Chapter One
Khirro blinked.
Wispy smoke floated across an otherwise unspoiled sky, marring it, capturing his attention, bringing him to focus. He realized there was nothing but sky and the smudge of gray—no smells, no sounds, nothing.
Smells returned first, all of them familiar—dirt and stone and dust, the scents of his life that had always been there.
The farm, then. I’m on the farm.
That didn’t feel right, didn’t explain the streak of smoke. Memories were faint, distant, as though seen through the wrong end of an eyeglass. It couldn’t be the farm, he’d left home months before...but for where?
Sound crept back into Khirro’s world. A man’s voice floated to him on the summer air, then more voices—not shouts of reverie but cries of anger and pain. Like a dam bursting, the clash of metal on metal added to the din.
The sounds jarred Khirro and memories flooded back like the tide filling a hole in the sand. Consciousness slammed down on him, brutal and unflinching. On his left, a sheer stone wall rose thirty feet or more; his right arm dangled over untold nothing. He moved his head to see and pain flooded his body, filling every joint and crevice, leaving no portion free from its touch. Something wet on his forehead and face, the taste of blood on his swollen tongue. The feel of it all filled in the last holes in his recollection: the invasion, the fight on the wall, the king and his men coming to his rescue. He’d tried to fight alongside the elite knights, but he was only a farmer forced to dress up in armor and wear a sword.
There’d be no harvest this year, not for him.
He spat weakly to clear his mouth; bloody saliva ran down his cheek into his ear. Ragged breath caught in his throat as he remembered the warrior breaching the wall, a huge man dressed in closed helm and black chain mail splashed red—paint or blood, Khirro couldn’t tell. The man easily bested him, forced him back until he stumbled over a fallen knight. He recalled the fellow’s pained groan as his foot struck his ribs, then he was tumbling end over end down the stairs, desperate to keep from going over the edge to the courtyard seventy feet below.
So that’s where he was—lying on the first landing, precariously close to death, as King Braymon and his guard defended the fortress from a Kanosee army.
King Braymon.
Everything hurt: back, arms and legs, hips. His head pounded. Warm blood oozed down his forehead from above his hairline. His throat worked futilely; it was a struggle to draw breath. Instead of his lungs expanding in his chest, panic grew in their place. He’d survived a bombardment of fireballs and the first Kanosee breach of the fortress wall; how ironic it would be to die falling down the stairs.
When he could breathe again, he gasped air past the bloody taste on his tongue like a man breaking the surface of a lake after a long dive. He took inventory of his body, wiggling his fingers and toes, flexing his muscles. They hurt, every one of them, but they all worked.
What do I do now?
The thought was fuzzy, as though spoken by someone with a mouthful of cotton. Another thought came fast on the heels of the first: The king needs me. Even warriors as fierce as King Braymon of Erechania and his guard couldn’t defeat so many. He wanted to get up and rush to his king’s side, to stand against the enemy, but more than the pains in his body kept him from it.
He thought of Emeline, and of his unborn child. His heart contracted.
Idiot! All you had to do was push over a couple of ladders. What kind of soldier are you?
He was no soldier, that was the answer. Spade and hoe were his tools, horse and plow, not sword and dirk and catapult. But he had a duty, and he’d made a promise to Jowyn before the hellfire claimed his life. Khirro scrambled away from the edge; his head smacked the stone landing sending a fresh jolt of pain through his temples.
I don’t want to end up like Jowyn.
Fighting sounds tumbled over the edge of the walk thirty feet above, carried to Khirro on a hot summer breeze that petered out long before it reached him. The thought of King Braymon and his guards fighting for their lives filled him with guilt. He heard the king’s voice call for aid. Someone answered, far away and