Chapter One
Andressat, winter of the previous year
Winter storms, one after another, cut off the high plateau of Andressat from the lowlands around it as Midwinter Feast neared. On the morning before the nightlong vigil, Meddthal Andressat, the Count of Andressat’s second son and present commander in the north, woke to hear the thud of the inner door closing, then voices in the tower’s main hall: exclamations, then quieter tones.
Someone, he gathered, had sent something to someone as a gift. Found it by the door. Sighing, he pushed back the covers, dressed quickly, and went out to see what was going on. Families normally did not come to the towers to leave gifts for their kin on duty, especially not during winter storms. Especially not without pounding on the door and coming inside. He thought immediately of treachery, poisoned food, perhaps, sent by an enemy.
“Whatever it is, don’t eat it,” he said, coming into the mess, then stopped short as he saw the wide eyes and horrified expressions turned toward him and the quick movement of men hiding something from their commander. “What?” he demanded. “Show me.”
The sergeant who had served with him since Meddthal first gained command shook his head. “Sir, you don’t want to see this.”
“Of course I do. Stand aside.”
“Sir, please. It’s … it’s horrible …”
Meddthal could feel the hairs on his arms rising; cold foreboding struck like a blow. His younger brother Filis had been missing since the previous summer, disappearing on a routine trip from Andressat to Cortes Cilwan. Almost certainly Filis had been captured by the one man in Aarenis who would want an Andressat son in his hands: Alured the Black, self-styled Duke of Immer.
“It’s Filis,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“There’s a letter, sir. To Count Andressat.”
Meddthal moved forward. “It’s more than that by the way you’re all acting. Stand aside. I must see to report to my father.” He braced himself for horrors: Filis’s head, Filis’s body. Then he saw it, and his breath came short, his vision darkened.
The box had been made with great skill, leather laid over a framework of wood. Filis’s face formed the top—skillfully padded enough to show the contours, like a mask, though much flattened, the ears—those distinctive ears—forming a hideously decorative border to left and right. Meddthal struggled to think about that, not that it was Filis’s face, the familiar face of a brother he had loved and quarreled with. Not—absolutely not—about how it had been taken from Filis, whether Filis had been skinned before or after death.
He struggled to stay upright, to breathe, to hold back the nausea that threatened to shame him in front of all. He became aware gradually that the sergeant’s arm was around him, steadying him—a strong, warm arm, and most of all a live arm. That his men were looking away from him, giving him time to recover, stirring about as if it were a normal morning and they were getting ready for another day. He dragged in one lungful after another of the chill air—air that would never be warm after this. And looked again.
He could not unsee what he had seen. He could not unthink the thoughts that raced through his mind, deadly as a flight of arrows. He had known—they had all known—that Filis was likely dead, killed by Alured or at his command. They had told themselves that, they had even—as his father had said aloud first—hoped he was dead and past suffering. Had it been Filis’s severed head … even a body bearing marks of torture … it would not have been so bad.
Filis’s hair fell over the back of the box, carefully braided with ribbons in Immer’s colors and formed into a decorative knot. On one corner was a scar Meddthal recognized from Filis’s shoulder … then he saw the fine stitching that had attached that piece of Filis’s skin to the others. A tube—it must be the message tube with the letter to Count Andressat—protruded obscenely from Filis’s mouth.
Rage shook him as suddenly as horror had. That scum had planned all this to the last detail … to foul one of the year’s holiest days, Sunreturn, with such horror … to make of it not the day of hope and joy Midwinter Feast had always been but to stain it with the memory of Filis’s death.
“It was in a sack, tied with a green ribbon,” one of the men said. “There was a message: Send it to Count Andressat as a Midwinter gift from his liege, it said.” He pointed to the sack, crumpled on the floor, coarsely woven, and the ribbon with a wooden tag still attached.
Meddthal shook his head. “He has no liege, and it would kill him.” To his surprise, his voice sounded almost normal.