Yeah, and maybe your father’s written you back into his testament. Maybe the Yhelteth Emperor is a queer.
That last was worth a grin. Ringil Angeleyes, scarred hero of Gallows Gap, chuckled to himself a little in the chill of the graveyard, and glanced around at the silent markers as if his long-fallen comrades might share the joke. The quiet and the cold gave him nothing back. The dead stayed stonily unmoved, just the way they’d been now for nine years, and slowly Ringil’s smile faded away. A shiver clung at his back.
He shook it off.
Then he slung the Ravensfriend back across his shoulder and went in search of a clean shirt, some food, and a sympathetic audience.
CHAPTER 2
The sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turned the persistent breeze chilly as it came. There’s an ache to the evenings up here, Ringil had said once, shortly before he left. It feels like losing something every time the sun goes down.
Egar the Dragonbane, never very sure what his faggot friend was on about when he got into that kind of mood, still couldn’t make sense of the words now, best part of a decade on.
Couldn’t think why he’d remembered them right now, either.
He snorted, shifted idly in his saddle, and turned up the collar on his sheepskin coat. It was a reflexive thing; the breeze didn’t really bother him. He was long past feeling the cold on the steppes at this time of year—yeah, wait till winter really gets here and it’s time to grease up—but the mannered huddling gesture was part of a whole wardrobe of idiosyncrasies he’d brought home with him from Yhelteth and never bothered to unlearn. Just a hangover, just like the southern memories that stubbornly refused to fade, and the vague sense of detachment Lara had cited in council when she left him and went back to her family’s yurt.