Interlude 2: Three Deaths
They brought out the king in a cocoon of chains. Overdoing it a bit, in Donnelly’s opinion, but who cared what a ghost thought?
Not just a ghost, he reminded himself, watching the procession from his shadowed nook. Shade that he was, very few in the grand grove would be able to see him as little more than a slight deepening of the gloom between the trees. He leaned against one towering trunk, arms folded beneath his dun traveler’s cloak, quietly observing.
A scene out of legend unfolded before him, a mural come to life. Beneath a tapestry of stars, the moons — both the living and the dead one — high in the sky, beings ageless and mortal gathered to watch a remnant of the last great war put to justice. They marched the prisoner through a path of stones set between scattered patches of violet flowers, whose petals drank the od shining down from the night so they shone, casting the scene in dreamlike illumination.
Rhan Harrower had been a lion of a man, when Donnelly had last laid eyes on him. That had been… Bleeding Gates, has it really already been eight years? He thought, shaking his head. Eleven now since Elfhome burned, and eight since the last battle of the war against the Recusants had been fought. Rhan, King of Losdale, had been at that battle. So had Donnelly, though not in the flesh. Many of those who gathered amid the towering wrecks of the eardetrees or within the moonlit circle had also been there.
No lion now, unless one imagined an old, sickly one, its mane of red hair gone all to pale gray, its proud head bowed by time, wear, and illness. Rhan hadn’t cut his hair in a long time, and one of his eyes had been eaten away by some blight — ugly veins spread from the pale, cataract-ruined orb, making him look half mad. Perhaps he was, at that. They’d let him keep his armor, a very Urnic custom, but its gilded frame had bled away, showing rusted, poorly tended steel beneath.
Even still, bowed by age and the heavy chains, Rhan stood as tall as the Accord knights who formed his guard. Once he would have towered over them, even in their wing-crest helms. Of his famous war spear, Donnelly saw no sign.
Elves, both Wyldefae and Seydii, watched like hungry wolves as the chained Recusant passed by them, their eyes shining near bright as the flowers. Human lords, representatives from the Accord, gathered in little groups here and there, whispering among themselves. Donnelly didn’t like how spread those little packs were, the suspicious eyes they cast to other representatives — not a good look, for those once united by the oaths of the Ardent Bough. How had a mere decade divided them so much?
Starting to think like an elf, Donnelly scoffed. Been Undying for a handful of years and you think everything is happening too fast, all the sudden.
Tearing his eyes away from the representatives, Donnelly studied the heroes of this tableau. A group of adventurer-mercenaries, a true Fellowship, stood at the end of the path with the eldest of the Sidhe. Six members, each a story unto themself, but he focused on the leader — a woman near tall as Rhan, powerfully built, with steel armor gilded in archaic bronze. She’d draped her broad shoulders with a cloak made of leathery hide, no doubt cut from some nasty thing Donnelly wouldn’t have wanted to meet, living or dead.
“A sellsword from the northern islands,” Donnelly muttered, scratching at his incorporeal chin in a habit he hadn’t lost along with his flesh. “Now, after this stunt, a hero of the Accord to be knighted by Forger himself. Impressive.”
“She will play a part in what’s to come,” the Other whispered. “This is but the first test.”