Chapter 1: The Necromancer Queen's Vengeance
The ash fell like snow.
It coated Leliana's shoulders, her hair, the curve of her blade. She didn't brush it away. Let it settle. Let it become part of her. The war camp stretched before her in broken teeth and blackened ribs—stakes driven into the earth, some still crowned with the heads of soldiers who'd been dead long enough that the crows had given up. The fires hadn't died yet. They hissed in the pits, fed by something that smelled like rendered fat and old rope.
She breathed through her mouth.
"South wall's collapsed," Xander said, coming up beside her. His boots crunched on something that might have been bone or might have been char. He didn't look down. "Goblins are holed up in the supply bunker. Maybe forty. Maybe less."
"Maybe more?"
He shrugged. The motion pulled at the scar that ran from his jaw to his collarbone—old wound, keloided and pale, like something had tried to take his head off and almost succeeded. "The dead don't lie, but they do exaggerate."
She almost smiled. Almost.
The army behind her waited. They didn't breathe. They didn't shift their weight or mutter or cough. A thousand soldiers who'd died in this place, in this war, for causes that had seemed important when they still had blood to pump through their hearts. Now they stood in ragged rows, armor rusted to their bones, weapons clutched in fingers that had no flesh left to grip them. The magic that held them together was old and angry and it tasted like copper at the back of her throat.
She hadn't asked for this. The power had found her anyway, the way fire finds dry grass. One moment she was a farmhand with calluses on her palms and dirt under her nails, and the next she was standing in a graveyard whispering words that made the ground shake.
"Leliana." Xander's voice was low, careful. "You don't have to do this."
"I know."
"You could let them rot in there. Starve them out. It'd take a week, maybe two."
"I know."
"But you're not going to."
She turned to look at him. His eyes were the color of the sea before a storm—gray-green, restless, holding depths that didn't show on the surface. A fisherman's eyes. A man who'd lost friends to things with too many teeth and not enough mercy.
"No," she said. "I'm not."
He nodded like he'd expected that answer. Maybe he had. He'd been following her for three months now, ever since she'd pulled him out of a flooded cave on the coast, half-dead and raving about something in the water that had taken his crew. She hadn't asked for details then. She wouldn't ask now.
"The mercenaries," she said. "The ones who sold us out. They're in there too?"
"According to the scouts."
"How many?"
"Twelve. Maybe fifteen."
Fifteen humans who'd taken goblin gold to slaughter villages that couldn't fight back. Fifteen men who'd burned farms and homes and the people inside them. Fifteen.
She'd been seven when the goblins came to her village. Old enough to remember her mother's scream, the way the door splintered inward, the smell of smoke so thick it felt like drowning. She'd hidden under the floorboards of the root cellar, her hands pressed over her mouth, listening to the sounds of everything she loved being torn apart.
The goblins had done the killing. But the mercenaries had opened the gates.
She raised her blade.
The dead behind her shifted as one. A sound like wind through dead leaves, like the last breath of a dying man, rippled through their ranks. Swords scraped against shields. Bows creaked. The magic pulsed in her chest, hot and hungry, and she fed it.
"Xander," she said. "Stay close."
"Wasn't planning on going anywhere."
The goblins had fortified the bunker well. Sandbags piled three high, wooden barricades reinforced with iron bands, archers positioned on the roof with clear sightlines in every direction. Smart. Tactical. The kind of defense that might have held against a conventional army.
But there was nothing conventional about the things she'd brought with her.
She walked forward, and the dead walked with her. Their footsteps made no sound. Their eyes—those that still had eyes—glowed with a cold, blue light. The ash swirled around them, disturbed by something that wasn't quite wind.
An arrow flew from the bunker roof, aimed at her heart.
She didn't stop walking. The arrow slowed in the air, wobbled, dropped to the ground ten feet in front of her. The goblin archer stared down at his bow like it had betrayed him.
"Last chance," she called out, her voice carrying across the ruined camp. "Throw down your weapons. Come out with your hands empty. I'll make it quick."
Silence.
Then a voice from inside the bunker, human, rough with fear and bravado. "Go to hell, witch."
She tilted her head. "I've been there. It's not as bad as they say."
She raised her hand.
The dead surged forward like water through a broken dam. They didn't run—they had no muscles to burn, no breath to waste—but they moved with a terrible, inexorable purpose. The barricades splintered under their weight. The sandbags tore. The goblins screamed, and the screaming was good, it was right, it was the sound she'd been waiting twenty years to hear.
She walked through the chaos. A goblin lunged at her with a rusty spear. She sidestepped, opened his throat with a flick of her wrist, kept walking. Another came from her left. She didn't even look at him—just drove her blade into his chest and let the dead behind her finish the job.
Xander stayed at her shoulder. He didn't have her magic, but he had his hooks and his knife and a lifetime of fighting things that wanted him dead. A mercenary charged them, screaming, sword raised high. Xander caught the blade on his hook, twisted, and drove his knife into the man's eye socket. The mercenary dropped without a sound.
"Clear," Xander said.
She stepped over the body.
The bunker was a nightmare inside. Bodies stacked like cordwood, goblins and humans tangled together in the last moments of their lives. Some had died fighting. Some had died running. Some had died on their knees, begging.
She found the leader of the mercenaries in the back corner, huddled behind a crate of spoiled grain. His name was Torvin, she knew. He'd been a soldier once, before he'd decided that killing for coin was easier than killing for country. He'd been at her village. She'd seen his face in the old wanted posters, the ones that promised gold for information about the men who'd aided the goblin raids.
He looked up at her with wide eyes. "You're her," he whispered. "The girl from Fox's village. The one who survived."
"I'm not a girl anymore."
"Please. I'll give you anything. Gold, information, I know things—"
"I don't want anything you have."
She knelt down in front of him, so their faces were level. The ash had settled on her eyelashes, her lips, the hollow of her throat. She could feel it in her hair, coating her scalp like a second skin.
"You opened the gates," she said. "You let them in. You stood by while they killed everyone I loved. And then you took their money and you walked away."
"I was following orders—"
"You were following gold."
He started to cry. She watched the tears cut tracks through the grime on his face. Twenty years ago, she would have felt something. Pity, maybe. Or satisfaction. Now she just felt tired.
"There were children," she said. "There were old people who couldn't run. There was my mother, who tried to hide me under the floorboards, who told me to be quiet, who died thinking I was safe."
"I'm sorry—"
"You're not. But that's okay. You don't have to be sorry. You just have to die."
She drove her blade into his heart.
He made a small sound, like a sigh, and then he was gone. She stayed there for a moment, watching the light leave his eyes, feeling nothing but the cold pulse of the magic in her chest.
Xander appeared at the doorway. "It's done. The rest of them are dead. The goblins too."
She stood up. Her knees ached. The ash in the air had turned the sky the color of old bruises—purple and black and sickly green. Somewhere in the distance, a crow called.
"The dead?" she asked.
"Waiting for your orders."
She walked out of the bunker and into the wasteland.