Page 24 of Wicked Things

He was quiet for a moment and then looked up at me with a steely resolve. “I should go there right away to avenge him, shouldn’t I?”

“No, you most certainly should not.”

“But I’m his son. It’s my place to do so. Someone should do it.”

“That someone won’t be you. It’s out of the question.”

“But why? I’m a grown man,” he reminded me for perhaps the hundredth time since I’d met him. “It’s my right.”

I looked at him thoughtfully as if I were actually considering it. “Yes, you’re right, of course. You owe the same vengeance as any man would. But you’re not a warrior, a chuisle. Whoever did this is treacherous and savage, not to mention bold, to sneak right inside the castle walls to kill your father. They must have had help from within. You’re not ready to fight such men.”

He was about to jump to his feet, his color high, so I forestalled him. “At least not yet. Not until you’ve been trained in weapons and warfare.”

“Oh,” he said, subsiding a little. “Then you might consider training me?”

“Certainly.”

“And then you’d let me fight beside you?”

“Certainly not.”

At the sight of his immediately crestfallen face, I tried to soften my response. “Perhaps one day. But you must understand that learning to fight properly takes a very long time. You’d be up against men who have been trained as warriors their entire lives. It will take a long while for you to be able to face them in a fight. I can begin your training, though, and some day, when you’re ready—you can possibly join me in battle, if you still want to. “

“But that would take so long.”

“Maybe a few years… or perhaps a bit longer. A decade or so. But in the meantime, you can go with me and watch me make war against the ones who did this to King Callum,” he shrugged. “You can be a witness when I kill them. I’ll even hold them for you so you can be the one to cut off their heads.”

The surprised look of horror on his face told me all I needed to know about that.

“Or I can kill them for you,” I said. “Either way. You’ll have to go with me to show yourself to the Gorian people and let them know who you are, but afterward, you can return here if you like. I’ll need to stay for a while to establish myself as the king and begin planning for how to deal with the kingdoms of Finias and Falias. I suspect one or both of them are behind your father’s assassination, and they must be dealt with. There will no doubt be a war. Your father certainly believed so.”

I walked over to the window and stared outside, so he wouldn’t see the anger in my eyes, as I thought again of the slaughter of Callum in his bed. He was a good king and deserved a far better fate. The kingdom of Murias would be next if I did nothing about this. I’d need to make a strong response to this new threat. It would be the first step to consolidating the Sidhe people and forming one strong kingdom.

“I may have to pay a visit to Falias to find Tadgh, the young man we met along the road home. I need to find out who he’s working for and if he knows anything about all this. If, as I suspect, he was sent to Jorvik to eliminate you, then I’ll need to deal with him. I believe now that you may have been right about him all along.”

“I was? But right about what exactly? Wait…did you say he was sent to eliminate me?”

“I’m not worried about that, and you shouldn’t be either. He’d have to come through me first, and I’d have no problem taking care of that situation. You said you wondered if Tadgh and his men followed us to that village that was attacked by the ogre.

“Yes. I told you that you were wrong about Tadgh and his men then. I thought because they were there at the village ahead of us, it wasn’t possible. But now I think you may have been correct after all. On reflection, I realized we stopped far more often than we normally would have on the way to the portal because of you and he could have passed us.”

I held up my hand to stop his protests. “It’s true, Braden, and you must know it. Your little horse, Crow, was smaller and not able to keep up as well. Tadgh and his group could have easily gone around us on the trail and gotten ahead of us. They hadn’t been at the village for long, if you remember.”

“Yes, I know all that, but why were they in Jorvik to begin with? Were they…you think they were after me?”

“You did say someone had been following you before we arrived in Jorvik.”

“Yes, that’s right. A few nights before you came, I thought someone got behind me on the street and followed me home. I never saw anyone though.”

“It could have been Tadgh and his men.”

“Do you really think so? You know the disappearance of my uncle Leofric was strange too. I do hope he finally returned home. But why would anyone bother my poor uncle if it was me they wanted?”

“Hard to say. For leverage, maybe—to hold him hostage and get you to deliver yourself to them in an exchange, maybe.”

“Oh, no,” he said, and jumped up to start pacing up and down the room. “But they didn’t have my uncle in the village.”

“Perhaps something went wrong, and he put up a fight.”