Henrik

The snow had stopped falling.

Henrik couldn't say when. The world had been a churn of white and turquoise a moment before, visibility swallowed to arm's length. The next, the sky above him had gentled into a still gray. It was almost beautiful, in the way things became once you suspected you wouldn't see them again.

Everything took more effort than it should have: breathing, thinking, keeping steady pressure on the wound in his side, which went on bleeding no matter how hard he pressed.

The oak at his back was old and unyielding, its bark grinding into his spine through what remained of his brigandine. His sword lay forgotten across his lap, the fine Dwarven make of it looking strange and out of place against the ruin around it, a gift from his father he could no longer manage to hold with any real strength. Both hands pressed against his left side, and blood ran hot between his fingers no matter how hard he pressed, though the cold had already begun stealing the feeling from his fingertips, one degree at a time. His breath came shallow and quick, and the edges of his vision had started to narrow, the whole world going soft and distant at the corners. The trail behind him told the story plainly enough: handprints and knee-marks bright against the snow, tracing the distance from where he'd fallen to where he'd dragged himself.

Here, it announced to anyone who cared to look. Here is where Henrik Volstadt crawled like a wounded animal to die.

He should have been moving by now, finding better cover, signaling for help somehow. Some tactical part of his mind, the part his father's officers had drilled into him since he was twelve, went on cataloguing those necessities with mechanical precision, even as the rest of him drifted somewhere strangely far away, his awareness coming loose from his body to watch the dying from a safe distance.

Instead, he sat with a hand pressed against a wound, thinking, with the odd precision of a man trying very hard to keep his thoughts in order: Mother will be devastated. She spent twenty-five years preparing me for kingship. This is a poor return on her investment.

The laugh escaped before he could stop it. It was something between humor and hysteria, and it hurt enough that he regretted it immediately.

Sorry, Father, he thought, this time with genuine regret, looking down at the blade across his lap. His mind had begun to loosen and drift, the way it did at the edge of sleep, pulling him toward somewhere quieter than the cold.

He wondered whether anyone would find him here, or whether the snow would simply keep falling until it buried him along with the season. Mother would prefer closed casket, he decided. She's always cared a great deal about appearances.

Underneath the joke was a simpler, sadder truth: he'd only come to talk.

Four days earlier, he'd stood in a council chamber and argued exactly that, to a room that had already decided against him.

The chamber had been too warm, thick with coal smoke, and King Frederick still sat wrapped in a fur-lined mantle he hadn't needed a season ago. He'd looked thinner than he had in autumn, the color gone out of his face, and yet he did not look like a man who could be argued past.

There was a village at the ford of Harrowford, demihuman families who'd spent the better part of a generation rebuilding their lives there after the Crown first drove their parents off older, ancestral land. Now the Crown wanted this ground too, for a new frontier garrison, and had ordered the village emptied to make way for it. The families hadn't gone, and without someone willing to talk to them first, the council's next order would put soldiers in the field instead of words. Henrik had made his case plainly.

The council, composed of the six houses, had been visibly divided. Some of its members regarded him with the weary indulgence reserved for those who had long since concluded that decency and statecraft rarely occupied the same room. Others looked genuinely uncertain, caught between the wish to believe him and a clear-eyed understanding of what his failure would cost the Crown.

Lord Hargrave ended the debate before it properly began, citing the cost of delay and the precedent it would set. As far as he was concerned, the matter was settled, and Henrik suspected the argument concealed something considerably less principled. A representative from House Thorne spoke next, and her objection proved harder to dismiss: not that the cause lacked merit, only that this stretch of frontier had claimed gentler men before him, and she was not convinced his gift for negotiation would be sufficient to survive it.

The six houses fell to arguing among themselves, voices rising over one another, until Frederick raised a single hand from the arm of his chair and the room quieted around it.

"Let him try." His voice came out thin, but it carried to every corner of the room, and beneath it, so faint that most of them likely missed it, ran the ghost of a wheeze. "A prince who has never been permitted to fail at anything will make a poor king of any of you. Let him fail at this, if he must, and learn from it while I am still here to help him carry it." He paused to draw a slow breath before he went on. "Take Corwin with you. Twenty swords, no more. I would rather the Crown be remembered at that river as a voice than as a blade."

Corwin was Henrik's cousin, close enough in age that the two of them had trained in the same yard since before either could properly hold a blade, and closer than that in the years since, once it became clear that standing between Henrik and whatever the realm decided to throw at him was simply going to be Corwin's place in the family. There was no one else in the household the King trusted more to bring his son home in one piece, and everyone in that room had known it.

So Henrik had ridden out with twenty men and Corwin at the head of them, riding through light snow flurries under a winter sky, and by midmorning the column had reached Harrowford.

It was a small place, a cluster of homes along a bend in the river, timber and mud-daub, smoke rising thin from a dozen chimneys. Beyond the last house, stakes had already been driven into the frozen ground to mark where the garrison would stand if the village didn't. Some of the demihuman families came out into the cold to meet the column directly, keeping close together and watching more than they spoke. Others stayed back in doorways and behind shuttered windows, close enough to watch and close enough to disappear if the morning turned violent.

The elder who stepped forward to receive them was fox-descended, gray showing through the darker hair at her temples, her vulpine ears twitching once as she came to a stop in front of Henrik. Two men flanked her, neither of her own kind: one built along a wolf's lines, long ears pricked forward and tracking the column man by man, the other built like an ox, broad through the shoulders and thick through the neck, with a pair of short curved horns pushing up through his hair.

Henrik reined in at the edge of the village and began to dismount. "I've come on behalf of the Crown," he said, swinging down from the saddle. "I only want to..."

He stopped.

A flake hung motionless just short of his face, caught mid-fall and going nowhere. When his eyes followed it outward, the rest of the snow was doing the same, suspended everywhere around him. What little wind had been blowing a moment ago seemed to cease with the strange phenomenon.

Across from him, the elder had gone still too, her mouth still open around whatever she'd meant to say. Her ears, which had been turned toward him a moment before, had gone flat against her skull, and behind her the rest of the gathered families were noticing it as well, one head after another tilting up toward snow that no longer seemed to abide by gravity.

Corwin, still mounted a few paces back, reached out and touched one of the flakes near his shoulder. It did not react.

A sudden pressure had begun building in the clearing, pressing in against the ears and the chest, growing heavier with every second that passed. The fine hairs on the back of Henrik's neck rose first, then along his arms, pure instinct insisting something was wrong before the rest of him had caught up enough to say what.

Then the sound came, loud enough that half the column flinched and a horse somewhere behind him shifted and stamped. For one confused second, his mind reached for something ordinary to explain the sound: ice cracking somewhere on the river or a branch giving way under the weight of snow, but none of it held up. The sound hadn't come from any direction at all. It had happened everywhere at once, like a struck bell.

A thin, jagged line cut through the air above the field beside the village, no wider than a hand, its edges lit from within by a restless blend of blue and turquoise that belonged to nothing else in the clearing. Every head in the clearing turned toward it at once, villagers and soldiers both, watching it in stunned silence, unable to look away or explain what they were looking at.

Then, in the space of a single blink, it tore wider. A rack of antlers forced the gap first, wide as a cart and branching into tines tapered to points sharp enough to have done the tearing themselves, and the edges gave all at once behind them. The force that came pouring through hit like a physical wall, throwing the people standing nearest off their feet.

It should not have fit through anything as small as that tear, and yet there it was, unfolding to its full size the moment its hindquarters cleared the gap, towering easily twice the height of the tallest man in the column even standing on four legs. It ran deer through the shoulders and forelegs, but wrong past that, the proportions stretched too long and too jointed to belong to anything they had ever seen, more centaur than animal in how it carried itself. Its hide hung loose on that frame, wet and ragged, split in places to show something slick and dark shifting underneath that had no business being visible at all. Along one side of its narrow, antlered skull, a second face had started to grow and never finished, a raw half-formed thing crowded with small eyes clustered like a spider's, none of them blinking, each one roving independently over the same stretch of field, as though still trying to orient itself.

The creature’s gaze settled on a cluster of demihumans who had gone down in the scramble, still tangled in one another at the village edge, too slow to rise and too stunned to do more than stare. Whatever served it for a mind fixed on them, and it charged.

For one breath, nobody moved at all, weapons left half-drawn and forgotten, feet rooted to where they stood. Even Corwin, twenty paces back with the column, stood frozen with his hand resting on his hilt rather than pulling the blade free.

Henrik tore himself out of the stupor first, drilled reflex answering before conscious thought caught up. "Archers! Nock! Draw! Loose!" The commands came out clipped and automatic.

The volley that answered was clumsy, more than one bow releasing early or late, arrows loosed by hands that hadn't stopped shaking since the tear opened. Enough of them found the creature anyway, biting into its flank before it bore down on the fallen families, and the impact threw its charge off line. Its own momentum carried it past them and into the trunk of a nearby tree hard enough to shudder through the ground. It reared back, threw that half-formed second face skyward, and formed a sound closer to several throats bellowing in pain at once.

The families scrambled up and bolted for the nearest houses while the creature was still tangled in the wreckage of the tree and its own confusion.

Henrik was already moving. He hauled himself back into the saddle in one motion. "Corwin, get the village secured! Every one of these people behind something solid, now!" He didn't wait to see it done. He wheeled his horse toward the supply wagon, tore a burning torch free of its bracket, and put his heels to the animal's flanks, riding hard along the tree line. "Hey!" he shouted, the word tearing raw out of his throat.

"Look, here!" He kept shouting, half command and half provocation, anything that would keep the creature's attention nailed to him and the fire instead of the village at his back.

It worked exactly as well as he'd hoped. The creature's head came around, every one of those restless eyes fixing on the moving light before it dropped back onto all fours and came after him.

Henrik angled his horse for the treeline, hoping the closer spacing of trunks might slow something that size, but the creature barreled through the first line of trees as if they were nothing more than saplings, and closed the gap before he'd covered half the distance.

It came in low and fast, then whipped its head sideways in one wide arc as the last of the distance closed, using the full spread of the rack like a scythe. One branch caught Henrik across the hip, low where his cuirass gave way to the plate below it, and drove through the gap hard enough to find flesh on the other side. The pain arrived a half-second behind the impact, a white, ringing shock that stole the air from his lungs before he'd even registered the warmth spreading beneath his hand. In the same sweep, a second tine caught the horse across the ribs just behind the girth, opening a long, ragged gash down its side.

The horse screamed, shrill and raw, and reared straight up onto its hind legs, forelegs clawing at empty air, throwing Henrik loose into the snow.

He hit the ground hard enough to empty what breath he had left, the impact driving a fresh, hot line of pain through his side where the antler had caught him. The horse came down only a foot away, one hoof striking the snow close enough to his skull that he felt the impact before he understood how nearly it had ended him, mud and slush spraying across his face and chest. The pain only seemed to sharpen its panic as it spun its hindquarters away and bolted, crashing off through the trees, half out of its mind with terror.

The creature, drawn to the larger, louder target, continued its pursuit and within moments the sound of the chase was already fading into the trees behind him.

He didn't remember the rest of it clearly, only that when awareness found him again, he was sitting against an old oak with his sword across his lap.

Suddenly, something moved at the edge of his vision, a shape between the trees.

His hand found the sword hilt with dream-slow clumsiness. The weapon felt impossibly heavy. He could close his fingers around the grip, but lifting it was an entirely separate problem, and one he no longer had the strength left to solve.

He tried to order them to identify themselves, aiming for something that might have passed for authority an hour ago. What came out was barely a whisper. He swallowed blood and tried again.

"Halt." That was better, almost audible. The sword wavered in his grip. "I'm... armed."

The claim would have carried more weight if his sword hadn't chosen that exact moment to slip from his grip and land at his side with a soft thunk, the sound that followed was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

The figure resolved out of the gray light. It was not rushing and not obviously a threat, but it kept closing the distance all the same.

"I mean it." His voice cracked halfway through the sentence. He sounded young, and frightened, and nothing like the commanding heir to House Volstadt he was supposed to be. "Stay back."

The words scattered like startled birds before he could call them back.

The figure was close now, close enough that the question of whether they were real had already answered itself in the way the light fell across them. Henrik registered this from several layers away, through cold and blood loss and a mind quietly closing its doors one at a time.

He let his head fall back against the oak and didn't look at them when he finally spoke. There didn't seem to be much point performing composure for a stranger when composure had already left without him.

"You'll have to forgive me." His voice came out quieter than he meant it to. It was unhurried, almost conversational, the tone of a man trying to meet the end with a modicum of grace. "I've had a rather difficult morning."