Perfect.
The word sang through Narbok like a hymn. He stood in the middle of the clearing and drank in the scene before him, his eyes moving slowly as he savored each element in turn.
The half-blood's friends had formed their pathetic little circle. Their faces were exquisite: bone-white and glistening with sweat; their bodies betraying what they didn't want to admit. The big human, Gavin, kept shifting his grip on his spear, the haft trembling in hands that clearly hadn't been tested much outside the training yard. Oh, how Narbok enjoyed that look on him after the shame of his failed confrontation with Jakob.
The innkeeper's daughter held her spear like she actually knew what to do with it, despite her fear. It's almost charming after the lesson I taught her in the tournament. And at the center of their formation, the baker wannabe crouched in the ferns while cradling the girl Finn had skewered. The coward looked to be in fierce concentration as he forced a healing potion down her throat, blood spreading beneath them in a widening stain.
Narbok scoffed. A cheap draught wouldn't mend a severed spine; the boy was just prolonging the inevitable.
And there, at the front of the circle, the dull-ear himself. Valorn. Standing defiantly with his spear leveled, his moss-green eyes glaring and face looking carved from marble. But Narbok could see past his brave facade.
The fury. Shock. And best of all… undeniable fear.
Narbok tilted his head, enjoying it. He'd imagined this moment hundreds of times. Finn's report on the contract schedule had been the key, allowing him to orchestrate this entire confrontation. The location chosen for its isolation along their route. The alchemical compounds Loric had provided, turning his pack into hunters who could walk within an arm's reach of the half-blood's vaunted perception and register as nothing more than damp air. Every variable accounted for, every advantage seized.
This is what a Mistblood is, he thought. Having your enemies at your mercy. May my ancestors witness my moment of glory!
He smiled broadly. The girl on the ground whimpered, a reedy sound that scraped against his nerves. It was irritating. Like a mouse caught in a wall, too stupid to die quietly.
"Nothing?" Narbok spread his arms, gesturing at the scene. "I expected more from the great Cal Valorn. The prodigy. The half-breed who can fight toe-to-toe with nobles and dodge conscription." He clicked his tongue. "But here you are, scared stiff and unmoving as your friend bleeds out in the dirt. Nothing clever to say?"
Narbok grinned wider as the man didn't respond, then began to pace languidly along the outer edge of his ring of fighters.
"What, you thought no one would notice you carrying two novice spirit cauldrons across the village? One to an alchemist's shop - a man who takes no apprentices - and the other to your own house. An interesting purchase for a spear-wielding adventurer, don't you think? And then there's Jakob." His grin grew more diabolical. "Surreptitious visits, whisperings of sweetheart deals... it wasn't hard to put two and two together."
Still nothing from the mut. But behind him, the baker's boy inhaled - a short, involuntary sound that Narbok caught at once. Leaning forward, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial murmur.
"Tell me, dull-ear. Did they know?" He swept a hand toward Cal's friends without looking at them, keeping his focus fixed on that rigid face. "Did your loyal friends here know you were sneaking around playing alchemist? That every potion you tried to sell was tightening the noose around their necks?"
Narbok stopped pacing when he was back in front of Cal, and watched the accusation land and ripple through the little circle like a stone dropped in still water. The innkeeper's daughter shot Cal a look that was equal parts confusion and alarm. The big human's grip tightened on his spear, but he looked confused more than anything.
The baker boy, though… he lifted his red-rimmed eyes from the injured girl to look at Cal, his face going through a complicated mix of emotions, finally landing on one: betrayal.
A laugh escaped Narbok. He relished Leo's crumbling countenance. "Yesss," he purred. "Feel that? That's the price of your greed. Beautiful, isn't it?"
Cal remained a statue. The crippled girl's rapid breathing and the wind through the boughs above were the only sounds in the clearing.
"Still not willing to admit it, hey, Valorn?"
Narbok sighed, reached behind his hip, and produced a small leather bag that was stained almost entirely black. It weighed more than its size suggested.
"Perhaps," he said, hefting the bag in his palm, "this will loosen your tongue."
He reached inside and plucked out a severed finger, one end ragged where something blunt had separated it from the hand. He held it up to the canopy light and examined it, turning it slowly, noting the calluses on the pad that spoke of years gripping quills.
Narbok had witnessed the whole process. Loric had conducted the interrogation personally, seated in a straight-backed chair with his legs crossed, casually directing the Greenshade brothers. Where to cut. When to heal. The merchant had howled himself hoarse by the fifth round, devolving into sobbing whimpers as the torture progressed. But he had to respect the man's resilience. Jakob endured round after round of mutilation, only to be forced back to wholeness by healing potions so the process could begin anew. It was only when the potion sickness finally set in, the man's body convulsing and rejecting the magical restoration, that his will broke. After that, the words poured out of him.
Narbok flipped his wrist and upended the bag.
Fingers tumbled out in a grotesque cascade, sprinkling down through the ferns. Dozens of them. Some curled inward, others splayed and rigid with rigor.
"Don't you recognize the fingers of your merchant friend?" Narbok teased.
Veins bulged in Cal's forehead as he clenched his jaw so hard Narbok could see the tendons cord in his neck. A barely controlled tremor ran through the spear Cal held, shaking the iron tip. But the marble expression held; his mouth stayed shut, and the eyes that stared at Narbok refused to bend. Behind Cal, Mira whimpered.
Narbok stepped forward, closing the distance by two yards, bringing himself just inside the range where Cal's spear became a genuine threat. A deliberate provocation. He wanted to see the half-blood flinch.
"Well?" Narbok demanded, an edge creeping into his voice. "Say something! Beg! Plead for your friends' lives! Offer me gold, to cut me in… anything!" He threw up his hands. "Give me something, Valorn. You're about to die. The least you can do is make it interesting."
The clearing held its breath.
Narbok scowled. The lack of response was a burr under his skin. He'd staged this moment, rehearsed the dialogue and anticipated the satisfying crack in the mut's composure that would validate every hour of humiliation he'd suffered. Instead, he got nothing.
It robbed him. It stole the ceremony from it and left only the killing, which, while enjoyable, was crude on its own. Was beneath him. Fine. He dropped the theatrics.
"Nothing to say? You stand there silent while your friend bleeds..." He let the sentence drag, then turned to the big human.
"Very well. Your silence just killed... him." He flicked two fingers at Durk.
The Mycari enforcer launched forward like a loosed boulder. His large frame covered the distance in an explosive stride, the spear in his hands already in motion, the steel tip aimed at the unguarded hollow below Gavin's chin. The big human saw it coming. His arms jerked upward, the spear rising in a desperate block that arrived a full heartbeat too late.
Durk punched his spear into Gavin's neck just above the collarbone and burst it out the back in a spray of dark arterial blood. His eyes went impossibly wide, a sound forming in his throat that never escaped. Knees buckled. Durk ripped the weapon free as Gavin fell, a lateral wrench that opened the wound further. The man scrabbled at his neck, unable to staunch the lifeblood that gushed from him.
The innkeeper's daughter wailed.
The sound tore through the clearing, a primal cry of grief. Corinne pivoted and lunged at Durk with her spear, the thrust aimed at his chest with a speed and fury that caught Narbok off guard. But Durk was already dodging, his heavy body dancing backward with an agility that his bulk belied, three long strides carrying him beyond the range of her weapon and back to the safety of the encirclement. A cruel laugh rolled from him as he settled into position.
Corinne halted her pursuit beside her friend, chest heaving, tear-streaked fury twisting her features. Gavin had managed to stay upright until the end.
"You bastards!"
Narbok delighted. Now the ceremony was complete. The first blood, the psychological fracture. This was how you unmade a group. You killed the body last. You killed the spirit first, then the bonds, then the hope, and only then, when there was nothing left but meat, did you finish the job. He turned back to Cal to drink in the results.
Cal had changed, alright.
His eyes had emptied into an icy stare, every glimpse of the person behind it extinguished. Something looked at Narbok through those eyes, something that saw into him and beyond him all at once, as if he'd ceased to matter at all. A cold prickle slipped its way down his spine.
Narbok stomped it down. Fear was a human weakness, a corruption in the blood. Valorn was in shock. That was all. Deep shock, the kind that shut the mind down when reality exceeded its capacity to process. He recognized it from animals caught in snares, that same glassy vacancy right before the end. Puffing out his chest, Narbok stepped forward again.
"That's your problem, dull-ear." He jabbed a finger at Cal. "The human filth in your blood makes you arrogant. Makes you think you can rise above your station. You see your betters and you think, 'Why not me? Why can't I sit at that table?' And your elf blood?" He spat to the side. "Too thin. Too diluted. Too weak to give you the power to back it up. You're nothing but a walking contradiction, and I'm here to resolve—"
Cal let go of his spear with his left hand and raised it into the air.
Narbok faltered in his rant.
What's this? Surrender?
Cal's fingers blurred over his head, the motion so fast and precise that Narbok couldn't track the individual movements even though Cal was the lower tier. The half-blood sketched in the air, and where fingers passed, blue light followed. Runic symbols cascading into being at dizzying speed.
Before the burgeoning animal instincts could alert Narbok further, Cal squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away. The world blanked out.
A sheet of white fire consumed Narbok's vision, so total that color ceased to exist. Pain lanced behind his eyeballs, and a fraction of a heartbeat later, sound arrived: a concussive crack that hit him in the chest like a battering ram and erased every other noise in the clearing.
He staggered backward. His hands flew to his face, clawing at eyes that saw nothing but blinding white, and his boots caught on a stone. He went down hard, his hip slamming into the earth, and he rolled onto his side, curling inward, pressing his palms against his useless eyes as if he could squeeze the light back out.
He couldn't even hear his own breathing.
Sight, sound, and even thought vanished beneath a tide of static that filled his skull.
Seconds passed. Or minutes. He couldn't tell.
Eventually, the white behind his eyelids fragmented. Gray shapes emerged from the static, formless and shifting, resolving with agonizing slowness into blurry patches of green and brown. The clearing. The trees.
Sound returned in layers. First, a muffled, underwater quality to everything, as if his head were wrapped in wool. Then, beneath the fading ringing, a repetitive sound. It seemed… wet?
Shlick. Shlick.
He forced his eyes to try to focus. The world was still a smear, but his vision was returning in fragmented patches that his brain fought to assemble.
The first thing to resolve was the source of the sound. Corinne.
She stood over Durk's prone form, fifteen yards to Narbok's left. Tears of rage and spattered blood covered her face. She held her spear in both hands, driving it down into the body beneath her furiously, over and over, as she gulped for air around choked sobs.
Shlick. Shlick.
Durk lay still. He'd clearly been that way for a while.
Narbok peered across the clearing through blurred vision, searching for his people with desperation.
Finn lay spread-eagled in the ferns near where he'd last been standing, arms splayed, his greasy black hair fanned out in a dark halo around his head. A pool of blood spread beneath him. A clean wound through his eye gaped open like a second mouth.
Fendrel was crumpled at the base of a spruce ten yards further, his back against the trunk, his chin on his chest. His eyes were open and unseeing. The front of his leathers were soaked red from a wound beneath his ribs, and his hands lay loose and empty in his lap, as if he'd dropped something important and forgotten to pick it up.
Narbok breathed in short, ragged pulls that fogged the chill air. He tracked across the clearing faster now, getting frantic. Movement. He needed to find movement, needed to find someone still standing, still fighting.His focus snapped to the far side of the clearing just in time.
Cal swept his shortsword in a horizontal arc, the blade catching a sliver of light as it passed through Griven's neck. The eldest triplet's head separated from his body in a spray of crimson that hung in the air for a nightmarish instant before gravity claimed it. The head tumbled end over end, the face still slack with confusion, and landed in the undergrowth with a plop as it rolled. The rest of him remained standing for a full heartbeat, arms still half-raised in a guard that no longer had a purpose. Then it folded sideways and dropped.
How?
The question squealed through Narbok's skull, shredding every assumption, every assurance Loric had delivered with his smooth confidence.
When did he learn magic!? How can he move so fast!? Loric told me his channels should have been too damaged to be a threat! He should be CRIPPLED! WHAT IS GOING ON!?
Cal stood over the headless body. Blood misted his face and speckled his auburn hair, and the shortsword in his right hand dripped steadily onto the fearns. He looked down at the corpse for the span of a breath, then turned away and began walking.
Just walking.
He crossed the clearing with purposeful strides, simultaneously reaching to his belt and pulling free two vials. One pinkish, one blue. He uncorked the first with his thumb and tipped it back, draining the pink liquid in a single pull. The second followed without pause, the blue Mana potion disappearing just as quickly. Both empty vials he tossed aside without looking, glass tinkling against stone somewhere in the ferns.
His destination became clear. Morian's corpse lay face-down at the western edge of the clearing, fingers dug into the earth in a final futile attempt to crawl away. Cal's spear jutted from the center of his back up into the air, the shaft standing vertically like a grave marker.
Cal planted his boot on Morian's spine and ripped the spear free.
Narbok felt his stomach drop. They were gone. All of them.
He scrambled to his feet, his vision still swimming and balance unreliable. The clearing tilted beneath him, and he caught himself with the spear he still held.
Corinne had finished with Durk. She'd moved towards the center of the clearing and positioned herself between Narbok and the two remaining figures still huddled on the ground, Leo staring blankly at the surrounding carnage. The Hearthsong faced Narbok with her spear, her breath coming in shuddering gasps, blood dripping from the blade. Hazel eyes found him through the tears and locked on with a hatred so visceral it was almost physical.
Cal continued back to the others, steady and deliberate, his spear back in hand and shortsword sheathed. He stepped over Finn's body without a glance.
And the look in his eyes. Narbok had seen anger. He'd grown up around it, bathed in it. Wielded it like a blade. Anger was fire. Anger was heat and motion and noise. It could be predicted. Exploited by a clever hand and redirected. But what stared back at him was something else entirely.
The eyes that fixed on him across the clearing held only dispassionate promise. Narbok was an item on a list. The last item. And those eyes said, with absolute certainty, that the list would be completed.
Raw fear stabbed through Narbok and threatened to liquify his knees. He took an involuntary step back, his breath coming in shallow pants. Then his hand found the vial.
It was tucked into a padded pocket sewn into the lining of his vest, right over his heart, where Loric had placed it himself. Narbok led his trembling fingers to close around the glass and pull it free.
The liquid inside swirled midnight blue, slow-moving currents folding back into themselves before they could settle. It was power. Distilled power, brewed by Zarven Mault himself. One dose. One chance. Narbok tore the cork free with his teeth and drank greedily.
The potion hit his throat like a river of scalding acid. It poured through him, rushing through his channels, flooding his muscles and bones with an energy so dense and violent that his spine arched involuntarily. His vision sharpened, each fern frond and shifting leaf in the clearing etched in fine detail. He swelled with power, every fiber tightening and hardening until it felt like tempered iron.
The fear compressed into a manageable knot beneath the deluge of chemical confidence.
He thinks he's won? Narbok straightened to his full height, rolling his shoulders, feeling the power sing through his frame. My blood protects me. And that little trick from the tournament won't work twice.
Lowering his spear, he settled into a low stance that his father had taught him. The stance of the Mistblood. The stance of his people.
Twenty yards separated them when Cal moved in front of Corinne. The clearing, which ten minutes ago had been Narbok's carefully staged arena, was now a charnel house. Six combatants had held the ring around Cal's group. Higher tiered. Better prepared. Now five lay dead in the moss and ferns, their blood mixing with the ever-present groundwater and running in thin red rivulets between the roots.
Cal raised his own spear and leveled it at Narbok.
Both combatants stared across the blood-soaked clearing.
It was time to finish this.