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THEY REMINDED HER OF DRAGON WINGS

So, she went from being the child of a village, loved and nurtured by all, to being a child of nothing and no one, with a swiftness that left scars so deep they might never heal. Every meal was a plan, then a risk, then a danger. Every slumber a sign to the forest’s predators . . . an alert in the scent of musk or urine to come and devour the child as she slept in the branches of the tallest tree she could find, an oak that had seen six centu- ries and offered little in the way of shelter or comfort.

The first nights after everything she had ever known was burned to ash, she sang quietly to herself in the tree’s unlovely limbs, bits of a lullaby her mother had sung nightly before bed. She didn’t remember all the words and would replace them with a tuneless, dead-eyed hum, more artifact than comfort. A fossil of an age that seemed only the fanciful dream of a drowning heart.

She would think of her mother, bone and burned sinew that she had buried along with everyone she had ever known. At ten summers, she had become her people’s last undertaker.

Pilatius III, The Song of Sonja, the She-Devil

Outside the Borders of Turan, the Hyborian Age

 

Sonja was behind schedule.

To be fair, “schedule” was plainly too fine a word for the heed‐less, headlong sequence of events she’d set in motion in those cold predawn hours. Even calling it a plan at all was a bit grandiose for what was a messy, unkind affair even by her low standards.

The She‐Devil was on the run.

She had not had time to dress properly. Her preference was warmer climes and few encumbrances, her light furs and sparse ring mail making her underdressed for a morning with temperatures just above freezing. Her tan had faded, making her skin paler than she liked, for both practical and aesthetic reasons. A hunter hunted best when difficult to spot.

Further, she had left with an urgency that saw her take only a few items aside from her horse and blankets. A bow (not the double curved bow of her homeland, sadly), a nearly empty quiver, a sword, and a few scattered items in her kit roll. Not for the first time, she cursed her impetuous nature. She had seen her opportunity and seized it, consequences be damned. No food, no water, and most painfully now, no alcohol.

She had left a warm, generously occupied camp bed covered in silken sheets for three small, scratchy horse blankets and a trail only another hunter could follow. In almost any other scenario, she’d be safe; she’d be on her way.

And she’d be rich.

Unfortunately, she was none of those things. Not yet. Because the Wolf Pack on her trail was led by a hunter whose skills were nearly equal to her own and whose rage would be intractable, even if, as Sonja had to reluctantly admit, it was also clearly justifiable.

She’d stolen from a queen. A queen who missed no trail sign, no matter how insignificant. And to add insult to an already festering injury, that queen had been the owner of that silken camp bed and the warm, lush body within. She allowed herself one regretfully sentimental moment as she brushed her fingers across the gold asp‐shaped circlet on her left upper arm. It would fetch a ransom from the right vendor, preferably someone with few ethics and many coins. There was already a generous, if sometimes murderous, potential buyer.

But that was a problem for tomorrow.

Her horse, whom she’d named Sunder after the manner with which he demolished his feed at every meal, snorted in disapproval— whether at the tight grading of the steep hill trail they were ascend‐ ing or at Sonja’s affairs of the heart, only mount and rider could comprehend.

“Look, I never said I was tactful,” Sonja said defensively, to no

response at all from the horse.

The trail narrowed further as they crested the hill’s final grade, surrounded by ominously tall eucalyptus trees, their leaves providing nearly enough cover to block out the coming dawn. In a fortuitous bit of unexpected timing, the greenery gave way at the same moment the sun’s light finally hit the clearing at the hill’s summit. And for the second time upon seeing what was planted there, Sonja’s breath caught in her chest.

“Mitra’s fist,” she exclaimed. Most of her vulgarities were barroom learned, but in rare moments, only her father’s favourite oath seemed to fit, even if the exact meaning of it was beyond her. Sonja dismounted, gesturing the hardy Sunder to stay.

In the centre of the glade, hidden to the outside world, was a stone tower, not unlike the turrets and parapets she’d seen on fortresses and castles throughout Hyboria. It was the sails that elevated her heart rate, the four beautiful multicoloured sails spiralling in the gentle breeze. She caught her breath just as she had the day it had been first revealed.

“It is called a windmill,” Queen Ysidra had said, whispering, as if imparting a secret so delicate that volume could destroy it. The queen was lovely, dark and imposing, but carried her responsibilities like the heavy load they were, and Sonja had never seen her so delighted.

“I . . . Give me a moment,” Sonja had gasped. She’d seen works of art before, primarily of gods and heroes carved in stone, and she had been entirely unmoved. They looked unlike any of the bloody battles she herself had experienced firsthand, with their theatrical posing. The slavering demons of this religion or that had left her thinking only of the madness of artists and zealots, two classes she did her best to avoid.

But this “windmill” was different, elevated somehow, inspired by divinity, perhaps. The sails were dyed in bright splashes of colour, some of which she had never seen before. Beautiful but arcane calligraphy walked up the edge of each huge swath of fabric, doubtlessly uttering majestic poetry to whatever blessed soul could read it. She loved it and she feared it instantly, her gut churning with emo‐ tions she lacked the vocabulary to express.

They reminded her of dragon wings, and she had never seen anything crafted by the hand of man that was so moving and, to her uneducated eye, unknowable.

“But who…who built this? What is its purpose?” she asked, unaware that Ysidra had been watching her reaction, grinning at her lover’s response

“The people are gone. Plague,” Ysidra said flatly, as if discussing the weather. Death was not fetishized in her tribe; Turanian they had once been, and so remained in their hearts. You lived, you

died, and nothing of substance was ever gained by mourning. “Come, I’ll show you.”

They entered the needle’s interior through a wooden door, the lock of which had been broken off at some great effort. The clan that had built this wonder had taken pains to keep its secrets unshared, but now its treasure was protected only by the height of the surrounding forest. Meticulous markings on the circular walls seemed to indicate fastidious recordkeeping, but was only gibberish to the Hyrkanian.

Sonja was afraid of no man or beast. But she was superstitious. And she felt ghosts around her as they entered, as if she were herself a violation, trespassing in a tomb.

In the centre of the interior, a great flat‐chiseled stone disc rotated, at the behest of a vertical wheel and a central rotating wooden pole that Sonja could barely have gotten her arms around, had she braved the vertigo to do so. There were other discs, with carefully aligned teeth. Sonja was no scholar. But she had a keen grasp of cause and effect, and she immediately understood how these gears coalesced from form to function. Ysidra’s most learned men were still taking notes and drawing sketches, months after the spire’s discovery. Sonja had lapped them in comprehension after just moments. She was frankly smitten.

Ysidra was clearly delighted by Sonja’s rapt attention. “You see, they would separate the chaff from the grain. Grist, it is named. Then this is placed on this stone tablet, and the wheel—”

“—crushes the grain. To make meal. I’ve seen it done with mules as its engine.”

“Yes. Yes. Do you understand what this could mean, Sonja, my love?”

For the first time since entering the glade at Ysidra’s side, Sonja turned to look at the Queen of Nomads, acutely sensing the urgency in Ysidra’s voice. The light through the small windows in the spire’s walls glinted off the asp circlet on the queen’s arm.

Ysidra smiled, the expression all the more beautiful for its rarity. Her dark eyes and long braided hair were arresting, her face framed by brilliantly coloured ribbons cunningly woven into her braids. Red and green, with gold threads at the knots that intersected them. She glowed, in a way Sonja had never witnessed, even during intimacy.

Sonja had felt the queen’s hands all over her and knew that the calluses and scars were hard earned, the ransom for a life hard fought for poor reward. The seamstresses of her tribe were famous, not just for the multicoloured patterns of their meticulous designs but also for their cleverness and their artistry of deceit. Ysidra’s tunic alone pocketed two blades in the soft lining and several jewels in the beadwork, which, true to her tribe’s nature, formed the pattern of a grey wolf.

The queen blushed. Despite her position, or perhaps because of it, she had no experience conversing plainly from the heart, and she braced herself to speak as if preparing to leap from an ocean cliff to the water far below.

“It means an end to fruitless toil, Devil. It means bounty and trade. It means no more thievery, no more slavery simply to lift hand to mouth. It means, Green Eyes, that after three hundred years of exile and living in a saddle, my people will have a home.”

Sonja blinked. She was not one for thoughts of tomorrow, when today could be so nakedly precarious. But she knew how much it meant to the dark‐haired woman. Her tribe had been cast from its homeland of Turan for crimes long forgotten, a penance that could never be fully paid.

The queen took Sonja’s hand in both of her own. “And you could rule by my side, a wanderer no more. Can you not see the trail, Sonja? To put down our swords? To drink like camels, to bed like rabbits, to eat like pigs? To have roots, Sonja. Roots, beloved.”

Sonja merely stared. This was a proposal not without appeal. She turned again to the wonder in front of her, each turn of the sails seeming to bring new emotions.

* * *

She awoke from her memory to a familiar roar.

“Devil.”

The name was growled with malice by a guttural voice she recognised as Ysidra’s. She turned to see the Wolf Pack, the queen’s elite guards, flanking their queen, two on each side, bows across their backs, each carrying a black sword. Sonja had once seen Ysidra kill a cherished horse who had broken both forelegs in a ditch hidden by tall grass. Her eyes had gone expressionless and faraway. It was simply an unpleasant task that needed doing.

In stark contrast, the queen’s eyes now blazed with a rage that was almost luminescent.

Each Wolf rider wore a short beard braided in two and made no sound, out of respect for Ysidra’s position. They had been trained from birth to emulate the wolf, to protect one another, and to hunt with precision. They would not waste their arrows. Sonja thought she recognised two of them; Raganus she knew. Festrel was another, perhaps? The rest she’d never bothered to know.

The queen pointed her sword, kept black by clever use of a forge’s flame and scrawled with runes of bloody deeds to its very tip, at Sonja. “You are a thief and a liar. You will give me the Asp and return to our camp for scourging and execution, dog.”

Sonja paused, as if considering the merits of this offer. “Am I not granted a hearing?”

Ysidra sneered. “After the execution. That is our custom.”

“I must say, that seems a bit unfair to the accused, Ysidra.”

The queen’s horse reared, its hooves sparking against the rocky path of the clearing. “The accused stole the heart of me and the heart of my tribe. You left on the day of our union!”

Sonja winced…Both the charges were true. But she also saw the riders of the Wolf Pack quickly glance at one another, taking measure not just of their prey but of their mistress. In Ysidra’s tribe, leadership came from neither combat nor heredity, but a complicated concept the Devil could barely wrap her head around.

They voted. Each person—man, woman, and child alike—put a name on a polished piece of wood, and those marks were tallied and a monarch chosen. At any time, a queen or king could be challenged and overthrown. It was the most unimaginable folly to Sonja, but even she had enough manners not to mention it.

The one stickler in this arrangement was that the new king or queen could, in an effort to prevent future elections, simply declare the previous leader a traitor and execute them. It had a quieting effect upon loyalists to the previous crown. Sonja saw the Wolf Pack riders noting their queen’s ire, witnesses to her humiliation.

To bed a comely foreigner was one thing; to propose to a thief— that was something else again. What Sonja felt for Ysidra wasn’t love. She wasn’t sure she had ever felt such a thing. She was more familiar with sex than sonnets. But Ysidra was walking a razor’s edge with her own guardsmen’s loyalty and either didn’t know or didn’t care.

Sonja looked right into the queen’s eyes. “Ysidra, look at me. I have never had a home. Do I appear to you to be anyone’s bride? I’d ruin the both of us, velvet cage or not.”

Ysidra looked down on her, unmoved. “I’ll hear no more of your liar’s tongue, Hyrkanian. There is still to be a ceremony. It’s just that you’ll deem it less festive by far.”

The riders smiled at this. Here was a queen to follow, who put her people above her loins.

Sonja sighed. “I don’t know why so many of my bedmates, high and low, seem to want to kill me immediately after communion. It’s very poor manners, if you ask me.” She drew her sword. “Come on, then.”

The Wolf Pack began to move forward on their horses, each holding their sword aloft, not yet committing to the challenge. From the ground, Sonja felt she might be able to defeat two at best. Four, never. And the queen herself was more dangerous than all of them together.

The queen held up her free hand, palm facing outward. “Hold. First, Devil, order your mount to stay. I know how you fight. Order him, and he lives.”

Sonja cursed under her breath and let out an exaggerated sigh. Without turning around, her back to the hulking animal, she held up two fingers and said the word “Asami,” the Turanian word for “wait.” Her eyes never moved from the queen as the Wolf Pack moved closer toward her. They focused on her with the intensity of the wolf they took as their totem. They were fierce, but they were hunters, not fighters.

Ysidra’s blade hesitated. “Why do you smile, Devil? You cannot win this fight, and you can’t outrun my Wolves. Why do you smile?” Sonja looked up, a terrifying grin on her pale face, eyes blazing. She lowered the two fingers on her upraised hand, making a fist. The queen’s eyes opened wide, too late.

“Because my horse doesn’t speak Turanian.”

The riders looked up, to no purchase whatsoever, as Sonja’s war‐ horse ran into them headlong, with a lust for fighting none of them had witnessed in a lifetime of horsecraft. Two were dismounted immediately, and the remaining two found their own mounts kicking and bucking in unexpected terror.

Sunder often left that impression when of a surly disposition.

Sonja kicked one of the soldiers brutally in the ribs, cracking three and taking whatever breath he had remaining completely out of his reach. The second fallen man was met with a crashing blow from the hilt of Sonja’s sword. The remaining riders were attempting to control their mounts when Sonja’s horse began to lay into them with his front hooves.

Sonja smiled. The Turanians were fine riders, and she wouldn’t fault them.

But they weren’t Hyrkanian.

She grabbed the first dismounted rider roughly, his braided beard in her clenched fist. Smiling, she sliced his flesh under the arm, a shallow wound that nevertheless produced a copious stream of hot blood across the frosted grass.

Sonja leapt on the back of her horse, slashing across the leather armor of the closest Pack rider, who was still gaining his balance.

Ysidra swung her sword at Sonja’s neck, a killing blow Sonja barely blocked…On a steadier steed, the queen would have killed her, like the horse with the sickly broken legs. Perhaps with a little joy in the doing this time.

Sonja smashed the flat of her sword against the queen’s shoulder, at just the tipping point to knock the dark‐haired woman out of her saddle. The woman landed hard on the ground, her foot still tangled in one rope stirrup. The riders, even the wounded, seemed to share an audible gasp. To die in combat was wholly noble in their eyes. To be humiliated was unforgivable.

Sonja looked down at the queen, not without pity, but still altogether irked at the threat of death . . .

“Hold,” Sonja shouted. “You have a badly injured warrior, Queen. If you get him back to camp, he will live. Or you can follow me. You can’t do both.”

Ysidra stood, holding up her sword. “Death was a mercy, Devil. I’ll find you. I will find you if you bury yourself in the ground like the worm you are.”

Sonja smiled; she couldn’t help it. Freedom and wealth called, and death had been denied once again, its thirst unquenched. “Ysidra, you worship the wolf and you love a devil. At some point, surely you must begin to question your choices in life?”

Sonja rode away down the hillside, and though it pained her to miss the sun’s rays on the spire behind, she did not look back.

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