The Iron Ring

 

DEDICATION

This novel is dedicated to my little brother, Preston, whose defiance, courage, and humor in the face of doom has inspired me to this day.

To all the little brothers out there: may they never, ever do what they are told. May they never, ever learn their place.

 

EPIGRAPH

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt to those we personally dislike.”

—­
O
SCAR
W
ILDE

 

CONTENTS

 

PROLOGUE

T
he complete rout of an army in the field was never a pretty thing. When it broke, those thousands of men who once were an orderly, deadly machine of steel and flesh suddenly began to writhe and wither, like a slug dipped in salt. Friends trampled friends. Hallowed banners stamped with a dozen great victories were cast down in the mud. Cowards knocked heroes over the head and stole their boots. The ground became a gory, crimson slush.

The Mad Prince Banric Sahand did not tarry to watch his army disintegrate. Not yet forty, he had fought in more battles than most men twice his age, and he knew the signs of defeat when he saw them. He had been the commander of the most feared, disciplined, and deadly army in the West—­the conqueror of kingdoms, the sacker of cities, the scourge of Galaspin, Saldor, and Eretheria. He had bent the whole of the Trell Valley to his will; he had been on the verge of besieging the ancient city of Saldor itself. His enemies, bogged down in an endless war in Illin against the vast legions of the Kalsaari Empire, could do nothing but watch the victories pile about his feet and hear the tales of their defiant kinsmen's heads mounted on pikes. That, however, had been before the rout. Before Calassa.

Sahand could scarcely think about the place now without bellowing his rage, though there was no one but his exhausted horse to hear him. His mind was still reeling at how his enemies had managed to accomplish it. How he had been duped. Fooled. Made into a mockery for all the world to laugh at.

He pressed his heels into the horse's flanks. It was sweating, despite the chill of autumn and the harsh winds blowing down from the snow-­capped Dragonspine to the east. The arrow shafts protruding from the horse's flanks gave it an uneven gait; he suspected it would die soon. It occurred to him that he had no idea whose horse this was. He didn't even know if it belonged to one of his men or one of the enemy. He supposed it scarcely mattered. Either way, he'd kill it under him and be glad of it.

Sahand's heart burned. Bile bit at the back of his throat. His eyes were wide and could scarcely focus on anything for long. He wanted to reach out and throttle someone—­anyone—­if doing so could just abate the mind-­numbing anger that seemed to consume him from his toes to his ears. It would have been easier,
so
much easier, if the defeat had been someone else's fault—­if he could not, even now, see how obvious the trap was in retrospect.

Calassa. City of Vineyards, heart of the Saldorian dominion, gatekeeper to the approaches of Saldor itself. A little walled city of crumbling battlements and pretty wooden houses; a road apple, a practice run for Sahand's siege crews. It was so obvious that he would attack there, Varner must have seen it coming for weeks. They were probably giving the fool parades at this very moment. The magi of the Arcanostrum were gifting him something grand and powerful and ancient; they were setting laurels upon his brow.

Sahand roared again as the horse stumbled. He leapt clear, rolling to his feet even as the beast hit the dirt. Its flanks shuddered with exhaustion; its tongue lolled out like a dog's. It didn't get up.

Sahand drew his broadsword, still bloodstained from battle, and muttered an angry and guttural incantation to draw the Fey energy into the blade. The steel shuddered and screeched with the influx of power and then glowed orange-­white, as though just drawn from a furnace. He stomped beside the horse, sorcerous heat making its sweat steam, and looked in its wild, bloodshot eye. He raised the sword over his head and dropped it in one heavy stroke. The Fey energy was released in a titanic burst of fire and noise, ripping the horse apart into fist-­sized chunks of charred flesh and boiling blood. Sahand looked at what was left of it—­the saddle, now on fire, and some bits of bone—­and roared again. He didn't feel any better. Overcome with heat, the sword began to melt in his hand; he threw it away.

It had been three days since the battle. He could still see the flames consuming the rooftops, hear the crackle of the painted facades as they withered beneath the heat. He smelled the smoke. He'd watched the city burn for thirty-­six hours, congratulating himself on the quality of incendiaries he'd used, sending his compliments to the war engine crews, drinking
oggra
with his officers like it was the eve of his damned wedding. What an idiot he had been.

Then Varner sent Cadogan, that self-­aggrandizing sell-­sword with his team of cutthroats, swimming through Calassa's moat with ash on his face and a knife in his teeth to murder Sahand's officers in their sleep. Sahand had made Cadogan pay for it, of course, but by then half his best officers were dead.

That was when it all fell apart. Sahand, standing in his own tent just at dawn, his sword soaked with Finn Cadogan's blood, with the sound of silver trumpets carrying through the air. Not Sahand's trumpets, nor Varner's—­it was Perwynnon, Falcon King of Eretheria, at the head of a host of glittering knights, charging at the flank of Sahand's army. The officers to prepare the defense? Dead, of course, and by Cadogan's hand. Sahand was only just in his armor as the Eretherians were turning his camp into cinders. Then Varner had charged from the city gates—­on foot, as always, at the head of a hard-­eyed host of war veterans, magi, and Defenders of the Balance. Every one of them was somehow untouched by fire, their eyes bright and their faces beaming as Varner's trap was sprung. The slaughter had been complete.

Now Sahand found himself fleeing alone across the empty grassy hills of the Galaspin hinterland without even a horse to his name. If there were a way, he would have murdered the whole world, right there and then, for refusing to be his.

He was able to walk another few miles, climbing steadily up into the thin air of the mountains, before he found himself too exhausted to continue. He hadn't eaten or drank since the night before the rout; he had sustained himself on a mixture of sorcery and raw, unfiltered anger, and he was now spent. The destruction of his former horse was the last he had in him.

Rolling on his back, Sahand looked up at the sunless, slate gray sky. He was near Freegate—­a neutral party, a guild-­run city of merchants and traders. He and Varner had sparred over it, each flirted with sacking it from time to time—­there would be no friends there. They'd hand him over for the bounty, he was sure of it, the money-­grubbing pigs. They wouldn't even have the courage to gut him themselves. He should have sacked them when he had the chance, just to hear them squeal as his men raped and pillaged their way across that wretched, tumbledown shanty town.

Sahand lay there, exhausted, indulging himself in revenge fantasies for what seemed like hours but may have only been seconds. A light snow began to fall, but he didn't feel cold. That meant he was probably freezing to death. Mumbling a few spells to heat his body, he found the magical energies gathering in his hands as easily as if he were dipping his hands in a warm bath. He had to be resting along a ley line—­the natural streams of invisible power that pooled all five of the Great Energies together into one place. He'd studied them in school as a boy, of course—­they assisted in navigation, shaped where cities had been built, and even how the land itself had formed, it was said. The one he laid on now probably ran from the mountains above Freegate, through Galaspin, Calassa, and all the way to the city of Saldor itself. He grunted to himself—­all of his enemies, tied together by one unbroken stream of magical power.

That was all he could think about—­his enemies. He could see Varner and his Defenders and Arcanostrum magi sitting in the old Calassa Keep, chuckling to themselves as they watched his camp through the veil of illusory flames. Sahand knew he should have been suspicious—­he should have
known
a city wouldn't catch fire that easily, not with Varner in command. Not with magi like Lyrelle Reldamar pulling strings and working rituals. The illusion had been her idea, he just knew it—­she'd sold him a pretty lie, and he'd swallowed it because he wanted to. Because he could already taste his victory and refused to conceive of anything else. It was the most basic of all cons; it was the oldest trick in the book.

He was an idiot, and the fact made him angrier than anything else.

For some reason, the face of Lyrelle Reldamar seemed to resolve itself above him. He saw her more clearly than any of his other enemies—­her platinum hair piled high on her head and pinned in place with silver posts, her eyes the color of the sky, but colder and sharper. A woman of thirty, but already a master mage. He could almost see her leaning over him, her black robes fluttering in the mountain winds. She wore the pinched expression a mother would use on a muddy child. “You're finished, you know.” Her voice was cool and calm, with a subtle firmness to it that reminded Sahand of ice beneath packed snow. “Even if you do survive to make it back to Dellor, you'll never have another chance at what you want again.”

“Damned Kroth-­spawned bitch!” He growled. He flailed his hands at the hallucination but touched nothing.

The image of Lyrelle wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you plan on dying here, then? Another bleached set of bones to adorn the wilderness. Another pile of teeth for some troll to make into a necklace. Fitting.”

Sahand pulled himself into a sitting position. He shook his head. Lyrelle's image did not go away, but rather floated in front of him, just beyond reach. “You . . . you're really here?” He blinked a few times but nothing changed.

Lyrelle snorted. “Do you really think I would
walk
out here to the middle of nowhere just to chat? Are you of the opinion that I intend to be strangled by those meat hooks of yours? No wonder you fell for the Calassa Shroud.”

Hallucination or not, Sahand spat in her direction. It might have hit her face, were she solid. Instead, he realized he had just wasted what was possibly the very last of his spit. “I'll have my vengeance. I'll make every one of you pay—­Varner, Perwynnon, you—­even if it takes the rest of my life I'll—­”

Lyrelle laughed the carefree laugh of a woman surrounded by friends in a sunny place. Sahand felt his face flush with what heat he had left inside him. He tried to stand but stumbled back to the ground. Lyrelle shook her head. “By the time you can raise another army and have another chance at conquest, you'll be too ancient to enjoy your rule and too feeble to keep it for long. That is, of course, assuming you don't die here on the side of a mountain or that the filthy hill-­­people you call your subjects don't lynch you the moment you get home.” She smiled. “That is a lot of assumptions, don't you think?”

“Then what
is
this?” Sahand bellowed at her, hurling a rock through her translucent form. “You've come to gloat? You mean to kill me? Kroth take you! I'll have my fingers around your neck, so help me . . .”

Lyrelle ignored him. “Take this.” On cue, a small, inert black sphere came into view. Moving about as fast as a trotting horse, the courier djinn wound its way up the hillside and stopped in front of Sahand, hovering a foot off the ground.

Reaching out, Sahand touched it. It vanished with a pop, and a wooden letter box dropped to the ground. He picked it up—­it was solid, warm,
real.
“This is really happening.” He muttered. He was too tired to wrestle with the implications, but something . . . a feeling, like a buzz at the back of his neck, woke him from his stupor just a little bit.

Lyrelle's voice rang in his ears as clear as church bells. “The war has changed the world, Banric. For the first time in millennia, sorcery was used on a large scale, and all those prudes in the Church and the Arcanostrum who'd been trying to keep the secrets of the High and Low Arts to themselves have been made to look like fools. Restrictions on magecraft are going to relax, warlocks and thaumaturges are going to multiply like rabbits, alchemists will be selling potions on every street corner in the West.”

“What's that to me?”

Lyrelle smiled at him. “An opportunity.”

Sahand frowned. “I don't believe you.”

Lyrelle laughed. “Do you actually think what you
believe
matters, Banric? Understand this:
I
marshaled Varner and Perwynnon and Cadogan to fight you,
I
crushed your armies at Calassa,
I
have been the architect of the events that brought you here, now, because
I have use for you.
Your entire brutal, violent existence—­your very life—­is something that I have designed to suit my purpose, so whether or not you think I'm telling you the truth is completely inconsequential to the choice you must make at this very moment. Will you accept the offer before you or stay here alone and die the bitter, frustrated despot of a backwater nation? I await your answer.”

Sahand scowled, the rage at his defeat again bubbling up inside of him to the point where he thought his eyes might catch afire. He opened his mouth to say something vile, but all he managed was, “Making a deal with me is treason, Lyrelle.”

“It can't be treason, as the magi of the Arcanostrum recognize the authority of no king.” Lyrelle looked out at the gray-­green hills and valleys that surrounded them and took—­or
appeared
to take—­a deep breath of sharp mountain air. “That box is your link to what you never had before, Banric—­secrets. You either take them, and everything that goes with them, or you don't. In either case, my time grows short.”

Sahand opened the box. It was empty, but its interior surface was covered in sorcerous runes so carefully drawn it would have taken the efforts of a master like Lyrelle months to inscribe them. This was no mere trinket; this represented a kind of power Sahand had never had. A kind of power that had just been used to destroy him, and now was resting in his hands.

But at what cost? Nothing from the hand of Lyrelle Reldamar, that spider of spiders, could be trusted. Take the deal, and he'd be playing into her plans somehow—­plans so far-­reaching and so fathomless that he'd probably never know their full depths. The idea that he had been a pawn enraged him past all sense; were he not so close to death, his curses would have echoed from the mountainsides.