Two days had passed since blood had baptized the hard-packed sand of the Crown's fighting ground.
The trial by combat had been the sort that poets begged for in their dreams: steel glinting beneath a scorching sun, gasping nobility pressing hands to their mouths, and the steady rhythm of death marching to its conclusion.
Alpheo still remembered the look on the boy's face—Lord Talek, barely grown, drenched in crimson, standing over the ruin of a man who had once murdered his father. The corpse had been reduced to little more than a butchered shadow—limbs separated from the body, a head tossed like a toy.
A grotesque echo of the crime it sought to avenge.
And poetic it was: justice served in the same coin.
Except for the ending. There was no burial. No incense. No rites. By decree of law, a murderer—regardless of his lineage—was to be denied earth and kin, his remains committed to the river like a stray animal, to be carried away by water and shame alike.
