Evans - Iron elves. Book 3: Ashes of a black frost

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ASHES OF A BLACK FROST

Also by Chris Evans

A DARKNESS FORGED IN FIRE
(Book One of The Iron Elves)

THE LIGHT OF BURNING SHADOWS
(Book Two of The Iron Elves)

Gallery Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products
of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Chris Evans

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition October 2011

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Designed by Stephanie D. Walker
Map by Michael Bechthold

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evans, Chris (Chris R.)

Ashes of a black frost / Chris Evans.1st Pocket Books hardcover ed.

p. cm. (Iron elves ; bk. 3)

1. MagicFiction. 2. SoldiersFiction. I. Title.

PS3605.V3645A93 2011

813.6dc23

2011024998

ISBN 978-1-4391-8066-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-8068-6 (ebook)

To the shooting star who lit up my sky
and helped me find my way.
Thank you.

We giving all gained all.
Neither lament us nor praise.
Only in all things recall,
It is Fear, not Death that slays.
Rudyard Kipling, Epitaphs of the War

T he night sky deepened, stripped bare in the growing cold. Stars burst forth like silent musket volleys, pricking the heavens with rosettes of white light. On the desert floor below, remnants of lives littered the sand in all directions. Broken bodies draped limply over rocks. Ash piles marked the deaths, though not the final resting places, of many more. Bones jutted from the sand at anglesnot odd angles, though, for that would suggest that there were ways bones could protrude that made senseand the eyes of those still living stared and saw nothing.

Or did their best not to.

Major Konowa Swift Dragon, second-in-command of the Calahrian Empires Iron Elves, stood among the carnage. His six-foot-tall frame loomed above the fallen like the last tree in a dying forest. Red-rimmed eyes and cracked and bleeding lips stained with black powder offered the only contrast in a face coated in gray soot. The ferocity of the battle marked his uniform, too. The once vibrant silver green of the cloth was now mottled in blood, dirt, black powder, and bits of gore. Ripped and burned sections of uniform exposed strips of bare brown flesh streaked with grime.

He didnt know how long hed been standing there. He realized he wasnt sure what time it was, or even what day. Battle did that, winnowing away everything until all that was left was a furiously burning spark that ignited only one of two actionskill, or flee and be killed. But battles didnt last forever, at least, not in the physical realm. Konowa felt his warrior veneer slip a little as time reasserted itself. The toxic high of battle that sustained and drove him when he shouldnt have been able to swing his saber one more time began to subside. Visions of the grotesque, the obscene, and the heartbreaking began leaching into tissue and memory, staining his very character and thoughts so deeply that no lifetime of drink and repression would erase them.

The wind snatched at the loose strands of his long black hair tied in the back in a regulation queue. A storm front was moving in.

With his left hand he absently pushed the hairs out of his eyes and behind his ear. His fingers paused as they traced the shorn ear tip. Hed been marked as a chosen one by the Shadow Monarch, his ear tip frost-blackened in the womb. He was one of the first so marked to remain with the tribe, albeit minus part of an ear. So fearful were the elves of the Hyntaland of the Shadow Monarchs touch that they chose to abandon babies born with the disfigurement to their deaths in the wild rather than raise them. In this way the Shadow Monarch gained Her children, collecting the babes and raising them as Her own. In time, they grew to be as twisted and dark as the Silver Wolf Oak at the center of Her mountain forest.

Neither their fate nor Konowas was one any elf should have to bear, but no one had asked if they accepted the burden. A thin, cold pain gripped his chest where the black acorn, the source of the Iron Elves eternal existence, rested against his chest. It was a reminder that the power of the frost fire and the curse of a hellish life after death had been a burden of his own choosing.

His hand reached up to adjust his shako, the distinctive tall black hat with its winged appendages, and realized it had fallen off. He looked down and spied it a few feet away. He walked over slowly, ignoring the wet sounds beneath his boots, bent down, and picked it up. When he tipped it right side up to place it on his head, a silver locket fell out and landed in the sand. Its not my shako, he realized.

After looking inside to see if anything else was there, he put the shako on his head and crouched down to where the locket lay half-buried in the sand. He grasped it gingerly between finger and thumb as if he were plucking a rose and trying not to get jabbed by a thorn. The metal was cool to the touch and Konowa realized that it wasnt silver at all, but simple pewter. It was oval in shape and no more than an inch tall, and a small post at one end was broken where a chain would have fastened, no doubt explaining why the soldier had chosen to keep it under his shako for safekeeping.