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So Azriel said, keenly aware of his mother’s frantic terror leaking through the nearby door, “The shadows tell me that you have weapons in your arsenal that you have yet to wield, weapons that will take you to new heights of influence and prestige.”
A blink—all the shock the male would show. But Azriel knew he had him, even before the male asked, “What sort of prestige?”
Azriel did not break his father’s gaze. “While you now rule only this mountain and its range, you might command far more.”
“How far? How much?”
The shadows whispered at last, and Azriel answered with the reply they supplied, “To the Steppes in the north, perhaps to Windhaven itself, if you use your arsenal wisely. Deploy it shrewdly.”
Another blink. The boy had never seen a map, never heard of either place—and his father knew it.
Azriel lifted his chin, daring the male to doubt him.
His sire swept his gaze over him once more. To his scarred hands, bunched into fists. A grimace crossed his face. But it faded as he noted the wings Azriel managed to keep from dragging on the stones, as a true Illyrian warrior always did. His father gave him another smile, again full of teeth. “Look at the size of you. More my son than those whelps. And yet still a boy—a boy who sent his brothers sprawling.” He chuckled. “An unknown weapon in my arsenal, indeed.”
The words meant nothing. This male was nothing.
His sire looked to the cracked door. To where Azriel’s mother was listening in pure panic. “Pack your things,” he commanded. “You leave at dawn with the boy.”
Azriel started. Had the shadows orchestrated this?
His father pivoted on his heel and strode for the stairwell. Azriel didn’t fail to note that his father hadn’t told him to pack his things. Azriel had nothing in his cell beyond two buckets, some hay, and a blanket. The threadbare clothes he wore were the only ones he owned.
His father said without turning back, “You will go to Lord Devlon’s camp, and there you will stay. He is one of the few with resources to properly train you—and one of the few I trust to do it right. In the meantime, you are banished from this keep and my territory until I see fit to summon you. Then you will report to me what you have learned, what you have seen. And if your shadows have spoken true this night . . .” His father paused, peering over his shoulder at Azriel at last. Only undiluted greed and cruelty filled his features. “Perhaps you will be able to prove to me just how valuable you are. And then we shall see which of my sons is given the honor to fight at my right hand as my true heir.”
With that, the male strutted away, content in his own dominion and lordship. Azriel had never hated a person more. Even his father’s wife. Even his half brothers.
Azriel stayed with his mother as she swiftly packed, one of the chambermaids bringing a rough-stitched sack for her to carry whatever she could.
And then they waited.
Those two remaining hours in the night were the longest of their lives, he thought. Waiting for the darkness to ebb, waiting for the silvery light to illumine the mists. Waiting for his father to change his mind and order him back to the pen. To keep his precious asset here.
Azriel and his mother clung tightly to each other as the minutes dripped by. She didn’t ask him about the shadows. She just held him, stroking his hair.
But then dawn broke, and the bulk of two warriors filled her door. Two—because they would both have to be carried.
Shame heated Azriel’s cheeks, worsened by the many who silently gathered to watch as they were hauled up into the sky, his mother shaking so hard he could hear her teeth clacking. Around them, the mist and wind howled. A beckoning and a warning.
And as the keep was swallowed by the mist, as his mother sobbed through her prayers of gratitude, Azriel bade the shadows and stone of the keep to await his return.
Not when his father called for him. He would never again be summoned on his father’s word. The male was a fool for thinking that dangling his title would keep Azriel in line.
He would sooner die than be named his father’s heir. But he would return—and so Azriel instructed the shadows to be ready.
For the day he’d come back to kill them all.
MOVEMENT I
SONATA
CHAPTER
1
Azriel
The howling, rain-lashed wind robbed every lingering ember of warmth from Azriel. The scales of his black armor did nothing against the lethal cold carried within those howls. Neither did his Siphons, their blue light unearthly through the downpour slicking every stone in the Monteserian mountain pass; nor his shadows, barely hanging on to his half-frozen wings amid the gusting veils of rain.
