Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

He used his own pristine white cloak to wipe her mouth.

”She’s in shock,” Gallahan said, his voice frantic. He looked up at the Duke, his eyes pleading. ”Your Grace, look at her. She’s hyperventilating. The sounds of the battle... the smell of the blood... it was too much for her.”

Seraphina buried her face in Gallahan’s chest, sobbing hysterically. ”They are looking at me... tell them to go away... the man with no head is looking at me...”

Gallahan went pale. He thought she was hallucinating from terror. ”Shh, shh, no one is here, My Lady. The bad men are gone. I promise, they are gone.”

”They are not gone!” she wailed, clutching Gallahan’s tabard. ”They are loud!”

Kaelus watched them. He heard the child’s nonsense words. Man with no head.

He glanced at the carriage wheel outside, where the headless corpse of the assassin lay.

He looked back at the child. A flicker of doubt crossed his mind. Could she...? No. Impossible. It was just hysteria. A child’s imagination fills in the blanks of trauma.

”She is unwell,” Kaelus stated the obvious, his voice devoid of the panic that infected Gallahan.

”She is burning up,” Gallahan said, pressing his hand to her forehead. ”And her pulse is racing like a rabbit’s. We cannot stay here. The miasma of death in this canyon... It’s bad for a child’s constitution.”

Gallahan stood up, cradling Seraphina as if she were made of spun glass. The girl was limp now, the vomiting having exhausted her last reserves of energy. She was twitching, her eyes squeezed shut, whimpering softly every few seconds.

”We need a healer,” Gallahan insisted. ”A real one. Not a field medic.”

Kaelus looked at the map in his mind.

”Count Rodhe’s estate is two hours away,” Kaelus said. ”If we ride hard.”

”Then we ride hard,” Gallahan said, bordering on insubordination. He looked at the mess in the carriage. ”We cannot put her back in there. The smell alone will make her sick again.”

Kaelus looked at the velvet seat, now ruined. He looked at the girl, whose face was pale and streaked with purple berry stains.

He felt a strange sensation in his chest. It wasn’t guilt. He didn’t feel guilty for killing enemies. It was... an inconvenience? Irritation?

Or perhaps it was the realization that his ”perfect bait” was currently malfunctioning.

”Take my horse,” Kaelus ordered Gallahan. ”Ride ahead with the vanguard. Get her out of this canyon.”

Gallahan blinked. ”And you, Your Grace?”

”I will ride in the carriage,” Kaelus said, stepping back inside, ignoring the stench of sickness. ”I have reports to finish.”

”But—”

”Go!” Kaelus’s voice cracked like a whip.

Gallahan didn’t argue. He turned and ran toward the horses, shouting orders to the men.

”Mount up! We leave the dead! Double time to the Rodhe Estate! The Lady is ill!”

The knights scrambled. The grim efficiency of the cleanup was abandoned for a frantic rescue mission.

Inside the carriage, Kaelus sat down on the bench opposite the mess. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his nose.

The door was still open.

He looked at the empty air where Seraphina had been staring earlier.

”Man with no head,” he muttered to himself.

He narrowed his eyes, focusing his mana, trying to sense if there was any magical residue. He felt nothing but the fading echoes of life he had extinguished.

He reached out and closed the door.

As the carriage lurched forward, leaving the massacre behind, Kaelus looked at the paper crane Seraphina had made earlier. It had fallen onto the floor, one of its wings stained with a drop of purple vomit.

He picked it up.

He didn’t crumple it. He didn’t throw it away.

He carefully wiped the stain off with his thumb, placed the paper crane in his breast pocket, and went back to reading his report.

But for the rest of the journey, he kept the window curtain slightly open, watching the darkness, wondering what exactly his daughter was seeing that he could not.

The sun rose over the eastern hills, but it brought no warmth. It was a pale, watery dawn, the kind that bleached the color out of the world rather than illuminating it.

The convoy that approached the iron gates of Count Rodhe’s estate did not look like a diplomatic procession. It looked like a funeral march that had taken a wrong turn and decided to invade a city instead.

The black carriage, usually a symbol of pristine authority, was coated in a layer of gray dust from the canyon road.

Splinters of wood near the rear wheel well showed where an assassin’s axe had failed to penetrate the ironwood. The knights of the Black Bastion rode with their visors up, their faces grim and shadowed by lack of sleep.

Their armor was dented, their cloaks stained with mud and dried blood that wasn’t theirs.

They moved through the town that sprawled outside the Count’s estate. It was early, yet the streets were lined with onlookers.

Rumors moved faster than horses. The townspeople had heard that the ”Reaper of the North” was coming.

They pressed against the walls of their timber houses, clutching their children, watching with a mixture of awe and terrified curiosity.

They expected to see a monster. They expected to see prisoners of war dragged behind horses.

What they saw was a wall of silence.

At the head of the procession, the carriage rolled through the open gates of the estate. The gravel crunched loudly, too loudly, under the wheels.

Standing on the grand marble steps of the manor was Count Rodhe.

The Count was a man who looked like he was made of soft dough left out in the sun too long. He wore a tunic of expensive purple silk that strained against his midsection, and his fingers were heavily ringed with gemstones.

Behind him stood two rows of servants, bowing low, and a contingent of his own house guards who looked like toy soldiers compared to the blood-soaked veterans of the Black Bastion.