Blood upon the Snow

The bailey was a cauldron of blind smoke, churning slush, and the screaming of dying horses. Morvath’s mercenaries had battered down the lower wicket with an improvised ram and pressed beneath the smithy arches, hurling torches into the royal stables to spark a stampede that would trample the last garrison stand.

Maddened horses whinnied through the greasy fog, battering stall dividers with their calked shoes in thunderous rhythm. Squires scrambled across the battlements with hods of sand and soaked blankets to choke the pitch-fires before they could lap into the sunken granary chutes.

Fadrique fought with the berserk fury of a man possessed by powers that were no longer mere flesh. With every clash of his broadsword against iron, the veins along his throat and temples pulsed with the blinding azure glare of the talisman rooted in his breastbone. The frost radiating from him was so bitter that spilled blood congealed into black glass before soaking the trampled drift.

Snow covers the fallen with the same haste the court forgets the defeated.

Irene shot from the roof of the mule shed, winding the crossbow with the unthinking rhythm that panic breeds when it tempers into stone-cold fury. Two pikemen lunged up a rope ladder; she kicked the top staves out with her iron-shod heel, hurling them into the ditch before they could reach the cedar eaves.

Morvath cut his way through the melee, brandishing a flanged war-mace with brutal strength. Seeing Fadrique stagger from steady loss of blood, the archduke bore down on him with a triumphant bellow that echoed across the stones.

"The relic is mine, bastard!" he roared, bringing the flanged head down with a blow Fadrique barely turned on his crossguard, tumbling both combatants into the red-stained slush.

Morvath’s mace spun into a horse trough of iced water, but the old lord pulled a narrow misericorde from his boot and drove himself onto his nephew’s ribs, hunting the gap in his harness where the accursed frost throbbed.

Irene had no bolt loaded in the groove. She dropped from the shed roof into the drift, rolled clear of a thrashing charger's hooves, and threw herself onto Morvath’s neck, driving the cobbler's rasp like a spike beneath his mail gorget.

The steel tooth bit deep into the archduke's throat. Morvath shrieked in agony, dropping the blade, and swung his gauntleted backhand, hurling Irene hard against the stone cistern lip.

Fadrique gave him no breath to turn. With a roar that tore the lining of his throat, he drove his hunting knife straight through his uncle's breastplate and velvet doublet, pinning the traitor deep into the frozen earth below.

Morvath froze. His small, bloodshot eyes stared wide in blank disbelief before glazing into lifeless gray stones.

Stillness dropped across the courtyard like a shroud of heavy lead. The surviving sellswords dropped their weapons upon the red snow the instant they saw their paymaster die.

Fadrique collapsed on his knees beside the cistern where Irene lay stunned, her temples resting against the chilled stone. The prince's tunic was torn to ribbons; over his bare sternum, the frost relic flared with an incandescent, blinding glare that threatened to consume his living flesh and freeze his lungs forever.

"Irene..." he wheezed, frost coating his split lips. "It closes... The heart goes dark..."

Irene hauled herself up with her last reserves of will. She remembered the wellspring in the tomb: living blood melting ancient falsehood carved in granite. Without pausing to breathe, she tore the binding from her wrist and pressed her opened flesh directly against the heart-stone, bathing the crystal in living, smoking blood.

A crack like a siege ram shattered the air of Oakhaven.

The frost talisman splintered into a thousand needles of clear ice that dissolved to warm vapor against his ribs. The azure veins shrank beneath his skin, vanishing into a single pale scar that pulsed with the full, hot, steady beat of an unchained human heart.

Fadrique drew a long, ragged breath—a living warmth that melted the ice from Irene's frozen lashes as he pulled her tight into his bloody, shaking arms.

Above the shattered machicolations and smoking battlements, the iron clouds tore apart for the first time in three hundred winters, letting fall upon the courtyard a shaft of golden, midday spring light rich with the scent of waking earth.