Crystal Crowned [ARC] (13 page)

Vhalla rolled her eyes. “Oh, hush.” She gave a small glance to the cleric that she hoped conveyed the silent request that any of Jax’s jests were not to be repeated elsewhere. The man seemed too focused on assessing the wounded Westerner to give much heed to what they were saying.

“How did this happen? What’s it like out there?” Vhalla wasn’t sure if she wanted the answers to her questions.

“A mess.” Jax grimaced as the man packed some salve into the wounds. “We may have had some of Mhashan’s might, but the soldiers were far from ready for an attack.

“We’ve taken down three beasts so far, but the bastards are nearly impervious to magic. The crystals give them some resistance and heal them at the same time. Takes three powerful sorcerers to bring them down.”

“Sorcerers are one thing we should have,” Vhalla hopefully thought aloud.

“We do, but not many at the level we need, and it has been slow communicating that the other soldiers need to protect our sorcerers exclusively.”

She knew what Jax was saying. Aldrik was one of those sorcerers, one of those skilled enough to take on the beasts. Vhalla didn’t know if she wanted to ask her next questions or not.

“Aldrik? Fritz? Elecia?”

He didn’t torture her. “All fine.”

“Were they injured as well?” Vhalla asked as the cleric worked on the last of his stitches.

“Not as of when I left.” Jax grinned. “I was the only one foolish enough to be willing to throw his life away to save a lovely lady in distress.”

“Well, I’m glad you were unsuccessful in throwing it away.” Vhalla patted his shoulder, standing. “Go to your room and rest when the cleric is finished.”

Jax looked utterly exhausted. Vhalla rubbed her own eyes tiredly. However worn she was, it was nothing to what the soldiers were facing at the front.

As the battle outside slowly began to quiet, the noise within the government building grew. The cries and groans of men and women, engaged in a different sort of fight for their lives, filled her ears and punctuated Vhalla’s every order. These people were in her care, and she would do everything she could to protect and save them.

Fritz was the next to return. Vhalla caught sight of him instantly as she had keep one eye on the door. She crossed over to him quickly, weaving through the men and women arranged on the floor of what was once her orderly medical station.

“Fritz,” she breathed in relief.

“Vhal.” He tiredly returned her embrace.

“Thank the Mother you’re all right.”

“You too, Vhal.” Her friend released her. “I was nervous something broke through.”

She shook her head. “The army held the line.” She’d been asking messengers all night for reports on the state of the city. They hadn’t even lost one building. “What’s the status?”

“The abominations are all dead. Aldrik is passing judgment on the remaining sorcerers now.”

Vhalla glanced at the room. If the battle was winding down, there wasn’t likely to be another influx of people to attend to. The clerics had developed their own systems based on her original suggestions as the night had waned, and Vhalla felt confident leaving them to it.

“Do you have a horse?” she asked her friend.

Fritz nodded.

“Stay here, get cleaned up.”

He stopped her. “Where are you going?”

“I should be there.” Vhalla shifted her arm to take his hand rather than gripping his wrist. “I need to be with him for this.”

“Vhalla, do you understand—”

“Of course I do.” She squeezed his fingers. “That’s why I must be there.”

Her Southern friend smiled tiredly. “Go on then, Miss Empress.”

Fritz let her go, and she was off. Vhalla appreciated that he hadn’t insisted upon going with her for her protection. She borrowed a sword from a soldier who would no longer need it, strapping it to her back. Even if the fight was over, she knew better than to charge unarmed into a battlefield. She had too much training now to even think otherwise.

With just the one weapon and a leather jerkin, she struck a course northward. Given all the reports she’d been receiving, it seemed like the most logical location for her Emperor. A red sunrise streaked across the sky, mirroring the crimson land before her.

The casualties had been heavy, heavier than she expected given the number of soldiers who had been in the Western force surrounding the city. But the hulking corpses of giant winged beasts offered a chilling explanation. Teeth longer than her body jutted out from their massive jowls. They had almost canine-like heads but with thick leathery skin pulled taut against oddly shaped muscles. Some had two arms, some had four, one even had six. They had the wings of a wyvern and scorpion-like tails. It was a creature that the Gods had never intended to exist, and the now-dormant crystals embedded in their bodies glinted like dull obsidian in the sunlight, slowly cracking into dust.

A handful of men and women were surrounded, forced to their knees. Soldiers waited around them, sorcerers and Commons alike, ready to execute the traitors who had ridden in to kill them all on the backs of monsters. The lean figure of a man was mounted before the lot—an Emperor casting judgment on those who fought against his throne.

“. . . forsake the false king.” Vhalla could hear Aldrik’s words as she approached. “Those who give information will be rewarded with their lives.”

No one spoke.

“You protect a coward,” Vhalla called out, announcing her presence. Aldrik turned in surprise as she rode up next to him. “You stand with a man whose power comes not through his own merit—as he would have you believe—but through theft.”

“What would you know?” one of the kneeling sorcerers demanded, curiosity drawing the words from him.

“I know all too well,” Vhalla replied quietly, “because I was the one whose powers he stole.”

Now she had their attention.

“Victor could not open the caverns on his own; he wasn’t strong enough to manage the crystals. I know because he needed me to help him do it. When he had what he wanted, he stole my magic to make him immune from the taint.”

“Lies!” one sneered. “The taint only affects those of weak will, Commons, and lesser sorcerers.”

Desperation carved the way for stupidity in the hearts of men.

“You can’t possibly believe that. Is that what Victor has told you? That you are the strong ones and immune?” She shook her head with a bitter sorrowful laugh. “He has written you off as expendable with his lies.”

“Are you really the Windwalker?” a timid voice asked from among them.

“I was.” Vhalla spoke only to the man who had asked. “I was the Windwalker until he stole my powers. Now I am a Commons. It was my magic that unleashed this monster upon the world—”

“Vhalla . . .” Aldrik had a cautionary note.

“—but because of that, no one will fight harder than me to do what is necessary to right that wrong.” The words hurt. They hurt like the wind still hurt on her cheeks, plain and un-magical. But it was finally the right kind of hurt. The hurt of a confession that needed to be said. “This is but a night. The sun will rise again, and I stand with the dawn.”

She looked to the Emperor. His eyes were a chameleon over the past few weeks, constantly changing to match the woman she was becoming.

“Who will stand with the sun?” He tore his eyes away from her to make his final demand.

The man who had asked his timid question stood slowly. “A false king sits on a false throne.”

“You disgrace sorcerers,” another loyalist spat. “You’ll follow a liar and a Commons.”

“Strength channels its own magic,” the man said in reply, looking directly at Vhalla.

“Who else will stand with us?” Vhalla demanded.

Two more stood.

“Why take pity on them?” a Western soldier finally spoke. “They fight against your Empire. Put them to death.”

“Because a wise woman taught me that no soul is beyond saving,” Aldrik replied easily.

Vhalla’s chest tightened, instantly thinking of Larel.

“Those who stand with us, live; those who do not, die. Make your choice. Dawn comes and it will wait for no man.” Aldrik turned back to Victor’s sorcerers.

Two more stood, five in total. That was all who were spared. Vhalla bore a silent witness to the other sorcerers who died for Victor’s ideal. Men and women who had become so tainted with his lies that they valued his dogma more than their lives.

Vhalla counted every man and woman put to death.
Twenty-three in total
. She shifted in her saddle and felt the sword pulling heavy on her shoulder. The next time she saw Victor she would stab him herself, Vhalla resolved, twenty-three times.

Vhalla rode back to the government building in silence. She visually checked Aldrik over several times. He had countless bruises and a gash by his shoulder, and she was prepared to scold him for not seeking treatment sooner, but he was okay, overall. A sickly feeling had bubbled in her stomach, but it was quelled at the sight.

How many more times would she have to watch the people she loved ride off to war?

She stayed a quiet shadow at Aldrik’s side until a cleric demanded his attention, and then she slipped away. Vhalla drifted through the halls, suddenly exhausted. She’d put everything she could think to the test, to be the Empress the people needed, and she wasn’t sure if she had even come close.

Her feet moved with the intention of seeking out Fritz, but she paused just before a different friend’s door, the sliver of light stretching across the floor from Jax’s current accommodations.

“. . . worried about me?” She could barely hear Jax’s quiet words.

“I had other things to focus on.”
Elecia
, Vhalla realized. She took a step toward the open door, relieved to hear the woman was well enough to have the usual sarcastic bite to her voice.

“Aww, you were,” Jax teased.

“Are you all right or not?” Elecia sighed heavily.

“I am.” There was a long pause. “ ‘Cia, truly, I’m fine.”

“You better not be playing hero again,” the woman murmured.

“If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here now.”

Vhalla stilled. Jax had said he sustained his wound while saving a damsel in distress.
Elecia wasn’t much of a damsel
.

“Thank you.” Elecia’s gratitude was forced and awkward, but it was as sincere as anything else Vhalla had ever heard the woman say. Elecia was often times abrasive, certainly sarcastic, but she was usually sincere in what she said—good and bad.

“Think nothing of it, Lady Ci’Dan.”

“That’s not going to be possible. You know this changes things—”

“I said, think nothing of it.” A nerve was struck.

“Fine, Jax, I won’t.” Elecia’s footsteps neared their door, and Vhalla knocked softly on Fritz’s, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping.

“You know, you’re one of the few,” Jax’s words stopped both women, “who doesn’t still call me lord.”

“Your title was stripped.”

And Vhalla still didn’t know why
.

“And it doesn’t stop the Western Court from reminding me of such by using it ironically.” Jax’s voice had changed.

“You know how court is.” Elecia’s voice indicated indifference, but there was a sorrowful and sincere echo that followed her words. “Some of them still take your side.”

“Who knows why,” Jax murmured.

“I still do.”

Fritz opened the door, distracting Vhalla from whatever was said next. She quickly pushed her way into the Southern man’s room before he said anything that Elecia would hear. The Western woman would never let Vhalla listen in on a private conversation.
Rightfully so
, Vhalla admitted to herself. But she wanted to know about Jax; she needed to know why he was attached to the crown. Why he was practically enslaved and yet so revered by his masters.

“Everything all right?”

These thoughts were shelved for another time the second Fritz asked his question. Vhalla wrapped her arms around his waist, holding her Southerner tightly. He still smelled of battle—sweat and the metallic tang of blood. But his arms wrapped around her without hesitation, without question. He held her silently as Vhalla took a breath and just let the world move without her for a brief moment.

“I’m glad you’re all right, Fritz.”

“Me too,” he laughed lightly.

“Why are you here?” The question escaped her as suddenly as she thought of it.

“I told you when we left my home: Larel would haunt me if I let you go alone.”

“That’s not good enough.” Vhalla shook her head.

“It’s not?”

“No, you’re still fighting. You’re at war on my behalf. Why are you doing it?”

“Silly Vhal.” Fritz sighed gently, and the sound transformed into a smile. “You were at my house, you met my sisters.”

Escaping the chaos of the Charem family home didn’t seem like a good enough reason either.

“They all have their place in the world. They each know who they will be. Cass is going to inherit the home. Reona will be an amazing wife and mother. Nia will be a chef or baker or something. They all have something. I never did.”

“You had your sorcery,” Vhalla pointed out.

“And it took me away from them.” Fritz had never seemed sorrowful about his magic before. His family was so accepting of it. “I went to the Tower and expected to find my place. And I’m still figuring that out. Grahm, Larel, you, you all know what you want. I want to know that, too. I want purpose.”

Vhalla clutched her friend’s hands tightly. “I don’t really know what I want.”

“Yes, you do.” Fritz actually laughed out loud at the notion. “There was a time when you didn’t, but you found it. Now I’m trying to find it, too.”

“Well . . .” Vhalla sat with Fritz on his bed. “What do you want to be? What do you
want
to do?”

Talking things through with Fritz was therapeutic. She gave him advice she needed to heed herself. It wasn’t any wonder why her messy-haired friend had stayed around for so long. They were so similar in all the ways they needed.

When Vhalla finally returned to her room, she saw the low glow of a fire coming from the door to Aldrik’s quarters. Her feet dragged forward, compelled by her heart. Aldrik worked dutifully at a small table by the fire, scribbling across parchment.