by Tad Williams
“Lay down your weapons!” the voice said again in thickly-accented Westerling. “You are prisoners of the rand-warders. We will kill you if you resist.” Several more torches flared alight. The night was suddenly full of armed shadows.
“Merciful Aedon!” Duchess Gutrun said from somewhere nearby. “Sweet Elysia, what now?”
A large shape pushed toward her—Isorn, going to comfort his mother.
“Do not move!” the disembodied voice barked out; a moment later one of the riders walked his horse forward, his spear point lowering, catching a glint of torchlight. “I hear women,” the rider said. “Do nothing foolish and they will be spared. We are not beasts.”
“And what about the rest?” Josua said, stepping forward into the light. “We have many here wounded and sick. What will you do with us?”
The rider leaned down to stare at Josua, momentarily exposing his hooded features. He had a rough face, with a shaggy, braided beard and scarred cheeks. Heavy bracelets clinked on his wrists. Deornoth felt his tension ease somewhat. At least their enemies were mortal men.
The rider spat into the dark grass. “You are prisoners. You ask no questions. The March-thane will decide.” He turned to his fellows. “Ozhbern! Kunret! Round them in a circle to march!” He wheeled his horse to supervise as Josua, Deornoth, and the others were herded at spearpoint into the ring of torchlight.
“Your March-thane will be unhappy if you mistreat us,” Josua said.
The leader laughed. “He will be more unhappy with me if you are not at the wagons by sun-high.” He turned to one of the other riders. “All?”
“All, Hotvig. Six men, two women, one child. Only one cannot walk.” He indicated Sangfugol with the butt of his spear.
“Put him on a horse,” Hotvig said. “Over the saddle, no matter. We must ride fast.”
Even as they were prodded into movement, Deornoth sidled closer to Josua. “It could be worse,” he whispered to the prince. “It could have been the Norns who caught us instead of Thrithings-men.”
The prince did not reply. Deornoth touched his arm, feeling the muscles tense as barrel staves beneath his fingers. “What’s wrong, Prince Josua? Have the Thrithings-men thrown in with Elias? My lord?”
One of the riders looked down, mouth set in a humorless, gap-toothed grin. “Quiet, stone-dwellers,” he snarled. “Save your breath for walking.”
Josua turned a haunted face toward Deornoth. “Didn’t you hear him?” the prince whispered. “Didn’t you hear him?”
Deornoth was alarmed. “What?”
“Six men, two women, and a child,” Josua hissed, looking from side to side. “Two women! Where is Vorzheva?”
The rider slapped a spear butt against his shoulder and the prince lapsed into anguished silence. They trudged on between the horsemen as dawn began to smolder in the eastern sky.
As she lay on her hard bed in the darkened servant’s quarters, Rachel the Dragon imagined she could hear the gibbet creaking, even above the howling wind that skirled through the battlements. Nine more bodies, the chancellor Helfcene’s among them, were swaying above the Nearulagh Gate tonight, dancing helplessly to the wind’s fierce music.
Nearer at hand, somebody was crying.
“Sarrah? Is that you?” Rachel hissed. “Sarrah?”
The moaning of the gale died down. “Y-yes, mistress,” came the muffled reply.
“Blessed Rhiap, what are you sobbing about? You’ll wake the others!” Beside Sarrah and Rachel, there were only three other women now sleeping in the maid’s quarters, but all five cots were huddled together to conserve heat in the large, chilly room.
Sarrah seemed to struggle to compose herself, but when she answered her voice was still shaken by sobs. “I’m…I’m afraid, M-mistress Rachel.”
“Of what, fool girl, the wind?” Rachel sat up, holding the thin blanket closely around her. “It’s blowing up a storm, but you’ve heard wind before.” Torchlight bleeding beneath the doorway revealed the faint shape of Sarrah’s pale face.
“It’s…my gammer used to say…” The maid coughed wetly. “Gammer said that nights like this…are when dead spirits walk. That you…you can hear the voices in the w-wind.”
Rachel was grateful for the darkness that hid her own discomforted shiver. If there ever would be such a night, tonight seemed a likely choice. The wind had been raging like a wounded animal since sundown, wailing among the Hayholt’s chimneys and scratching at the doors and windows with insistent, twiggy fingers.
She made her voice firm. “The dead don’t walk in my castle, idiot girl. Now go back to sleep before you give the others nightmares.” Rachel lowered herself back down onto her pallet, trying to find a position that would ease her knotted back. “Go to sleep. Sarrah,” she said. “The wind can’t hurt you, and there’ll be work in plenty tomorrow, the Good Lord knows, just a-picking up what the wind’s blown down.”
“I’m sorry.” The pale face sank. After a few sniffling minutes, Sarrah was silent once more. Rachel stared upward into the blackness and listened to the night’s restless voices.
She might have slept—it was hard to tell when all was in darkness—but Rachel knew that she had been listening to a sound beneath the wind-song for some time. It was a quiet, stealthy scratching, a dry sound like birdclaws on a slate roof.
Something was at the door.
She might have been sleeping, but now, suddenly, she was terribly awake. When she turned her head to the side she could see a shadow slipping along the strip of light below the door. The scratching became louder, and with it came the sound of someone crying.
“Sarrah?” Rachel whispered, thinking that the noise had awakened the maid, but there was no response. As she listened wide-eyed in the dark she knew that the strange, thin sound was coming from the hallway—from whatever stood outside her locked door.
“Please,” someone whispered there, “please…”
Blood pounding in her head, Rachel sat up, then silently placed her bare feet on the cold stone floor. Could she be dreaming? She seemed so very wide awake, but it sounded like a boy’s voice, like…
The scratching took on an impatient quality which quickly began to sound like tearfulness—whatever it was, she thought, it must be frightened, to scratch so…A wandering spirit, a homeless thing walking lone and lorn on this blustery night, looking for its long-vanished bed?
Rachel crept closer to the door, silent as snow. Her heart labored. The wind in the battlements stilled. She was alone in the dark with the breathing of the slumbering maids and the pitiful scraping of what stood beyond the door.
“Please,” the voice said again, softly, weakly. “I’m scared…”
She traced the sign of the Tree on her breast, then grasped the bolt and drew it back. Though the moment of choosing was past, she drew the door open slowly: even with the choice made, she feared what she would see.
The solitary torch against the far corridor outlined the faint figure, its thatch of hair, its scarecrow-thin limbs. The face that turned to her, startled eyes showing their whites, was blackened as though burnt.
“Help me,” it said, staggering through the doorway into her arms.
“Simon!” Rachel cried, and beyond all sense felt her heart overflowing. He had come back, through fire, through death…
“Si…Simon?” the boy said, his eyes sagging closed from exhaustion and pain. “Simon’s dead. He…he died…in the fire. Pryrates killed him…”
He went limp in her arms. Head whirling, she pulled his sagging form through the doorway, letting him slide to the floor, then shot the bolt firmly home and went looking for a candle. The wind cried mockingly; if other voices cried within it, there were none that Rachel recognized.
“It’s Jeremias, the chandler’s boy,” Sarrah said wonderingly as Rachel washed the dried blood from his face. In the candlelight, Jeremias’ dark-socketed eyes and scratched cheeks made him seem almost a wizened old man
“But he was a chubby thing,” Rachel
said. Her mind was boiling with the boy’s words, but things must be done one at a time. What would the senseless girls think if she let herself go all to pieces? “What’s happened to him?” she growled. “He’s thin as a stave.”
The maids had all gathered around, blankets wrapped as cloaks around their nightdresses. Jael, no longer as stout as she had once been, owing to the greater burden of work all the remaining girls shared, stared at the senseless youth.
“I thought someone said Jeremias ran away?” she said, frowning. “Why did he come back?”
“Don’t be foolish,” Rachel said, trying to tug Jeremias’ tattered shirt over his head without waking him. “If he had run away, how would he have gotten back into Hayholt at the middle of night? Flown?”
“Then tell us where he has been,” one of the other girls said. It was a measure of Rachel’s shock at Jeremias’ entrance that this near-impertinence went completely unremarked-upon by the Mistress of Chambermaids.
“Help me turn him over,” she said, working the shirt free. “We’ll put him to sleep in…Oh! Elysia, Mother of God!” She fell into astonished silence Sarrah burst into tears beside her.
The youth’s back was crisscrossed with deep, bloody weals.
“I feel…I feel sick!” Jael mumbled, then lurched away.
“Don’t be a fool,” Rachel said, regaining her composure once more. “Splash some water on your face, then bring me the rest of the basin. This wet cloth alone won’t do. And take that sheet from the bed Hepzibah used to sleep in and tear strips for bandages. Rhiap’s Pain, do I have to do everything myself?”
It took the whole sheet and part of another one. His legs had been scourged, too.
Jeremias awoke just before dawn. His eyes at first roamed the room without seeing anything, but after a time he seemed to regain his wits. Sarrah, sadness and pity shining through her homely face as though it were glass, gave him some water to drink.
“Where am I?” he asked at last.
“You’re in the servant’s quarters, boy,” Rachel said briskly. “As you should know. Now, what sort of mischief have you been up to?”
He stared at her groggily for a moment, “You’re Rachel the Dragon,” he said at last. Despite their weariness and fright, and the lateness of the hour, the chambermaids were hard put to suppress their smiles. Rachel, strangely, did not seem angered in the slightest.
“I’m Rachel,” she agreed. “Now, where have you been, boy? We heard that you ran away.”
“You thought I was Simon,” Jeremias said, wonderingly, staring around the chamber. “He was my friend—but he’s dead, isn’t he? Am I dead?”
“You’re not dead. What happened to you?” Rachel leaned forward to brush Jeremias’ tangled hair out of his eyes; her hand lingered for an instant on his cheek. “You’re safe now. Talk to us.”
He seemed about to slide back into sleep, but after a moment he opened his eyes again. When he spoke it was more plainly than before. “I did try to run away,” he said. “When the king’s soldiers beat my master Jakob and drove him out the gate. I tried to run away that night, but the guards caught me. They gave me to Inch.”
Rachel frowned. “That animal.”
Jeremias’ eyes widened. “He’s worse than any animal. He’s a devil. He said I would be his apprentice, down in the furnaces…in the forges. He thinks he’s a king down there…” The boy’s face screwed up, and he suddenly burst into tears. “He says he’s…he’s Doctor Inch, now. He beat me and…he used me.”
Rachel leaned forward to blot his cheeks with her kerchief. The girls made the sign of the Tree.
Jeremias’ sobbing diminished. “It’s worse than anything…down there.”
“You said something, boy,” Rachel said briskly. “Something about the king’s counselor. About Simon. Say it again.”
The boy opened his brimming eyes wide. “Pryrates killed him. Simon and Morgenes. The priest went there with troops. Morgenes fought with him, but the chamber burned down and Simon and the doctor died.”
“And how could you know that?” she snapped, a little harshly. “How could such as you know that?”
“Pryrates said so himself! He comes down to see Inch. Sometimes he just brags, like about killing Morgenes. Other times he helps Inch…h-hurt people.” Jeremias was having trouble. “Sometimes…sometimes the priest takes people away with him…takes them when he goes. They don’t come b-back.” He fought to catch his breath. “And there’s…other things. Other things down there. Terrible things. Oh, God, please don’t send me back.” He grasped Rachel’s wrist with his hand. “Please hide me!”
Rachel tried to mask her shock. She deliberately closed off her thoughts about Simon and this new revelation until she could consider it all in privacy. But despite her firm self-control, Rachel felt a cold hatred running through her, a hatred unlike anything she had ever felt.
“We won’t let them have you,” she said. Her straightforward tone made it clear that any gainsaying of her will would bring great risk to the gainsayer. “We’ll…we’ll…” She broke off for a moment, nonplussed. What would they do? They could not hide the boy for long here in the servant’s quarters, especially if he had run away from the king’s forges below the Hayholt.
“What ‘other things’ were there?” Jael asked. Her brown, calf-like eyes were puzzled.
“Hush, now,” Rachel said sharply, but Jeremias was already answering.
“I d-don’t know,” he said. “There are…shadows that move. Shadows without people. And things that are there—and then they aren’t. And voices…” he shivered, and his eyes stared past the candle-flame to the darkness in the room’s comer. “Voices that cry, and sing, and…and…” Tears formed in his eyes once more.
“That’s enough,” Rachel said sternly, displeased with herself for letting the boy talk so long. Her charges darted glances among themselves, nervous as startled sheep.
Elysia! she thought, that’s all I need—to have the last of my girls frightened out of the castle.
“Too much talking,” she said aloud. “The boy needs rest. He’s so worn and beaten he has the vapors. Let him sleep.”
Jeremias shook his head weakly. “I’m telling the truth,” he said. “Don’t let them have me!”
“We won’t,” Rachel said. “Go to sleep. If we can’t hide you, we’ll think of some way to get you out of the Hayholt. You can go to your kin, wherever they may be. We’ll keep you away from that one-eyed devil Inch.”
“…And Pryrates,” Jeremias said slurredly, succumbing to drowsiness. “He…talks…to the Voices…”
A moment later the boy was slumbering. A little of the fear seemed to lift from his hunger-thinned features. Rachel looked down at him and felt her heart grown hard as a stone in her breast. That devil-priest, Pryrates! That murderer! What kind of plague had he brought down on their house, what foulness to her beloved Hayholt?
And what had he done to her Simon?
She turned to look sternly at her wide-eyed maids. “You had all better get what sleep you can,” she growled. “A little excitement doesn’t mean the floors won’t need scrubbing when the sun is up.”
As they crawled into their beds, Rachel snuffed the candle, then lay down with her cold thoughts. Outside, the wind was still searching for a way in.
The morning sun rose above the gray blanket of clouds. It brought a diffuse light to the rolling grasslands of the High Thrithings, but could not lift the damp from the endless leagues of prairie grass and heather. Deornoth was soaked to the thighs and tired of marching.
The Thrithings-men did not stop for a meal, instead eating dried meat and fruits from their saddlebags as they rode. The prisoners were not offered any food, and were only allowed to pause for a short rest at mid-morning, during which time Deornoth and Josua quietly questioned the rest of their party about Vorzheva’s whereabouts. No one had seen her leave, although Geloë said she had awakened Vorzheva at the first sound of the approaching riders.
“She wa
s born on this land,” the witch woman told the prince. “I would not worry for her too much.” Geloë’s own face, however, showed more than a trace of concern.
Hotvig and his men roused Josua’s band after a too-short rest and the march began anew. A wind sprang up from the northwest, soft at first, then blowing stronger, until the ribbons on the Thrithings-men’s saddles whipped like tournament pennants and the long grasses bent double. The prisoners labored on, shivering in their wet clothing.
Soon they began to see signs of habitation: small herds of cattle grazing on the low hills, watched over by solitary horsemen. As the sun rose closer to its noon apogee, the cattle herds they passed grew larger and closer together, until at last the prisoners found themselves following the snaking course of one of the Ymstrecca’s tributaries through the very midst of an immense throng of animals. The vast herd seemed to run from horizon to horizon and contained mostly cattle of the ordinary sort, but shaggy bison and bulls with long, curving horns also grazed among them, lifting their heads to stare bleanly at the passing prisoners, mouths solemnly chewing.
“It is obvious that these folk do not follow Geloë’s advice on vegetable-eating,” Deornoth said. “There is enough meat on the hoof here to feed all Osten Ard.” He looked hopefully to his prince, but Josua’s smile was a weary one.
“Many of them are sickly,” Gutrun pronounced. In her husband’s frequent absences, she ran the duke’s household at Elvritshalla with a firm hand, and rightly considered herself a good judge of livestock. “See, and there are not many calves for such a huge herd.”
One of the riders who had been listening made a noise of disgust, as if to show his disdain for the opinions of prisoners, but one of his mounted companions nodded his head and said: “It is a bad year. Many cows die birthing. Others eat but do not grow fat.” The Thrithings-man’s beard fluttered in the wind. “It is a bad year,” he repeated.