The skyship seemed to wobble in the air, which was Galukar’s first sign that something was wrong. He needed only the one for his breath to snag in his lungs.

  She’s fine, she’s fine.

  But no matter how much he repeated the sentiment, no matter how much iron he bolted it down in his heart with, it did not change the doubt slowly building. It ate him from within, seeming to drain his strength like those few miserable days where the Godblade had been taken and his Vigour stolen.

  She’s fine.

  Galukar had lied to himself for a hundred years, and for the first time in weeks he wished he could do so again.

  The ship began to drop. For one moment panic sprung up, and Galukar was about ready to sprint across the city and plant himself ready to catch the fucking thing as it crashed. It didn’t, of course, merely continued to slowly descend, controlled despite the clear battering its aerial dexterity had taken.

  And still too damned far for him to glean anything of what was happening aboard.

  Galukar watched, and waited, and paced, and cursed. He had to mind his footsteps, finding himself cracking the granite of his balcony by exerting too much strength into each stride. Anger was dangerous, in a wielder of the Godblade. A century had taught him that much at least.

  The ship landed, perhaps a mile from him. Galukar crossed the distance in under a minute, simply leaping from his tower and trusting in his own resilience to weather the fall. He ended his sprint just as he saw Felicia making her way down the boarding ramp.

  She was alive. His spirits had never been lifted so fast and so completely by anything, not by the return of the Godblade. Galukar was just moments from snatching her up into an embrace when he saw the look upon her face. It stopped him dead, froze the joy in his heart. Left him hollow and fearful all over again.

  “What happened?”

  His daughter looked up at him with eyes Galukar remembered well. The ones he’d seen after destroying Arbite’s skyship. They’d only been a glimmer, then. A candle. Now he saw the bonfire.

  “My…My memories. My…” Felicia’s voice cracked, and she told her father only in slow, sporadic bursts of coherence, regularly strangled off by the treacherous lungs that kept gasping where she meant to speak. He understood anyway. Listened, for perhaps the first time since she’d been born.

  The anger came fast.

  Galukar turned from Felicia, took three steps away. Beside him was a statue of his ancestor, Karugar. It was a large thing, but, he had heard, only to scale with the man as he had been in life. A thing of marble, it weighed over eighty stone. More than some war-horses.

  He grabbed it, dug his fingers in, grit his teeth and twisted. Galukar’s arms flung the statue like it weighed nothing at all, and it soared far from him- disappearing to land near the centre of the palace’s acres-broad pond. A trebuchet could not have flung it so far, but the rage in Galukar’s arms had not been exhausted yet.

  A scream came from Galukar that even he didn’t recognise, and his foot smashed down into the ground. It shook, shivered. The very earth feared him, dirt blasting apart into a gaping crater, air filling with debris as cracks ran through the bedrock beneath. The thrill of combat was starting to seep into him now, the hunger for blood.

  He was Galukar, and he’d allowed some pitiable caster to…To…Hurt his daughter. It was unforgivable, unacceptable. He rounded, ready to sprint his way to Magira then and there.

  But Felicia stopped him. Not by doing anything in particular, she just stared at him. Backing away, hands raised, trembling. Her face, he saw, had been scraped where flying stones had caught it, blood starting to well beneath her superhuman skin.

  “Father, please.”

  Galukar’s anger drained in a moment, replaced by another cocktail of emotion. One that hurt far, far more. But one he welcomed. He lowered his hands, calmed himself, dropped his gaze.

  “I’m sorry.” He whispered. “Felicia, I’m so-” His daughter hugged him before he could say another word. Galukar didn’t think there was much to it, probably she just needed to hug something. He wrapped his arm around her all the same, held her tight and felt her tremble. She didn’t cry.

  Neither did he, and nor did he rage. Galukar had seen too many times what he brought upon himself by doing that, so instead he stood there and stewed in his regrets.

  Mafari wanted his cooperation, and the Archmagus would get it. Galukar would hate him till the day he died, but he had greater priorities than crushing those he hated. Protecting those he loved.

  ***

  Ado was a failure, a fraud, a wretch. Collin wouldn’t have minded any of these things, if the woman hadn’t insisted on telling him every other step.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  At first he nodded, sympathetically. Not quite listening, mind, not after the first hour, just remaining there, smiling and urging her on, letting her release her acrid thoughts and cleanse them from her system. But the cleansing just didn’t stop, the whinging just didn’t fucking stop.

  Collin hadn’t spent much time around women- almost none, really, before Shaiagrazni’s coalition- but he was fairly sure all of them weren’t like this. Probably, it was a feature of royalty. Well he didn’t like it.

  “Have you considered that it wasn’t entirely your fault?” He tried, after a while. “Shaiagrazni did demolish most of your defences already, thanks to your father resisting, and then there was the conflict with the Dark Lord. A single grotesquery might’ve changed this, but you didn’t even have that.”

  She seemed to think about it, and for one, glorious moment Collin thought she might actually shut up. She didn’t, just found another avenue for her complaints and regrets. Discovered new failings to agonize over.

  Collin wondered, vaguely, whether an arrow shot high into the air would land with enough force to kill…Just for instance, a Fleshcrafted Ranger of almost Hero abilities, made to be even more durable than he already was.

  His own arrows were iron, at least, and so much of their velocity would remain, at least if Shaiagrazni’s advice on wind and ballistics was anything to go by. Would it go through the skull? Maybe not easily, maybe not easily enough for a clean kill. So it’d need to be a neck shot, and-

  “Are you even listening?” Queen Ado asked.

  “No.” Collin replied. Truthfully, because he was an idiot.

  Her glare was quickly sparked, and quickly grown. Like a wild animal staring at him.

  “You haven’t been this entire time, have you?” She growled.

  “That’s not true.” Collin replied, taking a step back, so intense was her rage. “I listened…To the first hour or so.”

  They’d been walking for the better part of a day, or rather he’d been walking and she’d been sitting in a repeatedly remade icy sledge he was pulling behind him. Sad fact was, Queen Ado wasn’t nearly a match for his physical prowess. Collin was stronger than most warriors, and hauling a meagre two hundred or so pounds barely even slowed him.

  If she was grateful to have been spared the exertive walk, Queen Ado did not make the fact apparent in her features.

  “I fucking hate you, you know.” Collin froze, then turned to properly look back at her.

  Ado had insulted him before, snapped at him. And he’d done it back. But he’d gotten the impression she was warming up to him, at least. However aloof she could be- however sheltered- she seemed, at least, of a decent sort compared to most nobs. Someone able to change her mind when it needed changing, able to see past people’s stations if only eventually.

  But what he found in her stare now was hatred, of a more distilled kind than he could recall seeing anywhere else.

  “You always thought you were above it all.” She spat, actually spat. Collin stared at the foaming drool rolling down her chin. “Better than me. You’re not. You’re nothing, understand? Shit. Scum. You should be worshipping me, thanking me just to be allowed in my presence you dirty-blooded fucking rat.”

  Collin went cold, but not from her words. He saw a potential enemy the precise moment before she became one in truth, lunging at him with a madwoman’s fervor and more strength than Collin would ever have thought her body capable of mustering.

  But not nearly enough.

  He didn’t even exert himself holding her back, just grabbed Ado by one shoulder and held his arm straight. She snarled, clawing at him, eyes wide. Collin shoved, lightly. Not lightly enough. The queen shot back like a trebuchet stone and landed hard, tumbling away from him in the muck.

  She was up fast.

  This time, it was ice Collin had to contend with. He chose not to, leaping aside as the great lances cut through the space he’d just been occupying.

  Collin was a more potent fighter than Ado, deadlier in every measure. But she was a caster. In terms of sheer destructive power, even he couldn’t match her. And unless he was willing to kill her back there wasn’t a single advantage to be found in her frail body.

  More ice, a volley of it- all conjured by one woman instead of a company of archers. Collin rolled, and dove, and scrambled and cursed as the icicles flitted by him faster than he reckoned a wooden bow could manage. Some hit trees and sunk in deep, others broke on impact. Either, he reckoned, had no business being in him.

  It was inherently a delaying tactic, fleeing from her. Collin went through the basic mathematics of his situation. What would run out first- his luck or Ado’s mana?

  She’d been exhausted when he found her, but had had time to recover. He wasn’t exactly evading her narrowly, but she wasn’t exactly missing by a yard each time either. The thought of seriously hurting her made him uncomfortable.

  But it was feeling increasingly like the only one he could humour.

  That changed as Collin caught the movement. A fleeting thing, barely even there. It lasted a tenth of a quarter of a second, less time than a loosed arrow stayed in contact with its driving string. But he saw it, he caught it, and he turned his next dodge into a lunge. Ten yards separated Collin from his target, he crossed them faster than a human could react.

  But not faster than whatever he’d seen. It was darting away already, like a sunbeam caught in dust. Not caught in Collin, his thrown knife missed and beheaded a sapling behind its target. He turned the bladed attack into a physical one.

  If it had been a human Collin was lunging towards, they might’ve done something stupid. Frozen up, or kept retreating. But the Vampire, which was what he now recognised as the enemy, just planted their feet and met his tackle with all of their considerable strength.

  Unfortunately for them, he’d had a plan for that. In the time they needed to right their footing, Collin broke his grip and slipped around, grabbed one leg to yank it up and kicked the other out. They fell slow, gravity a lazy thing by his standards, and he’d already freed another knife before they were one quarter of the way to reaching the dirt. Steel came down against pale flesh, and the Vampire stiffened.

  Collin smiled, but it came out as a snarl.

  “Release her or I’ll kill you?” He growled, drawing the blade across their neck. Slow enough for them to react, fast enough for Ado not to. They had moments to stop their throat from being cut, their neck sawed open. Collin wondered if he’d get their head off before Ado’s magic hit him.

  Evidently, the Vampire wasn’t sure either. They released her.

  “You’re one of Lilia’s bastards.” Collin told the thing, recognising its face as he studied it. “Why are you trying to kill us?”

  For a moment, the Vampire looked defiant. Then its face fell.

  “Mafari, you know he’s back by now. My mistress is aiming to…Curry favour.”

  “By killing us.” Collin finished.

  “So you see-” The Vampire got halfway through, then Collin found the answer to his question of decapitating it. The knife bit deep, sawed the rest of its way through and separated head from body. He stood.

  No use leaving an enemy alive, not one who was aiming to preserve its people. They’d need to move fast.