Chapter 31: The Taste of Vengeance
The throne room’s cold clung to us like a second skin, a psychic grime that the howling wind outside did little to scour away. We’d commandeered a command post on the edge of the shattered city, a vast, crimson-draped tent that had once been some Hammerfell general’s pride. Now it was a gutted relic. Tattered silk banners, embroidered with snarling frost-wolves, flapped listlessly from the central pole. The air inside was thick with the smell of damp wool, old blood, and the weird, ozonic tang of discharged magic.
I dropped my gear onto a campaign table scarred with ancient mug-rings and knife marks. My body followed, a slow, controlled collapse into a rickety chair that groaned in protest. Every muscle sang a chorus of exhaustion. Mary mirrored me across the table, her movements stiff, deliberate. We sat in a comfortable, heavy silence for a long moment, the only sounds the wind and the distant, orderly clamor of our troops securing the city.
“Your left temple,” Mary said finally, her voice hoarse from shouting orders in the frozen air.
I reached up, my gloved fingers finding a tacky patch above my eyebrow. I’d forgotten about it. A piece of stone shard, probably from the gatehouse collapse. “Yours is worse,” I said, nodding at her.
A long, shallow cut ran from her right cheekbone to her jawline, a thin red line against her pale skin. Dried blood flecked her blonde hair. She touched it, winced slightly, then shrugged. “Souvenir.”
We both rummaged in our medical pouches, the practiced motions automatic. I handed her a sealed antiseptic wipe. She tossed me a butterfly closure. We worked on each other in silence, a quiet ballet of precise, gentle movements.
I cleaned the grit from her cheek. The cut was clean, not deep. “Hold still.” I applied the closure, my fingers careful against her skin.
“You’re bleeding through your collar,” she observed, her eyes focused on my temple as she swiped the wipe across it. The sting was bright and clarifying.
I craned my neck. A friction burn from my armor’s strap, raw and angry. “Just a rub. Nothing structural.”
She applied a pad of gauze with tape, her hands sure and quick. When she was done, she leaned back, studying her handiwork, then mine. A slow, tired grin spread across her face. It was the first real expression I’d seen since we’d kicked in the throne room doors.
“We definitely broke the promise,” she said.
I barked a short, dry laugh. “The ‘no new scratches’ clause? Spectacularly. Ellie is going to… I don’t know. She’s going to invent a new form of murder. Something involving excessive hugging and then a six-hour lecture on historical precedent for royal non-combatancy.”
“Nancy will just look at us,” Mary said, mimicking our daughter’s particular blend of fondness and deep disappointment. “That look. The one that makes you want to confess to crimes you haven’t even thought of yet. And then she’ll cry, and we’ll feel like monsters.”
We lapsed into silence again, but it was lighter now. The shared dread of our wives’ reactions was a familiar, almost comforting territory.
“It was efficient, though,” I said, my gaze drifting to the entrance of the tent, where the grey Hammerfell light filtered through.“The operation. Tidy.”
Mary nodded, picking a piece of gravel from the mechanism of her rifle. “Tidy.Sure. But admit it. For a second, when the breaching charge went off and their ‘impenetrable’ enchanted gate turned into a cloud of very penetrable shrapnel… for a second, it wasn’t just efficient.”
I met her eyes. The same spark was in mine, I knew. A dark, unprofessional gleam of pure, visceral satisfaction.
“It was glorious,” I said, the word feeling strange in my mouth. I wasn’t one for glory. I was one for results. But the physics of it… the perfect convergence of calculated charge weight, placement, and the subsequent failure of their arrogant, spell-bound architecture… it had been a thing of terrible beauty. “The look on that gate captain’s face. Priceless.”
“He looked like a man who’d just seen his god punched in the mouth,” Mary agreed, a smirk playing on her lips. She finished with her rifle, set it aside with a soft click, and leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her voice dropped, not out of fear, but intimacy. “And Valerian. In the throne room. All that talk of breeding and nurseries. Did you see his eyes when he realized the ‘broodmares’ were going to decide if he lived or died?”
“I saw,” I said quietly. The memory of that dawning horror, the collapse of his entire world into a single, unavoidable ultimatum, was a cold stone in my gut. It wasn’t pleasure. It was a grim confirmation. “He thought softness and strength couldn’t coexist in us. A fatal design flaw in his philosophy.”
Mary’s hand drifted unconsciously to her abdomen, a subtle, protective curve. “Six months along, kicking down doors and dismantling kingdoms. Not exactly the sedentary confinement he imagined.”
A gust of wind slammed into the tent, making the whole structure sway and the braziers gutter. The strange hearthstone in the corner, a carved piece of obsidian that still radiated a faint, magical warmth, pulsed once as if in reply. It was the only thing in the room that felt alive.
“We should comm home,” I said, not moving. “Give the all-clear.”
“In a minute,” Mary murmured. She was looking past me, at the tattered banners, her mind clearly elsewhere. “Do you think they’ll be okay? Valerian’s family?”
I followed her gaze. I thought of the queen’s damp shoulder, the young prince’s shaking shoulders. “They’re alive. That’s more than he offered our family. They’ll have a chance to be people, not props. It’s a better deal than they deserve.”
She nodded, accepting the hard truth of it. Practicality, again. The foundation we built everything on.
Finally, with a sigh that came from the soles of my boots, I pushed myself up. The movement stirred the aches back into symphony. “Come on. Let’s go tell our wives we’re mostly in one piece. And start planning the trip home.”
Mary stood, shouldering her rifle. She looked young again in the dim light, the cut on her face a stark new line in her story. “Mostly being the operative word,” she said, her tone light. “We’re going to hear about this for decades.”
“Probably,” I agreed, leading the way out of the tent and into the biting wind. The path home was ahead, long and likely filled with recriminations and relentless love. But behind us, the city was quiet, its heart seized. The math, as ever, checked out. We walked toward the comms tent, our shoulders almost touching, two shapes against the vast, unforgiving white.