Chapter 1
“Where is the witch’s son?” A voice rolled across the hallowed field like a blast from a horn.
Snow speckled a headstone before Calec. He lidded his eyes, keeping his head bowed in reverence and in prayer.
Whoever the owner of that voice was, they weren’t looking for Calec or Sir Calec. Someone looking for Calec with reference to only his mother meant one thing: something unexplained had happened. Obscure. Perhaps frightening. Bordering on the occult.
The hilt of Calec’s longsword clattered against his breastplate as he rose from a genuflected position. He sheathed his sword in a scabbard at his waist; wood and leather whispered against steel before he brushed aside brown locks and shaded his eyes from the metallic light of the winter sun. His breath plumed out into air so cold it felt brittle, as if he could reach out and shatter it with the tap of a finger. And the wolf wind blew out of the north, chasing rafts of clouds across the sky.
Someone in the distance hurried over the dead grasses that poked through a blanket of snow. Two others flanked the first, emerging from an outer ring of oaks.
Men in brown cassocks. Vicars.
Holy men. Searching the city for me. And they aren’t coming to pay their respects to
Father.
Calec brushed aside the dusting of snow on the headstone. The epitaph on the stone read: Here lies a man of knowledge and learning. One of the greatest sages of the epoch. The king’s consultant.
Calec shivered from something other than cold. Too much death here; his father’s bones already molder in the earth. Death—such an unexplained phenomenon among a world of only the living. Too much death every winter, and this winter was only in its infancy.
“God is with your father.” Eristin, the king’s niece, crossed herself over furs and locks of blond hair, then folded her hands, her cheeks aglow from the winter cold. “The world is dark, but He saves his children. Even if your father was too busy studying trees and animals and stars to regularly attend services, God will forgive him. Your father was far from a druid and only succumbed to a witch’s temptations. He never married her.”
If God could forgive Father, maybe He could forgive me as well.
Calec reached for Eristin’s hand.
She stepped away. “We shouldn’t touch. It wouldn’t be proper.”
Eristin glanced back at her chaperone, an older woman in a brown smock and furs, hips as wide as she was tall. The chaperone braced herself against the bark of a twisted old oak.
The vicars approached swiftly, heaving for breath.
“Something’s happened to one of the flock,” the lead vicar—so thin his cassock hung from his shoulders and revealed none of his figure—said, after noting Eristin and judging the distance between her and Calec with a discerning eye.
“Sir Calec,” the vicar continued, “you must ride with us at once. This may be the work of the witches. Or something worse.”
Chapter 2
Calec strode up an incline through a thicket of naked oaks, the surrounding branches gnarled and tangled like the bones of decrepit limbs. The border of the highlands.
He led his chestnut destrier, Wyndstrom, by the reins—too many low branches for riding. His boots and Wyndstrom’s hooves punched through a dusting of snow, crunching dead leaves and acorns beneath, often slipping on roots lacing the forest floor. Eristin followed close behind. Her chaperone was unable to keep up but would assume the vicars could keep an eye on them.
“You don’t have to come with us,” Calec said over his shoulder. He couldn’t ignore the summons of the church, but Eristin was the king’s niece and held more authority. And she detested the occult and death, anything from that side of Calec’s past—the reason the vicars came specifically seeking him rather than any other knight.
“And miss out on our courting day?” Eristin laughed facetiously, and a gust of wolf wind tore through the branches, releasing the last abandoned leaves in a tiny blizzard of yellow. The skeletal hands of the trees creaked and scratched at each other with bony fingers, throwing wisps of snow crystals into the air.
“The shepherd should be nearby,” the head vicar said as he guided Calec, Eristin, and the other two vicars into the gusts, each vicar leading a saddled mule. “He arrived first thing this morning and asked for Priest Nicobe’s blessing for the king’s flock. Looked as if he’d just seen a demon arise from the earth. What the shepherd reported was horrifying, and Priest Nicobe suggested we find you, Sir Calec, immediately.”
I’m a knight, not an authority on the occult. Calec suppressed irritation.
The king had owed Calec’s father a favor years ago, and although Calec was the son of a witch, the king eventually fulfilled his father’s wish and knighted Calec, his second-born son. His father made sure that Calec gave up his past life after he reached young adulthood, his formative years split between his father and his druid and witch grandparents in the woods after his mother died during his birth. And now that Calec recently completed all of his long years of training—learning proper faith and dedication—he was already two-and-thirty years old. People should now only be seeking him for knightly duties.
He was a soldier of God. A pinnacle enforcer of justice who would be called on to inquire about mysterious or suspicious deaths or threats to the kingdom. Perhaps that was why Priest Nicobe and the vicars sought him. But Calec also held knowledge of his father’s research.
“What did this shepherd describe exactly?” Eristin asked. She was still a maiden of four-and-twenty years, but there must have been a shortage of other princes or knights readily available to her. She must have settled, given in, to allow herself to be courted by Calec.
The head vicar cleared his throat. “It is improper to discuss such matters with a lady. I cannot stop you from coming, but I beg you to wait here.”
The vicars exited the tree line, mounted, and tramped through a cloak of untouched snow that was clean, fresh, and innocent. A deceitful omen of the winter ahead, deceitful of any winter in these lands. A pond lay in a depression on the field, small islands of snow dappling its surface, islands not yet swallowed up by the liquid world around them.
Calec offered Eristin a leg up to mount Wyndstrom, and he led the destrier on, finding it hard to keep up with the mules’ pace. Beyond the trees, the wolf wind howled, its icy teeth grabbing and snapping Calec’s wool cloak.
Whatever the shepherd said, it must have caused the Priest great anxiety, enough anxiety to send three vicars into the affairs of animals. Herd animals passed away at times; it was not out of the ordinary.
After five minutes, red and black objects or markings came into view amidst the white ahead. A circle of footprints had broken through the snow, surrounding the area.
As Calec approached, the objects became clearer: the black head, ears, and legs of a sheep on its side, its wool blending in with the layer of fresh snow. Blood surrounded it in a pool of crusty ice. However, what drew the most attention were the sheep’s eyes—they steamed or smoked in the chill air, that mist being stripped away by the wind. The irises and whites had both turned red, as if painted over in blood.
Bleeding from the eyes? And steam? The eyes should cool as fast as the rest of the body.
Calec released Wyndstrom’s reins and crossed the to-and-fro barrier of footprints ten feet from the corpse, probably the mad pacing of the shepherd upon his discovery this morning. Red swaths of blood formed a semicircle around the corpse, but only on the same side as the sheep’s feet and legs.
“Everyone keep their distance.” Calec knelt and, using only the metal of his gauntlet against the sheep’s skin, gently lifted one of the sheep’s legs at the knee. Frozen blood caked the hair around the upper hoof in small icicles like uneven fangs. More clung to the lips and nostrils. No smell of rot.
For a moment, Calec believed the blood smears on the snow were a strange symbol, an occult encompassment of the dead with its own blood, a barrier against something evil. To keep something evil out or in. A protection spell of the old magic.
Witchcraft.
Or maybe it was only that the sheep had bled from its hooves and thrashed around as it died.
He ran his gauntleted fingers through the sheep’s wool—stiff and matted. Black crusts and circular regions of pustules as large a Calec’s fist lay hidden on the skin beneath.
Memories swam about in Calec’s mind: times spent with Father studying disease in people and animals, living with his grandparents in the woods, their strange ceremonies. “I’ve seen something like this before, although not with so much blood. And not involving a sheep.”
“What is it?” the vicar asked. “Something your father understood?” His voice then took on a chilling bite. “Or something your mother performed?”
Calec stood. “My father. One of the plagues he studied. In people. The plague of winter. People developed black rashes across their bodies and bled, but they didn’t exsanguinate.”
“You mean bleed out?”
Calec nodded.
“The return of that plague?” The vicar’s face went ghostly white.
Or a new one …
“There’s another o’er here!” a voice called over the gusting wind. A man and a dog silhouette stood upon a hillock beneath the rising sun, the fiery orb hovering just over their heads like a halo of god-like immensity. Its light caused the blanket of snow to shimmer and burn the eyes. A flock of geese honked overhead as they flew, chasing a warmth that had already fled the northlands and the kingdom.
“It’s the shepherd.” The lead vicar guided his mule to the hillock, the other vicars following.
Calec trudged after them, but Eristin stopped him from her horseback position, her hand on his shoulder. Her face was more pale than typical. “Is this how the plague begins?”
Calec shrugged. “Not to my knowledge, but I don’t know enough about all my father’s studies and research. We should be wary.”
Calec led Wyndstrom on, trailing the vicars and the shepherd over the hillock to a ravine where another dead sheep waited, appearing similar to the first except that its legs were tucked beneath itself as if it had lain down to sleep and never woke.
“Where’s the flock?” Calec asked.
The shepherd—a middle-aged man with a salted beard and stained woolen hat, jacket, pants, and gloves—pointed at a copse of old oaks with his shepherd’s crook. “I ran to the church when I saw the dead one this morning before dawn. I’ve not been into those woods, but I’ve been all about the fields and there’s no sign of ’em. No prints. They bedded down in the oaks last night. Like they knew it was going to snow.” He shivered but made no move to approach the old oaks. Instead he patted a black mongrel dog sitting at his side, a dog with a white nose and stripe running between its eyes. “They’re usually up hunting for grass long before now.”
Calec’s hand twisted around the pommel of the longsword at his waist. He marched for the copse of trees at the edge of the highlands.
Eristin nudged Wyndstrom’s flanks with her heels, following after Calec.
Calec held up a hand. If the animals in those trees were sacrificed by witches, one glance will give you nightmares for the rest of your life. “You shouldn’t see this.”
Eristin stopped Wyndstrom in his tracks. She shivered and cinched her furs tightly about her slender frame.
Calec stepped into the woods, the snow patchy and mostly absent beneath the boughs. Leaves littered the forest floor in layers of crumpled browns and pale yellows.
And everywhere lay the hand of Death.
The red eyes of dead sheep surrounded him, staring hauntingly from their graves of desiccated leaves.
