Blood Runner: Book Three of the Empress Saga

CHAPTER ONE

Krayson had awaited his judgment for so long that he hardly believed his good fortune when it at last arrived. This little prison above the clouds had long ago lost any appeal it might have had. It would soon be over, his time in the cell.

He had grown weary of dangling from the ceiling by his arms. As it stood, his shoulders would likely never work right again. He hadn't seen so much as a drop of clean water or scrap of food since his incarceration. A week ago, perhaps two; it was difficult to say without a glimpse of the outside.

Others would have died by now. Krayson lingered in this fugue state on the edge of death. The spells infused into his flesh wouldn't readily allow him to die of something so paltry as dehydration and starvation.

It wasn't clear if Krayson's captors knew this, or if his continued survival was as much an inconvenience to them as it was to him.

Small. Damp. The stones stinking of his own filth and that of the hundreds of other prisoners they had seen in their time. The shackles of his chains biting into the flesh of his wrists and the tender care of the warden as Krayson's broken jaw was smashed again each day to keep it from healing.

Today, finally, he would die.

Out of the distant past, his father's words whispered to him still. "Live, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Survive, and you've won."

Within his chest, a fire burned. It flared to life at the thought of oblivion, a death that had awaited him since birth. This was not to be his end.

"I will live," Krayson rasped through his broken jaw and parched throat.

A balled fist striking him in the belly was his answer.

"You think so, eh?" The warden laughed.

Krayson had never bothered to learn the lout's name. Being Althandi, it was probably nothing more imaginative than Warden. Krayson's mother came from this land, but she had never been able to explain why her people were so thundering terrible with names. Had the Althandi no pride in their own blood? No purpose beyond their profession?

Do I? Krayson wondered.

The warden seized Krayson by the jaw, the thick fingers digging into his flesh and the cruel grip sending agonizing tendrils of pain shooting throughout his face.

"It's as I told you, rat. The Highest King summons you. You're to finally get your sentencing, Krayson."

Flecks of the warden's saliva spattered over Krayson's face when he spoke the name. His mother's name, and her family's before her. An ancient name, going back as far as the founding of Althandor and likely further even than that. Ancient and once renowned, now reviled.

Theirs was the house that committed the most sensational of crimes in living memory. If murdering a child had been the extent of it, it would have been cause enough to see their place among the nobility of Althandor taken from them. Unfortunately for House Krayson, the child they murdered had been the infant son of the Highest King.

A dark crime, and one committed before the last Krayson alive in the world drew his first breath.

"Surprised you lasted this long," the warden went on, clearly disappointed that was the case. "You're supposed to be a member of the Order, eh? Not a one of them's raised so much as a pip that you're here. They abandoned you, Krayson. If you're not a blood runner, than you're just another blood mage what needs to be put down. What do you say I save the king the trouble of tossing you from the tower? It's a rather long way down."