Dawn’s Light

Excerpt

Dawn’s Light
Shannon Blair © 2021
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

Moranthus had spent the better part of a fortnight chasing his quarry along the Dawn’s Gate edge of the Ghostwood. His meager diet of chalky waybread and oversalted jerky did little more than take the edge off his hunger, and spending weeks on horseback had left him beyond saddle sore. His days blurred together like the colors of the glowstone he kept cradled in the center of his palm. Though it was his only reliable guide at the questionably mapped edges of this unfamiliar country, the strain of determining where each of its shades faded into the next, counting off one less mile between him and his ever-moving destination, left him with a near-constant headache.

The wide, hilly landscape around him certainly didn’t offer much else to guide him on the rare occasions he glanced at it to ensure he hadn’t strayed too far from the Ghostwood’s edge in his search. Dawn’s Gate’s northern plains didn’t look so different from the southern steppes of Moonridge, his homeland, but in the absence of the bone-chilling winds that screamed across Moonridge’s southern steppes, the still air around him felt foul and stagnant, as though a dozen people had breathed it before him and sucked all the life from it.

But Moranthus wouldn’t have traded any of it for the world. This was the first real hunt he’d seen in over a decade, after he’d made a pariah of himself by getting caught on the losing side of the coup that had killed his Patriarch and set his Patriarch’s illegitimate daughter on Moonridge’s throne. A few minor discomforts were nothing to complain about.

Even the solitude came as a welcome change after finding himself at the center of attention in every human village he passed through. The adults gave him veiled stares and treated him with just enough politeness to make him feel unwelcome. Their children’s endless questions over what had made his ears so long and pointy and whether he’d gotten his purple skin from frostbite, of all things, made him feel like one of the framed butterflies his Patriarch had kept in his study. Moranthus wondered if they treated all elves that way. Or if they knew the shaved sides of his head marked his probationary status in Moonridge and didn’t want him trying to find a place for himself in their community. Not that anyone in Moonridge had treated him much better lately.

*

Just over two months earlier, he’d lounged on the narrow, rickety bed pressed against the left wall of his rented room, happy to be home after the latest in a series of jobs only marginally more interesting than watching snow melt. Beside him, his amethyst cameo of his former Patriarch sat in its usual place near his pillow. Moranthus absently rubbed the carved likeness of his Patriarch with his thumb, missing the days when his work left him feeling fulfilled instead of frustrated. In his service, Moranthus had spent his days tracking down fugitives, missing persons, and lost or stolen valuable objects.

His Matriarch’s latest orders had gotten his hopes up by sending him in search of a messenger who had vanished en route to his destination while carrying sensitive correspondence. But when Moranthus found the messenger’s belongings and gnawed bones strewn about an abandoned wolf den, the “sensitive correspondence” in question turned out to be nothing more than a dinner invitation to the head of a minor noble household. Moranthus had been reduced to a glorified follow-up letter.

The room’s low ceiling and windowless walls made him wonder if it had been part of an attic before its conversion into a living space. The cramped space around him—occupied by a table and single chair pressed against its right wall in addition to the bed and chest of drawers that lined its left—felt comfortable enough compared to the inns he stayed in on the road. After ten years, he hardly noticed the draft his poorly sealed walls let in. The fire he kept blazing in the small fireplace against his back wall kept the worst of the cold out anyway.

The smell of blood from the butcher’s shop beneath him wafted through the gaps between his thin floorboards, mingling in a not entirely unpleasant manner with the crisp, sweet taste of the bowlful of plums he’d made into his evening meal. As he finished each plum, he tossed its pit across the room, where it bounced off his doorknob with a sharp ping before clattering along his floor. It made a completely unreasonable amount of noise, really. But that was the point.

He’d done it as his latest mild act of revenge against the butcher downstairs, who had woken well before dawn that morning for what seemed to be the sole purpose of loudly and thoroughly fucking his wife. For the past several years, the butcher had made a point of waking Moranthus that way every morning after Moranthus returned from a mission and wanted nothing more than a good, long sleep.

Moranthus still hadn’t decided whether the butcher did it as a backhanded reminder that Moranthus wasn’t getting any, or as a bizarre way of marking his territory. More than once, he’d considered pulling the butcher aside and explaining that, if he had any intention of running off with a member of the butcher’s household—which he did not—he would’ve been far more interested in the charming young fellow the butcher had recently brought in as an apprentice. If the charming apprentice in question hadn’t already taken up with the butcher’s wife, anyway. But pointing out that the butcher had an attractive apprentice and an unfaithful wife would probably get him banned from the butcher’s shop, and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding another reputable place to buy meat in the lower district of Aurora, Moonridge’s capital. Or a new landlord, for that matter.

The first knock at his door caught Moranthus off guard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a visitor. He’d halfway decided to dismiss it as a trick of the wind, or a child throwing rocks as an ill-advised form of amusement, when a second knock echoed through his room, followed by several more in rapid succession.

Moranthus slid off his bed and retrieved the dagger he kept beneath his pillow before padding, barefoot, across the floorboards between him and the door, careful to avoid the ones that creaked. No one who’d come to his door unannounced was likely to have anything pleasant in store for him. Not anymore.

He opened his door to find one of his Matriarch’s messengers standing outside, an official-looking satchel in his arms. In that moment, Moranthus wanted nothing more than to tell the bastard that his next set of orders could wait until he asked for them and slam his door shut again.

Instead, he sighed and asked, “What do you want?”

“I am looking for Moranthus. I’ve come to the wrong place, I take it?” The messenger frowned as he cast a disdainful glance over Moranthus. His eyes lingered on the shaved sides of Moranthus’s head and the thick stripe of red hair—the only thing separating him from a clean-shaven full exile—that ran down its center, woven into a disheveled, three-strand commoner’s braid. Outside of Aurora’s upper district, Moranthus rarely bothered with the elaborate, seven-strand affair that marked him as a veteran duskblade. In Lower Aurora, it only served as a marker of how far he’d fallen.

“Not at all. You’ve already found him, in fact.” Moranthus flipped his dagger so its blade rested in his palm and presented its pommel—engraved with a stylized snowhawk, the duskblade insignia—to the messenger for inspection.

The messenger’s face snapped into a toothy smile, oozing false cheer as he presented the satchel to Moranthus. “Excellent. I come bearing orders from our most esteemed Matriarch,” he said, each syllable accompanied by a tap of his well-fitted, overembroidered right boot. The steep, narrow streets that wound their way through Lower Aurora—slick with mud and whatever other refuse trickled down from the upper city—had left it and its twin covered in a layer of filth that would never quite wash off. It served him right for wearing that sort of footwear on the job.

He was a mousy little thing, with pale, watery eyes set in a bland, but well-proportioned face, his ears perfectly pointed and skin a flawless shade of dusky lilac. Probably hadn’t set foot outside Upper Aurora before their Matriarch had sent him on this delivery, no doubt as a punishment of some sort. Moranthus would’ve much preferred the sight of the butcher, his face flushed ruddy-violet from exertion and his blood-stained apron draped over his ever-growing paunch. At least he’d earned his place in the world.

“So I noticed.” Moranthus made no move to accept the satchel.

The messenger blinked at him, brow furrowed in an almost comical display of confusion. “Would you like to invite me in then? I’d prefer to conclude my business here as soon as possible.”

“Not particularly, but I take it I don’t have much choice in the matter.”

“You don’t. There are certain…details our Matriarch insisted I explain to you in person. To prevent any misunderstandings.”

Moranthus opened his door wide and gestured for the messenger to step through. “Let’s get this over with.” Before he lost his temper at being forced to offer hospitality to a highborn busybody, who’d no doubt leave grimy footprints all over his floor.

The messenger made himself comfortable in Moranthus’s chair, his hands folded over the satchel on his lap. Well aware the messenger expected him to remain standing as a way of acknowledging that the messenger acted as an extension of their Matriarch’s will, Moranthus seated himself on his bed and leaned back against the wall behind him. The frustrated glare it earned him made him confident he’d chosen the right course of action.

“So, what’s this all about?” Moranthus gave the messenger the most ingenuous smile he could manage. Best not to press his luck too far.

The messenger took a deep breath, pinching the bridge of his nose as though he meant to fend off a headache. “Our Matriarch has, for reasons far beyond the comprehension of one such as myself, chosen to entrust you with a highly sensitive mission of the utmost urgency. I would advise against treating it with the same flippancy you have shown me thus far.”

Moranthus sat up straight, eyeing the satchel with a sense of curiosity he hadn’t felt in years. “Is that why she was so adamant about you explaining my orders to me?” When they’d last spoken, their Matriarch had told him in no uncertain terms that he should consider himself lucky she’d spared even his life after he’d chosen his master so poorly. She’d then evicted him from his hard-won room in Aurora’s palace and made a point of restricting him to assignments well below his rank, most of which took him as far away from Aurora as possible. Putting this sort of trust in him wasn’t like her. “Because that won’t be necessary. I’m sure our Matriarch has told you all sorts of wild stories about me—most of which, in her defense, are probably true—but I assure you, I am perfectly capable of reading and understanding whatever’s in that satchel of yours.”

“The orders themselves aren’t what she asked me to explain,” the messenger replied. “In fact, I couldn’t explain them if I wanted to. Our Matriarch felt that sharing the exact nature of your orders with me would compromise their security. They should be self-explanatory once you’ve taken the time to read over them.”

“So, if I can’t ask you anything about my orders, what did our Matriarch want you to explain to me?”

“That a great deal depends upon your success in this matter, and that you may find yourself in a more…favorable position upon your return so long as you do not disappoint her. She also instructed me to give you this, to be used in the unfortunate event of your failure.” The messenger retrieved a razor from a pouch on his belt and tossed it onto the bed beside Moranthus. Even tucked inside its wooden handle, its steel blade had a cold, sobering shine. “Does it clarify the gravity of the task that lies before you?”

Using only his fingertips, Moranthus picked up the razor, casting a wary eye over the ceremonial carvings that adorned its handle. So, that was his Matriarch’s game. Either he returned home with news of his success, or he faced the grim choice he’d so narrowly avoided ten years ago: death or exile. Whichever he chose, the razor’s edge would suit his needs. “That it does. I suppose I’d best get to work,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, like a distant echo carried on the wind.

“Indeed, you should. Sooner, rather than later, if you’ve any sense left in that space between your ears.” The messenger got to his feet and placed the satchel on Moranthus’s table. “This contains your orders, as well as everything you’ll require to carry them out. I wish you the best of luck. You’re going to need it.” With that, the messenger let himself out of Moranthus’s room, leaving the door open behind him.

The autumn air it let in felt warm compared to the ice in Moranthus’s veins.

*

His Matriarch’s orders were maddeningly sparse. Apparently, Dawn’s Gate’s settlements closest to the Ghostwood, which acted as the goblin territories’ eastern border, had gotten ransacked more than usual by goblin raiding parties that year. Orthenn, the third son of the King of Dawn’s Gate—and hardly more than a child at his twenty-seven years of age—had taken it upon himself to lead a scouting mission through the Ghostwood to discover which warlord those raiding parties belonged to.

Moranthus’s Matriarch had it on good authority that a goblin warlord had somehow caught wind of Orthenn’s planned route and intended to send out a raiding party to kidnap Orthenn. And so, for what was no doubt a very good reason—that his Matriarch had neglected to share with him—instead of sharing that information with Dawn’s Gate’s king and letting him sort the matter out for himself, she’d decided to task Moranthus with intercepting Orthenn before a goblin raiding party absconded with him. Once that was taken care of, Moranthus needed to bring Orthenn north to the border Dawn’s Gate shared with Moonridge, where they’d rendezvous with a detachment of Moonridge frostguards who’d take Orthenn back to his father as a gesture of goodwill.

Even after having pondered it for weeks of solitary travel, Moranthus couldn’t wrap his head around why his Matriarch had gone to such trouble on behalf of the King of Dawn’s Gate. She’d justified staging a coup against her father by claiming he’d weakened Moonridge by relying on diplomatic negotiations instead of trusting in the legendary prowess of Moonridge’s soldiers to ease any tensions between Moonridge and Dawn’s Gate or the goblin territories along Moonridge’s western border. Strengthening diplomatic ties between Moonridge and Dawn’s Gate by ingratiating herself to Dawn’s Gate’s king went against everything she believed in.

And if Moranthus’s mission failed, she risked destroying the peace her father had spent the centuries of his reign working so hard to forge with Dawn’s Gate. Dawn’s Gate’s king didn’t know a goblin warlord was scheming to kidnap Orthenn, after all. Ordering Moranthus to stage a counterkidnapping—because, with all the formalities and sugarcoating washed off, that was what Moranthus was about to do—without consulting Orthenn’s father put Moranthus in an awkward position. He doubted Orthenn and the soldiers under his command would take kindly to a strange elf dragging Orthenn up to Moonridge without so much as a by-your-leave. If any of them managed to get word of that back to their king before the frostguards returned Orthenn to his father, relations between Dawn’s Gate and Moonridge had the potential to turn very violent, very quickly.

Really, his Matriarch would’ve done better to arrange for Orthenn’s entire company to be rescued along with him, or quietly disposed of, to prevent them from making any misguided attempts at rescuing their prince. Fewer loose ends to deal with that way. Moranthus might have even said as much if people who questioned his Matriarch didn’t have a nasty habit of ending up dead.

But then he would’ve been saddled with at least four or five heavy, tramping frostguards at his back, slowing his pace to an agonizing crawl. Duskblades operated best in solitude, without the distraction of other fighters encroaching on their space and the shouted orders of commanding officers who held no real authority over them. He would’ve gotten along with a group of frostguards like a snowhawk got along with a pack of wolves.

With a bright flash of light, Moranthus’s glowstone shifted into the pale, blue-green hue that indicated he was within a mile of Orthenn’s location. It didn’t matter why his Matriarch wanted Orthenn rescued or why she’d gone about rescuing him this way. She’d sent Moranthus on a mission, and too much depended on his success for him to be distracted with matters that for the time being were above him.

As the glowstone’s light faded to its usual dull glow, Moranthus’s horse, Storm, stopped to snatch up a mouthful of the wispy grass that softened the noise of her hooves. With a flicker of a smile and a pat on her neck, he slid off her back instead of urging her onward. She’d carried him as far as she could, and he welcomed the chance to stand on his own two feet again. Even if he’d had a longer distance left to travel that day, he wouldn’t have begrudged her a rest. Tall and stocky, with a thick, mottled-gray coat, she’d been bred to jog at a steady pace through snow and over rocks, not for sprinting across open fields. She’d been a gift from his Patriarch just before the coup, and he’d never forgive himself if he lost her to overexertion.

To his left, Dawn’s Gate’s western plains extended in an endless sea of yellow-brown. In summer, they supposedly glowed with vibrant, green life, with grasses that reached as high as a man’s waist, but on the verge of winter, they were as barren as the frosted fields of his homeland. Late autumn in Dawn’s Gate could’ve passed for summer in northern Moonridge, but in his sturdy leathers and hooded, fur-lined cloak, Moranthus found the warm weather more stifling than comforting.

On his right, the gnarled, twisted oaks and drooping willows of the Ghostwood sprawled across the land as far as he could see. The sun’s slow descent below the horizon cast dark, eerie shadows between their branches, plunging the Ghostwood into a deeper darkness than its midday twilight. Even in Aurora, as far to the north as even elves dared to settle, tales of foolhardy travelers venturing into its depths, never to return, were sung by third-rate bards to eager children who were delighted and terrified, in equal measure, by their descriptions of starving, man-sized wolves and vengeful spirits.

Or at least, those were the kinds of songs Moranthus’s father had always favored. In adulthood, Moranthus had come to fear the real threats he faced while traversing Moonridge’s northern pine forests more than fictions dreamed up by a man who’d died without ever setting foot in the wilds. But he still felt a shiver of unease run down his spine at the thought of passing through a place that had spawned so many of his childhood nightmares.

Still, unless he wanted to shave the rest of his head and make a new home for himself in Dawn’s Gate or the goblin territories, his only path forward lay within the Ghostwood. His Matriarch’s orders had been clear as a spring-fed stream on that matter. With a chance at regaining some semblance of his old life on the line, he couldn’t afford to let a few ghost stories stand in his way.

Moranthus patted Storm’s flank as he removed two days’ portion of waybread from her saddlebags. He doubted it would take him long to reach Orthenn’s encampment, but he didn’t want to risk going hungry if traversing the Ghostwood took longer than expected. “This is where we part ways, my friend. Try not to get yourself into too much trouble while I’m gone.”

Storm flicked her tail in acknowledgment and gave him a brief, curious glance as he walked toward the Ghostwood without her. Tethering her wasn’t necessary. Moonridge horses were trained to never stray far from where their masters left them before they were saddle broken and were smart enough to know that straying off on their own in such a cold, unforgiving land would lower their chances of survival. She’d stay where he’d left her, or at least not wander too far for him to call her back with a whistle. Tethering her would only make her an easy target for any hungry creature or unaffiliated goblin that roamed the Ghostwood’s edge.

When he reached the tree line, Moranthus stopped, gazed into the darkness before him, and almost went back to grab Storm’s reins and lead her into the forest with him so he’d have some comfort when its trees closed in around him. But finding a path through the undergrowth large enough for her to pass would only slow him down, and she’d make too much noise for him to reach Orthenn’s camp unnoticed. With one last check to ensure that his bow, sword, and dagger were all in their proper places and securely fastened to his leathers, he took a step forward and passed into the Ghostwood.