Prologue
The Great Hall of House Aikman had not been built for silence. Its vaulted ceiling had been raised to carry the sound of feasts, of laughter echoing off stone, of a lord’s voice reaching every corner when he stood to toast his name. Tonight, the hall carried something else. The wet rasp of breathing through broken teeth. The shuffle of soldiers’ boots on flagstone. The low, animal sound of a woman trying not to weep.
Outside, the mountain peak was a jagged, black tooth, biting into a sky the color of a fresh bruise. A predatory blizzard howled across the peaks, screaming through the valleys and slamming directly into the fortress. Snow came in through the shattered doors in violent, stinging sheets. It drifted across the threshold in thin white tongues, melting where it met the thick, steaming lake of crimson blood that had pooled between the stones. The freezing air struck the liquid, forming a horrific slush—a congealing, pink-tinged crust over the expanding gore. The braziers along the walls had been kicked over during the breach. One still burned on its side, its coals hissing and spitting against the damp floor as they dissolved the frost, throwing a crooked light across the faces of those kneeling.
There were eleven of them. Lord Bren Aikman, Head of House Aikman, knelt at the center, his wrists bound behind him with iron cord that bit so deep into his flesh it had split the skin, leaving frozen, dark crusts along his knuckles. His jaw was swollen and shattered where a gauntleted fist had struck him, a steady trickle of dark, venous blood dripped from his chin. His eyes were open and fixed on a point beyond the soldiers, beyond the hall, beyond anything that still existed for him in this world. Beside him, Lady Sana Aikman knelt with her knees pressed into the wet stone, her hair unbound and hanging across her face in dark ropes. Her hands were not tied. They had not needed to be. She had stopped fighting the moment they told her where Annar was.
Behind them, in a ragged line, the others knelt in various states of despair. Lords and Ladies of three houses, stripped of their cloaks and their dignity and arranged like livestock for the counting. The sub-zero wind stripped away their body heat, turning their skin a ghostly blue. Some bled from ragged wounds taken during their arrest—the deep, jagged gashes of halberds and broadswords that leaked dark fluid onto the stones, the iron-scent of internal trauma heavy in the air. Some had not been touched at all and knelt in the particular stillness of people who understood that stillness was the only currency they had left, their breath pluming in thick, desperate clouds that seemed to crystallize in the air.
A man in the black and silver of the Gracemarian Republic stood before them all. He was not tall, and yet, in that moment, he could have been the giant sent to David, only, in this story, David did not slew the giant Goliath, he was squashed. Flattened like a bug in dirt. The man held a scroll in one hand, and a short sword in the other, and he read from the scroll in a voice that carried neither pleasure nor regret.
“By the word of The Platinum Pariah, Sovereign of the Gracemarian Republic, Keeper of the Eternal Accord, Protector of the Draconic Pact, the Houses of Aikman, Aethelgard, and Pyre are found guilty of conspiracies against the throne. Their lands are forfeit. Their titles are dissolved. Their bloodlines are stricken from the rolls of the Republic.” He paused, the scroll trembling once in his hand before he steadied it. “The sentence…is death.”
No one screamed. That was the unsettling part. Eleven people heard the words that ended their lives, and not a single one so much as flinched. Perhaps they had known. Perhaps they had come to terms with this finality the moment the doors came down around them, soldiers of House Graves pouring in to slaughter their brothers and sisters like cattle. Soldiers that should not have known, that should not have been there without purpose. And yet they knew, and they were there, and they did have a purpose, for someone had told them everything.
Sorovia.
Bren Aikman’s lips moved around the name, though no sound came. He had trusted them. He had sat across from Gravitus Sorovia in this very hall, in this very season, and laid out the shape of their failed coup like a man dealing cards to a friend. Every route. Every garrison. Every name. Gravitus had nodded. Had poured the wine they sipped between hushed tones. And it was Gravitus who had gone to the Platinum Pariah before said cups had even emptied.
“Sana.”
Bren’s voice came out broken. A sound like something tearing. His wife turned to him. Her face was a ruin of grief, but her eyes were steady, and in them was something harder than grief: a calculation. A final, desperate, arithmetic.
“They have Annar,” she whispered. “At the Gelemerian Temple. The Tovarian one. She’s there with the other children.”
“I know.”
“She doesn’t know what’s happening. She doesn’t understand any of this. She’s only eight years old, Bren. Eight.”
He closed his eyes.
“When they come for me,” Sana swallowed. Her voice dropped to an octave so low that only he could hear it. “I am going to beg, do you understand? I am going to beg them for her life. I need you to not stop me.”
“Sana.”
“Don’t.” Sana’s lips trembled, but her eyes were unflinchingly stern. “Do not tell me it won’t work. Do not tell me there is dignity in silence. I don’t want dignity, Bren. I want our daughter’s life spared.” She blinked away tears. “I want her, at least, to live.”
Bren opened his eyes and looked at his wife. He looked at her, truly, the way a man looks at something he is seeing for the last time, and knows it. “Then beg.” He whispered.
The man with the scroll, a commander for The Gracemarian Republic’s armies, stepped forward. He gestured, and two soldiers hauled a woman from the far end of the line upward. Lady Cassia Pyre. She was younger than the others. She had been Lord Devos Pyre’s most recent wife, taken from the Grey Ports on the coast. A woman of oriental birth, it was her beauty that had been Lord Pyre’s driving force. Now, Lord Devos Pyre was dead, and the raven haired beauty he had so mercilessly pursued struggled against the soldiers’ grip, finally fighting back. Her hair was matted with blood from a gash above her ear. She sobbed as they dragged her to the center of the hall. She did not speak. She looked at the commander with the flat, broken expression of a woman who had already died somewhere inside herself and was waiting for her body to catch up.
They did not use a sword on Cassia Pyre. They used fire.
“Something befitting a Lady of your House.” One of the soldiers had grinned as he and another drove an iron stake into the gap between two flagstones, and chained her to it. Another soldier came forward with a torch and a clay jug of pitch. He poured the pitch at her feet in a slow, deliberate circle, and the black liquid caught the torchlight, gleaming like a living beast.
Cassia watched him pour, her breath quickening. She watched the way a person watches a coming storm through a window, with fear and a suspension that could not be quelled, but also an understanding that what is happening is happening to the world, and not just her. Then the torch came down. The fire took her legs first. It climbed her skirts in a rush of orange and white, and the heat hit the kneeling prisoners in front of her like a wall. The temperature in the hall spiked violently, melting the snow drifts beside her into muddy torrents. The smell—that was the thing that broke them. Not the sight. The sight could be turned away from. But that unforgettable scent of burning hair, blistering yellow fat, and roasting flesh filled the hall with an unforgiving ferocity, as if meaning to announce itself and be acknowledged in every corner. Every crack. The pitch and heat expanded the gash on her head, making the blood boil and hiss against her skull. One of the kneeling men began to retch violently, vomiting bile onto the pooling gore, while another began to pray, and Cassia Pyre began to scream. It was not a human sound. It was the sound of something being unmade. A sin being cleansed. As her flesh split and blackened, peeling away to reveal charred, white bone beneath, the blistering fat dripped onto the stones, fueling the flames with her body.
Sana pressed her forehead to the stone and covered her ears with her hands, but the sound came through her palms. It rang through the stone, through the very bones of the hall itself. Bren did not look away. He watched Cassia burn through blurred eyes with his jaw clenched so tight that blood ran from where his teeth had bitten through his lips. Looking away would have felt like leaving her alone in it, and it took a long time.
When it was over, the hall was quieter than it had been before Though this silence held a different atmosphere now. The air was thicker, heavier; pressed down by the weight of what was left of Cassia’s body which now lay, slumped forward, still smoldering. Whisps of smoke lifted into the air like tiny slits of a broken spirit, desperately searching for a light that did not exist. It hung in the vaulted ceiling like a second sky, thick with the oily soot of incinerated marrow.
The commander turned to the line.
They killed them, all of them, one by one, and the efficiency and methodology used was monstrous. A Lord of Aethelgard, Lord Suming, gray-bearded and shaking, was struck with a heavy bearded axe. The blade splitting his collarbone down to the sternum, opening his chest cavity with a wet, sucking sound; his lungs collapsed in a spray of frothy, bright red foam that hissed against the cold air before his body folded forward in a shaking heap.
Next was a young knight, also from Pyre, who wept openly and called for his Mother. A soldier stepped behind him and drove a dagger upward through the soft tissue beneath his jaw. The steel pierced the brain; the boy’s eyes rolled back as a dark, heavy fountain of crimson burst from his mouth, painting the white snow banks behind him a horrific, steaming red.
Next was his Mother, a woman whose name no one had spoken in years. She was disemboweled with a casual, sweeping stroke of a falchion. She died with her chin raised, and her eyes on the snow coming through the broken doors. Even as her steaming intestines spilled over her lap like gray, tangled ropes, pooling onto the freezing stone, she did not look from that white abyss. Each death added to the mounting butchery. The line grew shorter, the blood spread farther, and the hall filled with the copper-sweet stench of hot viscera freezing in the mountain air.
Sana waited. She waited through every death, counting them, holding herself together with the desperate focus of a woman who knew that her moment was coming, and that she could not afford to break before it arrived. When the soldiers reached for her, she moved. Not away from them, but toward the commander. She threw herself forward, her knees hitting the stone hard enough to split the skin, and dragged herself through the warm, gelatinous mire of her kin’s remains. She looked up at him with a face that had abandoned every pretense of composure, splattered with the dying spray of the knight of Pyre.
“My daughter,” She swallowed. “Annar. She is only eight years old. She had no part in this. She didn’t know. Please. She is a child. Whatever we have done—whatever punishment His Grace demands—spare her.”
The commander looked down at her, his face unreadable. Sana’s eyes briefly flickered to the sigil on his armor. He was not a Graves like those that had been sent to Aethelgard. This man was of House Riven. Gracemaria’s saboteurs. Assassins. Hired murderers.
“The children of the traitor houses will be dealt with in accordance to the Platinum Pariah’s decree.” His voice held no emotion.
“Wh-what decree? Wh-what does that mean? Tell me what that means!”
“They will live.”
Sana’s breath stopped.
“They will be branded. They will be adopted by loyal houses. They will carry the mark of what their parents did for the rest of their lives. But they will live.”
A sound came out of Sana Aikman that was not a word. It was something older than any language, any tongue. A sound that came from the same place the screams Cassia Pyre exuded as she burned, but turned inside out. Relief so vast it was indistinguishable from agony. She pressed her face to the commander’s boots and wept. The soldiers lifted her, and she did not resist. She did not speak again. Whatever had been holding her together, whatever desperate need to survive long enough to plead for her child, had served its purpose, and now it was gone. What remained was a woman walking toward her death with the knowledge that, though she would not, her daughter, at least, would breathe another day.
They killed Sana Aikman quickly. A heavy executioner’s blade sheared clean through her neck. The severed head bounced twice on the flagstones, its eyes blinking once in a final, dying reflex, while the stump of her neck geysered dark, pressurized blood onto the commander’s silver armor.
Bren watched. He watched the way he had watched Cassia burn, without turning, without closing his eyes, and without granting himself the mercy of not seeing. His wife’s headless torso slumped forward, the blood spilling forth, joining the frozen slush of the others. Snow kept billowing through the broken doors, landing on every body, every pool. It visited every wail, until all that was left kneeling was Bren himself. The commander stood before him now.
“Lord Brennan Aikman.” His voice held an opinion now. Bren looked up. The swelling had closed one of his eyes. The other was clear, and in it there was something that might have been hatred, or even gratitude, or perhaps nothing at all, just the flat, spent gaze of a man who had run out of things to feel.
“Riven.” Bren hissed. “Tell Sorovia,” He swallowed bitterly. “Tell Gravitus Sorovia that my daughter will outlive his treachery.” He looked at the commander fiercely. “Tell him that.”
The commander said nothing. He made Bren Aikman kneel with his neck over a block of oak that had been dragged in from the courtyard. The block was dark with old rain and freshly crusted with frost. The executioner was a large man who moved with the practiced economy of someone who had done this before, and would it again, without ever thinking about it in the interim. The blade came up.
Outside, the storm reached a deafening crescendo. The gale-force winds ripped shingles from the roof, and the twilight turned the sky the color of a rotting wound; deep purpled bleeding into a necrotic gray, the last light of the day caught in the belly of the clouds. The wind carried the snow sideways through the broken doors, blasting a white shroud directly across the hall. The frozen flakes landed on the hot, spilled entrails of his allies, hissing as they cooled them, and drifted onto Bren Aikman’s bare neck. They did not melt, because his skin was already cold.
The blade came down. The crunch of severed vertebrae echoing off the walls with an anticlimactic finality.
Three miles east, in the Tovarian Temple of Gracemaria, the storm was just as loud, but it was muffled by thick, stained-glass windows depicting faceless, merciful gods. The air inside smelled of stale frankincense, damp wool, and the bitter, oily tang of hot lard.
Annar Aikman sat on a long stone bench with her arms wrapped tightly around her shins. Her small boots were caked in gray slush. She was surrounded by twenty other children from the fallen houses, though there were many more scattered elsewhere. They sat clustered together like panicked livestock. Some of the younger ones were sobbing into their sleeves, while others stared blankly at the high altar. Annar did not cry. Her Mother had always told her that an Aikman kept their chin up when the wind blew too hard. But her chest felt tight this night, and her collarbone ached from the rough grip of the soldier who had dragged her from her bed.
At the center of the nave stood a heavy iron brazier, its coals glowing a fierce, pulsing orange. Resting deep within the white-hot embers were five heavy branding irons, their long rods ending in the cruel, coiled sigil of the Republic.
A high priest in soot-stained white robes stepped forward, accompanied by two massive temple guards wearing leather aprons over their chainmail, and a man holding strange jars to his person. This man wore a hood so that his face was not visible, but Annar could vaguely see the dark grey skin beneath, and the whisps of snow white hair. From his robes, she could just make out the markings of what her Father had called a ‘High Mage.’ It was a‘profession’ her Father despised, and she instinctively withdrew. The high priest carried on him a heavy ledger. He didn’t look at Annar, or any of the other children’s faces, he looked only at the names.
“Jorah of House Aethelgard.” The priest called flatly. A boy of twelve was seized by his arms and dragged forward, kicking and screaming. It was a high, piercing sound that ricocheted off the stone arches. The guards slammed him facedown onto a heavy wooden table. One held his legs, the other pinned his shoulders and forced his head down, exposing the bare skin at the base of his neck.
The priest pulled one of the irons from the coals. The tip was incandescent. It shone with a blinding white-yellow that shimmered with intense, radiating heat. Immediately, the hooded figure stepped forward, outstretching dark hands that now glowed an unnatural purple. He was speaking too quietly for Annar to hear, but it was a rapid fire of some kind of incantation as the priest stepped forward. He lowered the iron, and then the metal hit the boy’s neck, the reaction was instantaneous. A loud, violent hiss erupted as skin cooked, accompanied by a thick plume of greasy, white smoke that rushed toward Annar and the others. Jorah’s body buckled violently, his fingers clawing at the oak table until two fingernails ripped away, leaving bloody tracks on the wood. The sickening stench of burning fat and scorched hair instantly filled the room, heavy and sweet. When the iron was pulled back, it tore away a ragged chunk of caramelized skin with it, leaving a weeping, black-edged crater shaped like a fractured wing, the underlying tissue pulsing a raw, angry red.
Annar watched, her small fingers digging so hard into her knees that her knuckles went entirely white. Her breath came in shallow, jagged gashes.
The priest placed the iron down, picking up another. He looked at the ledger. “Annar of House Aikman.”
The guards came for her. She didn’t scream, but her body went stiff. They hoisted her onto the table, the wood beneath her face slick and warm with Jorah’s sweat and the fluid weeping from his wound. A guard’s heavy, leather-gloved hand slammed into the back of her head, pressing her cheek hard into the blood-stained oak. She could taste the iron of it on her lips. She looked sideways and saw the priest approaching. Her arms were outstretched, the back of her right palm being held firmly in place. The hooded man approached again, and this time, Annar could hear his whispered words.
The heat hit her face before the iron did. It was a suffocating, blistering wall of air. Then came the pain.
“We do not punish the blood for the sins of the Father.”
It was not a burn. It felt like a heavy, jagged axe hacking directly into the bones of her hand. Annar’s eyes dilated until the iris was gone, staring blindly at the stones. The hiss of her own flesh roasting filled her ears, louder than the storm outside. The iron boiled the fat beneath her skin, the yellow fluid bubbling and dripping down her fingers in scalding rivulets. She bit her own tongue to keep from screaming, biting through the flesh until a thick, hot fountain of her own blood filled her mouth and spilled over her chin onto the table.
“Redemption can be found in the service of the state.”
The priest held the iron down, counting to three. Each second felt like an hour. The heat cooked the deep muscle of the back of her palm, charring the blood vessels until they snapped and sizzled. When he pulled it away, the suction of the cooked flesh lifted her hand slightly off the table before releasing it with a wet, tearing sound. The mage held his hands above her wound, that same purple glow now hovering over her. The wound seemed to heal over, and they dumped her back onto the cold stone floor. Annar lay on her side in the fetal position, her body shaking in violent, uncontrollable tremors as she held her hand. The sleeve of her tunic was ruined, charred black and soaked through with a mixture of dark blood, yellow serous fluid, and melted fat. The cold air of the temple hit the fresh burn, sending a localized shock through her nervous system that made her vomit a mixture of bile and blood onto the flagstones.
She pressed her face into the cold stone, the chill against her cheek the only thing keeping her conscious. The back of her palm felt like it was still on fire, a deep, throbbing agony that vibrated with every beat of her heart. She did not know that three miles away, her Mother’s head was resting in a pool of freezing slush. She did not know that the blood drying on her chin was the same color as the blood soaking into the snow of her Father’s courtyard. She only knew the heat, the smell of her own cooked flesh, and the heavy, black shape of the Broken Wing burned deep into her bone.
She was eight years old.
She would not learn the truth of her blood for a very long time. And by then, the truth would no longer be enough.
~
The whitewash did not hide the smell.
Gravitus Sorovia stood at the high dais of the great hall, his boots crunching on the salt the servants had scattered to break up the frozen, black crusts of blood still stuck between the flagstones. The blizzard had passed, leaving the mountain air thin, brittle, and so cold it made his lungs ache with every breath. Outside, the crows were too frozen to fly; they sat like heavy, black gargoyles in the skeletal pine trees, waiting for the sun to soften the eleven stiff mounds buried in the courtyard snow.
He held a silver goblet of spiced wine, but the heat of it was already dead, a skin of pale ice forming over the dark liquid.
“The mines are secure, My Lord.” Commander Chloris Sorovia’s breath plumed grey in the freezing air. He kept his eyes low, deliberately avoiding the dark, jagged stain on the oak execution block three paces away. “The Pyre overseers were chained before they could flood the shafts. The Treasury Guards have already begun counting the ore carts.”
“Meridians.” Gravitus spat. He did not look at Chloris. He was looking at the threshold. A servant was using an iron scraper to pry up a frozen chunk of what had once been Cassia Pyre’s skirts, mixed with yellow, coagulated fat that had hardened into the stone like grease. It came away with a sharp, wet snap.
“And the children?” Gravitus’ voice was low, flat, stripped of the warmth he used to fake when he sat in this very room with Bren Aikman.
“The Branding is finished. The Aikman girl survived the iron, though I’m told she nearly lost a piece of her tongue to her own teeth. She is being carted south to Valerius City tonight. She’ll be there until another House picks her up. The wind will keep the infection from taking her hand before she arrives.”
Gravitus took a sip of the freezing wine. It tasted of cloves, iron, and the faint, unmistakable stench of incinerated marrow that still clung to the vaulted ceiling like greasy soot. He had traded a friend’s head and an eight-year-old girl’s flesh for the title of Grand Chancellor, but as he looked out at the vast, white graveyard of the Sunder-Pass, he realized the fortress was a tomb. The stones would always be cold. The air would always taste of copper. He had won the Republic, but he would have to sleep in the ash of the people who built it.
