high. Shoulder moving too soon. Weight on the front foot. On an ordinary day, an opponent like that would not have lasted a minute against him.

But this was no ordinary day.

Kassian’s potion had already reached his legs. His fingers obeyed with a delay, the crypt walls swam, and the torches left red streaks across his vision. Taren knew where his foot had to land—and his body arrived there a moment too late.

Edrik came at him again.

Taren knocked the blade aside, stepped in, and cut back. The point passed a hand’s breadth from the heir’s throat.

The smile vanished from Rodgar’s face.

“Hit him!”

Edrik recoiled. Fear flashed in his eyes before anger did.

Taren saw it.

And for the first time that night, he believed he might still leave the circle alive.

He took the next step.

His left leg buckled.

Taren only had time to twist his body.

Edrik’s blade went in beneath his ribs.

First came the dull impact. Then heat.

The air burst from his lungs. The sword slipped from his weakened fingers and struck the stone.

Edrik yanked his blade free.

“That’s it, bastard.”

Taren dropped to one knee. Blood ran down his side and pooled in the silver groove by his boot.

He looked up at his father.

Ordrik watched calmly.

Not like a father watching his dying son.

Like an owner watching a thing that had finally served its purpose.

Taren did not yet know that in a few moments, the rules that had held the five kingdoms together would stop working the way they had for centuries.

He knew only one thing: he had no intention of dying for Edrik.

* * *

Twelve Years Before That Night

For two hundred years, the continent of Zagrea had been dying the slow death of five divided states.

When the ancient united Empire fell, the world broke into fragments sealed inside their own pride. The kings of the five kingdoms taught their subjects one central dogma: a man was defined solely by the blood of his estate, and power was granted to the lawful descendants of the great houses through the ancient sacrament of First Blood.

While the nobles of the five crowns butchered one another in endless border clashes, common folk paid for it with their lives. Arkenor’s grain rotted in warehouses while Veldrein starved in the mountains. Veldrein’s iron was sold to Sallar for gold, and Sallar hoarded knowledge in the sealed towers of its mages while Roven’s mercenaries burned border villages.

In the darkest corner of Varden, the capital’s castle, among horse manure and the guards’ contemptuous stares, grew a boy whose birth violated the established order. The bastard of the reigning king Ordrik III, son of Maera, a stable servant who had died in childbirth, had no right to a coat of arms, an inheritance, or a place beside the sovereign’s legitimate children. He spent his first years with another woman’s wet nurse, and from the age of seven he was given a corner by the western stables.

The world did not yet know what that hatred, scorched into him year after year, would become.