Bringer of Winter- a M/M/M Epic Fantasy Romance

6- Monsters

THEO—

My contingent of two soldiers, Napa, and Sia reached the border city Uriok within a day, leaving behind the two hundred men that had left Eleyan with us just after we had left the city. We had ridden ahead to meet up with the main contingent of soldiers that waited just north of Uriok in the base camp Ryt. Eighteen-hundred spearmen, bowmen, and swordsmen camped in the base on the border of Nibea and Pryn, and a messenger sent out twenty minutes before I and my two hundred soldiers had left Eleyan should have arrived at least half a day before, giving the men in the camp plenty of time to prepare for battle against the Northmen.

The last attack had been on the fishing village Calei, which was only five miles northwest of Ryt. I planned to muster the Ryt troops and attack the Northmen before they could destroy another innocent village, before my own reinforcements came in.

With no intention to stop in Uriok, I had moved through the town as quickly as I could, trying to ignore the whispers and stares that surrounded us as we moved. The town would have heard of the attacks, and that the crown prince was coming to defend them, and so I knew that they recognized me for exactly who I was.

With Sia muttering about the inability of the Pryn people to keep their mouths shut, and how impossible it would be to ever keep anything a secret even if you told no one and no one knew the secret, we crossed through the center of town and began our way through.

"The trees would hear your heart speaking the secret, and they would tell the nearest ten maids and five courtiers," she cursed softly, rolling her eyes as she looked around at the townspeople around us, showing us their obeisance with curtsies, bows and full prostration. "Some bit of the unknown would be nice when facing the Northmen. With how little we really know of them, we should try to keep ourselves just a bit more mysterious. We're like open fucking books."

I rolled my eyes, smiling at her rant, and studied the crowd again. The city wasn't a bustling metropolis, but it was definitely larger than any of the other border towns. The buildings were all made of stone or wood, none were of thatch or mud, and this far north everyone wore heavy wool or cotton. I could see some of the fashions that were popular in Eleyan, but I could also easily discern how the Northmen heritage was in the blood of the people this close to Nibea. Most were fair, some with hair as light as straw, and I couldn't see a head of black hair anywhere. Their eyes ranged from light blue to green, most with a light, stormy gray, and even their hairstyles showed their northern heritage. The men wore their hair as long as the women and it hung around their faces in thick clumps of curls.

Many of the horses and their riders and even a few carriages had been pushed off of the road to make way for my group, and for that I was irritated. If we had been able to get through Uriok silently, with no one being any the wiser that we had ever been there, it would have made me blissfully happy. As it was, I could feel my cheeks redden with the stares of the men and women around us.

One of the carriages I saw stood out immediately, as rather than hay, bundles of firewood, or bushels of wheat, there were metal bars that stood up and connected to a wooden roof, like a cage.

A cage for what? I wondered silently, unsure if we should stop so I could appease my curiosity.

For a moment, the dumb thought that the townspeople had somehow caught a bear entered my mind, but when we neared the cage I could see my musing hadn't been far off. Standing and staring at me with piercing, eerie, far too blue eyes was a young man. For a full ten breaths I was unable to look away from the huge eyes and the dark depths that seemed to want me to see the things they had seen, know the things he knew.

When I was finally able to pull my gaze from the boy's eyes, I took in everything else at once— the blood, blue tattoos, and white paint that streaked across his face, completely coating it like a mask. With that mask, it was difficult to tell what the boy truly looked like. His cheekbones were high and his face impish; rather than soft it had an edge to it that made him seem older, more mature than I even felt, and the boy was probably a good year or more younger than me. His nose had been broken, for it stood at an odd angle, and his ears were too big for his head, sticking out almost as much as Napa's did. I could see piercing holes in the boy's ears, as if he normally wore many earrings, and the hand that clenched the bars of his cage, shackled and trembling as he tightened his grip on the metal, was a bit twisted as well, as if his fingers had broken and set just a bit off. The rest of his small body— he was barely above five feet tall, and with how skinny and petite he was I thought I could wrap my arms around him twice and still be able to clench my hands together— was also coated in blood, the ominous blue tattoos and the white war paint of the Northmen soldiers. It looked as if he had been dunked in the paint, and then splattered with jugular blood and had reveled in it for weeks.