Ember of the Broken Oath

Chapter 1: Ash on the Standard The banners still burned long after the screaming stopped. They fluttered in the heat above the village square, blackened cloth that had once been the green and gold of Albrath’s royal stag. Now they were ragged tongues of soot, licking at a sky jaundiced with smoke. Embers spiraled up, chased by a carrion wind. Somewhere timbers crashed inward with a hollow boom, and a flock of crows rose all at once from the fields, startled and giddy, as if the slaughter beneath them were only another harvest. Sir Caelan Morren knelt amid it, armor streaked with ash and other people’s blood, his bare head bowed under a weight no steel had ever matched. The stink was the worst. Burnt wool and thatch, pig fat, hair. Beneath it all, a sweeter, heavier rot that turned his stomach—the smell he had left behind on distant battlefields and sworn would never drift over these cottages, these lanes where he had learned to walk. He could still name every house that now lay in cinders. There, the low stone-walled hut with the crooked doorframe his father had mended three times. There, the Miller’s place, whitewashed each spring. The lean-to where Aunt Elira kept her goat. The space that had been his sister Maeva’s home was a black pit, collapsed. The tiny window where his nieces once waved wooden swords at him was a mouth rimed with charcoal, teeth of shattered glass. He had ridden in yesterday under his order’s banner, scarlet and gold of the Radiant Flame snapping bright above polished helms. The children had run out to see, because knights were stories to them. Because Caelan was one of their own, the peasant boy raised on merit and ferocity to sit a destrier among nobles. He had thought—fool—that this meant he could protect them. “Sir.” A voice at his shoulder, wary. The clink of chain. The scrape of boots through damp ash. “We should move you.” Caelan did not look up. His gauntleted hand shook as he reached for what lay in front of him. She was not intact enough to be recognized at a glance, not like in the heroic paintings where the fallen sleep bloodless on unrumpled cloaks. Her dress was charred to her skin, flute-patterned blue replaced by cracked black. Her hand—small, familiar—was fused to the frame of the doorway where she had tried to shield whoever had been behind her. The gold ring in her burned fingers, the iron nail she had once bent with her teeth, these he knew. “Maeva,” he croaked. Someone shifted behind him, boots grinding bones he did not want to identify. “Sir Caelan, we have our orders. The justiciar—” “Be quiet,” he said. He pried her hand loose. It came away with a wet, tearing sound. He flinched as if struck, swallowed bile, and set her fingers, with their proud ring, gently on the cloak he’d spread. He had no shroud finer to give her than the Order’s scarlet. You swore, he thought, not sure whether he accused himself, the king, the Flame, or the gleaming-faced commanders who had stood on that rise and watched this place drown in fire. You swore this would not touch them. He had argued. By every sainted ember, he had argued. “The reports say rebel banners were seen in these parts,” Lord Commander Halvern had told him that morning, his tone crisp as drawn steel. Behind his gray beard, his mouth had been thin with impatience. “Your kin or not, the village harbors sedition. The king demands an example.” “They are farmers,” Caelan said. “They pay their tithe. Search the place if you must, strip it to its barns, but give me an hour. Give me time to talk to them. To bring out whoever—” “The peasants in borderlands play both sides.” Halvern’s eyes slid past Caelan toward the thatched roofs and the pale threads of smoke from cookfires. “We have witnesses, signed under oath before the Church. The Radiant Flame’s priests confirmed unrest.” “Witnesses who want their neighbor’s field,” Caelan snapped before he could cage his tongue. “Or their daughter.” He reined himself in, lowered his voice. “My lord, I know these people. Let me go alone. No armor, no banner. They’ll listen. If there’s a rebel among them, I’ll bring him to you myself. If we burn this town, we light torches for the Emberbrand.” Halvern’s brows knotted. “Mind your words.” “The Concord holds, my lord,” Caelan pressed. “The elves watch us. We are not butchers.” Halvern’s gaze flicked to the tree line in the distance where the Elven Woodland stood like a dark wall. “The elves do not rule us. The Sacred Flame guards our sovereignty as much as theirs. It is dimmed of late; we do ill to show weakness.” “I’m asking for an hour.” Halvern considered him too long. Men shifted, the horses snorted. The priests of the Radiant Flame in their white and gold cassocks stood a little apart, lips moving in tight prayers, hands on their staff-icons. Beyond them, the village carried on in summer ignorance; a woman stepped out to shake a rug, a child chased a chicken, someone laughed. “Half an hour,” Halvern said finally, reluctantly. “You are popular with them, Morren. Use that. Bring out anyone spreading sedition. But if we see resistance, if so much as a pitchfork is raised—this place burns. Do you understand me? No second guessing.” Caelan had understood. Or thought he did.