AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Always remember their names and remember their faces. He’d taught Edrick that. Nay… the Black Wolf had taught Edrick that.
Who am I? Who am I becoming? he asked himself for the hundredth time.
Rowan looked at him now, at the coldness in his friend’s eyes. Edrick shifted his weight, his graying brows drawn together, his flat eyes hiding his emotions.
Rowan moved down from the top step. “As you may recall, Blanchette had a lady-in-waiting,” he began.
“I am sure she had many,” Edrick said in a voice as flat as his eyes.
“Aye,” Rowan said, his tone sinking into a gravelly tenor. “And you had lied to me. She was quite fond of that lady-in-waiting.” He took another step down the stairs. “I think you did meet her the night of the siege.”
Edrick broke eye contact for half a second—the one telltale of his discomfort. “Perhaps. If I had, I don’t recall. My thoughts were elsewhere that night.”
Rowan took two more steps. Now he was close enough to where Edrick had to look up to meet his stare. “Maybe so. But it’s not where your thoughts were that concern me.”
“What do you mean to say, Rowan? Speak your mind.”
Rowan came down the last step, and Edrick had no choice but to shuffle back. Smoke growled again, the ominous sound swelling the cavernous room. “You defiled her.” It wasn’t a question. He watched Edrick’s face for any sign of regret or shame. It remained blank and unreadable, and Rowan knew he stood before a monster.
That decided him.
God, this man was like a brother to me once.
Edrick’s lip twitched as his eyes shifted downward—just an inch. Then a stone-hard expression claimed his face. Smoke bristled beside Rowan and released another growl. It was menacing. A herald of death. The wolf lifted his paw and snapped at the empty air between them. “What about it? War is a ruthless and cruel business. Children starve, and men die crying for their mothers. And yes. Women are raped. You have grown so soft, Rowan.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. That’s where you’ve always been wrong. My war wasn’t merciless—it was a mercy. It is you and you alone who are cruel. I don’t even know you anymore.”
“That makes two of us.”
Their gazes locked again. Whatever Edrick found in Rowan’s eyes jarred him. He stepped back—just another inch—and his emotions were unearthed for once.
Fear was written plainly on his face. Edrick released an audible breath, then came forward, nearly to the first step. His eyes sharpened, and his voice was low and venomous when he spoke—steel biting through flesh. “I have been with you, Rowan, from the very beginning. Since you were a boy under your father’s banner. I saw you after your wife’s death, with your hands still wet with her blood. I saw the horror on your face. I wept with you. I took you into my home, into my daughter’s home! I risked our lives to protect you!” Rowan heard the rage in his voice. Seeing Edrick show such emotion shocked him. “And then I followed you. I followed you across the battlefields and against the king’s laws. I rode in your vanguard and held your banner. I believed in you as you had once believed in me…” Rowan felt his insides weaken as a dejected smile lifted the corner of Edrick’s lip. For a moment—just a moment—he glimpsed the man he’d been before all this bloodshed. Before the madness had changed them both.
“And now you have failed me, Rowan. Your purpose, all of that… it’s a lie.” His eyes shifted away to the crown. It glinted in the light, basking in the rays like a longsword wallows in its victim’s blood. “This conquest has become your greatest lie. You stand here and call me cruel when you have hidden behind your men’s acts at every step. You killed those good soldiers for executing the prince, yet you knew it had to be done. You let them fall for it and pay for it before the country’s eyes, yet in private, you were glad. They did what you couldn’t do. Not while you called yourself the Black Wolf of Norland, the people’s champion. You have become a coward.”
Rowan swallowed against the scream in his throat. Then he balled his fingers into a fist, tightening and loosening, tightening and loosening. His nails dug into his palms, cutting through the callused skin. Suddenly, he felt like a stranger to himself.
Does he speak the truth? Is everything I fought for—is my love, yes love, for Blanchette—nothing but a twisted manipulation?
His destiny had always been so clear, the path carefully drawn and calculated. Like a map. Or a battle plan. And now it seemed he’d acted only in chaos… not like the Black Wolf, but with the rabid drive of a mad dog.
“Sir Edrick, as lord of this castle, I hereby banish you from the capital. Now get out of my city before I throw your head into the sea.”
Edrick turned to leave. He stopped before the archway, his gaze fixed on the shining crown. “She’ll never love you, Rowan. You know that. She will always see you as the monster… as the wolf… who savaged her home and family. But there was another lady who had loved you. And she’s dead because of your neglect. Always remember that.”
* * *
The sun was bleeding. It hung vivid and dark red over the horizon, soaking the forest and path in a cloak of molten gold. Everywhere the light touched seemed to bleed; it was a massacre by God’s own hand.
Sir Edrick sank his heels into his mount and stormed across the drawbridge and into that blistering world. Dust swarmed in the air as his horse tore the path apart. The sun blinded him. He blinked against the assaulting light, sweat beading from his brow and forming inside his kid gloves. He rode up a hill, an overlook that he and Rowan had used countless times to assess the village and country.
Heartache momentarily washed over him. In his mind’s eyes, he saw his friend kneeling under his roof, his fingers wet from his wife’s blood, tears dried on his cheeks. In her death, a demon had been born, and its name was Vengeance.
I’d believed in him once. I’d loved him like a brother.
I would have died for him.
But that had shattered… that and the promises Rowan had made to him.
