The iron-plated gauntlet didn’t merely catch the legionary’s dropping blade. It stopped three feet of hardened royal steel dead in the air with the dull, ringing thud of an axe burying itself in a wet log.
The guard grunted, the impact echoing up his forearm, his visor tilting upward in sudden, panicked disbelief.
From the swirling cloud of grey ash pouring from the Speculum against Ren’s chest, a towering figure stepped into the lamplight. He stood nearly a head taller than young Ren, his shoulders broad and thick, clad in an iron-scaled mantle lined with the shaggy, silver-grey pelt of a northern frost-wolf. Beneath the pelt, blackened plate shin guards and a heavy iron cuirass bore the gouges and dents of three dozen campaigns. His jaw was scarred on the left side by the brutal furrow of an assassin’s crossbow quarrel, his hair shorn down to the skin like a field legionary’s. His eyes were chips of flat, frozen slate.
He was Ren Vale at forty-five years old. A man who had crawled through the mud of three civil wars, climbed over mountains of skulls. Then he seized a royal throne with his bare, bloodstained hands.
Lord Ren, the Ash Emperor.
