Deathmarked (The Fatemarked Epic Book 4)

  To the south…

  In the Burning Sea, Grey Arris and his sister, Shae, sail on The Jewel toward Pirate’s Peril, where they hope to uncover the truth of Shae’s mysterious connection to the pirate king from her dreams. As they approach the island, they are attacked by treacherous sea vampires called Drahma, but manage to survive the attack, though there are numerous casualties. The pirates capture them and they finally meet the pirate king, Erric Clawborn. He also bears a marking, a halfmark, which completes Shae’s marking. Before they can explore their power further, the Drahma attack the island. Their combined forces manage to defeat the vicious sea creatures, driving them back into the ocean. In the aftermath, Shae and Erric learn that they have the power to either destroy all the fatemarked, including themselves, or further strengthen the fatemarked of their choosing. They decide the latter, and the pirates set sail for Phanes…

  In Phanes, a rebellion is brewing, with the Black Tears, Jai Jiroux, and Shanti Parthena Laude at its core. They seek to overthrow the Hoza brothers until Shanti learns that the new emperor, Falcon Hoza, is not a bad man. Jai also discovers a slave army, ten-thousand strong, trained from birth to fight for the empire and none else. The efforts of the rebellion come to a head when Falcon’s brothers, Fang and Fox, challenge him for the empire. In the ultimate betrayal, Fang kills Fox and then poisons Falcon. Just before Fang kills Falcon, Jai uses his justicemark to take control of the slave army and kill Fang. The slavers are overthrown, the slaves liberated, leaving the empire in a time of upheaval…

  In Calypso, Roan Loren makes his way to Citadel, where he begins to study under the supervision of the scholar, Lady Windy Sandes. His goal: learn of the origins of the fatemarked and their purpose.

  Simultaneously, the new empress, Raven Sandes, seeks to fight off the easterners, who continue to attack the Calypsian borders under the command of King Grian Ironclad. Angered, she agrees to a dragon attack on their capital, Ferria in the heart of Ironwood.

  Roan tries to dissuade Raven of this course of action, and at the last moment she calls off the war. However, several of her dragonmasters rebel, attacking Raven and her allies and flying for Ferria. Her royal soldiers, the guanero, are killed, but Raven manages to survive. When she tries again to stop the attack, she watches as the ore-based Ferrian defenses wipe out all her dragons, their masters, and her soldiers…

  To the east…

  While the Calypsian assault continues, the Kings’ Bane appears. The deathmarked one has had his own problems: poisoned by his friend and ally, Chavos the plaguemarked, he is weakened but not defeated. He pretends to try to kill Gareth Ironclad to gain the attention of Roan Loren, but both Raven and Roan intervene. Bane manages to use his power to transport Raven back to Calypso, where she is taken captive by her aunt, Lady Viper, who has usurped the throne in her absence…

  Bane also transports Roan to a place of darkness and silence, where he tries to convince the Peacemaker to join him. Roan rejects him, however, and goes back to Citadel to continue his studies, where he learns the answers he seeks are in the decimated nation of Teragon…

  Angry and alone once more, Bane decides the only path to peace is for the Four Kingdoms to be united under one ruler:

  Him.

  And now, the story continues…

  Prelude

  Crimea, Circa 532

  THE HORDE

  He didn’t enjoy the taste of blood, not the way they did.

  And yet there was a measure of satisfaction in seeing it spilt so easily, crimson puddles darkening as twilight fell like a scythe across the most powerful nation in the world.

  It was a prelude of things to come. Practice for the grand event.

  Vengeance will be mine, he thought as he strode amongst the carnage: ruined buildings, once grand and fine, now laid low by fire and hammer; bodies adorned in the finest silks and leathers, now torn and shredded, soaked in death and ash; beautiful beasts of war, magnificent horses and the famed mongolbeasts, with their thick legs, flat heads, and curved spikes protruding from their snouts…dead. Broken. Fallen like all the others before them.

  The Horde was a force of nature, as powerful and unstoppable as a giant wave roiling across the ocean.

  And I will crash on the Four Kingdoms, he thought. Oh, yes. I shall crash.

  And they will burn.

  In their tongue, he was known as Kklar-Ggra.

  Son-Gäric.

  Others called him the Lost Son.

  PART I

  Roan Zelda Annise

  Christoff Tarin Lisbeth

  Rhea Gareth Gwendolyn

  Siri

  In life, we fought, we raged, we conquered worlds without measure. In death, we met the truth with upraised chins, our jaws set. In the eternities, that’s where we loved.

  Japarti, famous Calypsian poet

  One

  The Southern Empire, Citadel (circa 532)

  Roan Loren

  He awoke with a start, the dream fading into the orange light flickering around him.

  Strangely, the smell of death—melting copper, burning tar—lingered on the tip of his nose.

  That single word pounded in time with his beating heart: Horde…Horde…Horde…

  “I don’t understand,” Roan whispered, closing his eyes. Thankfully, the images were gone, sucked back into the Void from whence they’d come.

  “And that, my young acolyte, is music to a scholar’s ears,” a familiar voice said.

  Roan’s eyes flashed open to find a face bearing a whimsical expression peering down at him. The woman’s hair was a tangled bird’s nest, her skin the color of molasses, gilded with honey from the flickering wall sconces affixed to each wall. Windy Sandes, the eccentric but shrewd aunt to Raven Sandes. She was the master of Citadel, the Calypsian city renowned for its archives, the largest collection of knowledge in all the Four Kingdoms.

  “Wha—what?” he said, trying to sit up. The room spun, the heaped piles of books and disjointed baskets of scrolls spiraling like the wings of a falling bird.

  Windy reached out and collected him under the arms, her spindly fingers stronger than they looked as she laid him down gently. Something soft caught him in a warm embrace—a mattress and two fluffy pillows. “Slowly,” she said. “You’ve been unconscious for almost two days. You’ve had nothing but drips of water to sustain you.”

  Two days? Roan strained to remember how he’d arrived back in Citadel.

  Images appeared, one at a time at first, and then pouring forth like the waters behind a released dam.

  The mutiny against Empress Raven Sandes. The dragon attack on the eastern stronghold at Ferria.

  Bane.

  What had the dark bearer of the deathmark said to him? No, Roan thought. It wasn’t what he had said, it was what he had shown him. That glimpse into the past, where the Western Oracle and her son, Bear Blackboots, had been transcribing her visions.

  In the beginning, there shall be Death and there shall be Light.

  And they shall be two sides of the same coin.

  “No,” Roan said aloud, still trying to refute the truth that had been laid bare. “It cannot be.”

  I am nothing like Bane. I am a different coin. He lied to me, or twisted the truth to suit his purposes.

  “What cannot be?” Windy asked.

  Roan’s eyes snapped to meet hers. For a moment, lost in the memory, he’d forgotten she was there. He remembered something else: It was Bane who had given him the gift that allowed him to return to Citadel. Bane had wanted him to return to that dark place with no beginning or end, the place where time seemed to stand still, an eternity held back by nothing but will and shadows.

  “I,” he said, but then stopped. Raven. “Where is your niece? Bane took her when—”

  “My dear sister Viper usurped the throne while Raven was being betrayed by her own dragon masters.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true.” Windy spun a lock of wispy hair around one finger. “Even I underestima
ted my sister’s wiles. Evidently she’s been building an army of criminals from the fighting pits of Zune.”

  Roan shook his head, trying to make sense of the senseless. “What will happen to Raven? To her sister, Whisper?”

  “Viper has held a grudge against Sun and her daughters for many years. She will not be kind to them.”

  “But what will she—”

  “I don’t know!” It was the first time Roan had ever seen the keeper of the archives lose her temper. Windy refused to meet his eyes.

  “We have to help them,” Roan said. Even as he said it, helplessness seemed to push in from all sides. Every step he took forward seemed to drive him back a dozen paces. He remembered what he’d been told time and time again: Peace is impossible. The Four Kingdoms do not want peace. Even his closest friends, Gwen and Gareth, had told him this. Hell, his own sister, Rhea Loren, wanted to wage war on three fronts at once.

  Windy’s eyes snapped back to his. “And what of the fate of the Four Kingdoms? Would you watch it burn while you save the lives of a mere two players?”

  “There are no players, no pieces to be moved,” Roan said. “This isn’t some game.”

  “Exactly. This is real. And our lands sit on the edge of a knife. On one side is peace, and on the other war. Or we may be torn in two.” Windy paused, but Roan could tell she wasn’t finished. “Unless we do something first.”

  Roan let that thought sit for a moment in the silence. It was so close to his own thoughts over the last few weeks that it couldn’t be coincidence. He was meant to be in this place, at this time. The winds of fate and the strength of his own two feet and Bane’s unexpected gift had brought him here, whether for good or ill. Something Windy had said broke loose in his mind. “Thank you. For quenching my thirst while I slept.”

  Windy’s eyes narrowed slightly, but then widened. “It is not me you should thank, but Yela. She rarely left your side. She squeezed the sponge that dripped the water between your lips.”

  Yela, Roan remembered, the girl he’d once believed to be dead, murdered at the hands of his guardian, Markin Swansea. As it turned out, Markin had faked her death to threaten Roan into never using the power of his lifemark again, at least not publicly. Now Yela and her brother, Daris, were scholars under the tutelage of Lady Windy Sandes herself.

  “Please, thank her for me,” Roan said, feeling an odd electric sensation buzz through him at the thought of Yela’s silky dark hair brushing his cheeks as she leaned over him, pushing a finger between his lips to open them to receive each drop of water…

  “You can thank her yourself,” Windy said. “She’s standing just behind me.”

  Roan snapped away from his thoughts, feeling heat on his cheeks. Yela peered around Windy’s bony shoulder, offering a quick wave.

  The heat left his cheeks quickly when his eyes met hers. Her eyes were pools of night-dark water speckled with starlight. Despite having only truly known her a few days, she felt like a dear friend already. There was something about the quiet time they spent seeking knowledge together that felt…intimate.

  Roan brushed away the thought. “Thank you,” he said.

  Her eyes never left his. “It was nothing.” She hurried on, as if anxious to depart the topic. “I’ve been pouring over these manuscripts, and I’ve discovered at least a dozen references to the death of Absence—”

  “Yela,” Windy said, cutting her off sharply.

  The girl clamped her mouth shut, a sheepish look crossing her face. “Apologies. I tend to get ahead of myself.”

  “Absence?” Roan said. The word sounded familiar in this context. “You mean the Teran god?”

  Yela looked to Windy for approval before answering. The lady sighed, but then offered a nod. A smile creased Yela’s lips, and Roan found himself smiling too. There was something about her delight in the pursuit of knowledge that was contagious.

  “Absence was the Teran god for many years. In Teragon, the people would travel hundreds of leagues to gaze upon the nothingness in hopes of finding truth.”

  Wanting to find truth was something Roan understood all too well. But nothingness? “What do you mean, ‘gaze upon the nothingness’?”

  “A hole,” Yela said. “The Terans believed their god was represented by a hole with no bottom, located in their capital city, Shi. Only the priests and priestesses were permitted to enter the hole itself, spending time communing with their god in order to reach enlightenment. To become a holy person one first had to achieve all Seven of the Virtues: Patience, Selflessness, Generosity, Perserv—”

  Windy cleared her throat.

  Yela blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “Right. The point is, this infinite hole was the symbol of their faith.”

  The death of Absence, Yela had said earlier. “What happened to the hole?” Roan asked.

  “According to the stories, it was filled in.”

  “How can a bottomless pit be filled?”

  Windy said, “Wrong question. What matters is that it was, and the Terans lost their faith, their will to fight, to persevere.”

  “That’s when they were enslaved by the Phanecians,” Roan said, understanding filling him even as air filled his lungs.

  “Exactly,” Windy said.

  This was all interesting, but… “What does this have to do with me?”

  Windy smiled thinly. “That’s the right question. Why don’t we have some tea and I’ll tell you.”

  Staring at the scrawled note written on the last page of the book, anger rose in the back of Roan’s throat. “You kept this from me, didn’t you?”

  If Windy was offended by the accusation, she didn’t show it, her expression nonchalant as she took a sip of her mud-like tea. Nearby, Yela busied herself unstacking and restacking books.

  “Answer me,” Roan demanded.

  Windy placed her mug on the table. Looked up. “Yes,” she said simply.

  Roan shook his head, frustrated. He read the words again: Find Absence. Find the Truth. And find me.

  It was signed by Bear Blackboots, the very man he’d been seeking when he’d traveled to Calyp, to the Citadellian Archives. A renewed sense of purpose rose within him.

  “What would you have done if I’d shown you this note?” Windy asked.

  Roan stared at her, chewing his lip. His anger melted like butter in a heated frypan. He knew exactly what he would’ve done. In his haste to find the man he believed to be the son of the Western Oracle, he would’ve cast aside everything else and travelled south, finding his way onto a boat headed for Teragon.

  More importantly, was what he wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have gone with Raven Sandes to Ferria. I wouldn’t have fought Bane.

  Gareth Ironclad would be dead.

  That thought brought him back to reality. “You knew I had another purpose before I read this note?” Roan said. “How?”

  Windy seemed to consider the question, picking up her mug and swirling its contents around. “I have no power, not like you.” She tapped her head. “Only my mind and instincts. Something told me it wasn’t time for you to see that book.”

  Roan nodded. She wasn’t lying, of that he was certain. He closed the book and gazed at the cover, running his fingers over the title, which was etched into the leather, darkened with gold ink. The Death of Absence, it was titled. A Story of Woe, by the Western Oracle.

  “Have you read it?” he asked.

  As usual, Windy dodged his question. “I noticed you didn’t ask who Bear Blackboots is,” she said instead. “You know him, don’t you?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of. He helped save my life from a nymph queen back in the Tangle. We weren’t formally introduced, but I came here to find him.”

  “Why?”

  Now Roan had the opportunity to hold something back, if he chose to. He sighed. There were too many secrets in his life already. And not so long ago he’d pledged not to keep them anymore. “I believe he’s the son of the Western Oracle.”

  If Windy was surprised b
y the declaration, she didn’t show it. Yela, however, stopped what she was doing and said, “The Western Oracle was executed almost two centuries ago. How could her son be alive?”

  Roan shook his head. “I don’t know. Perhaps he is marked. Perhaps he’s half-Orian. Somehow he’s alive, and he can change his shape into that of a bear.”

  Windy licked her lips, her eyes seeming to catch fire. “A shapeshifter? Then the northern stories are more than just legend. I’ve heard rumors of a man who could transform into a bear near the Mournful Mountains. I believed them to be naught but drunken gossip, but if what you say is true…”

  Roan hadn’t heard such rumors, nor did he care much for them. “I still don’t understand what the death of a Teran god has to do with the Western Oracle, other than the fact that she wrote a book about it.”

  Windy smiled, saying nothing, staring at the book.

  Roan gazed down, realization hitting him for the first time.

  This book was new. Its hard cover was in fine condition, its pages sturdy, not brittle like the countless other books he and Yela had handled while conducting their research on the Western Oracle and the origins of the fatemarks. Either the Western Oracle was still alive, or…

  “Bear Blackboots wrote this,” he said.

  Windy clapped her hands. “I was thinking the same thing. Of course, at the time I didn’t know he might be the Oracle’s long-lost son. That changes everything. Somehow Absence and Teragon are at the core of this story. Yela’s research might hold the answers we’re looking for.”

  Yela nodded excitedly. “The Western Oracle—before she was known by that name—went to Teragon, did you know that?”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Windy said. “Even I didn’t know that.”