Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Twenty-Eight

Endarion

North Kalduran

13th of Tantus

Though he and Dobran had lost a little over half their combined supply train since the campaign had commenced—what he now knew as Kavan's doing, on the approach to Allodek—Endarion still found enough alcohol remaining to get him suitably drunk. He scanned the quartermaster's stock, singling out the more expensive Kaldurani wine vintages seized during the sacking of Dykumas. As damaging as Estrid's raid on his train had been, he was grateful to her for inadvertently neglecting the booze and leaving him a way to descend into pleasant oblivion.

As arch-general, he should've visited the quartermaster with the intent of working out how sorely the scuffles at Dykumas and Allodek had affected his stocks. With Iana's director murdered before he'd even left for this campaign, the Denjin army had been on the backfoot from the first step. He knew, even if he'd rather remain ignorant, that the two fights he'd engaged his army in had resulted in the need for replacement weapons and armour. Replacements Iana would've supplied him with had her armoury in the Industrial District not been stricken by murder and then forced to halt operations as the Praevin and then Nazhira's men investigated.

Instead, he'd come here to drink himself to destruction, so that he could ignore that issue alongside all the others.

"How about this one?" the quartermaster, a soft-spoken middle-aged man, said as he offered a bottle.

In reply Endarion waved his hand across a whole shelf of the quartermaster's makeshift store. "All of them."

"All of them?" the quartermaster asked. "That's enough to last a ranker a month."

"All of them." Endarion pitched his voice low.

"Paramount-General, sir, I don't think that's wise." The man's voice was shaking. "We don't know when we'll replenish our stocks, and that's enough alcohol to kill a man, I reckon."

"Even better," Endarion said.

He levelled lifeless eyes at his quartermaster, holding the poor bastard in place with his iron stare until the man relented. The wine bottles, ten in all, were loaded into a cloth sack Endarion slung over his shoulder. He grunted as the weight slammed against his back, igniting the dulled pain of his whip wounds, though the sheer number of bandages wound around his torso blunted the impact. His wrists, chafed bloody by the ropes, flared, but no worse than usual.

When he returned to his pavilion with his prize, he remembered with a burst of anger that he'd punched his desk in half when Dobran and Khian had come for him. He dragged his armour chest between the chairs and dropped the sack onto it, before falling into his seat. His knee complained, but he'd become adept at ignoring it lately.

He made short work of the first bottle, swigging it like water and grimacing past the fiery trail the wine burnt along his throat. It wasn't his preferred Padrean vintage, and weaker than he was used to, so he threw back half the second bottle, not pausing until the pleasant haze of drunkenness descended.

That wasn't enough, though. Hot shame and roiling rage still plagued him days after his public whipping.

By the time he'd been roused from unconsciousness, a full four hours had passed since he'd fainted, naked and bleeding in the dirt. His wounds had already been bandaged and the crowd had long dispersed. Because his pavilion boasted only a thin mattress he kept on the floor, he'd been confined to a camp bed in one of the tents neighbouring the amputation tent, stuck laying on his stomach, for days.

Apparently, after he'd been untied, Dobran and Khian had abandoned him, left him sprawled in the clearing as a macabre warning. They'd prevented his own men from leaping to his aid for a full hour, and Endarion could picture the two bastards hovering on the sidelines, grinning cruelly at the sight of his abused body. It wasn't until Palla and Avelyn had been permitted to haul him to his camp's chief medic alongside Daria, who had been knocked unconscious by the Warmaster's beating, that his shameful ordeal had ended.

Though he was still technically Paramount-General, it had been made insultingly clear to all who'd witnessed his debasement that Endarion no longer commanded them. Not that he had before, not truly.

No doubt the rumours about him had doubled in strength. People would no longer fear the Iron Wolf, not when they'd seen him strung up and whipped until he blacked out.

He felt infinitely worse when he remembered Daria's swollen face and his inability to help her. He'd nearly torn the posts free, his struggles powered by something he still didn't understand, and yet he'd collapsed. Collapsed as Khian had carried on punching her. What kind of father was he to allow such a thing to happen? To watch his child dragged into the consequences of his failure and tormented before his eyes?

The second half of the second bottle helped suffocate his rising fury. The beginnings of the third almost made him forget the humiliating events altogether.

By the time he drained the dregs from the third bottle, his bandages started chafing and he felt imprisoned. He rolled his shoulders and shifted in his seat, but to no avail; it was like being strung up all over again. He snarled as he rose on unsteady feet and shrugged his coat off. He didn't bother with the buttons of his shirt, instead ripping it away and tossing it behind him. Next were the bandages, tied off with care. He dug his fingers beneath the first layer and unravelled it, movements erratic, hands trembling.

White, white cloth unspooled around his feet. White, unstained by blood.

His frayed mind, well on its way to intoxication, tried to comprehend. Where was the blood? His wounds, though not fatal, had been raw and weeping. For the first few days after, every movement had torn open a half-sealed slash and ensured half a dozen shirts had been soaked scarlet. Dragging the sack of wine to his pavilion should've reopened his back. A perverse, self-hating part of him had desired that very outcome.

An issue for another time, he decided. First, and most importantly, he needed to get himself thoroughly inebriated.

As he grasped bottle number four, the flaps of his pavilion entrance hissed open and Daria strode in. She stopped in her tracks when she saw him, shirtless, dishevelled, three empty bottles cluttering his armour chest. Had he not been quite so disoriented, and had she not already seen him naked and humiliated, he would've been ashamed.

She snatched the bottle from his hands.

"Leave me alone," he growled, reaching for the wine. "Let me fester in peace."

"Is that what this is about?" Daria asked, nodding to the bottle in her hand. She released her grip and stood firm as it shattered at her feet. For good measure, and because she'd no doubt noticed him glancing at them, she grabbed the sack and deposited it out of his reach.

"Any more?" she asked.

He shrugged. "That's all of them. Happy now?"

"The opposite," she replied.

"Was it the quartermaster?" he demanded. "If that callow bastard went running to you, he can walk all the way back to the Imperium."

His daughter shook her head, heavy brows creased. "I saw you carrying the sack. Figured I'd give you half an hour to make the right decision before I intervened."

He scoffed. "Sorry to disappoint you."

Then he noticed the bruises on her face for the first time. A canvas of blues and purples comprised her right side, the cheek scabbed over where Khian's vicious backhand had split the skin. One eye was black, and her lips were still swollen and discoloured, though she managed to grimace. He wanted to reach out a gentle hand and console her, to hold her to him like the small child she'd once been, to comfort her. But she just stared at him, her brows now raised as she regarded his pathetic state.

"Is that how you looked at me when I was mad?" A measure of sobriety returned with his words.

"How do you think I looked at you?" she said.

"Like an invalid. Like a babbling, lack-witted idiot. Like something to be despised and embarrassed of." He swallowed. "Like you were ashamed of me."

"Never," Daria said, the word slipping between gritted teeth. "I expected there to be a consequence to your torture, Father. You were almost dead. There was more blood pooled around your body than in it, and it seemed not an inch of you was uninjured. I was surprised you were lucid at all during those first few days." Her eyes flashed as if she recalled those dark times. "Afterwards, when your mind paid for the abuse of your body, I was just relieved you were alive."

He said nothing, so she kept going. "I didn't give a shit that I needed to care for you. Because you were alive. I hadn't lost my father, and that was the greatest victory I could hope for."

He ground his teeth together as he searched for a reply, though there was nothing he could say that he hadn't already. Like her, he'd assumed he'd succumb to his injuries even after he'd been rescued and tended to. Unlike her, though, the toils of his rising madness had left him wondering if death would've been preferable. He'd lost his mind inch by ragged inch, aware of the deep plunge into insanity, only losing himself fully during the worst bouts and remembering everything else.

Stolen novel; please report.

Whatever she said, he would always think his madness shameful.

Daria inhaled heavily, prompting him to meet her eyes again. "Father, the fact you went through madness and escaped it makes you the strongest person I know. Not lack-witted. Not an embarrassment. Not shameful. Strong."

His lips parted in the vaguest echo of a smile, but then he frowned. "Not strong," he said. "I'm going mad again. My mind is weak to let that happen."

"You're not going mad," Daria insisted.

He balled his fist, holding back the urge to punch the armour chest like he had the table. "I am," he insisted. "My old bloodlust is returning and I am becoming a tyrant again. I've killed indiscriminately on this campaign, and I can't claim to have not enjoyed the slaughter. The Iron Wolf controls me as that madness once did." He raised a hand to halt her reply. "I have nightmares of a dark monster in the cells of Shaeviren, about to kill me."

His daughter said nothing. He could see the helplessness in her expression as she looked upon him. She knew he suffered frequent nightmares, though his habitual chagrin had prevented him from divulging the details.

"I told the officers Cato died in the fighting in Dykumas, killed by a stray blade. I lied." He heaved in a heavy breath, held it. "I killed him. I saw him torturing the prefect and so I stabbed him."

He expected his daughter to recoil in disgust, to flee the pavilion and seek out his officers, to share with them this grievous news. He'd murdered his first-general, after all. That he'd done it in the middle of a city's razing, in the midst of a war, was irrelevant. He'd butchered one of his own.

But Daria simply nodded. "I suspected."

"How?"

"When you told me what had happened to Romanus, you were cold and blank, like you were supressing something," Daria replied. "It's how you looked when you told me about my mother's death."

He opened his mouth to reply, but the words abandoned him. He could still remember the conversation he'd had with a four-year-old Daria, could recall in perfect detail the wideness of her sapphire eyes as he'd told her Aemilia wouldn't be coming home. The childish confusion on her young face, her brows, heavy like his even back then, knitted into a stern little frown. When she'd asked why, his answer had at first been, "She's moved to another city, to be with her parents." He hadn't known his daughter had detected the lie. Now he considered it, she hadn't been surprised when he'd revealed the truth of her mother's fate a handful of years later, when he'd deemed her old enough to understand. She'd nodded coolly, as if receiving information she was already privy to.

He shook his head against the flood of memories and ripped his mind back to the present. "Before I killed Cato, I attacked him because I saw him as my father," he continued. "And then, when I stabbed him, I didn't recognise him. Didn't even bother checking who it was I was killing. Not until he made me slit his throat."

"So you didn't know it was him."

"Before that," he continued, not heeding her interjection, "I killed one of my own soldiers. I was in the middle of a fight, didn't realise I'd started strangling him. When I snapped out of it, I saw I'd already stabbed him." He swallowed. "After he died, I looked at his face and I saw my mother. My mother on the night…" I killed her. "On the night she died."

He clamped his mouth shut and choked on the torrent of words rising in his throat. As far as Daria knew, her paternal grandparents had died just a few months after she'd been born in a blaze started accidentally by his younger brother, Helleron. The story everyone accepted—the story he and Heller had concocted together—was that his brother had argued with their father upon his return to Alzikanem. The fire had sprung from their fight, with Asterion and Phaedra perishing and Heller managing to escape. In the aftermath, Heller had fled the Imperium in the direction of Drasken, shedding the shackles the Caetoran placed upon all his aasiurmancers in favour of the freedom and education of the far more tolerant northern empire.

It had been a convenient lie for them both. Heller won his freedom, though not the way he might've chosen, and Endarion was, theoretically, absolved of any guilt for the crimes he'd committed that night.

He wasn't ready for his daughter to know the truth. He'd probably never would be.

"I was made to destroy. Your mother, who deserved far better than me. Estrid, at least three times over now. The mothers of your half-siblings. All my illegitimate children, to whom I am at best an absent father. And now," he looked pointedly at her, "you."

"Me?"

"You were beaten because you intervened in my punishment."

"I intervened because I knew what it would do to you," Daria said firmly. "Because I needed to protect you, even when you distance yourself from me."

He inhaled a shuddering breath, his eyes glistening as he palmed a hand through his hair. "You are my finest achievement," he said as he tried to stand tall. "I distance myself because I don't want to taint you."

"You wouldn't," Daria replied. "All I want is my father back." With those words, she became young again, the veneer of the professional twenty-four-year-old would-be commander shucked and replaced with the innocent young girl she'd been before they'd drifted apart. His daughter, who he'd raised alone, who was closer to him than anyone else, who he'd addressed as nothing more than an inferior soldier for the duration of this campaign.

His daughter, who deserved better from him. Better than him.

He snorted. "A pitiful excuse for a father," he said. "Five chances I've had at fatherhood. Five chances wasted."

"Not wasted," Daria insisted.

"Of all my children, you are the only one I really know. There's Avelyn's boy, Remus, of course, but I only see him in passing when I train with the doglords. He avoids me so well I haven't spoken to him since before Shaeviren. There's Lexia and Bekker in the capital, but both are indifferent to me, and rightly so. There's Tali, stuck on Alzikanem and blaming me for her imprisonment there, again rightly." His shoulders slumped with a heaved sigh. "I doubt I've spent a grand total of a week with any of them, just as I doubt they barely spare me a thought." He looked up at Daria. "What kind of father is that, then?"

"A father who cares, despite everything," Daria replied. When he made to argue, she spoke over him. "Lexia's proud to be your daughter; she told me so herself when we were last in the capital. And Remus only avoids you because he doesn't want the other doglords thinking he's favoured because of who his parents are. I can't speak for Bekker and Tali, but you've got at least three of us."

She bunched her fists at her side and wavered on the spot, apparently battling with a decision. After a sigh, softer than his own, she paced towards him and pulled him into an embrace, forcing him to stoop slightly to accommodate her. He returned her affection, a lost man weathering a storm, and only slackened his grip when he felt her pull away in surprise.

"Father," she said, "your back."

"What?"

She motioned for him to turn around. "It's healed."

"Healed?"

"Not even scabbed over, just scarred, as if you were whipped months ago." She pressed a hand to his marred skin. "Does that hurt?"

Like when the sack had rested against his back, he felt a dull sensation, not quite pain. Mild discomfort. "No," he replied. He looked down at his wrists, where the ropes securing him to those fucking posts had chewed into his flesh. Though the wounds had required less care than his back, he hadn't thought to monitor them. Daria's gaze followed his, noting the absence of healing scabs. A thin ridge of scar tissue braceleted both hands, far thinner than he would've expected of how thick the ropes had been.

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know." Suddenly self-conscious of his exposed torso, he bent over and shrugged himself into his discarded jacket. "Remember when the assassin at Dujaro sliced my shattered knee? That healed within days as well. I thought Palla might've done something to the bandages, the night she... the night I was almost killed."

He hadn't told his daughter about the revelation of Palla's aasiurmantic abilities, or about her enigmatic identity as a 'Sudarium Blade'. In truth, he still wasn't sure what to make of the woman and her claims that she protected him on the orders of a higher power. He supposed, if he somehow managed to emerge from this campaign unscathed, he could confront Palla and demand clarification.

He also hadn't shared with Daria the more vivid details of his nightmares, about how real the demonic entity that stalked him seemed, about how even now, four years later, he still felt contaminated by whatever had been done to him on Shaeviren. Was there something polluting him? The same thing that had almost manifested a few short days ago, towards the end of his whipping? Was the same force that drove him to try to tear the posts away, the force that had filled his mind with images of Dobran and Khian's ravaged corpses, responsible for this accelerated healing?

"Shallow wounds heal quicker. Must be that," he said with a dismissive wave, trying to reassure himself more than his daughter.

Daria nodded slowly, as if she didn't quite believe him. Perhaps she clung to the slim ledge of their reconciliation, because she changed the subject. "Father, what are we going to do?" she said. "Now that Kavan has defected?"

"I don't know."

He hadn't yet sent word to Valerian, but he knew what his brother's advice would be: keep obeying orders, roll over and show his throat like the cowed little lapdog he was supposed to be. It didn't matter that they'd lost an entire army loyal to their cause, that Kavan's defection left them with only his and Ricardus Naevon's armies to fight their insurrection; his older brother always erred on the side of caution, always ensured they never acted when they probably should have.

"When this campaign is over, I will be removed from my position as Arch-General of Denjin," Endarion continued. "Ricardus will likely lose his title as well, leaving us with no armed force behind our insurrection. As soon as we take Varanos, we're finished. This is likely what Estrid intended because I have been cornered."

"Either rebel now, or not at all, ever," Daria said, understanding.

He inclined his head, his expression grave.

"You're conflicted," she surmised. She watched him for his response, but they both knew she was right. "You want to defect, so why wait? Why despair?" She swatted his answer aside before he could offer it. "Don't tell me Uncle Val stops you, because that's a lie."

"I've committed far too many crimes against them to be welcomed into Drasken," he said. "Estrid already despises me, so what incentive do I have?"

"Estrid doesn't despise you. She's probably angry with you, for good reason, but she's never hated you. You know that. It's just an excuse. Besides, you were just whipped to unconsciousness for her actions. I think she owes you."

"I accused her of trying to have me killed."

Daria shrugged. "And you don't believe that now, if you ever did."

That was the truth, at least now. In the aftermath of his near-death at Dujaro, the assassin's words had convinced him Estrid was behind the attempt. But everything else he knew combated that conclusion and proved him an idiot for thinking, even for a heartbeat, that Estrid wanted him dead.

If she'd truly wanted to end him, why not press her advantage and batter his army outside Allodek? Why not thrash him into an undeniable defeat and then pluck him from his sundered camp to summarily execute him on the stronghold's walls? Why not pursue him and Dobran as they fled into a wilderness she, as a Kaldurani kandras, knew well?

Only now, when given the space to think back on that brief scuffle, did he realise her actions there had contradicted his perception of her motives at Dujaro. How had he been so blind? Why had it taken Daria's confrontation to force his comprehension? How had he allowed his brief anger at almost being murdered in his room overcome his entire history with the woman he'd once—always—loved?

It was almost certain the assassin had overheard their conversation and used her words against him to manipulate the situation, as she'd suggested herself during their duel. If the assassin had been successful, Khian would declare war on Kalduran for his death. If he survived, he'd think Estrid guilty and ensure war was declared that way. By duelling her, he'd done exactly as the assassin had wanted.

It had taken something as significant as the battle outside Allodek to penetrate his stubborn paranoia.

I assumed she wanted me dead because she should want me dead. But she's a better person than I. In our years apart, I allowed myself to forget that.

Endarion regarded his daughter as if seeing her for the first time. "You want me to betray the Imperium?"

She didn't hesitate, nodding vigorously. "Go to Estrid." At his raised eyebrow she added, "Avelyn told me about the scout. You know she wants to talk to you. Maybe now is the time."

"We'd be giving up everything," Endarion said. "Our family in the capital will be at the Caetoran's mercy, and our plans for insurrection will be in ruins."

His daughter scoffed. "The Caetoran can't touch our family. Valerian, Kaeso, and Sephara are too powerful. If you think for a second that Iana, Lexia, Kesa and Bekker are vulnerable, you don't know them at all. Stop making sacrifices because of your fear for us." When he said nothing, she added, "Father, you're not a monster, but you do have a habit of making the wrong decision. The Imperial decision. Make the right decision now. When it matters most."