They ran for a league or so before the horses huffed and slowed to a trot, and then walked for a stretch.
“Tell me what happened during the last Incursion.” Nightrender hadn’t minded the quiet between them—she was a solitary creature, generally—but mortals often felt more at ease if they were engaged in conversation. Besides, she needed answers, and they were several horse lengths ahead of the guards. They could speak in relative privacy.
Prince Rune gave her a sideways glance. “Surely you remember better than I could tell you.”
“I want to hear what you believe happened.” It wasn’t a lie, not exactly.
“All right.” He glanced over his shoulders—at the guards following—then pulled his horse alongside hers. “Before I begin, though, I have to say that I don’t think you’ll like the story people have been telling.”
“I will not punish you for being the messenger, Prince Rune. You may speak freely.”
He flashed a tight smile, but didn’t quite look convinced. “I don’t know everything. Most of the details are lost because the people in a position to know them died.”
This definitely didn’t begin like a story she was going to enjoy.
“There were signs of an Incursion, and so you were summoned. You were sent to a place called Sunview.”
“I remember Sunview.” Nightrender’s heart twisted painfully. Sunview hadn’t been an important town. There’d been no mine attached, no industry beyond a few farms, a granary, and a blacksmith and cobbler. It hadn’t even been close to a main road. No, Sunview had just been a peaceful little town, filled with peaceful people.
Its most notable feature was that it happened to be close to the Malstop.
Nightrender had seen a lot of death over the millennia, but that scene had been uniquely terrible. By the time she’d been summoned and sent to Sunview, it was too late, and her attending Dawnbreakers—warriors who’d bloodied their swords in countless battles—had wept at the sight. The entire town had been drenched in malice, rancor stalking in the shadows. Houses had become gaping skulls, while streets peeled themselves out of the dirt and wrapped themselves around people, squeezing like pythons. It was all blood and pulverized bone, with no one to save, nor remains to be burned.
She’d hunted the rancor and killed them, but not before they mauled three of her Dawnbreakers to death. She’d barely learned the men’s names, but felt each death as deeply as though she’d known them a hundred years. It was always that way between her and her warriors.
Then, heart heavy, she’d doused the entire town of Sunview in kindlewater and hurled in a torch. The fire had blazed for a day and a half, burning up every trace of the horror.
All this, she kept to herself. People didn’t generally want to hear about the messy parts of being their champion. They wanted her to be the righteous fury of the Numina’s holy light made flesh. They wanted their victory clean. No dead children to burn; no towns turned to ash; no one to mourn.
“Right,” said the prince, still blissfully under the illusion that she was untouched by human loss. “Those were only the first of the rancor to escape. There was a thin spot in the Malstop no one had noticed, and rancor had been slamming themselves against it until they got free. After a half dozen more attacks, you told the people of all three kingdoms to withdraw into their cities. Not everyone obeyed. Thousands of lives were lost when people refused to evacuate—”
Nightrender shook her head. “Not all were given the means to evacuate. The rulers of the time hadn’t prepared for such an invasion, and I cannot be everywhere at once. The rancor were too numerous by then.” That was why they were to summon her at the first sighting. At the first hint.
Waiting meant death.
Prince Rune paused to consider that—the idea that monarchs and nobles wouldn’t have ensured everyone’s survival—and a frown turned down his mouth. “All right. Well, everything escalated from there. You tried to save as many as you could, but it was never going to be enough. Not with the Malstop flickering and malsites popping up across the kingdoms. So you took the Dawnbreakers through the Soul Gate.”
She could almost remember that. It was her normal procedure, when there was no more she could do from the outside. But the details were fuzzy, blending with expeditions into the Malice before that. Her memories spanned thousands of years, like stars on the dark scroll of her mind. For most people, it would have been easy to mix the different timelines, but she’d never had trouble before this.
“Tell me what happened then,” she whispered.
“Some of your warriors started coming back through the Soul Gate. Most of them were near death—horribly wounded. They said you had sent them back, because whatever you found in the Malice was more terrible than you’d anticipated.”
Nightrender frowned. More terrible than rancor? But what…
A face tore through her memory, horrible and twisted, with a thousand too many teeth and alabaster flesh—
Then the memory was gone, flashed out like a dead star.
But it had been there. Just a moment ago. She remembered remembering, and now it was nowhere to be found, not in any corner of her mind. Memories didn’t just vanish like that. They couldn’t.
“Nightrender?” Prince Rune’s voice came from just up ahead. “Are you all right?”
She’d stopped moving.
Her grip was too tight around the soft leather reins, and her horse’s head was pulled tall, as though he sensed the wrongness, too.
“Are you all right?” Prince Rune asked again.
“I forgot something.” Hollowness yawned through her.
He frowned, like he thought she meant something had slipped her mind or she’d left something important in the castle and needed to fly back to get it, but when she didn’t say anything else, his eyes hardened as he glanced beyond her—toward the guards—and then looked back at her. His voice was soft, so that no one would overhear. “Something is wrong with your memory, isn’t it? That’s why you wanted me to tell you what happened.”
She couldn’t deny it.
And she should probably tell someone that she wasn’t completely well. The prince was her summoner, her sole Dawnbreaker. She had no one else.
“I’m struggling to remember the last time I was here,” she admitted, her voice equally quiet. “There are pinholes in my memory. I remember lifetimes before this, billions of moments both large and small, but as for the events of my previous awakening: I have almost nothing.”
It was a dangerous thing, her losing her memory like this. If she couldn’t draw upon her centuries of knowledge and experience, then what hope did she have of protecting humanity from this impending Incursion?