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  She was a beautiful girl, and even more so when she was blushing. Red-haired, narrow waist, and curvaceous, she was what Theron called lower-class loveliness. Full and strong from a life of work, yet timid, unlike the women in court, who were stick-thin and arrogant from a lifetime of nothingness. He had to admit he liked the girls at court too—in fact, he had liked one just two nights past in the stables—but tonight he wanted Caroline.

  “Please, my dear, call me Theron, and do close the door behind you. That cool draft will only diminish my splendor.”

  Caroline giggled and closed the door.

  Some time later, Caroline helped Theron into a royal-blue doublet then a black vest over top. She tucked the shirt into his black trousers and her hand spent a little extra time up front. They stood in front of the mirror, and although Caroline was still naked from their romp in the sheets, Theron was all business now, and he was purely inspecting himself in the reflection.

  “How do I look, my dear?” Theron asked.

  “Like the most handsomest of princes, my lord.”

  He smiled, not at her but at himself, then unbuttoned the top of his shirt.

  “Buttoned or unbuttoned?” he asked.

  “Well, that depends—are you going to meet with another lass?” She ran her hands over his abdomen; he tightened it out of vanity.

  “I’m going to go see the count, actually.”

  Caroline laughed at this, and covered her mouth as she did. The way timid girls do when they are shy of their teeth.

  “Then button it up, right up, or the count may think you are trying to seduce his daughter.”

  “Unbuttoned it is.”

  * * *

  “Not here. I want it in the stables. I want the beasts watching me,” said the lady with lustrous green eyes, the rest of her features concealed beneath her mask.

  “What manner of nymph are you, woman?” asked the gentleman.

  “I am no woman, I am a fiend. I am hungry and thirsty and I am a fiend. And I want to go now.” She grabbed his wrist.

  “Leave this lovely masquerade with food and drink? For the stables? I should stay and fortify myself. Tomorrow I must hunt.”

  “I will fortify you. We go now to the stables, so we can fuck like animals,” she said.

  The gentleman was a gentleman, but he did not say no.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  The Emerald Woman

  They took her anyway, you damn fool.

  No.

  They did, they took her. You counted them through the bars of your cage. Eighteen every time, not twenty, just eighteen. Two stayed behind and they took Alma. Probably raped her. You did that, Ken. She suffered. She is dead. Because of you.

  Fuck you.

  Think about it. Why else would they have stayed behind?

  They were laughing. You heard them laughing. You know that laugh, the laugh of men who have become beasts.

  Fuck you.

  First you killed your wife. Now you killed Alma.

  So much for burying Kendrick the Cold in the past.

  Ken slammed his chained fists against the wall of the wagon.

  He could have killed every last one.

  He should have. He should have saved her instead of holding out his hands and letting himself be chained.

  Should have wasn’t the same as could have.

  Kendrick the Cold could have killed them. But he was not that man now. He was not cold. He was hot and sick, the rage a red film before his eyes. Impotent rage.

  “I should have killed you all. I should have slaughtered you all, you fucking bastards, hung you in the woods by your own intestines, carved out your fucking eyes. Nailed you to the trees and let the ravens pick you apart. Should have done to you what I did for the count,” Ken yelled into the darkness of the wagon. Should have done it to them so they couldn’t do it to Alma.

  No response came. Ken told himself it was because the bastards were afraid, but in truth, by now they realized that Kendrick the Cold was just another human being, another sniveling rat.

  The wagon had been stopped for a while, and he knew he was there. He had returned home, his real home. Norburg. Fourteen years ago he had joined the count’s men. Fourteen years old. The count’s men joined the royal army and they set out to the east, the far southeast to bring the Luminescence—the God of Light—to the heathens. And in the far southeast the count’s men became something inhuman.

  The God of Light was a dark god.

  The wagon had been still for an hour, maybe more. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. The doors opened.

  “Kendrick Solomon Kelmoor. Welcome home, you bastard.” Sebastian Calabaster, the man who’d recruited him all those years ago, was standing outside. He was thinner now, much thinner. His cheeks were sunken and his chain mail hung from his skeletal form like iron rags. His mutton chops had grown gray, his hair thinned, but Kendrick knew it was the same man. Calabaster had not gone to the far southeast. He had not fought there, but he fought at home. He fought the Rata Plaga, and that must have been just as bad, Kendrick reckoned.

  “You are not little Kendrick anymore, the small, sickly orphan that begged to join the regiment. You’re a bloody bull now. By God you’ve grown,” Calabaster said.

  “It’s been fourteen years, and it wasn’t by God that I’ve grown. It was by force. You, too, look different, Calabaster. You look old, dreadfully thin.”

  “Thanks for noticing, lad. I do try, I certainly do try.” The old man smiled, rotten yellow and black teeth nearly as gnarly as the bloody plague rats.

  “Well, out you come, to the cells with you. You’ll be hanged in a day or two,” he said.

  “Thanks for noticing,” Kendrick said. “Don’t sound so sad.”

  They both laughed, because Calabaster hadn’t sounded sad. He hadn’t sounded anything at all.

  There was strange rumbling in the ground when Ken stepped down from the wagon.

  “There it is again,” mumbled one of the guards.

  Calabaster turned to Ken. “Strange rumblings, in the ground around the city the past few weeks. First time I noticed it was when the Emerald Lady from the northeast arrived. Ground was rumbling so bad she nearly tripped and fell. The Honorable Count Salvenius caught her, luckily. Quick hands he has for a large man.”

  Ken scowled at the mention of the count, not much caring about the rumbling in the ground or this Emerald Lady.

  Armed men closed tight next to Ken, and after a few steps a crossbow was at his back, steering him.

  “I suppose there won’t be a trial?” Calabaster asked.

  “For the likes of him?” The surrounding guards laughed. “No, no, not for the likes of him.”

  * * *

  Atop a fine white gelding purebred, Theron trotted toward the count’s keep. He was decked out in his lavish clothes, his long blond hair tied with a royal blue ribbon at the base of his skull. He rode with a short sword at his hip and his claymore on his back, the blades in black scabbards encrusted with gems.

  He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt so the muscles of his forearms bulged as he gripped the reins. Every so often he would look down at them and twist his wrists to tighten the cords beneath his flesh. As he trotted past a fountain he pulled his horse to a momentary stop and admired the fine figure he made in the water’s reflection with the quarter moon shining above his left shoulder before moving on.

  It is a mad world, Theron thought as he stared at a thin girl of perhaps fourteen at most, being fondled by a man old enough to be her grandfather and large enough in the waist to fit four of the girl. He was laughing with some other so-called gentlemen as they stumbled drunk through an alley just off the main thoroughfare. Even in the dim light of the street lantern, Theron could see the purple bruising around the girl’s eye. These nobles call the lands outside of Brynth savage. They call the peasantry lowly, yet they see no issue in forcing young girls to marry old men. In leaving children to beg in the streets. This is the hy
pocrisy of man.

  “Are you looking at something, sirrah?” came the slurred words of the vermin with his hand around the girl’s wrist.

  “Nothing but a pack of rats in an alley,” Theron said, his voice calm but tinged with venom.

  There was a sad humor in the fact that he had just killed a monster in the defense of the people of Norburg, yet as he looked at the poor girl he wondered if killing just one monster ever did any good. There will always be more.

  He spat on the ground, then carried on, and with each clop of his horse’s hooves upon the stone cobbles and with each instigating yell from the drunkards, he imagined himself dismounting, killing the lot of them, and telling the girl she was free. Free to do what? Have her father marry her off to another man of equal wickedness, or perhaps one even worse.

  He did not stop for a fight; there was no point, for if he fought over every injustice he would never get anything done.

  Theron had no love for the count’s city, but the city had had a monster, and Theron was a killer of monsters, so he came to the count’s city and he killed his monster. It had not been an altogether terrible trip. Caroline had been a sweet thing, and the ball he’d attended two nights past had him loving a spry noble girl in a golden mask. A real demon, she was; dragged him to the stables, said she wanted it like an animal. Pretty, from what he could see that was not concealed by her mask. Green eyes, not of the forest. A different green.

  Theron at last arrived at the keep, a perilously tall gray-stoned building, built with the design somewhere between a cathedral and a lordly estate. He dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to a well-dressed young lad in the courtyard, who bowed his head and walked away toward the stables with Theron’s gelding.

  “Careful with him, boy,” Theron said, and when the boy turned around Theron tossed him a gold coin. The boy nodded and went on his way.

  In the center of the courtyard was a great sundial, more a thing of richness than of any actual use, for the sun rarely shone down on the city of Norburg due to its almost constant cover of cloud. Past the dial, the wagon he had seen earlier on the road sat just outside the keep, with half the escort still milling about. The wagon was empty now, the prisoner gone. Theron felt a pang of sympathy, for the count’s dungeons were notorious. He walked to the front doors, where a guard nodded and opened the gate.

  “Lord Wardbrook,” said the guard, and Theron was not at all surprised that though he did not remember the guard, the guard remembered him.

  The interior of the keep was a thing to behold. It made Wardbrook seem mundane and poor in comparison, but Wardbrook at least had a sense of design. Black marble was the floor, black marble was each and every pillar, and black marble was each and every wall. Numerous paintings of the count that depicted him in his younger years, or in some fantasy realm where he was handsome and not grotesquely obese, adorned the walls. Trophy heads of exotic animals and beasts were jammed between and above the paintings. Their glass eyes seemed to follow Theron as he made his way down the long hall of nonsense things, past the heads and the paintings and the pieces of armor and ceremonial weapons. There was no order to it, and certainly not even a whisper of good taste. It looked altogether a bit mad.

  He paused once and looked back. The eyes still stared.

  Theron thought nothing one way or the other about the count. Salvenius was rich, even by royal standards, and his wealth neared that of the king himself. Much had been amassed through inheritance from his long and noble line, and enhanced by the brutal taxes he imposed. All that wealth went to the important things, such as big feasts, big parties, and big collections of nonsense.

  Theron considered it common sense to make certain that those under his rule and care were well taken care of. It wasn’t sentimentality. It was simple reason. Healthy peasants could work, yield more crops, enrich the estate. Starving peasants could not.

  A crimson rug ran down the center of the black marble floor, right up to the lacquered oak doors that opened into the court. He put his hand on the door, and something in his chest seemed to harden and expand. He swallowed, feeling acid burn his gut. Anxiety. A sensation Theron was not usually accustomed to. A sensation he had not felt since Mother. Since Mother had done what she had done.

  He looked at the jar he carried in his hand, at the black, rotting heart of the plagued she-rat. It had a dark shimmer to it, the same dark shimmer as the black marble. He took a deep breath; perhaps expanding his ribs would get that burdensome rock to fall from his chest. It did not fall; instead it grew. Theron had an urge to smash the jar and run, to sprint in the other direction, to leave Norburg and ride like all the devils in hell were nipping at his heels back to Wardbrook, where he would stay, stay for some time, his servants armed and his doors and windows boarded up.

  Why he had this feeling he did not know. Theron despised feelings that he did not understand, and so he ignored the growing stone in his chest and opened the big oak doors.

  The court had not a single sycophant at that late hour, and in truth, Theron thought he would be receiving his payment and handing the heart to one of the count’s men. Instead he was greeted by the count himself, a strange woman standing just behind and to the side of the throne, and an absurd amount of guards lined against the right and left walls. The count was waiting, and he looked exponentially more grotesque than he had two nights before. He heaped over the sides of his lavish golden chair and his beady eyes looked as if they were about to burst from his head, more red in them than white. There was spittle on his greasy black beard, and his white tunic was drenched through at his armpits. Drenched and yellow.

  The woman’s elegant ringed hand rested on his shoulder, elegant but strong, fingernails painted emerald green. The woman was not his wife, for it was known to most that the count’s wife had died many years ago. Mysterious causes. Most royal wives in Brynth were known to be taken by that plight, the plight of mysterious causes.

  The emerald-nailed woman had black hair, so long it nearly dripped to the floor. If one black could be blacker than another, the woman’s hair was the blackest, no shimmer to it, no luster. Just black. Full red lips, and eyes the same emerald as the polish on her nails. Her pale white breasts pressed against her black and green bodice, faint branches of blue veins running just beneath her milky skin.

  Theron was not sure if he should be aroused or repulsed, for there was something baleful about this woman, and although he was not a man of God—far from it, in fact—he shivered at her unholy aura.

  The woman engulfed his focus so entirely he had not registered the count yell, “Seize him.” He heard him; he just somehow wasn’t altogether receptive to the words, as if they were part of a scene that was of no importance to him.

  It was of importance to him, though.

  The armed guards surrounded him, weapons drawn and raised, snapping him out of his daze.

  “Seize me?” Theron dropped the jar with the plague heart. It hit the ground with a clink but did not crack. He put his hand on the hilt of the short sword at his belt but did not draw. “What the bloody hell for?”

  “For the defilement of my daughter, you debaucherous filth!” The count turned a deep shade of red then a bit purple. He stood from his chair, his fat legs shaking beneath his enormous weight.

  “Debaucherous filth? Why I never. I am Theron Ward, Lord of Wardbrook, and I shall not have my name so besmirched, sir, Count of Norburg or no!”

  The guards edged closer. They were wary, as they should be. Theron could take a handful of the bastards right to hell, and they knew it, for the name Theron Ward was spoken far and wide and it was spoken with veneration… or at least so he told himself. He could kill a handful but there were too many, and Theron was not keen on dying in Norburg.

  “Besides,” he said, “I think I would have known if I had taken your daughter to bed, and I can assure you I did not. There is a mistake. Someone is spreading lies. Tell me who told you such a thing and I will make them spill the truth.”
/>   The count’s face did not change color, but he did sit back down, prompted to do so by the dark-haired woman. She spoke then, her voice not at all like her features. It was too deep for her figure and had a hellish rasp to it, the rasp of old age, old age lived out in a smoke pit. Yet the woman was no more than twenty-five years in appearance.

  Sorcery.

  “It is true you did not bed the count’s daughter,” she said. “You ravaged her cunt in the royal stables. You fucked her from behind.” The rock in Theron’s chest had grown so large now it felt as if his spine was any moment to rip from his flesh. “You fucked her like a beast.”

  Theron stared into the woman’s eyes. Such a green, not like a forest, like a mist of poison, miasma, and rotten death.

  At this, the count’s face turned from deep red to white then green, and he gave a malodorous belch, then made a choking sound, and then—Theron cringed as he steeled his mind for what was to come—the count hurled up thick chunks of his royal dinner onto his royal tunic and his royal trousers. Even at Theron’s distance he could smell it, quail pie, bile, and stomach-churning rage.

  The guards lowered their pikes, a veritable forest of sharp points leveled at his throat. Theron thought this a good time to raise his arms in surrender. The count had clearly just reached past the point of discussion, and so Theron would forfeit and find a way out of this conundrum in due time. The moment his hands went up, a guard came up behind him and pulled his hands down to bind his wrists. When he was bound and a man held him at each side, a third one sheathed his sword and stepped forward.

  “Not the face, you bastard,” Theron warned. “Don’t you dare strike me in the face.”

  The man, a big, thick bastard equal parts muscle and fat, dared to do exactly that.

  * * *

  Shards and splinters of white in a puddle of red. Fragments of teeth and skull. The father was dead. The wife screamed. The children wailed. Kendrick had orders, and on the cross they would be nailed.