by Morgan Rice
“Maybe,” Edwin admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I’m letting you into the castle. I’m not a traitor.”
“I’m not asking you to be,” Royce said. “I just want to know what has happened to my brothers. You can’t think it’s right that they’ve been taken just because they’re my brothers, can you?”
Edwin stood there, and Royce had some sense of the conflict within him. The young man probably knew that his duty as a guard meant that he should call out to the others on the battlements, and that he should at least try to kill Royce where he stood. To do anything else was a betrayal of the people he had—
“The Hill of Traitors, to the north,” Edwin said. “They took them to the Hill of Traitors, so that the Picti could have them.”
***
Raymond clutched the rock in his fist while guards moved into the clearing where the tower lay. The ones from before were there, along with a couple more who had clearly come along to see the horror of it; maybe participate, given the evil-looking knives and tongs and other instruments of torment they had tucked in their belts.
That wasn’t even the frightening part of it, because away in the woods, Raymond could hear the calls of the Picti, yelling back and forth to one another in something that wasn’t quite the tongue of the rest of the land, clearly excited about the prospect of what might follow.
“Didn’t die quietly, I see,” the guard who had driven the wagon said. “You’ll probably wish you had though, soon enough.”
Raymond thought about the rock he held. One more blow, and he suspected the lock on his cage would give way. One blow, and he might be able to grab whichever guard was nearest, try to wrest a blade from him.
Then what? Alone, he would find himself facing the other guards, and he wouldn’t be able to free his brothers. He needed a moment when they were distracted. Act too early, and all of this would be for nothing.
Too late, and…
“Now, which of you shall we start with?” the guard demanded.
“Me,” Raymond said, trying to be brave, and thinking about what he might be able to manage with a blow from that rock. Bringing down the first guard by surprise might at least give them a chance. “Leave my brothers alone and choose me.”
The guard laughed at that. “Oh no, you’ll be last, boy. You’ll get to watch your brothers die, and hear every scream. No, we’ll start with… this one.”
He pointed at Garet.
“No!” Raymond yelled, but the guards ignored him, moving across to his brother’s cage. “Leave him alone!”
“You’ll get your turn,” the guard promised Raymond. “Just as soon as you’ve watched what happens to the others. Bring him!”
Garet fought, but even so, the guards dragged him out of the gibbet. A part of Raymond wanted to strike that final blow against the lock right then, wanted to come to his brother’s aid as they pinned him in place and chained him down atop the life stone, but even then, it felt as though the moment wasn’t right. Raymond would get only one chance, and he wanted to make sure that when he took it, it would save all of them.
That was when Raymond heard something that was even worse than the shouts and the calls of the Picti: he heard silence from them. It was the kind of silence that promised death, and slow death at that. It was the silence of hunters in the moments before they struck.
“We have a deal with them,” the guard said. “They know that if they strike us, the duke will hunt all of them down and slaughter them, so they leave us be. You, though… they get to take out all their hatred of us on the likes of you.”
The Picti started to emerge from the trees then, and it was like a kind of magic in itself. One moment, there was only the tree line below the tower; the next, men and women were loping forward, wrapped in tartan, painted in woad. They were human, but there was something different about them, something more sharp-edged and graceful, more wild and less settled. Their eyes were wider, their frames mostly more slender. Their weapons were things of bronze as often as iron, their ornaments made of bone where they weren’t torcs of gold. Even from this distance, Raymond could see their hatred of him, his brothers, and every person whose farms and laws had driven them out into the wild places.
They stalked forward, and in spite of his supposed deal with them, Raymond saw the guard who had driven them there take a step back. The guards and the Picti stood staring at one another over the expanse of the life stone, and Raymond could see that there was no love there, no liking, only the kind of cold hate that would turn to violence if there were any chance of getting away with it.
In that moment, things felt as though they were balanced on a knife edge. Maybe if he’d had more time, Raymond might have been able to think of something to do. If he’d spoken any of the old tongue, he might have thought of some clever way to turn the Picti against the guards, or appealed to their sense of honor to try to get them to help him and his brother.
Instead, all he could do was sit in the gibbet clutching his rock, and hope that somewhere, somehow, a way would come for them to survive this.
***
Royce rode uphill through the trees, not caring about the branches that whipped at him while he did it. Around him, the people of the village ran, or rode, trying to keep up, heading for the bare space at the hill’s summit.
“Nearly there!” he yelled out, drawing the crystal sword. He leapt down from his horse, knowing that any horse untrained in fighting risked throwing him, and that his time on the Red Isle had prepared him for fighting on foot, not on horseback. Royce didn’t let that slow him, plunging on through the trees, toward the space where ahead, he could hear Garet cry out.
He burst past the tree line, up onto the broken ground where the tower lay. There, guardsmen and woad-painted Picti stood, all armed, all dangerous. Royce plunged in amongst them without even hesitating.
He cut a guardsman down without slowing, ducked under the swing of another’s sword, and plunged his blade hilt deep into the man’s chest. Royce tore the weapon clear, spun away, and parried a blow aimed at Hendrik’s head. The huge young man swung an axe two handed and battered through a guard’s defenses. He saw Matilde leap at one of the Picti, almost as wild as they were, stabbing with both the weapons that she held.
Around Royce, villagers plunged into the conflict, striking down guards and Picti alike as they strove to save Royce’s brothers. Royce fought his way forward toward the flat stone, shoving back a guardsman and cutting the legs out from under another. One of the Picti came at him, stabbing with a spear, and Royce darted aside, before Ember’s claws raked across the man’s face, sending him staggering away.
For those first few seconds, they seemed unstoppable. Royce saw his people cutting and killing, bringing down guards and Picti before they could strike back. Matilde brought her knee up into a Picti woman’s face, while Hendrik severed the head from a guard with one sweep of his axe. More villagers cut and killed around them.
Then the Picti and the guards started to fight back, and villagers started to die. Royce saw a boy stabbed through the heart, a girl hacked down by the sweep of an axe. He flung himself forward, parrying a blow aimed at Matilde’s head, then cut back at the man who had attacked her.
Still, the Picti kept coming, too many of them to hope to stop.
“We need to run,” Matilde said.
Royce nodded. “I need to get my brothers first, though. Just hold them a few more seconds.”
Even that seemed as though it might be too much to ask. Around Royce, he could see his people being driven back by the force of the Picti’s attack. The guards weren’t the problem, but the wild folk fought with all the savagery of folk who fought every civilized person they met.
Royce ran forward, and from the corner of his eye, he saw a guard approaching. He started to turn to try to block the blow that he knew would come, but that attack never came at him. Instead, as he turned, Royce saw Raymond standing there over the fallen body of the guard, holding a lump of rock.
; “I’ll free Lofen,” Raymond called out. “You get Garet.”
Royce nodded, and then hurried for the spot where his youngest brother lay chained in place. Around him, the battle raged more and more, Picti flowing into the space around the tower in seemingly limitless numbers. Royce had never known so many lived nearby.
For now, the only thing he could do was try to save Garet. Royce pushed his way through the fight, standing over Garet and holding the crystal sword in both hands.
“Leave me!” Garet called out. “You won’t be able to get out otherwise.”
Looking around, Royce could see that his brother had a point; there were Picti everywhere he looked now, pretty much surrounding the clearing. If it had only been the guards, they might have been able to fight their way clear, but like this, there would soon be no chance.
Royce didn’t care. He wasn’t going to leave without his brothers. There was no key nearby, and no obvious way to find one, so there was really only one way to free his brother. He hefted the crystal sword and then brought it down using all the strength he had.
The metal of Garet’s chains gave way, the crystal sword slamming into the stone beneath, and it rang out like a bell. Something seemed to resonate through Royce, and as he touched the sword to the stone again, he felt something pour from it.
A scream rang out around the clearing, and it was a scream that seemed to run through every fiber of him. Improbably, impossibly, it came from the stone, pain and anguish pouring out from the place where so much had gone into it. The raw agony of it was overwhelming, and for a moment, Royce could only stand there, the sword in his hand.
Around him, in that moment, everything came to a halt. Everything. Guards stood there staring at him. Villagers stood there as if they didn’t know what to do next. The Picti, meanwhile, stood there in stunned silence, staring straight at Royce in a way that had nothing to do with their usual hostility. They were staring at him in awe.
A horn sounded then, somewhere back in the trees, and at the sound of it the Picti started to back away. Those who could still stand melted back into the forest as smoothly as they had come from it. Their leaving seemed to be the spark that reminded the guards that there was still a fight going on, and now they clumped together, weapons raised.
Royce charged at them.
He cut down one man, spun toward another, and hacked off his arm. He ducked under a sword blow, and the crystal sword sang as it ripped up into him. Royce dodged and spun, cutting and killing, and then his brothers were there beside him, and the villagers joined them, all of them attacking in a group.
Against the might of them together, the guards couldn’t hope to prevail. In just seconds, the guards were down, leaving only bodies around the tower. Ember flew down, and Royce had an image of more of the Picti around the clearing, watching, obviously trying to understand.
“We need to go,” he said to his brothers. He looked over to where Matilde was be dragging a half-conscious Picti girl along, and Hendrik was going around the guards, checking that they were dead. “We need to go right now.”
CHAPTER TEN
Altfor rose from his bed when the messenger started hammering on his door, hastily wrapping a robe around himself and stalking across his chamber to throw the door open.
“This had better be good,” he said to the servant who stood there, flanked by a pair of guardsmen.
“My lord, forgive me, but Lord Alistair requires your presence.”
“Then tell him I’ll be awake at a civilized hour. What kind of man gets up before noon when there’s no hunt planned?”
Not that Altfor normally lay abed that long. Only the half glimpsed sight of Moira still there was enough to make him wish to be back there. Well, that and the thought of keeping his uncle waiting, reminding him that Altfor was not some weak boy for him to—
“At once, Lord Alistair said,” the servant insisted, in a tone that said that it wasn’t negotiable. A part of Altfor wanted to shut the door in the man’s face anyway, but one of the guards took a half step forward, in a way he wouldn’t have dared to just a day or two before.
“Oh, very well,” Altfor said. “Give me a moment to get dressed, and—”
“At once, his lordship said,” the servant insisted. “We were to bring you by force if necessary.”
Altfor considered his options and realized how few he had in that moment. He couldn’t exactly fight his own guards, especially when he was anything but certain that he would win. His only choice was between being dragged forward and walking with grace, so he chose to do the latter, walking with as much pride as he could muster in just a robe. All the time, he considered the things he would do to the three men escorting him once he had full control of his lands again.
Instead of the great hall, they took him to his father’s old chambers, which his uncle seemed to have commandeered without so much as asking. The same way that he’d taken the dukedom, Altfor thought. He’d made changes too, his father’s more extravagant ornaments and oddments piled against the walls, ready for servants to take away. The rest of the room looked more severe now, like the command tent of a hard-bitten general.
His uncle stood in the middle of it all, looking down at a table where a map of the dukedom was set out. A nervous guardsman stood next to him, looking as though he would rather be anywhere but where he was.
“Uncle,” Altfor said, “was it really necessary to drag me out of my bed for this?”
“For this?” Lord Alistair said. “Yes, when this is your mess.”
“My mess?” Altfor tried to think of all the things it might be. He liked to think that he had things under better control than that. “What do you mean?”
“Tell him what you told me,” his uncle said to the guardsman. Looking at the man now, Altfor could see that he looked disheveled, scratched, bruised, and cut.
“We were at the Hill of Traitors, dealing with the brothers as you ordered, my lord,” the man said to Altfor. “When Royce showed up, with a group of… they must have been villagers, but they didn’t fight like villagers. They fought us, and they fought the Picti, and then the boy did something that made the stone scream out, and the Picti just… left.”
Altfor shook his head. “Picti do not just leave,” he said. “Not unless you face them with an entire army. They stay, and they fight, and they kill.”
“They left,” the guard insisted. “And then there were more villagers than us. I think… I think I was the only one to get away, because I’d been hurt on the edge of the fight, and—”
“You ran like a coward,” Lord Alistair said.
“I managed to grab a horse,” the guard said, “I fought my way free with—”
“You ran,” Lord Alistair said again, “and the penalty for one of my men who deserts is death.”
He drew his sword and struck in one movement, the blur of the blade at neck height. The guard had a moment to look shocked, and then his head toppled from his shoulders, his body collapsing. Altfor’s uncle was already cleaning his blade.
“You sent the boys away to die rather than just killing them quickly,” he said. “That was foolish. Where a man has an enemy, he must strike quickly and completely, not play games. Do you understand, Altfor?”
“Yes, Uncle,” Altfor said, meaning every word of it. “I understand completely.”
“See that you do. Now, there is the question of what we do next.”
“You’re asking my opinion?” Altfor said.
He saw his uncle shrug. “One day, eventually, you might rule this dukedom. It would be nice to see if you have the strength to be a good ruler. Perhaps you’re going to prove better than your father and your brother were.”
Altfor bristled at the suggestion that his uncle got to decide whether he ever got to rule the dukedom, but even so, he decided to try. He wasn’t stupid.
“If they are coming from the villages, then we need to show them that any village that supports them will suffer,” he said.
“There
are those who would say that such a strategy risks damaging us as much as them,” his uncle said. “We need the food from those villages, and everything else they produce.”
Altfor saw the gleam in his uncle’s eye. He knew a test when he saw one.
“Authority comes first,” he said. “We have the gold to buy food elsewhere, and villagers can be replaced.”
His uncle seemed to pause, and then nodded.
“Good. Cruelty for its own sake is worthless, but sometimes it is necessary. Every village that supports the rebels will be cleared, the inhabitants replaced by those who are loyal. The rebels will be hunted down, and if they do not come forward to face justice, they will see those they care about die.”
That caught Altfor a little by surprise. His uncle was even more ruthless than Altfor had thought. Under other circumstances, he might even have appreciated it. As it was, though, it just meant that when he took his dukedom back, he would have to be thorough about it.
“That will be all,” his uncle said, dismissively.
Just the tone of it was enough to make Altfor’s hackles rise, but he was careful not to let it show as he turned and stalked toward the door.
“Just one more thing, Nephew,” his uncle said as he left. “Where is that wife of yours?”
“Did you wish to speak to her, Uncle?” Altfor asked, again careful not to let any of what he felt show.
“I merely want to be sure that she is under your control. A man who cannot control his wife can hardly be ready to control an entire land.”
“There is nothing to worry about, Uncle,” Altfor said. Internally, he seethed, because he didn’t know where Genevieve was. She was missing, and he hadn’t even noticed.
***
Genevieve kept looking over her shoulder as she and Sheila made their way down to a small stream not far from the village, down to a spot that she had used to bathe sometimes before Altfor had taken her. There, she was sure that she and Shelia couldn’t be seen by anyone passing, but even so, she couldn’t help looking around for the possibility of someone coming after them.