Rint dared not look again at his sister; not to see her as she was, on her knees and broken by the words they had flung between them. He left Ville and Galak to make ready the camp, and sat staring into the northeast, trapped in his own desolation.

It was a struggle to envisage the face of his wife. When he imagined her sitting wrapped in furs with a newborn child against her breast, he saw a stranger. Two strangers. His hands would not cease trembling. They felt hot, as if they still held the fires they had unleashed in that moment of fury, so fierce with brutal vengeance. He did not regret the pain he had delivered upon Olar Ethil; but when he thought of it, he saw himself first, a figure silhouetted by towering flames, and the screams filling the smoke and ashes rising into the air became the voice of the trees, the agony of blackening leaves and snapping branches. He stood then, like a god, face lit in the reflection of his undeniable triumph. A witness to the destruction, even when that destruction was his own. Such a man knew no love, not for a wife, not for a child. Such a man knew nothing but violence and so made of himself a stranger to everyone.

Insects spun through the dusk. Behind him he heard Ville muttering something to Galak, and the smoke from the cookfire drifted past him, like serpents escaping another realm, fleeing off into the gathering darkness. He looked across to where he had left Raskan’s cloth-wrapped body. The hands were stretched out, bruised and swollen, and where the leather strings were tied round the wrists they now bit deep. Beyond them were the moccasins, lying on the grass. Draconus was free with his gifts indeed.

Urusander would find a way. He would crush the madness and force peace upon Kurald Galain. But blood would flow and the struggle would be arduous. If only the guilty died, then such deaths could be deemed just, and so make of each unfortunate murder an act of execution. Justice was at the heart of retribution, after all.

For too long had the highborn lounged, smug and complacent with the privileges that came with the wielding of power. But nothing of worth was given for free. Privilege was a bright weed growing on the spilled blood of the enslaved, and Rint saw nothing precious in such bitter flowers. When he looked ahead, he could think of nothing but smoke and flames, the only answers he had left.

It was Draconus’s noble blood that had yoked them all, dragging them through misery and unfeeling abuse. Without his title, he was no different from any of them. And yet they had bowed before him. They had knelt in deference, and by each and every such act they but served to confirm the Lord’s own sense of superiority. These were the rituals of inequity, and everyone knew their role.

He thought back to Tutor Sagander’s nonsense — the appalling lessons the old man had thrust upon Arathan on the first days out. The self-righteous could argue unto their last breath, so certain were they of their stance, and yet with outrage would they view any accusation of being self-serving. But smugness filled the silence after every pronouncement they made, as if condescension were virtue’s reward.

The Borderswords were men and women who had rejected the stilted rigidity of Kharkanas and sought out a rawer truth in the wild lands upon the very edge of civilization. They claimed to live under older laws, the kind that bound all forms of life, but Rint wondered now if the very sentiment had been forged on an anvil of lies. Innocence withered before knowing eyes just as it had once withered behind them. The first foot set upon virgin ground despoiled; the first touch stained; the first embrace broke the bones of the wild.

Outside House Dracons, it had been Ville — or was it Galak — who had bemoaned the slaughter of the beasts, and yet dreamed of taking the last creature by spear or arrow, if only to bring an end to its loneliness. That was a sentiment breathless in its stupidity and tragedy. It arrived as punctuation, and only idiotic silence could follow. And yet Rint knew the truth of it, and felt its heavy reverberation, like a curse to haunt his kind down the ages.

He would fight for justice. And, if need be, he would expose to the Borderswords the sordid delusion of their so-called neutrality. Life was a war against a thousand enemies, from the sustenance carved from nature to the insanity of a people’s will to do wrong in the name of right. His hands trembled, he now knew, from the blood they had spilled, and their eagerness to spill yet more.

There was a truth that came with standing as would a god, with eyes fixed upon the destruction his malign will had wrought. To be a god was to know utter loneliness, and yet find comfort in isolation. When one stood alone with nothing but power in one’s hands, violence was a seductive lure.

And now, dear Ville, I long for a spear to the back, an arrow to the throat.