The Ashes of House Varendel

My father served the Carlovian Empire for forty years. He fought its border wars and brought its rebellious provinces back beneath the imperial crown. The songs called him the Wolf of the North.

His soldiers called him the Duke. I think he preferred that. He had little patience for songs, especially the ones that made his victories sound easy. At our table, he spoke more often of washed-out roads and spoiled provisions than of charges and captured banners. He knew which captains had children and trusted only certain officers to bring wounded men home.

At Blackgate, he held the western pass for three months against an army twice the size of his own. Years later, he came home from the Frostmarch with a secured border and so many dead to account for that he spent his first week writing letters.

Emperor Carlo rewarded him for all of it. Each victory brought another grant of land or honor at court. Once, before an assembly of nobles and generals, he called my father the Empire's shield.

Later, those same men would sit quietly while he condemned him. I was young when I first noticed something changing at Varendel Hall. Conversations stopped when I entered a room. My father began receiving visitors late at night, and I sometimes found scraps of burned letters in his hearth the next morning.

I remember finding him in the map room after he returned from the capital. Snow was melting on his cloak. He stood beside the fire without taking it off, staring at the provinces picked out in gold across the wall.

"Father?" He turned. In the firelight, the lines around his eyes looked deeper than I remembered. "Are you all right?"

"Only tired, little dove." He held out an arm, and I went to him, pressing my cheek against his chest.

"Did something happen at court?" I asked.

His gaze went back to the map.

"The Emperor is growing suspicious of his oldest friends. I find myself wondering when he'll turn on me."

I burrowed further into his embrace. "But you've always stood by him. And the soldiers love you."

"That may be what troubles him."

I didn't understand. The men my father led into battle loved him because he had earned it. Surely the Emperor knew that. It took me longer to understand why my father had come home afraid.

Not long after that conversation, a letter came from the capital. My father was accused of treason. According to the court, Duke Edric Varendel had spent years turning the northern legions into a private army. His victories had been a means of buying loyalty, and his correspondence with the border lords concealed plans for rebellion. There were even letters, the officials said, proving he had promised territory to the Frostgard Empire in exchange for its support.

I never saw those letters. Neither did anyone permitted to speak for him.

Men in fine robes testified that they had seen his seal on letters arranging the rebellion. No one questioned them. Soldiers who had traveled to the capital to defend him were kept outside the hall.

The verdict came quickly. One decree stripped him of his title and everything our family owned. The next ordered his execution.

They took him at dawn. By sunset, a messenger had arrived at Varendel Hall with a document confirming that the sentence had been carried out. I asked where they had buried him. The messenger said he did not know.

I asked whom I should speak to about bringing him home.

He would not look at me. My mother was taken to the palace dungeons. Lady Elowen's royal ancestry had always been a matter for genealogies and tedious court introductions; now it was the reason Carlo kept her alive. Killing her might offend families he still needed. Imprisoning her gave those families a reason to behave.

For me, he chose a monastery. That was the public arrangement. The daughter of a traitor would be placed under the Church's guidance, far from the corrupting influence of her father's household. Carlo's mercy was praised before I had even left home.

I left in chains, with three guards and a prison wagon. They told me the monastery stood in the north, near the Frostgard border. For months, reports had come south of missing patrols and raids along the mountain roads. Each empire blamed the other. Another attack would surprise no one.

I learned why they had chosen that road on the second night of our journey. The guards had stopped beside an abandoned tollhouse. I lay beneath a blanket in the wagon, trying to keep my feet warm, while they passed a bottle around the fire. They must have thought I was asleep. At first, their voices were too low to follow.

Then one of them asked whether the raiders knew where to meet us. I kept my eyes shut. There would be an attack farther up the road. In the confusion, I would supposedly try to escape toward the Frostgard men. My escort would have no choice but to kill me.

One guard wanted to know who would carry the report back. Another asked when they would be paid. They spoke as though it were an ordinary duty, something to finish before they could go home.

By the third night, I had stopped hoping one of them might change his mind. The road had narrowed to a frozen track between black pines. They tethered the horses in a hollow sheltered from the wind, then settled around the fire to drink. I watched through a gap in the wagon canvas.

My father had insisted I learn to defend myself. I had resented the bruises and the early mornings, and once, after being knocked flat again during a lesson, I had accused him of enjoying it.

He had helped me up.

"You're smaller than most people who might hurt you," he'd said. "You cannot afford to be slower as well."

He taught me to look for weaknesses. An opponent favoring an old injury could give me an opening, but only if I noticed before he struck.

The guard who checked my shackles always leaned too far into the wagon. His breath grew fouler with each passing night.

That night, I waited for him to come close enough. The fire had burned low by the time he pulled aside the canvas. He set a small lantern near the door and tugged at the chain between my wrists.

I let my hands move with it.

"What's wrong, little dove?" His words were thick with drink. "No fight left?"

I knew his voice. I had heard it often enough at my father's table, though on the road he had scarcely spoken to me. Now he leaned into the lantern light, and there was no mistaking him.

Sir Kaelen. My father had sponsored his elevation to the Imperial Guard, and his children had played in our gardens. At the trial, he had sworn that he recognized my father's seal on letters addressed to Frostgard commanders.

He sneered at me, his face streaked with dirt. I looked down at the key in his hand, then back at his face. "Could you loosen them?" I let my voice come out weak and frightened.

He caught the chain and yanked me toward him. I went with the pull, driving my forehead into his nose.

The blow hurt more than I expected. For a moment, my eyes watered so badly I could barely see. Kaelen reeled against the doorway, dropping the key onto the wagon floor. I found it by touch.

He was swearing, one hand clamped over his face. The key resisted until I turned it the other way. By the time he reached for me, I had pulled one hand free and slipped the chain from the wagon's iron staple.

He caught my sleeve. I twisted toward him and pulled the knife from his belt as we stumbled out of the wagon. His knees hit the mud.

"Quiet," I whispered.

He looked up at me. Blood ran over his mouth. When his free hand moved toward his sword, I drove the knife into his throat.

He made a sound I still hear sometimes. I held on to the knife because I did not know what else to do, and when he fell, he nearly pulled me down with him. My father had told me the first man you killed never really left you. I had never thought to ask whose face he remembered.

For a few seconds, I crouched beside him, unable to move. My head throbbed, and blood ran over my hands from where the shackles had rubbed my wrists raw.

Across the fire, one of the other guards stirred. I stopped breathing. He muttered something and pulled his cloak over his shoulder before settling again. Only then did I draw the knife out.

I searched Kaelen's belt first. His purse held a little money, and I took the gloves tucked beside it. As I reached beneath his collar, my fingers caught a leather cord. Something heavy hung from it.

I pulled it free. My father's signet ring lay in my palm, the wolf's head dark with grime.

I had last seen it on his hand in the map room. He used to turn it when he was thinking, pressing his thumb against the underside until the skin there grew callused.

I wiped it on my sleeve. I do not know whether Kaelen stole it from our home or took it after the execution. I wished I could have made him tell me. Then his body shifted against my knee, and I recoiled so sharply I nearly dropped the ring.

I slipped the cord over my head and tucked it beneath my dress.

The other two guards were still asleep. I stood near them with Kaelen's knife, watching the rise and fall of their cloaks. They had discussed my murder over a bottle. I could have killed them.

I was less certain I could do it without waking one. And if they lived, they would have to explain what had happened. Men willing to invent a border attack would hardly return to Carlo and admit they had drunk themselves senseless while a prisoner escaped.

I could only hope their fear of him would serve me better than their deaths. I went through the supply trunk beside the wagon. Beneath a folded blanket, I found spare clothes and a battered cap. The trousers were too large, but a belt held them. I changed with shaking hands and bound my hair beneath the cap. Before leaving, I took a heavy cloak and as much food as I could carry.

There were horses, but I would have had to lead one past the sleeping men and saddle it in the dark. I dared not risk the noise.

I left on foot. At first, every snapping twig sounded loud enough to wake the camp. I kept expecting a shout behind me, the scrape of a sword leaving its sheath. Nothing came.

The trees closed around the firelight. I walked until my legs trembled, then kept going. At a creek, I waded upstream through water that numbed my feet and climbed out among exposed roots. Farther on, I left a short trail toward the Frostgard border before doubling back over stony ground.

It was a poor deception. My father's scouts would have seen through it. I hoped the guards would be less particular. By dawn, I was heading southwest.

I could not go home. Even if Varendel Hall still stood untouched, it belonged to someone else now. Our servants would be watched, our friends questioned. Any lord who sheltered me would have to weigh my life against his family's.

For several miles, I thought about my mother. I imagined reaching the capital in stolen clothes and somehow getting into the palace to free her. Each version ended at a locked door or a guard I could not pass. I had barely enough food to keep myself alive, let alone a way of finding her dungeon.

I hated myself for walking in the opposite direction. But there was one place I might learn enough to help her: the Northern Imperial Warrior Camp.

My father had commanded the northern legions for most of his life. Veterans passed through the camp as instructors or returned between postings. I had heard their names at supper and read them on the letters he received. Somewhere among them might be someone who knew what had happened in the months before his arrest.

Someone might know where the supposed letters had come from, or why Kaelen had agreed to testify. Someone might still be loyal enough to tell me.

The camp took recruits from across the provinces. Most came for wages. Others had nowhere else to go and stayed for the food and a place beside the barracks fire. A name meant little at the gate, provided the recruit could work.

At least, that was what my father had always said. Getting inside would be easier than remaining there. I knew how to hold a blade and sit a horse, but I had never endured a soldier's training. I would have to manage it while sharing a barracks with men who must never discover what I was.

Then there were the officers who might recognize me. I tried not to think too far ahead. I needed to reach the camp before I ran out of food. After that, I would need a false name and a story I could stick to.

Aren, I decided.

Aren Veyr.

I repeated it as I walked, until I could answer to it without thinking. Snow began falling before sunrise. It caught in the folds of the cloak and settled over the tracks behind me. When I stopped beneath a fallen pine to unlock the remaining shackle, my fingers were so stiff I could barely manage the key. I buried the chain in the loose earth beneath the roots.

For a moment, I stayed on my knees. Somewhere behind me, the guards would be waking. Ahead lay a camp full of men who served the Emperor who had killed my father. My mother was still in his prison, and I could do nothing for her yet.

I reached beneath my tunic and closed my hand around the ring. Then I got up.

By the time the camp gates came into view, I would have to be Aren, a boy looking for wages with no family worth mentioning. I practiced the story under my breath and kept walking.