Bern sat with people around him laughing and buying him drinks, the way they always did when he set himself down in the middle of a tavern. It wasn’t that they liked him, Bern had no time for such things, but they knew what was good for them. One man who hadn’t lay on the floor, several of his teeth spilled out across the dirty straw of it.

His “friends” stood around him, although they weren’t really friends, just men who were smaller and less violent than him, but who had worked out that being on his side was safer than not being. To be fair, most men were smaller and less violent than Bern; he was a mountain of a man who could crush a skull in his bare hands if it came to it, and had tattoos across both shoulders that wove their way down his arms as if to pick out the muscles. There were a lot to pick out. He kept his head shaved so there would be nothing for a man to grab onto to head butt him, while his face was pinched and roughened by the blows he had taken over the years.

He sat there at the center of attention, telling whatever stories he felt like, listening to the news that people brought him. People often brought him news, because they’d worked out that it was the one thing that Bern did pay for, and paid well. People assumed he didn’t think, but he’d found that thinking paid almost as well as hurting people.

He spotted the peasant boy instantly, because this wasn’t the kind of place where young boys came in safely. One of Bern’s men moved to intercept him, but Bern pushed past, shouldering his man out of the way casually, because it wasn’t like he mattered.

“You’ve something to tell me,” he said, his voice rumbling.

The boy nodded. Bern produced a coin, holding it just out of reach.

“Tell me then.”

“It’s about Princess Nerra,” the boy said.

“How would you know a princess when you see one?” Bern shot back. “If you’re wasting my time…”

“She goes into the woods a lot,” the boy said. “And I’ve seen her coming out of the castle, it’s her.”

It might be her or not. Probably the boy didn’t know the difference between a princess and a scullery maid.

“What about her?” Bern demanded.

“There’s… two things,” the boy tried.

Bern grabbed the front of his tunic then. “Trying to weasel a second coin? Tell me, and then I’ll decide if it’s worth it.”

“She has the scale-mark!” the boy blurted.

That was enough to make Bern pause. If true, it could cause a lot of trouble for the royals. It could also earn him a lot of coin. There were those who paid even better than him for the right information.

“And I’m to believe that?” he said.

“I saw it,” the boy replied. “All over her arm. I promise.”

“You know what I’ll do if you’re lying?” Bern said.

“I’m not!” He could see the fear there. More than enough to say that this was true.

“All right,” Bern said. “What’s the second thing?”

“It’s… what she found out there,” the boy said. “You… you won’t believe me.”

“I’ll believe what’s true,” Bern said.

“She found… she found a dragon’s egg!”

For a moment, Bern considered hitting the boy for saying something so stupid. Then he saw the fear in the lad’s face. He was serious, and even if it wasn’t something Bern had heard about in his lifetime, he believed him.

“A dragon’s egg?” one of the men around him said. “Do you think we’re…”

Bern hit him without looking, and the man went sprawling to the floor. “Shut up. I’m listening. What makes you think it was a dragon’s egg?”

“It was bigger than any egg I’ve seen,” the boy said, holding out his arms to indicate the size. “It had all golden veins over it too, just like in the stories.”

Bern hesitated. He’d heard the same stories. He’d even had people offer him petrified eggs before, when they couldn’t fence them elsewhere. It sounded right, even though it couldn’t be.

“Where’s this egg?”

Something like that… well, it might not be real, but if it was, then how much would someone pay for it? How much would some rich man give to have the only fresh dragon’s egg in living memory?

“It’s in the forest,” the boy said. “There’s a clearing. I can show you.”

“You will,” Bern said. He snapped his fingers at another of those there. “Run to the castle. Bring the news of the princess’s… condition to one of the ones who pays for these things. I expect gold for it, not silver.”

“Yes, Bern,” the man said.

“You cheat me and I’ll know.” Bern turned his attention back to the boy. “Now, show me where I can find this egg, and we’ll see if you’ve found an impossible thing. And if you’ve lied to me…”

***

“It’s not here!” Bern shouted, his roar echoing out over the silence of the forest. He struck out at a nearby tree, and his strength was enough to splinter the trunk. “Where is it? Where’s that boy?”

He looked around for the peasant boy and found him in the middle of quickly scaling a tree. Smart lad. Bern might have smacked him one otherwise, and a small thing like that would only have broken.

“You, you lied to me!” Bern called out, stalking up to the tree. Half a dozen men came with him, surrounding it. They were the ones out of his crew who had been nearest when he called, hard men, the lot of them. None would think anything of putting this boy in the ground if he’d lied to them.

“Didn’t!” the boy called down. He was shaking so hard that the whole tree seemed to tremble with it.

“Then where’s the egg?” Bern demanded.

“This is where she found it,” the boy replied, “I promise this is the spot.”

“Then where is it?” Bern demanded.

“She spotted me and I had to run. Maybe… she took it somewhere?”

Bern growled to himself. “Do you think?”

“So it’s probably somewhere in the castle,” one of the others said.

Bern shook his head. “If it were, I’d have heard. Think that runt’s the only one who tells me things? No, it’s hidden somewhere. We’ll find it.”

“And if we can’t?” the man said. Bern silenced him with a look.

“Then we’ll wait until this girl comes back for it, and we’ll ask her where it is.”

“Hurt a princess?”

Bern laughed. “Think she’s actually a princess?”

The others laughed with him. It was what they were best at.

The truth was that Bern didn’t care. A dragon’s egg was enough to be worth the risk, and a princess… well, she could go missing as easy as a peasant girl in a forest this size.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The creatures continued to circle and Devin didn’t know what to do. How long would it be before they leapt at him and the others again? Halfin, Twell, Lars, and Rodry were all fine fighters, but they would die just as quickly as he would. Devin swallowed at that thought. He was about to die; they were all about to die.

He found himself thinking about the moment in the House of Weapons when he had stopped Vars from killing him. He’d done that accidentally, but could he do it deliberately? Could he actually use magic on purpose?

Devin found himself thinking of all the things he would lose when the creatures tore him apart. It was a shorter list than he wanted. He’d already lost his place in the House of Weapons. His parents… well, his father was angry all the time, and his mother anything but kind. He tried to think of the things he might now have though. He would never go on to have a family of his own, never see any of the world, never…

“No,” Devin said, shaking his head. “No.”

The creatures’ jaws slavered with the prospect of the kills to come. Their eyes focused with hatred, and Devin could see one of the beasts’ muscles bunching to leap.

He wasn’t sure what happened then. It was like something in the fear, the certainty of his own death, flicked some kind of switch in him, changed something in him in a way that seemed familiar. Devin recognized this feeling, because he’d felt it once before. He tried to reach down into it, tried to remember the sensation of it. In that moment, looking at the world, he could see something close to another world layered on top of it, a place composed of writhing energies, and with things there that moved like shadows on the edge of sight.

Devin understood in that moment how to pull the energy of that other place through himself, knew how to do it the same way that he knew how to breathe. He reached out, and, as easily as if he were pulling aside a curtain, he ripped aside a fragment of the barrier between the two places.

In that instant, power spilled out into the world, in a wave of force that rippled out, sending the wolf-things reeling back. They toppled over one another, and they weren’t the only ones, because Rodry and the others were also knocked from their feet. Only Devin seemed to be able to stay standing there, perhaps because he’d been the one to do this.

He looked at his arms, and he could see something that looked like black fire flickering around them, down along his limbs to the tip of the blade he held. The wolf creatures rose and stared at him, then turned as one with a whimper and ran, back away from the stream. Devin couldn’t understand it, couldn’t begin to guess what was happening, but he watched them run nonetheless, and he knew they wouldn’t be back.

As suddenly as the flames had come, they were gone, extinguished with a whoomph of inrushing air. Around him, Devin could see the world as it was, with no sign of that other place, just the thickness of a thought away. All that was there was Rodry and the others, who were finding their feet again after being knocked flat.

“What,” Rodry asked, “just happened?”

He and the knights were staring at Devin, Rodry’s expression caught somewhere between shock and awe.

“What just happened?” Rodry repeated. “What… did you do that?”

“I… don’t know,” Devin said, because he wasn’t sure that he could explain it all to the prince. “I… maybe.”

“Those things were there one moment, and we were all knocked flat with them running the next,” Halfin said. “They just ran. Twell?”

The other knight shook his head. “I’ve no idea.” He looked over at Devin. “How did you stay standing? Did you do something?”

“I don’t know,” Devin said. He realized that they hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t seen him rip through the world to grab power, hadn’t seen the black fire around him, only felt the effects of the force he’d called.

He could have tried to explain it, but somehow he knew that it would be a bad idea to say too much. Sorcerers like Master Grey were rare and feared, and men like this might not react well to the idea of suddenly traveling with one who didn’t know what he was doing.

Rodry stared at Devin with something like awe. “You did magic.”

“I…” Devin shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

The others stared at him, and in that moment, Devin fully expected them to back away from him; to fear him now that they knew what he could do. Instead, they looked at him with something like awe.

“That was… impressive,” Sir Twell said. “Whatever it was.”

“Very,” Sir Halfin agreed. “Can you do it again?”

Devin shook his head, even though the feeling of what he’d done was down there in him now, buried away and there to touch. He didn’t know enough about what he was doing to risk even trying.

“Then there’s no time to keep standing here,” Rodry said. “We need to get moving again in case those things come back. We still need to find the star metal. Devin, mount up.”

Devin nodded, only too grateful for the distraction, and more grateful that Rodry didn’t seem to be treating him like some kind of freak. Of all of them, he was the one whose opinion mattered most.

The others seemed grateful for the chance to put some distance between themselves and the things that had tried to kill them. Gathering himself up, Devin found his horse and managed to mount it. The five of them set off again.

They kept riding until they found a space where the ground fell away even more sharply than it had, and as they rode, the landscape around them was curiously quiet. No more animals came out toward them, or even watched them. It was as if everything there had seen what Devin could do, and was staying back.

He still didn’t understand it. How could he do something that powerful? He wasn’t some trained magus, like Master Grey, or someone who had made a pact for power. He was just a smith, who knew about steel but not about magic.

“There,” Rodry said, pointing, and breaking Devin’s chain of thought.

Devin saw what he meant at once. A large rock sat in the ground, in a crater obviously caused by its fall from the heavens. It shone with a silvery tint, and the stream washed around it. From where he sat on his horse, Devin could see that the stream was ordinary above it, but had a faint shine to it downstream of the rock. This was where the oddness of the place came from, everything around the rock twisted and changed by its presence, so that there were flowers taller than their heads, and furred things with butterfly and dragonfly wings that flitted around their heads.

“We’ll need to gather the metal,” Devin said.

“I have a pick,” Twell said, taking one from his saddle and passing it across to Devin. By this point, it wasn’t even a surprise that he did.

“We’ll watch for dangers while you gather what you need,” Rodry said.

That seemed fair to Devin, since they were the knights and he was just a peasant boy. Even so, a part of him wanted to point out that he’d been the one to drive off the wolf-things. Then again, Devin was the one who had worked with metal enough to know what he was doing. He got down from his horse and headed to the sky-fallen rock, seeking the spots where he would be able to get the most metal ore for his efforts.

He set to work, striking at the rock. It was hard work, even for someone who had worked in the forges for so long, and before long, Devin was sweating.

“Here,” Rodry said after a while, “let me take a turn with that pick.”

He did, although Devin would never have thought that a prince would work like that. Rodry chipped away at the stone, and soon, there was enough ore to fill a sack, and more. Devin lifted it onto the back of his horse, feeling the weight of it. Now that he had the ore, he had a sword to make, and then he had to decide who to give it to, and who to anger.

Then there was the question of the magic. Devin could still feel the connection bubbling within him. He’d always wanted to be a swordsman, a knight, but he knew that this power had other ideas. He needed to understand it, needed to learn about it, and for that, he would need to seek out Master Grey.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The tower that housed King Ravin’s throne room had taken a thousand men and women three years to construct, along with the finest minds to come out of the south’s schools. He had employed not one, but three architects, so that no one of them would understand the whole picture of it, with its passages and its secrets.

Of course, he’d ensured that everyone involved died shortly thereafter. The servants had been easy, because they were bond slaves and bought things. The architects… well, he’d accused one of treason, ensured another slipped from a high spot in the building, and the third had apparently choked on a fish bone a year after the completion. King Ravin was a thorough man.

It had been worth the effort, towering over any who entered, with the individual symbols of the lands he claimed arranged high above, a map of the known world covering the ceiling. There were galleries for the higher nobles, a vast expanse of mosaic floor for those who were lesser, and guards arranged by every pillar of the hall to ensure that they remembered their place.

Ravin’s place was the one he had carved for himself with blood, the throne sitting at the head of it all a thing of pure white and gold that matched the robes he wore. At thirty, he filled that throne with a muscular frame, his crown of platinum sitting atop close-cropped dark hair. A darkly curling beard went down to his chest, his great sword, Heart Splitter, sat in its sheath beside him, while the purple robes of state did little to disguise the fact that he was a warrior, and more than a warrior. He’d had the symbols of the old magic woven into the hem and sleeves as a reminder to all that he’d spent as much time with the scholars as the warriors, that he was not the same barbarous fool his father and his father’s father had been.

There was no second throne beside his for a wife. Instead, the latest of his concubines knelt in the finest silks beside his throne, a slender chain from her ankle running to his hand. Before, she had been the daughter of a noble house, given to him as an honor. Maybe he would even keep her for a while.

For now though, there was the business of running the Southern Kingdom and its possessions across the sea.

“Is there any news on the latest expedition to the Western Continent?” he demanded, looking to the spot where the admiral of his fleets stood.

“Not so far, my king,” the man said. “But perhaps the messages are just delayed.”

“They will be dead like the others,” Ravin said. “My seers tell me as much.”

That angered him. When he commanded men to do a thing, he expected them to find a way to succeed. With the current ones, he had ordered their families taken as an incentive to go and come back with news. He would have to have them sold now, or just killed.

“What else?” he demanded.

“My king…” A man moved forward, obviously a merchant by the look of him. He fell to his knees. “I beg your aid. A nobleman has taken goods from my carts without payment, claiming that they are his by right, yet I have the papers to show that they are mine.”

Ravin quirked an eyebrow. It took bravery to come to him with something like this, given what the penalties could be for wasting his time. Still, let no one say that he was not a fair and even generous ruler.

“You will bring these papers to my chancellor,” he ordered. “If all is as you say, your goods will be returned, and the noble will pay on top of that.”

“You are the wisest of rulers,” the merchant said.

“However,” Ravin said, “I will also be sending word to the noble. If your goods fall within his legitimate taxes, the rest of what you own will be taken as an example.”

He saw the merchant swallow, and wondered if he would be so foolish as to say something then.

“Of… of course, your majesty,” the man said, starting to crawl backward. “Thank you.”

Ravin sighed and looked around at the men and women there. He wondered how many of them understood what it was truly like to sit where he was. They all had their schemes and their plans, which was why he had so many guards and spies, his sorcerers and his quiet men, yet did any of them think about what it would be like if they actually succeeded? Did they understand that there was no point where it ended, that every day meant dealing with the problems of a kingdom, trying to gain more, be more, to pay for the rest of it? Of course they didn’t.

Instead, they came to him, one by one, with their problems. Guards brought in prisoners and Ravin ordered some sacrificed to the gods, some sent to the arena to fight and die, some sold, some maimed for their crimes. A couple he even let go, teary-eyed and grateful for his justice, because it was important for a king to be just.

Eventually, a figure staggered in. He was so ragged and rough looking that Ravin’s guards started toward him, and it took even the king a moment to recognize the form of his emissary to the northern lands.

“Let him through,” Ravin said, and although he didn’t raise his voice, it still carried over the rest of the sounds of the hall. His dead architects had seen to that as well.

The man came forward, staggered slightly, and then managed to execute a perfect bow in spite of how unsteady he was.

“Your majesty, I bring grave news.”

“My generous offer to the north has been rejected, I take it?” Ravin guessed.

“It has, my king,” the emissary said. “I also regret to inform you that I was attacked by Rodry, the son of King Godwin of the North. He slew my guards in cold blood, and then… humiliated me in the way that you see now.”

King Ravin stood and went to the man, seeing the fear there in him. Did he truly believe that his king would do him harm?

“You have been through much, my friend,” he said, placing a hand on the emissary’s shoulder. “Not as much as I had hoped, but perhaps enough.”

“My king?” the emissary said.

King Ravin smiled. “It is well known that Godwin’s son has no control. I had expected that he would cut you down for the things I offered. Still, he slew your men, and that is something.”

He looked around the hall. “From this moment, we are at war with the North. Attacks will be made to bring it to heel.”

“Your majesty,” the admiral of his fleet said. “How are we to do this when the river…”

King Ravin nodded, and three of his quiet men stepped out of the crowd, their knives flashing. The figures were masked so that none could guess at their true names, or seek to bribe them. The admiral fell with a gurgling sound, while around him, others stepped back, hoping they would not be next.

“I have long felt that you have not been trying your utmost,” Ravin said to the dying man. “Again and again, your fleets have failed. I suspect that your successor will be more motivated to succeed.”

He returned his attention to the room. “As we speak, soldiers are finding their way across the bridges in small groups, ready to strike. Quiet men will kill their nobles and take those they hold dear. Desperate men from the arena will be given the chance to throw themselves across the bridges and take them. At the same time, my fleets will strike its coast. Will no one ask me how?”

None dared, of course, so Ravin had to answer a question that wasn’t asked.

“We will not sail directly north,” he said. “We will head east first, where the current will not snatch us.”

He heard the murmurs as people started to understand what he meant.

“For too long, we have been held back by thoughts of peace and neutrality, by the idea of places that should be held only by the gods,” he said. “The time for such things is over. We will act, and we will reunite the kingdom as it should be.”

“But how?” the emissary asked, and King Ravin smiled again, because once more the man had done something useful. It almost made him glad the man wasn’t dead.

“That part is simple,” he said. “We will take a staging post from which to strike, and attack our foes from there. We will encircle them and overwhelm them, because they believe that no one would dare to do what we will do.”

He went back to his throne and tore off the purple robes, revealing scale armor underneath. Ravin drew his sword and pointed up, to the spot on the map that hung to the east of the two kingdoms.

“Prepare ships,” he commanded. “For soon, we will take the Isle of Leveros.”