Page 88 of Morfran, Dark Lord Reformed

Bronwen stood over them. Her bindings gone. Her hands empty.

“Bron,” he murmured. How? How had she escaped? How had she killed Ravana with the hex?

She didn’t reply. Her eyes weren’t on him, but on some far-off thing in the room, and her breath was growing heavier, her chest heaving with increasingly greater pants. Her hands flew to her torso, her face twisting in pain.

“It hurts—” she choked out to no one, before her knees cracked against the floorboards.

“Bron—!” He coughed, dragging himself towards her. There was blood blossoming through her armor, right where she’d stabbed Ravana. She slumped to the ground. “What did you do?” His words came out in breathy stutters, his stomach wound stunting his breath. “Why didn’t you stay put? You were supposed to stay out of the way!”

“Morfran.” Her fingers found his. Her grip was weak, growing weaker by the second. “I think…that kiss…”

She didn’t get to finish. The light was bleeding out of her eyes. He forced himself to sitting position, with his back against an armchair, and held her in his lap. “Stay alive. Stay awake. Bron—please. We’ll get Drezella. She can heal you. She can—”

Her head fell against his chest. The last spark of light vanished from her eyes. She was dead. It was that quick.

“Bronwen?” He inhaled a frantic sob. No. She wasn’t supposed to die. Someone good like her deserved to live. She was supposed to find both him and Ravana dead, find relief and release in it, and walk out of the castle with a lighter heart. She was supposed to go back to her garden, go back and join her father and brother, go back and celebrate this long fight against him with triumph.

She wasn’t supposed to die.

“You hate me, do you?” He forced back tears. As his body lay dying, he wasn’t inflamed in pain but felt himself growing cold, growing numb. “That’s fine. You can hate me all you want. But you have to hate me when you’re alive.” He buried his face in her hair. “Only alive.”

He pulled back. Started crawling across the room, towards the shelves of Ravana’s spoils of war. He reached up towards a vase only to nearly black out. With his foot he dragged the knife towards him, and using that extra reach, managed to knock the vase off the shelf. The nightshade scattered like purple threads before him.

He gathered it, then dragged himself back to Bronwen’s body, feeling already weaker, like the energy was being sapped from his blood by a nasty illness, and all he needed to do was just sleep.

Taking her back in his arms, he pressed the nightshade against her heart, where Ravana’s magic had killed her.

He hesitated then. He hadn’t done this in many years. His father had tried to teach him, out in the graveyard late at night, where none could see their actions. Each time he’d brought the dead back wrong; they were mindless. They bled. They decomposed. They were never the same as before, and it was because Morfran had always thought of his future boasts rather than the deed itself and the selflessness it required.

He wasn’t thinking about any of that now. He was thinking that she’d probably return to life only to quicken his death once she saw him.

Even then he pressed his fingers against her wound and muttered the ritual words in the old language, the language that still possessed a few traces of power if one spoke it aloud.

Please. His eyelids were dragging shut as he chanted. He forced himself to stay upright. Just a few more seconds. Just a few more. He was dying. The strength keeping his hand pressed against her chest faded. He was slumping against the chair. Still, he forced his lips to say the words, to finish the incantation, to finish, to finish—

“Morfran?”

The voice speaking his name was muffled, like he was beneath water and it’d been said above the surface. The last thing he saw as he died was the shape of a turtle off in the distance, waddling ever so slowly towards him. If it reached him, he wasn’t there to find out.

29

The Trial of Lord Morfran

Morfran woke in a grassy courtyard that looked suspiciously like Castle Atrago’s. The sky was partially black with residual smoke, and the scent of burned buildings and blood coated the air. And yet among all that there were birds, chirping happy little songs from their perches along the buttresses of the castle.

Gone was his armor. Instead he was in a simple white shirt and brown breeches, the blood and fatal wounds he’d received earlier gone as well. He was no longer in pain, no longer numb, no longer anything. Death, he thought, wasn’t actually that bad.

He tried to stand and realized his wrists were bound behind a big post jutting out of the grass.

Wonderful. His mood instantly plummeted. I’m not dead, and I’m back to where I started: tied to a post.

Across the courtyard was the castle wall, and behind it he could hear cheering from a large crowd as someone spoke. The rebels had won. They’d achieve victory. They’d freed themselves. Despite his predicament, he smiled. At least, and at last, they’d won their peace.

What was that other noise, though, that sounded like a semi-dying cat and a high-pitched fly in his ear?

Two children came around the corner of the gatehouse. It was Toothless Pete, twiddling away on Morfran’s lute, and Tad, who was piping out quite a hot tune about victory day and biscuits. Why biscuits, he didn’t know, and wouldn’t ever, because the two spotted him and instantly flew the other way, screaming:

“He’s awake! He’s awake! The Dark Lord is awake!”