Blood of the King

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Khirro blinked.

Wispy smoke floated across an otherwise unspoiled sky, marring it, capturing his attention, bringing him to focus. He realized there was nothing but sky and the smudge of gray-no smells, no sounds, nothing.

Smells returned first, all of them familiar-dirt and stone and dust, the scents of his life that had always been there.

The farm, then. I’m on the farm.

That didn’t feel right, didn’t explain the streak of smoke. Memories were faint, distant, as though seen through the wrong end of an eyeglass. It couldn’t be the farm, he’d left home months before…but for where?

Sound crept back into Khirro’s world. A man’s voice floated to him on the summer air, then more voices-not shouts of reverie but cries of anger and pain. Like a dam bursting, the clash of metal on metal added to the din.

The sounds jarred Khirro and memories flooded back like the tide filling a hole in the sand. Consciousness slammed down on him, brutal and unflinching. On his left, a sheer stone wall rose thirty feet or more; his right arm dangled over untold nothing. He moved his head to see and pain flooded his body, filling every joint and crevice, leaving no portion free from its touch. Something wet on his forehead and face, the taste of blood on his swollen tongue. The feel of it all filled in the last holes in his recollection: the invasion, the fight on the wall, the king and his men coming to his rescue. He’d tried to fight alongside the elite knights, but he was only a farmer forced to dress up in armor and wear a sword.

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