Page 34 of The Villains of Winter

“He’s my best friend.”

Friendship was a foreign concept to a tyrant like Lucien Montclair. He only had subjects, strategists, enemies, and allies, not friends.

He could not comprehend true intimacy in friendships. Affection. Trust. Loyalty.

“Prove your fealty to your best friend. The fox and the swan.” Lucien dragged the putrescent, gristly boar head across the table, its coarse bristles laden with several days’ worth of fermented, degenerating ligaments from its cartilaginous snout, where it’d been shot. Lucien, no doubt, knew Elliott would try to save James. That he would always try.

Elliott truly was predictable.

“What will the myth of the fox and the swan be in the end?” Lucien mused. “Swans are violent, territorial, and kill their own, but they are relentlessly loyal and mate for life. Even with fellow male swans. Foxes are playful, smart, curious, affectionate and, most of all, helplessly loyal and mate for life. Even foxes have been found to bond and pair with the same sex. Will you live out the rest of your years in the forest together? Will the hunter make a pelt of him in the end?”

Callum’s strained voice cut in. “Elliott, we already gave you our word. You don’t need to do any of this. Head back to your dorm.” There was a hint of tragedy in his tone, something he wasn’t telling him. Elliott mistook his uneven timbre for lies.

Elliott glared at Lucien, who kept the miasmic air smeared with indecency, refusing to open even a frosted window.

Lucien reminded him heartlessly, “As senior elector, I outnumber a quarter of the electors by my single vote. All it would truly take is a few treasonous votes for bird season to begin–”

Elliott grasped the fork into his hand.

“Elliott.” Callum released his breath. “Don’t. You’re already too late.”

“I will not stand witness for this nonsense.” Valeria traipsed out of the doors without a single retreating glance. Her scarlet robes flashed behind her.

Callum Han attempted to remove the hulky boar head from the hollow plate, but Lucien glowered. Above all, it was clear, Lucien would take his vengeance against James Wilde in one method or another.

After the horror was finished, Callum departed without a word left in him.

​​ PART FIVE: THE HIBERNAL CEREMONY

BANEBURY, CONNECTICUT

WINTER

​​ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ON THE MIDNIGHT OF THE hibernal ceremony, the practitioners cleansed their hands with ivory cloths, sprinkling seedlets onto the sacred grounds. The rain fields were filled with a quarter of a hecatomb of twenty-five cattle, oxen, and rams restrained in the frigid, bone-dry night.

Elliott swallowed. The gamy, fulsome clot of the flesh of the boar was still stuck in the back of his throat.

The ceremonial theatricality astounded him in its grandeur. As always for Æscwulf College, it was the year of the deer. The sacrificial elk were absent, except for the honorarium.

The brawny woodsmen entered the rain fields with their hefty boots, before they lurched the oxen’s necks back, then slit the throats. Heads fell to the earth. In panic, the cattle screeched in their restraints; the rams drove their horns into the chests of the hunters that bent down to thrust their utility knives into the animals; the premonitory carrion circled the sky.

“Ēċe tō ealdre!” The torchbearer woodsman roared. For all time, forevermore.

“Ǣfre tō ealdre!” The students roared back. For eternity.

May their sacrifice to the earth be forever. The ancient Anglo Saxon words echoed in Elliott’s mind as he shouted in tandem with his peers. Elliott’s voice was drowned out in the throngs of packed, terrified students forced to stand before Banebury townsmen gathered to attend the hibernal ceremony.

After the death of the honorarium, the masterful play would begin–a triumphant haze of vengeance, war battles, political warfare, and low-lit candled scenes of the emperor’s intoxication by his wife with deadly fungus that Elliott would likely hardly recall after his blur of foreboding dread.

The hibernal ceremonies were held in the heart of town, deep in the fields where the harvest had already been taken for the year. Where the soil was aged and weathered, dying in the winter. Thousands crowded the fields for mercy in the highest devotion to art.

As always in Banebury’s liturgy, there were three high principles of barbarity:

Barbarity as a means of art.

Barbarity as a means of pleasure.