When the Villian Comes Home Read online

  Azallé adjusted her hood over her dusty black hair. “At least he has the sense to avoid burning off his feet.”

  Her companion glared at her with red-rimmed eyes. Breath steamed out through the mouth slit of the gruesome steel and leather skull he wore over his face. “And I suppose you know all about this land, eh, Mistress? You do hail from this forsaken backwater.”

  “All the Aza know of the Seep.”

  “I warned you against this return.” His voice sounded like wind whispering through broken glass. “If only because of the four day ride. These beasts test me.”

  Magic blurred the air around Mask’s right-hand gauntlet—a clawed monstrosity that was yet another in the sorcerer’s collection of ancient relics. The gathering power overwhelmed the skittish horse’s last nerve. It threw its rider into the snow, then trotted a short way down the treacherous path.

  Azallé covered her mouth to stifle a laugh.

  “We should just kill the dumb brute.”

  Mask rose and threw off his snow-encrusted cloak, revealing blood-stained leathers that wrapped him from head to foot. He burned like a furnace: snowflakes that touched him melted and ran down his gaunt, plague-ravaged body in rivulets. He turned murderously to his horse.

  “Wait. I’ll handle this.” Azallé swung down from her saddle and stepped past Mask. Her cloak blew open, revealing a golden dagger that hung from her belt. It was her only weapon—the only one she had ever needed. The blade of the Red King.

  Azallé stretched out her hand, palm open, and hummed in soothing tones. The horse’s ears rose and its flaring eyes narrowed. Slowly, the horse lowered its head so Azallé could lay her fingers on its brow. She basked in its beatific trust that all would be well.

  “Remark—” Mask began.

  A deep voice whispered in her mind.

  Azallé unsheathed her golden dagger and plunged it into the horse’s throat. The animal’s shriek choked off into a dying gurgle. Azallé watched the life drain from the horse’s terrified eyes, its skin turn gray and crack like wasted earth, and its hot blood slake her fiery hand. Its strength joined to hers, soothing her, empowering her...

  The vision passed and Azallé stared into the horse’s soulful eyes. She realized she was holding the handle of her dagger very hard, and she slowly relaxed her fingers.

  Doing so, she revealed a tiny streak of chapped, gray flesh across her palm, as though the dagger had burned her. The scar was old, however—she’d earned it before she’d ever wielded the blade of the Red King.

  “Remarkable.” Mask’s raw voice infused the word with derision. “You never fail to amuse me, Azallé.”

  “Lea,” she corrected him. “You named me Azallé, but Lea is my name among my own people.”

  “Ah yes, Lea of the Aza, a true mistress of beasts. A scrawny girl shivering in the cold. But she had strength in her eyes, and that is why I took her in—not to mention what she carried.” He nodded to the blade of the Red King. “What country lass wields such a blade?”

  “True.” Azallé covered her dagger with her cloak.

  “You think hiding what you are means anything?”

  “Says the man with no face.”

  “Oh, I have a face, but not one worthy of you,” Mask said. “Nothing is more beautiful than you with that blade. Returning to this place will not change that.”

  Azallé couldn’t decide if his words were a compliment or an insult. “Mount up. We’ve far to ride, yet.”

  “As you say, Mistress.”

  5

  Azallé rode as though born to the saddle, but it was slow going with Mask. Every so often, they had to stop while the sorcerer recovered himself awkwardly. Azallé had never seen him without his armor, but she knew his harsh past had stripped his body of its grace. When they first met, she had found Mask’s disjointed corpse of a body unnerving, but now she only felt sadness for the man trapped within. Not that she would ever speak of it. Mask was the closest thing she had to a friend—excepting the one she had come back to see.

  Mask reined his horse to a halt.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Warning magic flared around his gorget—one of his many relics of the fallen mage-empire of Calatan. “We’re not alone.”

  Mask stared into a copse of snow-encrusted trees until shadowed figures emerged. At first, the steamed breath from their horses obscured their faces, but Azallé could see their drawn weapons clearly enough. As the riders drew closer, Azallé recognized them as young men from the village, haggard after a lean winter. They turned their spears toward Mask, marking the sorcerer the greater threat. Azallé knew they could not be more wrong.

  The Red King bid her take up her dagger and show them their error, but she pushed the whispers away. She was glad of her vision earlier, which had warned her to hide the golden dagger. None could mistake the blade of Azathorn the Red King, God of the Aza—the blade that drank so others might live. It was the Aza’s most sacred relic, and Azallé had stolen it five years before. If they recognized it, they would know her, and then blood would turn the snow to slush.

  “Hail,” Azallé said. “Walk safe, men of the Aza.”

  One of the outriders guided his horse a step closer. He raised one hand, which bore a faded gray scar across the palm. That was the mark of the Aza, of their devotion to the Red King’s power. “Walk safe, travelers.”

  Gorode. Azallé recognized the young man by his pock-marked face and cracking voice. As a boy, Gorode had once chased her through mud pits and called her names. She’d learned much of men in the war, and realized now that his boyish pranks by day meant he had dreamed of her body by night. Had she stayed in the village, would she have married a boy like Gorode?

  Looking upon him now, all she saw was a reminder of her own sins. She remembered him lying pinned beneath his dying horse five years before. She shook the memory away.

  “There’s a toll to travel this road,” he said. “Else...well, we’ve steel.”

  “Ha.” Mask’s broken laughter split the silence, and burning magic coursed around his right-hand gauntlet, as well as humming force around the delicate silver mesh across his left-hand glove. “Shall I heat their bones until their flesh melts? I could spare one or two, if you would break your fast?”

  The whispers stirred. Azallé had not drunk of a foe in almost a year now, and the blade’s call was weak. She choked the urge down like bile—she would not be that woman.

  “Silver is cheaper than blood.” Azallé reached for her coin-purse, which she tossed to Gorode. He bobbled it in cold fingers. “Take it with my blessing, and guide us into the village. I would speak with the Elder as soon as he would hear me.” She extended her hands, wrists together. “If you will bind us, I will not resist.”

  “Who are you, lady, that you would seek the Aza?” As he looked at her, Gorode’s eyebrows rose. Azallé wondered if he recognized her.

  Five years ago, Gorode had chased her through the snow, crying “traitor!” and “murderer!” His spear had taken her in the left shoulder, and she’d felt the Red King’s magic, new and exciting, rise in response to the wound. She’d felled Gorode’s horse that she herself might live. The blade had healed her, but also demanded she kill Gorode too. Fortunately, after what happened to her brother, she’d had the strength to resist its whispers.

  Now, her shoulder ached with phantom pain, and the Red King hungered anew. His whispers grew louder.

  Gorode was staring at her, awaiting a reply. Azallé could not speak, but Mask came to her rescue. “We bring good tidings and a gift—but we will give them only to the Elder.”

  Azallé relaxed. Elder Nava would know her and understand. He was, after all, her father.

  Gorode nodded and gave orders to his men, who encircled the travelers to escort them down the lonely mountainside. The outriders left them unbound, but watched them closely. Azallé
collected her composure.

  “I do not understand,” Mask murmured. “You are Azallé the Blood Reaver. You have slain a thousand men and taken their strength for yourself.”

  “Nine hundred and seventy-seven,” she corrected him.

  They had not all been men, either, but also weeping women and defenseless children. And though the strength she had stolen from them had joined a pool of might, she would never forget their individual faces wracked with fear and pain. Perverted from its original use, the blade hungered to absorb as many souls as it could.

  “Regardless,” Mask said, “this rabble owes its very existence to you, and yet you go meekly among them like a nameless dog? You will not find what you seek in this place.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But I will be what I choose, and nothing else.”

  Azallé could not read her companion’s face behind his mask.

  “I cannot decide which is the greater tragedy,” the sorcerer said at length. “That you have all that power and refuse to use it, or that you think you can stop yourself.”

  5

  As the band descended the mountain, Azallé’s heart lightened.

  The village of the Aza was much as she remembered: the smells of baking bread and roasting venison, the boasts of bowmen freshly returned from the day’s hunt, the oil lamps lit in the windows as dusk fell. Children laughed and lovers pressed their scarred hands together. The Aza bore the gray scars of the Red King, but the marks had faded in the years since the last ritual. The youngest did not bear them at all.

  This peace endured because of her. She had done what had to be done, and the Aza lived because of it. In that moment, she knew it had been worth the heavy cost.

  Mask’s cutting voice cooled her rising spirits.

  “Harshest woman I’ve ever met, and you’re beaming like an untraveled commoner,” Mask said. “If all those Echvar barbarians could see the great Blood Reaver, carried off by pitiful guardians to an even less relevant authority...”

  “You have not met my father, you do not know.”

  Mask shook his head. “What happened to the Azallé I know? She that the Valeri named Red Queen when she slew their general and washed her wounds with his blood? She that the Tar Vangryur call Blood Binder, for making blood-slaves of their children?”

  “That was another time, Mask. That war is over. We lost.”

  “That depends what you tried to win. I know what I won.”

  “Indeed? And what was that?”

  Azallé looked at him sidelong, but the sorcerer kept his secrets.

  “Certainly, the war had its losers,” Mask said. “The Children took Echvar but lost it in days. Valeran is smashed and destroyed. Two mage-cities succumbed to Ruin, never to be redeemed...Our erstwhile allies might have lost their war, but at least your little hidden vale is safe. That is a victory, is it not?”

  “A victory at a cost.” Azallé thought of the countless lives she had ended. She could not forget a single victim so long as she carried the golden blade. Just the reminder of the power it offered made her yearn to hold it.

  “There is always a cost.” Mask gestured back up the mountain, where they could still see the towering, petrified warmachines that held the pass. “Those monsters had to die the slow death of a millennium to keep Aza’s enemies at bay. Then, when less godly madmen came...”

  “Then the task fell to someone else. Me.”

  “Indeed.” Mask sounded pleased.

  With a chill, Azallé remembered the advent of the Children of Ruin five years gone. The Children branded themselves and pierced their faces with shards of metal harvested from slain foes. They knew nothing of mercy, or of respect for the old gods. When they had streamed through the haunted pass like a wave of blood and hate, they raped and slew and burned their way through the outlying villages of the Aza. They stopped only when Lea, the priest’s daughter, took up the golden blade sacred to the tribe and did what was needful.

  She had bought her village’s safety with the blood of thousands, then left her name and heritage behind to join the war in Echvar and Valeran. As Azallé the Blood Reaver, she had slain all who knew of the secret vale of the Aza: her people would never taste Ruin’s kiss again. Now she meant to leave that behind: to become again the priest’s daughter. She would beg forgiveness of the family she had spurned, help rebuild what her people had lost, and—she prayed to Azathorn the Red King—find the friend she had loved enough to break her tribe’s most sacred tenet.

  “Sael,” she whispered without sound.

  The repetition of the name always gave her the strength to resist the blade’s call. Soon, Azallé would return the blade to the temple, and her bloody quest would finally end.

  “Ah yes,” Mask said, though he could hardly have heard Azallé. “You’ve mentioned this Sael. I would like to see this creature that holds such sway over the Blood Reaver’s heart.”

  Not for the first time, Azallé wondered if one of Mask’s many relics let him hear her thoughts. Did he also hear the whispers of the Red King, or was that her own particular curse?

  As they rode into the village, Azallé searched the faces—some she recognized, others she did not—for her most precious of friends. What would Sael be like after five years? Would they be as close as before?

  What she found instead was something that turned the warmth in her belly cold. The sweet scents of the village became the taste of mealy apples and moldering bread in her mouth.

  “No,” she said. “That—that cannot be.”

  “How wonderful,” Mask said.

  The Elder’s Hall lay in ruin. What five years ago had been a grand stone edifice now looked like a melted cake, its strong beams reduced to cinders and its crenellations drooping. The remains of the hall squatted like a scar in the center of the pristine village. Azallé had seen many destroyed buildings, but had never imagined she would find the same in her homeland.

  “What...” Azallé’s voice broke. “What happened here? I thought the Children’s invasion failed.”

  “It did.” Gorode looked at her closely. “You know of it?”

  “My lady is a student of history,” Mask said.

  Azallé tasted salt and iron: she had bit her tongue, and she swallowed her own blood rather than show her despair. “This looks old. When did this come to pass? Is Elder Nava...?”

  “The old Elder died shortly after the invasion, the night of the fire. I would not speak on it, Lady.” Gorode’s face turned dark. “The Elder will see you in the morn.”

  “A new Elder? Who could possibly—?”

  Mask spoke over Azallé. “And where are we to wait?”

  “Few travelers come to the lands of the Aza. I will arrange a place by the fire in the Common House.”

  “No decent bed, then?” Mask sighed.

  Azallé felt like a distant eavesdropper on the conversation. She stared at the burned husk of the Elder’s Hall, which had been her home for so many years. She remembered hours of watching her father hold audience, of peaceful reading by the waterfall in the garden, and of times spent with Sael here.

  Had she acted too late?

  The Red King whispered that she had. It goaded her to draw the blade and make those responsible for this atrocity pay.

  “There is always a cost,” she murmured, “but it is one that I must pay.”

  5

  As night fell, they found themselves in the Common House, crowded in among those who had no home or name of their own: laborers, hunters, and other single men and women. It was, as such, filled with whores and drink: a place for loose morals and dishonor.

  “Disgusting,” Azallé said.

  “Glorious,” Mask agreed.

  More than a few men sized up Azallé, who was a vital woman of a smooth age, but one look at her leather-wrapped companion soured any desire.

  “We
make a curious pair, do we not?” Mask asked when they had found a corner of their own. “You, so beautiful and so deadly. Me, so ugly and also deadly.”

  Azallé scowled. “Is this life but a jest to you?”

  “If it is a jest, it is not ours,” Mask said. “And you object to my jests more strongly than usual. I thought this homecoming would brighten you, if nothing else.”

  “So did I.”

  Mask clicked his tongue at the weak wine their hosts provided, opting instead for fire-heated water to brew the foul-smelling tea he always drank. It was for his health, he claimed. Azallé thought it just another means of driving folk away. She refused wine also, her thoughts already muddled with the image of the Elder’s Hall.

  “I do not know what could have happened.” Azallé shook her head. “I took the relic to save the lands of the Aza. The cost should have been for me to pay, and no one else.”

  “Fancy. Not everything’s working out the way you expected.”

  Azallé glared at him. “You could be sympathetic, you know.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “When are you ever—?” Azallé trailed off as the doors to the kitchens swung opened to admit a haggard young woman. Care had worn away her fine features, but Azallé knew her without question. “Sael!”

  Azallé crossed the room, heedless of the sorcerer or other patrons of the common hall. After five years away, no one else had known Azallé’s face, but Sael’s eyes lit with recognition. Azallé best friend in all the world stiffened.

  “By the Red King,” the small woman said. “Lea! But how—?”

  Azallé threw her arms around Sael, weeping freely. Sael felt too small in Azallé’s arms, as though squeezing would crush her frail body. And likely it would, with all the blood strength she had acquired over the years.

  Mask coughed to draw their attention. “That’s Sael?” he asked. “I expected someone taller. And male.”

  “Old gods and dead lands.” Azallé pressed her forehead against Sael’s own, and tears ran down her cheeks. “I thought—after the Elder’s Hall...”