“Well, I’ve been creating a record of all the artwork in the castle, and that tapestry is proving difficult. I honestly don’t know where else to look. I may have to give up on it.”
“Have there been many dead ends?”
“A few. Oddly, all the pieces that remain nameless are from the same era, at least I think so. There seems to have been a period of twenty years or so in the past century where no records exist for the art brought here.”
“Have you tried the chapel?”
Ivanore stopped walking. She turned to peer curiously into Erland’s face. “What chapel?”
“I take it you’ve never been there.”
“I didn’t even know there was such a place here.”
“Few people do, actually. It’s a small room at the top of the tower. You must take a flight of rather questionable stairs to reach it, and it’s cold. No glass in the windows, so it’s not really the ideal place to spend one’s time. But there are a few compartments there that contain old documents and such. I can’t make any promises, but maybe you’ll find something of interest.”
“It couldn’t hurt to look.”
“May I escort you there?”
“Now?”
“Of course, unless you have more pressing matters to attend to?”
Ivanore noted the mischievous grin on his face, like a little boy with a harmless secret. She couldn’t help but grin back.
“Here,” said Erland. “We’ll need this.”
He lifted a burning torch from a sconce in the wall. The flame moved and breathed like a living being.
“It’s later than I realized,” said Ivanore, noting the odd shadows their bodies cast along the corridor. “I didn’t even notice the servant lighting the torches.”
They walked in silence down the familiar hall, passing closed doors and the grand staircase spiraling down to the entry and the dragon’s statue. Sounds from the lower levels of the castle drifted up through the floors: the banging of metal pots on the kitchen stove, the commands of the head chef to his underlings. Dinner would be ready soon, but surely, they could spare a few minutes.
Soon the hall ended in darkness.
“The servants don’t come this far,” explained Erland. “The dragon makes them nervous.”
He lifted the torch, and the undulating light spilled over a black, monstrous visage overhead. Ivanore gasped and nearly lost her balance as she stepped away from it. Erland caught her by the arm and steadied her. She looked again at the carving above a stone archway, its wings unfolding as if from the stone itself, its snout projecting outward with teeth bared, and its tormented eyes peering down on her like a demon. It sent an involuntary shiver down her back.
“It looks so real,” said Ivanore. With the initial fright behind her, she stepped closer to it. She raised her hand to touch it, but it was just out of reach. “It looks remarkably like the one downstairs. I wonder if the same artist made them both?”
“I suppose you’re the one to find out,” said Erland. “The dragon scares off most of the servants. As far as I know, few people have been up here in years. Maybe decades.”
He took her by the hand. “Come on.”
The steps were thick slabs of wood curved and worn smooth from generations of wear. They creaked in protest with every step. Some wobbled.
“What’s under here?” Ivanore asked, imagining falling to her death should a step give way beneath her. But Erland tightened his hold on her in a silent assurance that he would let no such thing occur.
“I wouldn’t want to find out,” he said with a confident laugh. “Would you?”
The steps curled upward along a central post connecting the floor to the ceiling which arched high above and was cloaked in darkness. The torch’s light did not even reach into its recesses. The topmost stair spread out onto a narrow platform made from the same aged wood as the steps. A rough square of it jutted out from the stone wall, the remains of what must have been a railing which had long since broken away. There was no boundary to protect them from toppling over the edge. Ivanore was tempted to look down, but instead pressed herself closer to Erland for safety.
They stood before another archway, the twin of the one downstairs but without the dragon. Already Ivanore could feel the chilled air moving through it.
“It’s the ocean,” said Erland, as if that explained everything. “Wait here.”
Erland stepped through the arch, taking the torch with him. He and the light disappeared behind the wall as if the darkness had swallowed them whole. But then the room beyond the arch lightened.
“Come in,” called Erland.
She obeyed and stepped into the chapel.
She was surprised at its simplicity. She had expected something grand and elaborate, but this room was small and circular with nothing adorning the walls except two alcoves, each with a large white candle, their single wicks giving off a pale light.
“I wanted you to see it as it’s meant to be,” said Erland. He held the now extinguished torch in his hand, which he laid on the floor. The candles gave off a surprising amount of light, though the room was so small it wouldn’t take much to illuminate it. In the center of the room stood a rectangular waist-high altar, and an opening in the wall served as a window.
The air in the room swirled gently, tugging at Ivanore’s hair and robe. She could hear the sound of the sea almost as clearly as she could when she was outside in the courtyard. She moved to the window and looked down. The tower overlooked the open sea, its waves hammering against the massive stones directly below.
“This part of the castle actually juts out over the water,” said Erland. “If you were to jump from that window, you would land in the water. It’s a bit unnerving, if you ask me.”
Ivanore agreed. She pulled away from the window and faced Erland. “The candles,” she noted, “the flames are steady, yet the air seems to be constantly moving.”
“It’s the way the room was designed,” he said. “Those alcoves are just out of reach. You don’t want to come up here in the winter,” he added with a false shiver. “It gets bitterly cold.”
Ivanore stepped to the center of the room and ran her hand along the smooth top of the altar. She tried to imagine priests kneeling here long ago, praying to the Gods. From what she had gathered from the histories she’d read in the library, the priests had all been executed when the Vatéz came to power. The only religion they believed in was magic.
“Do you come here often?” she asked Erland.
“Not often,” he answered. “When I need a place to be alone. It’s peaceful up here, don’t you think? And it’s not likely I’ll be disturbed. I discovered it a few years ago. One night, I couldn’t sleep. It was late, so I snuck out of the barracks and began exploring. There are a lot of passages and rooms in this castle that haven’t been used in years. But this is my favorite. It has a lot of history. I could swear the prayers once spoken here are embedded in the walls themselves. Sometimes I can almost hear them, if I listen closely.”
Erland joined Ivanore at the alter, his arm brushing against hers, and her heart quickened.
“Here,” he said, pressing against a panel in its side. At his touch, a drawer slid open. Ivanore hadn’t even noticed it, it was so well concealed.
“There are several hidden drawers in the altar in which you’ll find documents dating centuries back.”
Feeling uneasy so near Erland, Ivanore shifted around to the opposite side of the altar. She tested the panel there and found another hidden drawer, this one filled with sheets of parchment.
Ivanore looked up and discovered Erland watching her intently. With only the altar between them, he reached for her hand and held it in his. His skin felt warm as his thumb explored the back of her fingers. For a moment, Ivanore relished the touch of a man who obviously was attracted to her. She could not deny that her body responded to him, that she enjoyed Erland’s advances. But it was all a fantasy, she knew, nothing but an echo of the feelings she still had
for Jayson. It would be unfair to let Erland believe otherwise.
She slid her hand out from under his and turned away. Outside, the sky had grown dark. The first stars of the night were appearing one by one on the horizon.
“I’ve watched you roam these halls,” said Erland. “You’re here against your will, I understand that, yet you never complain.”
Ivanore looked up sharply, surprised to learn that she had been the object of an unknown observer all this time. “I was supposed to return home to Imaness,” she said, “but Arik brought me here instead. I’m still hoping one day he’ll let me go.”
Erland came around the altar. He reached for her hand again. “And in the meantime, might I dare to hope—”
He leaned close to her, his face moving to within an inch of hers. Her breath caught in her chest as she realized that he intended to kiss her, and for only the briefest of moments, she was tempted to let him. It had been so long since she had been kissed, and like any woman, she longed to be cherished, to be loved. But this was all wrong. This was not the man she dreamed of night after night. This was not the love she wanted.
She took a step back, their hands still grasping each other.
“I’m sorry if I’ve mislead you,” she said with tender certainty, “but my heart belongs to my husband.”
Erland held her eyes for another long moment, then he released her hand and took a step back as well. His form lost its casual easiness, and the stiffness of a soldier returned.
“My apologies,” he said in almost a whisper. “I hope I have not offended you.”
“You haven’t,” she said.
Erland nodded sharply. “It will not happen again, I swear it.”
He walked to the archway and picked up the torch. He held it to one of the candles and relit it. The flame sprung back to life.
“I’ll take you down to dinner,” he said.
Ivanore hesitated, glancing back toward the window. Then she shut the hidden drawer and followed Erland out of the chapel.
16
Jayson could not sleep. He lay in his bed listening to the stillness in the air. At times, he heard the hoot of an owl outside his window, the same owl that had been overseeing Ashlin since he had first arrived. Jayson’s intensified sense of hearing caught sounds humans normally missed: insects’ rapidly beating wings, the crunch of their carapaces in an owl’s beak, the snap of leaves snapping off tree limbs in the night wind.
He rolled to his side and pressed his eyes closed. He was tempted to go to the kitchen and sneak some of Nira’s prized wine which she used in her cooking. That might make him drowsy at least, and it wouldn’t take much. Agorans’ systems reacted strongly to even a little alcohol. So, she wouldn’t even notice it was missing. But no. He chided himself for even considering it. He’d sworn off drink years ago when it had nearly cost him the crystal, which he now kept in a cloth sack tied to his waist. He would never let it out of his sight again, not until it was safe in Ivanore’s possession again.
Jayson drew in a deep, slow breath. He imagined the air moving through his chest and shoulders and back, trailing through his limbs to his fingers and toes. He willed each muscle to relax.
As his mind finally began to drift, he heard a distinct creak of wood in the distance. It wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable. He sat up and tuned his ear toward the Guardian cottages. Why had someone opened a door so late at night? It wasn’t any of his business. Nor were the faint sounds of footsteps along the ground. It was more than one person, though he couldn’t be sure.
It wasn’t until he heard the whinnies of several horses that Jayson got to his feet. By now the sounds were louder, horses’ hooves clomping, their breaths snorting in the frigid air. By the time he reached his bedroom door, the horses, a dozen of them at least, he was certain of that, were galloping away.
“Nira!” Jayson shouted, flinging open his door.
The woman’s head appeared a moment later through a crack in a door down the hall. She wore a loose-fitting lace cap over her braided gray hair, and the candle she held in her hand cast a weak glow across the walls.
“Nira, someone’s taken the horses,” he said, bounding past her and down the stairs.
He didn’t bother searching for his cloak, which was still damp from being washed a few hours earlier. Instead, he marched, barefoot, out of the house toward Gerard’s cottage. But the leader of the Guardians was already outside.
“I was on my way to you,” said Gerard, “but it seems you heard it too.”
“The horses. Are they all gone?”
Gerard shook his head. “Fourteen. The others are fine. What happened?” He scratched his head, bewildered.
From the barn, another figure appeared, running toward them. When he was close enough to Gerard’s lamp, Jayson saw that it was Teak, gasping for breath.
“We have to go after them!” he shouted frantically.
“Of course, but there’s no point in the darkness. We might as well wait the few hours until dawn and track them then.”
“No, you don’t understand. The horses weren’t stolen. Dianis and several of the men have gone to Ralen-Arch. They plan to head off the Vatéz.”
Gerard ran a nervous hand through his thinning hair. “What has that girl gone and done?”
“We have to go after them,” said Teak. “If we hurry, maybe we can stop them.”
The young man turned, ready to run off to the stables, but Gerard grabbed Teak by the arm. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.
Teak looked at him with a shocked expression. “What? But Dianis is your daughter. What’s more, she’ll soon be my wife. She’ll get hurt. She might get killed.”
“I know the risk, son,” said Gerard. “But say you managed to catch up to her, which you won’t. Not until you’ve reached the village. Do you really think she’ll listen to you? That any of them would listen to you?”
“She’ll have to listen to me.”
Gerard’s shook his head. “Son, you’ve got a lot to learn about women. At least you’ve got a lot to learn about that woman.”
Teak yanked his arm free of Gerard’s grasp. He looked to Jayson, his eyes pleading. “Jayson, will you go with me?”
Jayson knew Gerard was right. He had known many women in his life, and few were as stubborn as Dianis. Once she got an idea in her head, there was no getting it out again.
Teak had a right to be concerned. He looked at Gerard who studied him with narrowed eyes, as if the old man felt cornered. He was the leader of the Guardians and had to consider the wellbeing of all under his care, but he was also a father with a father’s love for his child. Gerard didn’t have to say it. He wanted Jayson to go, needed him to bring Dianis back.
“All right,” said Jayson with a reluctant sigh. “We’ll go. The two of us,” he added, eyeing Teak. “We don’t need the whole camp charging into Ralen-Arch and causing a ruckus. We’ll find Dianis and the others and do our best to talk some sense into them.”
Teak gave a relieved smile, then he hurried toward the stables. Before Jayson followed, he glanced back at Gerard, who already wore a smug expression on his face.
“Happy?” asked Jayson.
Gerard nodded. “Just bring my daughter back,” he replied. “Preferably alive.”
***
Jayson and Teak rode as if their lives depended on it, but what did they hope to gain? If they were lucky, they would intercept Dianis and the others before they reached Ralen-Arch. Though he doubted he could dissuade them from continuing on. Would Jayson and Teak be forced to join their brigade? He supposed so, though he preferred not to get involved at all.
There was always a chance that they might run into the Vatéz themselves, coming or going from their mission. What then? They’d have to be careful to avoid the main road once they got closer. Dianis would surely be thinking the same thing.
They stopped a few times to let the horses rest and drink from a stream but then continued on with as much speed as the horses coul
d bear. As the sun began to peak over the distant mountains, Jayson began to recognize the area. They were nearing their destination, but they had not caught up with Dianis. She and the others had, of course, chosen the fastest of Ashlin’s horses.
Jayson and Teak veered off the road into the forest and cut through the trees toward the village, but before it was even in sight, Jayson stopped his horse. “Teak, hold up,” he said.
As Teak’s horse paused beside him, Jayson listened. The sound of air pushing through the horse’s nostrils was loud in his ears, but he focused on sounds further away, the sounds of multiple horses’ hoofs scraping restlessly against the decaying undergrowth of the forest, and beyond that a faint whimper of a child. Jayson sniffed the air. To his relief, he smelled no hint of fire. The village had not been burned. He did smell a hint of fresh blood, but not enough to suggest a slaughter.
“Someone’s hurt,” he told Teak.
They continued forward cautiously and soon came upon the horses from Ashlin tied to a few trees. Jayson and Teak left their mounts as well and continued on foot to the edge of the village. It was quieter than he expected, but a new sound reached his ears, a slow rhythmic creak, as if someone were opening and closing a stubborn hinge.
When Jayson stepped through the cottages into the village center he saw immediately why the town was so quiet. A group of people, it looked like nearly everyone who lived there, had gathered around a large oak tree and were staring solemnly up at it. A branch jutted out like an extended arm, a thick rope tied around it. The rope hung down, taut as a bowstring, and swayed one way and then the other, the rope around the limb creaking as it rubbed against the bark. At the end of the rope was a man, his neck bent at an odd angle and trapped in a tight noose while the rest of his body hung limply, except for his arms, which were secured behind his back.
Teak looked away, but Jayson scanned the faces of the crowd. A young girl clung to a woman’s skirt, her cries weak and muffled. The others were all silent, their eyes vacant of expression as if in shock.
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