Spirit of the King Read Free

sand, but the creature pushed him back with the tip of his club, knocking breath from his lungs in the process and leaving him no choice but to watch the giant set his club aside and pick up a boulder bigger than the first. It hoisted the stone above its head, bending its elbows like a living catapult.
    “No,” Khirro wheezed. “Athryn.”
    After all that had happened during their journey, and despite being a soldier in the King’s Army, Khirro still didn’t considered himself a warrior or think he possessed a killer’s instinct, but he realized this might be his last chance to prove to himself he could be.
    As the giant heaved the boulder, Khirro leaped up, lungs desperate for air. The Mourning Sword glowed red in anticipation of the blood to come, the radiance brightening as Khirro sank the blade’s tip into the beast’s lower back. The giant howled and jerked away, sending Khirro tumbling back, but not before he’d embedded the sword to its hilt, skewering kidney and lung and heart.
    Khirro dug his hands into the sand and pulled himself out of the thrashing beast’s path. The giant stumbled, reaching around in an attempt to grasp the sword’s hilt, its fingers brushing it without finding a hold. It spun a circle like a dog chasing its tail, but the damage proved too much, and the beast dropped to his knees. The ground shuddered under its weight when it pitched forward, face first into the sand, a trickle of blood seeping from the wound in its back.
    So little blood.
    Khirro watched the blood flow down the giant’s side for only a second before remembering his companion. He spun toward the beach, laboring for air and half-expecting to see the magician crushed beneath the boulder, his hopes of returning to the kingdom with the king’s blood flowing in his veins dead along with his companion.
    Athryn knelt in the sand near the boat, dagger in hand, head hung. The black lines of his tattoos swept across his back, over his shoulders and down his arms, the letters foreign and unfamiliar, words to cast spells inscribed in his flesh by his brother, Maes, when he was no longer able to speak them himself. Khirro approached slowly, his breath returning in ragged gasps, relief that his companion appeared unhurt swirling with anger as he wondered why the magician hadn’t aided him.
    “Are you all right?” Khirro asked closing the distance between them; he saw three fresh cuts on Athryn’s forearm oozing blood. The magician looked up, face bare, his cloth mask lying on the sand beside him. He looked so different with his face free of scars. “Are you hurt?”
    Athryn shook his head and the despair and disappointment noticeable on his face told Khirro enough about what happened to force the anger out of him.
    “I could not do it.” Athryn spoke quietly, his voice strained. “I do not know how to make my magic.”
    Khirro kneeled beside him and noticed a dozen more cuts on the magician’s arms and torso, many of them camouflaged in the curved lines of the black letter tattoos. Khirro shook his head, guilt poking his gut for the anger he’d felt at Athryn. The magician had tried to do what he knew how to do and failed. He picked the mask out of the sand, turned it in his fingers.
    How many times have I failed when I should have helped?
    “I couldn’t, either,” Khirro said handing the mask back to Athryn. “I tried to become the tyger, but it didn’t work.”
    “But what am I without magic?”
    Khirro shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. We have other problems to consider.”
    He gestured toward the boat. The giant’s second boulder had struck the vessel’s hull, splintering it into hundreds of pieces and dashing any hope of returning across the Small Sea.
    “At least we’re both alive,” he said.
    Athryn nodded. “But with no way home.”
    “Get dressed. Better to use sunlight for travel than sentiment,” Khirro said slapping the magician on the shoulder as he rose.
    Athryn stood and shook sand from his