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He gripped the saddle with his thighs, fighting to stay mounted, but his body had reached its limit.
In the end, he spilled headlong onto the frozen, snowbound earth.
“Your Grace!”
Someone caught him just as he slid from the horse.
Kneeling in the snow and fighting for breath, Varkas shoved away the hands trying to hold him up and leaned his weight on the halberd, using the shaft like a crutch to force himself upright.
The world tilted again in a dizzying blur.
He rested his forehead against the weapon, waiting for the vertigo to pass, and glanced down at his flank. The strain of combat had torn the wound wide open. Blood poured steadily through the cleft where the blade had pierced his armor.
A cavalryman scrambled over, tore his surcoat into strips to pack the tear, and bellowed across the field.
“A mage! Bring a mage now!”
Knowing his limbs would carry him no farther, Varkas finally let himself sink back against the snow.
There was no pain, only a bone-deep cold and an exhaustion that seeped into every fiber of his being.
Perhaps this will be the last sight I ever see.
With that quiet thought, he looked toward the sky. The late afternoon spilled brilliant cobalt light across his eyes.
A sharp, burning ache opened deep in his chest.
It made no sense. It was his side that had taken the steel, yet it felt as though his heart had been pierced clean through.
His vision blurred. He blinked once, twice, and then closed his heavy lids.
A warm breeze carrying the thick scent of green grass brushed against his face.
Caught within it was the faint, sweet tang of fruit, and Varkas immediately turned toward it.
Presently, beside a pond dyed crimson by the dying sun, he found the girl he had spent hours searching for.
Perched on a thick bough roughly level with his shoulders, she swung her bare feet back and forth as he looked up with a frown.
“Aren’t you a bit old to be climbing trees?”
Her blue eyes, which had been fixed on the ripples disturbing the purple lake, drifted toward him.
“Not yet. You can do whatever you like until you’re fifteen.”
He arched a brow at the absurdity. A daughter of a noble house learned the deportment expected of a lady from the age of eight or nine.
He started to snap back, but sighed instead and held out an open hand.
“It grows late. Come down now.”
The girl peered down at him with a strange flicker in her gaze, then turned her face away with a petulant pout.
“I can’t.”
His eyes narrowed.
Pressed by his silent, demanding stare, she swung her pale feet beneath the hem of a skirt gathered high around her calves.
“See? I’m barefoot. I can’t take a single step from here.”
“…What happened to your shoes this time?”
“Who knows? They tumbled down somewhere over there.”
She pointed toward the dense brush beneath the gentle slope rolling down to the water’s edge.
Swallowing another sigh, Varkas walked down and parted the brambles until he found a pair of velvet shoes no larger than the palm of his hand.
He brushed away the dirt and walked back to the branch, where she promptly thrust a foot toward his face as if she had been waiting for the moment.
“Here.”
He grimaced, irritated to be treated like an ordinary servant when he was a knight and the heir to the Grand Duchy, but the annoyance was brief. He took hold of her foot and carefully worked the velvet over it.
Her small toes wriggled against his fingers, tickled, before she presented the other foot.
Without a word of complaint, Varkas slipped on the remaining shoe, straightened up, and tilted his head.
“Satisfied now?”
“Satisfied? Far from it. Now you have to lift me down.”
She reached out with both arms, entirely shameless.
Varkas watched her for a quiet moment, let out a resigned breath, and lifted her from the branch. He meant to set her straight on the grass, but her soft, pale arms wound tight around his neck.
He stiffened at the sudden contact, then caught the pungent, sweet stench of wine and knitted his brow. He had wondered why she was acting so spoiled; she had stolen drink and slipped away to finish it alone.
He peeled her clinging hands from his chest and fixed her with a stern glare.
“Where did you get wine?”
“That’s a secret.”
A quiet, airy giggle escaped her.
That laugh, ringing clear as a spring wind, scattered every harsh rebuke hovering on his tongue.
He stared down at her flushed, rosy face, struck by how foreign she looked. She usually carried herself as though she were withering beneath the misery of the world, but here she was, laughing without a trace of care, and he could not tear his eyes away.
“Look, Varkas. The moon is out.”
She pointed up at the sky as it bled into indigo.
Following her finger, he saw a slender crescent suspended right between the twilight red and blue.
The girl gazed up at it for a long while, as if she had discovered some rare treasure, and spoke in a dreamy murmur.
“Just one more year, and I’ll be sixteen.”
Those water-washed blue eyes slowly dropped to meet his.
“And when that day comes…”
Her drifting voice snapped off mid-sentence.
Varkas stared blankly as her silhouette dissolved like a heat haze.
A sudden, violent gust ripped across the air, battering against him.
When the wind passed, he was standing in the inner courtyard of Raedgo Castle.
Beyond the garden in full bloom, he saw her again.
She sat bathed in bright sunlight, smiling radiantly, cradling a tiny baby boy in her arms.
She looked down at the infant’s face with the very same wonder she had shown the moon, then lifted her head and met his gaze.
“Varkas.”
He took slow, hesitant steps toward the woman calling his name, and she tilted the bundle toward him as if bestowing some precious favor.
“Look at him. Isn’t he beautiful?”
She spoke with proud triumph, showing off a priceless treasure, and pressed her rose-tinted lips to the child’s soft, fair cheek.
Without daring to blink, Varkas lowered his eyes toward her embrace.
Bright, jewel-like blue eyes looked up from a tiny face that seamlessly blended her features with his own. Then, bleeding across that memory, came the ghostly image of a gray face turning cold inside its swaddling cloth.
Behind those eyelids that had closed forever, had there been eyes as vivid as these?
The numb thought drifted through his mind as his hand reached out toward the child’s cheek. The moment his fingers grazed the skin, the fragile, futile vision shattered. The radiant smile on her face disintegrated into drifting ash.
Watching every shining thing dissolve soundlessly into the wind, Varkas curled his empty fingers into a tight fist.
The world around him drained to gray and crumbled to pieces. Another gust blew through, sweeping away the last fragments of the illusion.
All that remained was a ruined, rotting body and an infinite, hollow dark.
He collapsed to his knees, staring blankly out into the boundless wasteland.
“Are you finally awake?”
A low groan tore from his throat as he forced his eyes open, and the first thing to meet his gaze was Daren’s haggard face.
Why was the man who should have been holding Tarlin sitting at his bedside?
Frowning, Varkas realized he was not in a military pavilion but in a richly furnished bedchamber, and he pushed himself upright.
Daren’s face paled, and he rushed forward to press Varkas back against the pillows.
“Your wound hasn’t closed. Don’t move.”
Varkas looked down, his expression hardening. Stark white bandages bound his bare torso in tight layers.
He pressed lightly on the dressing, and a dull, throbbing pull flared through his side.
He raised his eyes to Daren, demanding an answer.
“Why hasn’t healing magic been used?”
“Why wouldn’t we use it? Four high priests nearly exhausted themselves pouring sacred power into you.”
Daren sank heavily into a chair, letting out a weary breath.
“The blade carried some foul demonic poison. The holy power struggled to take hold, so the priests had to tend to Your Grace day and night for fifteen full days just to purge it.”
Varkas’s brow twitched.
“How long was I out?”
“Two weeks and five days, without waking once.”
END