The Demigod Proving Read Free Page A

innocents. And his wives. His precious and pure wives. All murdered.
    His breath caught. His hands and arms trembled. He clenched his teeth against the urge to weep, and instead reared his head back to scream. The rafters trembled at his voice. Rocks of nitrate vibrated on the ground.
    Wester.
    Wester and the other renegades had done this. His own sons who’d spent the last two years conspiring against him even as they worshiped, praised, and served him. He’d let them gain confidence and boldness as they whispered their sedition and recruited other traitors, so he could gather their names in preparation for a cleansing. They were fruitless boughs in the tree of his family, and would need pruning.
    He’d had waited for the right moment to eradicate his kingdom of the unholy alliance, to not spook the renegades and let some escape, but had never dreamed they would strike at him in this manner. Had they also attacked elsewhere, at his hundreds of other children and wives lower in the canyon?
    The thought lifted him to his feet. He turned from the doors and ran back past the paladins. Outside, he commanded his draegon, Cuchorack, to rise. The draegon snapped his wings open and stood. Sunlight shone through holes in the hairless wings, where the leather had decayed and fallen away. His black horns, turned down from the top of his head and extending past the end of his snout, glistened.
    Athanaric swung up onto the saddle on the shoulders, between the wings and the serpentine neck. He grabbed handfuls of red fur, tightened his legs, and ordered the draegon to take him to the Courtyard of the Wall.
    He would wait no longer.
    The time had come to cleanse his kingdom of treacherous children.
    As the draegon wheeled into the sky, a memory came, as clear as if it had happened one day past, and not two millennia before. The vision assaulted him every few years, in moments when he didn’t expect it, like a vision triggered by some small detail. Perhaps today, the glint of the sunlight on the wooden stairs leading up to the porch triggered the memory.
    On that day two thousand years before, he’d entered the Divine Palace and found that his brothers had killed Fedron, the sibling who’d taught him in secret to use Ichor. He’d found his ten brothers standing over Fedron’s broken and still body. They’d looked at him apologetically, and said it had to be so.
    Fedron. The brother who’d loved him most.
    In the subsequent years he’d found revenge against them all, until only he remained to bring the land peace.
    And now, his children had broken the peace again.
    He turned the draegon westward, toward the Courtyard of the Wall.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 3: Unexpected attention
     
The only way to free a people is to enlighten their minds, to teach them how their world could be if they understood the lies they’ve learned from the cradle. For this reason, those in power always silence those who speak the truth.
-Wester
     
    Attending the Reverencing should have excited Teirn like it excited Wrend. Wondering at his brother’s unusual seriousness, Wrend followed Teirn up past the wagons and buildings, toward the trees that bordered the top of the courtyard. Beyond a thirty-yard expanse of open flagstone, the stone narrowed into a path that wound among pines and firs. To the right, along the back of the courtyard, other paths also led up into the canyon.
    “What’s the problem?” Wrend said as they approached the trees. “What has you so worked up?”
    Teirn looked back, his lips narrow and thin. “I’ve wanted to tell you for years.”
    “What?” Wrend said. “Tell me.”
    Teirn started to respond, but a voice called them from behind. They halted and turned.
    Rashel and Calla had disappeared among the wagons, but an older demigod, a Caretaker probably in his forties, jumped down from the end of the boardwalk and approached them.
    Like all male demigods older than twenty, he wore plain pants, a white button shirt, and a