Soren couldn’t have made more of a mess of things if he’d been actively trying.
His only comfort was that neither Rane nor Kayla had followed him through the strange magical tunnel from Eric the Bold’s dungeon to this place. If they had managed to get away from Eric or kill him, they were safe.
His only motivation from now on was to get out of here, find them, and help his brother out of whatever trouble Soren’s recklessness had gotten him into.
Keeping Rane from more hurt had been all he’d cared about when he’d dived for the gem before Eric could get his hands on it.
“Well, just when we thought things were already interesting, they get even more so.” Five new men shuffled into the thin moonlight from the far corner of the cell.
“Who’re you?” Soren already knew it would be hard to keep Travis’s men back, but another five would be impossible.
“We also touched the gem. I’m Garth, and my friend Jon, here, and me, were the first to come through.” The man limped a little as he walked forward. He was big, with the build of a blacksmith or a bricklayer. “Harwick, Fred and Sam,” he indicated the remaining three, “came one by one, later.”
Garth paused and Soren could see the look in his eyes when he glanced at Travis’s men was one of dislike.
“Seems you have a history with these five, and it’s not a friendly one. So on the wisdom of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, you’ll find we’d be in your corner, here, not theirs.”
Soren gave them a nod. “Making friends as usual, Travis?” He pulled his former training partner up a little higher.
“It was a misunderstanding over food when we first arrived, is all. And I told you, I took no pleasure in treating you the way Jasper wanted you treated.” Travis’s voice hitched a little.
“And yet, your first action on seeing me was to attack,” Soren said.
“I thought you were Rane. It never occurred to me you would escape Jasper, and you’ve always looked so much alike. I blamed him for sending us here.” Travis tried to lift himself higher on his toes.
“Ah, now that, I believe. Although I know my brother would have warned you not to touch the gem. That’s exactly the kind of person he is. If it had been me you’d captured in the forest, I’d have gotten out of the way and left you to it. But Rane, he’d have told you exactly what would happen, and you went ahead with it anyway.”
One of Travis’s oafs, Burk, if Soren remembered correctly, made a snorting sound. “We were warned, right enough. But no, Travis had to have a look.”
Soren grinned at the first sign of a crack in the group in front of him.
Travis twisted beneath his arm, trying to get free. “I’m sorry, Soren. But how you were treated by Jasper was nothing to do with me. And you’re right, Rane doesn’t deserve my anger. I touched the gem, even though he told me not to.”
Soren squeezed a little harder. “I might accept that, although not from your four oafs, who were never happier than when they were following Jasper’s orders to make my life a living hell. But Princess Kayla told me Rane was under the power of an enchantment by Eric the Bold when you grabbed him to take him back to Jasper. That your forcing him in the wrong direction would have been terrible for him.” Soren had seen the way Kayla had looked when she’d viewed the evidence that Rane’s journey to Eric had been cut short, and he’d been abducted and taken toward Jasper’s stronghold. She’d hunched over and shivered, and he could only guess, as she’d been under the grip of the same enchantment as Rane at one time, that she knew exactly how agonizing it must have been. He had to breathe to get control of himself. “For hurting my brother, there is no forgiveness.”
There was silence.
“I didn’t believe him about the enchantment at first. Thought he was putting us on.” Travis’s words were a thin whisper.
“And later?”
Travis shuddered. “What was I to do? Let him go? What would Jasper have done to me?”
Soren said nothing. He found a place of cold, hard rage inside him, and was able to loosen his grip a little. It was time to work out an escape plan.
“Who is lord here?” Soren addressed his question to Garth. He hadn’t seen much of the stronghold he’d landed in, but the moonlight had shown enough to see that it was well-kept and large.
“William of Nesta. We’re in Klevan, on the north-eastern edge of the Great Forest. Nesta is a small principality, with the Great Forest on the western border, and Klevan to the north, east and south.”
Soren had heard of Nesta, but he hadn’t paid attention to the politics of the area. “Is the liege lord still on good terms with the King of Klevan?”
Garth nodded. “He is. Or was, at the time I came here. Since I’ve been in his dungeon, who knows?”
Soren looked around the room, keeping his hold on Travis nice and tight. “Does he know how you all came to be here?”
Garth shrugged. “Until Sam arrived, I didn’t know, myself. About six weeks ago, Jon and I were eating lunch at the edge of the forest. We’re from Jerat, in south Klevan. There’d been a storm raging for three days, and it was the first time we’d been able to go back to chopping wood. One of the trees had been blown over, and we saw a pouch caught beneath it. There was a deep hole in the trunk, and it had obviously been hidden in there, and had fallen out when the tree was blown over. I tipped the pouch out, saw the gem amongst the things, reached out for it . . .” He squirmed, uncomfortable. “We thought we’d been taken by wild magic.”
“He didn’t know whether to believe us or not.” Jon, his friend, was almost as big, his voice deep and rough. “But enough strange things are happening in the Great Forest that it was possible we were telling the truth. He didn’t let us go, though, just in case.”
“And you three?” Soren looked over at Garth and Jon’s companions. He wanted all the pieces before he made his next move. He could feel Travis had almost relaxed under his grip, although he didn’t loosen his hold.
Harwick shrugged. “I’m a woodcutter, too. I found the pouch, all the contents spilled over the ground. Saw the glitter of the gem . . .” He made a face.
Fred lifted his hands. “I went looking for Harwick. Same thing.”
“And Sam?”
Sam shifted. He was young, not yet twenty, if Soren was to guess. He had the thin, whip-like build of a hard-worked apprentice. “I work for a magic hunter. And from what I’ve just heard between you and Travis, I know of you.” He looked at Soren with interest. “The De’Villier brothers, right?”
Soren gave a slow nod.
“Got a reputation in the business, you do. No-one knows how you always find such good stuff. Anyways, me and the boss were combing for items, came across the pouch, but we weren’t going to touch nothing. Kiss o’ death.” He glanced sideways at the others, with a look that dismissed them as amateurs.
“Handled everything with gloves, put it all back in the pouch, went to sell it at the Hidden Market, over in Therston.
“And?” This was getting very, very interesting.
“Jisuel was interested. He usually is.” Sam gave a shrug. “But when he went through the pouch, there weren’t that many wild magic items there. Said it were a sorcerer’s pouch. That almost everything in it were made from sky magic.” Again he shrugged, as if he didn’t understand why that should make any difference. “He only wanted the two or three wild magic items, tried to give the boss the rest back. But the boss didn’t want it, if it were some sorcerer’s stash. They come after you, they think you messed with their stuff. And some of their things, it actually calls to them, tells them where it is.” He shuddered. “So the boss wanted it gone. He were outside the tent, making a deal with Jisuel, special price for the lot, and I thought, if the gem ain’t a wild magic item, and Jisuel said it weren’t, then maybe it were an honest to goodness gem. The real thing. So I picked it up to have a closer look . . .” He lifted his hands, the result self-explanatory.
“And you’ve told William of Nesta all this?
” Soren wondered why the liege lord had them all imprisoned.
“When Harwick, Fred and Sam landed here, a couple of weeks apart each, he started developing a suspicion we were being sent by a sorcerer to take the stronghold from the inside.” Garth shifted, stepping more fully into the moonlight, and Soren could see he was still recovering from a beating. “He questioned us for days trying to find out if that was true before giving up. He hasn’t even bothered asking this lot.” He tipped his head at Travis.
Soren thought about it. “Travis and his merry crew would be more likely to confirm his suspicion than anything else. They’re trained men of war.”
Travis snorted, the sound vibrating through Soren’s forearm which lay across his throat.
Garth gave a little nod. “He has something else up his sleeve. We heard the guards say he was calling in his own sorcerer to find out what’s going on.”
There was silence while everyone considered how unpleasant that might turn out to be.
“I’m going to let you go, Travis.” Soren forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. He’d have to worry about dealing with a sorcerer when the time came. “You going to attack me again?”
Travis shook his head, and Soren pushed him forward into his men.
For a moment everyone waited to see if the power shift in the cell held.
Travis shook his shoulders and rubbed at his neck, but he didn’t launch himself back at Soren. The two groups arranged themselves on opposite sides of the dark room, and as Soren slid down to sit with Garth and his friends, his eye was drawn to a small rucksack on Travis’s side of the cell.
He felt a familiar tingle.
The De’Villier brothers were the biggest providers of wild magic items to the Hidden Market because in the same incident that took their father from them, they’d both been touched by a strange affinity to the bizarre, mysterious things that wild magic produced.
And Soren’s senses were telling him Travis had at least one of those things in his rucksack.
All he had to do was get it.
CHAPTER THREE
HALAKAN STRONGHOLD LOOKED IMPOSING against the moonlit sky. The front gates were guarded, and there was no back gate. Climbing the walls was almost impossible with the guard William had set.
Luckily Miri didn’t need to.
She kept to the dark shadows thrown by the trees at the forest’s edge, and made her way to a part of the wall into which a small, circular look-out tower had been built. It jutted out from the wall in a smooth curve.
She watched the window of the tower for more than ten minutes, until she was convinced there was no-one watching at the narrow window, and slipped across the open ground until she was directly under the overhang.
No-one looking down from above could see her now.
She felt along the wall, moving quickly in case William had set some ground patrols, or sent someone out to fetch her on the heels of the latest flare of light.
At last her fingertips found the slim lever masquerading as a metal pin set into the wall. She pulled it toward herself, and the small door her father had created swung open with a tiny creak.
She hadn’t thought about maintaining it since her father’s death, but hearing the hinges squeak made her realize she’d grown complacent, cut herself off too much from what was happening around her.
She stooped low and eased herself into the short tunnel that ran the length of the wall’s thickness, at least eight feet, and shut the door behind her.
She was plunged into absolute darkness, but she knew the door out was only a few steps away, and she shuffled forward, hands out, until she reached the other side.
She fumbled for the lever, and pulled it toward her.
This time the squeak of the hinges seemed worse.
Instead of the outer wall, with the soft hiss of the forest and the calls of birds and animals to cover any sound, the inner wall was set in an empty courtyard, and the noise seemed to echo and amplify.
Miri winced and eased the door open only as far as it needed to go for her to slip through.
She pressed herself back against it to make sure it was completely shut, and froze when she saw a guard right across from her in the small, quaint courtyard with its fountain and pretty flower beds laid out in a concentric pattern. The courtyard she’d always been sent to play in when her father had business with William of Nesta.
The guard had his back to her, facing into the main courtyard beyond, hunched a little against the cooler air.
Unfortunately, the fountain had been switched off, Miri guessed so that the noise of it would not cover any sounds of intruders, but why William would expect trouble here was a mystery. Unless he knew about the secret door her father had created.
Fear washed over her, and then she breathed through it. If William knew about the door, he’d have placed a guard on the other side of the wall, right in front of it.
This was something else. Something she would have to work out later.
She crept closer to the guard, and blinked when she saw he was leaning against a kind of pitchfork.
Whatever William was up to, she would have to get to the bottom of it, but now, she needed to get the man out of the way.
She crouched down and felt about for a stone, her fingers closing around a piece of gravel.
She pitched it, high and far as she could, and heard it hit the cobbles in the larger courtyard beyond.
The guard straightened and turned, and she was grateful she was still crouched low and deep in the shadows thrown by the high walls.
The guard seemed to shudder in relief when he couldn’t see anything, his gaze going high, as if looking into the sky. He turned back to face the courtyard, but he didn’t go and investigate.
Annoyed, Miri searched for another stone, found a bigger one, and pitched it low this time, so it clattered and skittered before it came to a stop.
The guard took a step away from her. “Baldic? That you?”
The silence stretched out, and then Miri pitched another stone.
“S’teeth.” The guard shifted, looked briefly over his shoulder into the small courtyard again and then moved out of sight.
“Baldic, damn you, answer.”
Miri kept to the wall, edging forward until she reached the entrance into the main courtyard. The guard was walking toward the back door to the kitchens, nerves and fear making his strides angry and clipped.
She ran, silent and in shadow, toward the side of the sturdy castle at the heart of the stronghold. The open stairs down to the dungeon were well known to her. Her father had taken them often, leaving her to play in the garden she’d just come from.
The sight of them always put a weight on her chest, and a sick nauseous feeling in her stomach.
She would get bored in the garden and come out into the main courtyard, playing with the cats the cook kept to deal with the mice, and talking to the servants as they walked back and forth. The sight of her father climbing the stairs after a few hours in the dungeon, shoulders drooping, gray-faced, was seared into her memory.
Which was why, when William had coming knocking on her door, asking her to take up the vacant position of torturer, she had slammed the door in his face.
Her questions tonight would be of a far more polite nature than any William would have asked her to make.
* * *
Soren couldn’t sleep.
He watched the slim stripes of moonlight that fell through the high window as they moved slowly across the floor.
It was only two days ago he’d still been a prisoner in Jasper’s dungeon, hanging from a wall, in pain, with not enough food or water. But it had been the darkness that had bothered him the most.
Pitch black, with no-one but himself for company, with no idea whether it was night or day, the weeks he’d been there had blurred together into one long night of hell.
Even a strip of moonlight was far more than he’d had before. And then there were the two glorious days of freedom a
fter Rane’s betrothed had rescued him. Of light, and food and, thanks to the golden apple, no more pain, either. His body had been completely healed, although even the golden apple couldn’t put back the weight he had lost.
Things were obviously different in William of Nesta’s prison. Not nearly as harsh.
Travis had set a man on watch, but Soren was sure that was only because of his own arrival. The guard had nodded off half an hour ago.
It was time to search Travis’s bag for the wild magic item that he felt from the other side of the room like a second heart-beat.
He rose, waiting a moment to see if he’d disturbed anyone, and then moved across the cell.
Travis had set the bag beside him, but he didn’t seem overly protective of it, and Soren wondered if he even realized what he had in there.
Most people didn’t.
It had always seemed to him and Rane that a law of inverse proportion applied to wild magic. The more ordinary an item appeared, the more powerful it was.
When he got close enough to Travis, he crouched and then lay down, just one more body asleep, if anyone were to wake and check.
Slowly, he inched to the bag, lifting it and turning it around so the flap faced him, and carefully opened it up.
The bag contained a crushed wool tunic, which Soren lifted out. The bag appeared empty without it, but he could sense the wild magic, pulsing just within reach of his fingertips. He inched back and slid away from Travis, taking the bag to where the moonlight filtered in.
He had to angle it to catch the light, because he wasn’t prepared to touch anything without looking at it first, but at last, deep in one corner, almost invisible, he saw a small black stick and a dull moonstone, and his hatred for Travis flared a little brighter.
Rane’s things.
He should have guessed.
If Rane had had his moonstone, he would not have been caught by Eric the Bold to begin with.
Travis’s theft had caused his brother serious harm.
The Silver Pear (The Dark Forest Book 2) Page 2