The Void Prince Who Devoured the Demon Queens

Chapter 8: Bounty on a Prince

Five thousand crowns is a great deal of money to spend on a dead boy.

Kaelen sat on the tower sill with the poster in his hands and read it a third time. The woodcut had been carved by someone with talent. Beneath it, in the Crown's heavy black ink: Alive, preferred.

"Alive," he said. "Not 'dead or alive.' Not 'proof of death accepted.' Alive."

"I noticed that," said Pip, perched on the shutter. "A corpse is cheap. Nobody pays five thousand for a body unless they've already got a use for the rest of it."

"Think," Pip went on. "Somebody's ward breaks, and within a day there are posters on every gatepost for twenty miles. Nobody carves a woodcut that fast. Either the Church is very stupid or it wanted you found."

Kaelen had heard that line before, from a very different mouth, on the first day of his second life. It sounded worse in the imp's.

Behind them, the bedclothes stirred. Ignis woke the way a cat does, all at once, with her ears forward and her tail flicking. She took the poster out of his hand and read it, and the gray went out of her face and something red came into it.

"Five thousand," she said. "For you."

"For a very flattering likeness of me."

"I will burn that road to the horizon."

"You will not." He said it gently. "Smoke can be followed. You told me that yourself."

"The ward," Kaelen said slowly. "The one on the cellar door. I ate it, and I thought it was a snack. What if it was a bell?"

"Oh, it was a bell," Pip agreed. "That kind of ward is a thread. Somewhere in a chapel in Valerius, a priest has a hand on the other end, and when you pulled it..." He mimed a ringing with two claws. "Ding."

"And the poster?"

"The poster's the part I can't explain." The imp's grin was gone. "That one's older than the bell."

The wind brought the first sound over the ridge while they were still arguing, a long, quavering note, high and thin and not quite a dog's. Ignis stiffened. Every hair on Pip's body stood straight up.

"Ash-hounds," the imp whispered. "Oh, that's very much not good."

---

They came at first light, six riders in gray surcoats with a white sun on the breast, and two hounds running ahead on silver chains. The hounds were the size of ponies. Their eyes were white as boiled eggs. Each wore a collar with a sun glyph cut in the metal.

"Wardens," Ignis murmured. She lay flat on the broken battlement above the gate, one hand resting on the stone, and her voice had dropped to the flat, pleasant tone she used before a fight. "The Church breeds the dogs to smell taint in the blood."

"They won't smell me," Kaelen said. He crouched in the shadow beside her, the quartermaster's sword across his knees. "That's what the Void is. There's nothing in me for them to catch."

"And me?"

"You're the bait."

She looked at him. He looked back. After a moment her mouth curved, slow and mean and delighted.

"I do like it when you plan things," she said.

The plan was not complicated. The old portcullis hung by one rusted hinge. Under it, a long gatehouse passage ran forty feet between two stone walls, with a single door at the end. Ignis had dragged her cloak through the keep that morning, from the tower to the passage, a trail any hound could follow, and then she had climbed the wall and gone still.

The hounds hit the scent at the gate and howled. Their handlers whipped their horses forward. The six Wardens swept in under the arch, the dogs straining on their chains, with crossbows leveled and blessed bolts shining at the tips.

Kaelen cut the hinge.

The portcullis came down behind them like the end of a sentence. It hit the stone with a sound he felt in his teeth.

The first Warden had time to shout. The second had time to look up. Then Ignis dropped from the battlements with her fists wrapped in nothing at all, no flame, no smoke, only a demon's own weight and a hundred years of rage, and she hit the lead horse so hard its legs folded.

It was ugly and fast. Kaelen went in on the left with the sword and cut the nearest crossbow in half before the man could fire. He caught the next rider by the surcoat, hauled him down, and put the pommel into his jaw. Somewhere on the right, one of the hounds got loose and lunged for Ignis. She caught it by the collar. Her fingers closed on the sun glyph and the metal groaned.

Kaelen was already there. He slapped his palm against the sigil.

It tasted like salt and church wine. The light drained out in thin bright threads, and the hound went limp in Ignis's grip, blinked, and sat down. It was just a very large, confused dog.

It was over in less than a minute. Four Wardens lay still. One had fled into the courtyard and gone down under Pip, who had turned into something with far too many legs. The last was the captain, a broad gray-bearded man. He lay pinned beneath his dead horse with Ignis's boot on his chest and Kaelen's sword at his throat.

"Demon's pet," the captain spat. Blood ran from his nose. "You'll hang from the Spire for this."

"Maybe." Kaelen knelt. His voice was perfectly calm. "Who sent you?"

"Name," Kaelen said.

"Hale." A wheeze. "Warden-Captain. Holy Order of the Sun."

"Captain Hale. When did the order go out?"

Hale laughed. It was a horrible little sound, wet and almost fond. "Three days ago, boy. Three days. Did you think the Prince would waste his time on a corpse?"

Kaelen did not move.

"Three days ago," he repeated, "I was dead."

"Not by his reckoning." Hale's eyes had gone far away. "Prince Valerius said you'd wake. Said we'd find you at Cinder Keep, and when we did, we were to bring you in whole. Not a mark on you. The Church has a use for the Void, he said. The Church has a use for a thing like you." The smile widened. "He said you'd come back wrong."

A cold finger traced down Kaelen's spine.

His brother's voice, from a white marble balcony. It's mercy, Kaelen. Be grateful.

"Wrong how?" he said.

But Hale was no longer looking at him. The man's whole chest had begun to glow.

It came through the surcoat first, a pale gold seam along the breastbone, and then the sun on his chest lit up like a coal. Ignis jerked her boot away. The light went from gold to white, and a thin screaming note rose out of the dead man's ribs.

"Back!" Pip shrieked. "It's a beacon, get back, get back!"

The sun burst. A pillar of white fire shot straight up from Hale's chest through the broken roof of the gatehouse and into the dawn sky, so bright it turned the clouds to glass. Then it was gone, and the captain lay burned black on the flagstones, and the only sound was a dog panting and the ringing in Kaelen's ears.

"Every Warden within thirty miles just saw that," Pip said faintly.

"How long?" Ignis was already moving, snatching up her cloak.

"Dusk. Maybe sooner." The imp had shrunk back to his normal size, and his wings trembled. "And it's four days to Brimstone Market, and they'll be watching every road. A human prince walking in the front gate is a human prince walking onto a spit."

Kaelen looked down at the burned man. At the dog, which had begun to lick Ignis's hand. At the little silver collar lying in the dust, its sun glyph gone dark.

Pip followed his gaze, and an expression that might have been thoughtful slid slowly across the imp's face.

"Your Highness," he said. "I have an idea. You're not going to like it."