Prologue
It was an ordinary night until the yard was filled with the sound of a dozen swords sliding from their sheaths. The guards shouted warnings at an intruder, their hounds barking in kind. But soon the barks became whimpers, and the guards were shouting in fear.
The head servant stepped out onto the high porch of Castle Hillport. She didn’t need her lantern to see the guards and their dogs circling about the yard as though caught in a violent storm, their armor sometimes catching the moonlight.
The servant rushed back inside, ordered the guards to bar the doors, and ran to find the captain.
The eight guards in the main hall dropped the bar at the very moment an unseen force caused it to rock. One of the guards was thrown off his feet. The sergeant noticed the doors had blasted outward, as though they had been pulled from the outside.
They shook twice more in rapid succession.
All eight guards surrounded the door, their swords drawn toward it.
The captain’s boots came clanking down the stairs. “How many are there? Did anybody see anything?”
“No, captain,” the sergeant replied. “But there’s magic involved.”
“You’re certain?”
The room of mortar and stone rumbled as the doors exploded from the castle, their splinters scattering to the stars. The bar that held them shut remained, undamaged, across the open archway.
Archers came rushing in along the upper level, filling the mezzanine. Their bows strained in loud creaks as they trained their arrows at the door.
The night went quiet again as the splinters fell slowly over the yard, and upon the tall staircase of the porch.
The guards remained watchful. The captain stood behind his shield and mace.
The silence broke to footsteps climbing the porch stairs.
The guards and captain tightened the hold on their weapons and shields, the archers tightened the strings of their bows.
The footsteps were slow and soft, but unyielding.
At the horizon of the porch, a figure rose: a blue robe decorated in black triangles. The man who wore it crossed the porch and passed beneath the unbroken bar, entering the main hall. The guards all recognized his fair skin, distinct jaw, and hair as black as the sky behind him.
“Magistrate…” the guard captain said, stepping forward. “What is the cause for this behavior?”
The blue-clad magistrate stopped in the middle of the hall, forty arrows trained upon his neck from the surrounding mezzanine.
He said to the captain, “Take me to Lord Orlin.”
The captain lowered his shield and raised his mace. “You’re going nowhere but to prison for vandalism and assault!” He looked to his sergeant. “Arrest him.”
The sergeant paused, then looked to his guards. “Men, escort the magistrate into town.”
The guards gingerly surrounded the man in the blue robe. Two of them stepped alongside him, each reaching for one of his arms. The moment they touched him, the steel of their gauntlets became red hot. They struggled to pull them off as the heat spread through the armor on their bodies.
“Loose!” the captain shouted.
The forty archers on the mezzanine released their arrows, every one of which vanished within inches of the target. They reappeared within inches of the archers, with all the momentum of their release. All forty archers were struck dead, some falling over the railing to the stone floor.
Two guards lay helpless as their armor melted upon them.
Six standing guards, including the sergeant, escaped the castle through the open archway.
“Cowards!” the captain cried out after them.
The fleeing soldiers were met on the porch by a little man in black, who landed there from somewhere above the castle’s entrance. He dispatched two of the guards with his bare hands, breaking a neck and crushing a throat. The guards who ran ahead were met by a man of seven feet, who came storming up the porch steps, swinging an eight-foot sword. One swing ejected three legs from their stumps, sending their owners tumbling down the steps. A sidestep and another swing cut a man almost in two. The last guard was picked up by the big man and flung against the bar in the front doorway, breaking his back.
The magistrate in the blue robe looked to the guard captain.
The captain threw his mace and shield aside. He wound up a spell of luminous orange in the palm of his hand and cast it at the magistrate. But instead of projecting, the spell was forced back through the captain’s arm, lighting his veins, then exploding out of his eyes. He collapsed like he was made of twigs.
The magistrate looked to his two allies on the porch. “Guard the entrance.”
The bigger man stepped forward and brought his sword down upon the solid wooden bar, breaking it into a partial barrier.
The smaller man sneered at the act. “Oh, look at me, I can chop some wood!”
The magistrate proceeded through the castle to the coaxing of yet more guards; he didn’t break stride as he flung them against walls and crushed their bodies with their own armor.
The last twelve guards retreated to a corridor on the third floor, at the end of which stood the door to Lord Orlin’s chambers. They aimed their swords and halberds at him. One of them was trembling.
Without so much as a twitch of his eyelid, the magistrate pulled the men into a straight line, crushing them into a battering ram of flesh and iron. The block they formed was so tight that blood dripped from it like a wrought sponge. The human ram flew straight through the bedroom door, and the magistrate followed it inside.
Inside, a gentle fire gave light to a room with a table and a chair, both of which cast long shadows. In the chair was a small, middle-aged man, his round face ensconced in the bushy collar of a fur robe. Standing next to him was a woman in leather armor, a dagger in each hand. She glared with anger at the doorway, where the magistrate was standing.
But Lord Orlin regarded the magistrate with fear. “Meldorath…” he said to him. “Why are you doing this?”
The magistrate stepped into the room. “You have been found out, my lord.”
Orlin tilted his head. “What are you talking about?”
The magistrate answered, “Indecent acts upon children.”
With a gasp, the lord drew back against his chair.
“I’ve guarded this man’s person for years,” the leather-clad woman said with a scowl as sharp as her daggers. “Everyone in this castle knows he’s never touched a child.”
The magistrate looked at her. “Everyone in this castle will be remembered for abetting him.”
“I love children!” Lord Orlin protested. “I invite them to my home. We socialize!”
“Yes,” the magistrate replied. “I know all about your social parties.”
“I never so much as patted a child on the head!”
“It’s too late, Lord Orlin,” said the Magistrate. “Children have already begun speaking up.”
The lord growled. “What witchcraft is this?”
“I am no witch, and you are no longer Hillport’s lord.”
The bodyguard lunged across the room with speed that impressed even the magistrate. All the same, he projected her against the ceiling, disintegrating her with blinding luminosity, until all that remained of her was a shadow upon the stone.
In a panic, Lord Orlin jumped from his chair, scampering past the magistrate.
And the magistrate let him go.
Frantically, the lord ran through the hillside town in the dead of night, slamming on doors, shouting through the streets, even the side streets made of dirt, that he had harmed the child of no one.
By the magistrate’s unique authority, the crazed lord was arrested and held on charges of undisclosed perversion.
At first, the town was curious. Then the evidence came to bear.
It wasn’t a week later that the small-town jail was stormed by the people. Lord Orlin was dragged out and set upon. Only the smallest circle of the mob could have known if he was still alive when his body was brought to a pit outside of town and burned.
That very same mob might have tried the same act upon the king himself, if His Majesty did not confer lordship of Hillport upon their heroic magistrate, who single-handedly closed this unspeakable chapter in their town’s history.
Thus, no longer magistrate, he was now Lord Meldorath.
* * *
Three months later, a woman came to Castle Hillport. She entered that bedroom on the third floor, the one with the table, chair, and fireplace. She had a robe of green and black, her hood pulled back over hair of blazing red.
“Lord Meldorath,” she said, “you’re under arrest.”
His chair facing the fire, the lord turned his head toward her and calmly asked, “By whose authority?”
There was fear on the face of this hardened mage-commander as she answered, “His Majesty, the king.”
“And the charges?” said the lord.
The commander replied, “We do not live in the Lands of the Princes; lives are not toys.”
“Am I to presume there will be no trial?”
“It is the king’s wish that you come quietly, my lord.”
“He means to execute me quietly.”
“Think what you wish, Lord Meldorath. Half the Eastern Army surrounds this castle, and I am not the only mage among them.”
“Yet you stand alone now.”
The commander swallowed, and nodded. “The king commanded that I act respectfully.”
The hint of a smile appeared on one corner of the lord’s mouth. “I wonder if he was being friendly on my behalf, or on yours?” He regarded her for another moment, drinking her fear. Then, slowly, he stood. “So be it, woman.” He pulled his hood over his eyes. “Do unto me as your king commands.”
He followed her out of the room, where ten soldiers of magic were waiting, their leather armor tucked under black robes. They surrounded him as the commander guided the procession through the castle. Other soldiers, who were positioned around the castle, mages and swordsmen alike, stood down as the procession passed. By the time the lord was stepping out onto the porch under the afternoon sun, a hundred soldiers were leaving alongside him.
And there were many more in the walled-in yard, who exited the castle’s property in a quasi-parade, then marched down the hill, through the central street of Hillport, toward the great ocean before them.
Townspeople of this lower-class speck on the Voulhirian shore came out to see the quiet parade. It may well have been every soul who lived there watching as the lord made it to the docks, to the ship that was waiting for him.
All made way as Meldorath, now former lord of Hillport, stood before it on that bright, late-summer day. Every soldier, whether they wielded magic or steel, kept their good distance, but watched him well. Most of them were sweating under the sun, but none dared wipe it from their faces.
Meldorath turned his shadowed face back to the arresting commander, the red-head in green and black, and saw the eyes of every citizen and soldier that watched him. For a moment, he had something to say: a final message for the king of Voulhire.
But he thought better of it. Instead, he turned back toward the ship, walked up the ramp, and disappeared within its lower decks.
A team of mages brought a wind that pushed the ship gently away from shore.
The soldiers, commanders, and townspeople all watched quietly until the ship had disappeared into the blue horizon.
