by S E Wendel
She caught a glimpse of the women on the bridge clinging to the ropes, their eyes wild, deciding which fate was better.
Ennis bit down on the gloved hand that tried to trail from her neck to her breast, and, able to wriggle just enough, she drove her elbow into the man’s nose. When he reeled back with a cry, she was momentarily free. She pushed through ironclad bodies, almost making it to Lora in the chaos before being grabbed again.
The men began to bicker amongst themselves over the stolen jewelry and captured women. Ennis cried out when Lora was wrenched from one man, taken by another.
A hush swept over the group as a tall man sauntered into Ennis’s sight from the direction of the Keep. They parted for him and she needed little to guess who he was.
Larn, Lord of the Midlands, Conqueror of the Lowlands, Murderer of the Highlands. His name was whispered, his person feared, his scar and its cause rumored about. Ennis thought his scar less gruesome than some of the stories made it seem, only running along the bridge of his nose down to his left jawline, and he certainly didn’t stand eight feet tall like some said. Still, she found him sufficiently terrifying. What short hair he had was matted, his skin was leathery and blood splattered, and his hands, gnarled, impossibly large, had only nine fingers. He was the stuff of nightmares and demon-tales. He turned his gaze to the few women who still clung to the swaying bridge.
“This way,” he said in a low voice. Ennis shuddered at the sound.
The women shivered. Ennis shook her head when her gaze met Mena’s, the daughter of her father’s seneschal. She opened her mouth to cry out, to stop her, but the girl sprang forward before she could form the words. Mena made a desperate leap at the far side, her feet pounding on the teetering boards.
Smirking, the Lord of the Midlands drew his sword, already dripping with blood, and cut the lines. The bridge creaked before falling into the dark water with a thunderous crash. The women’s screams echoed in Ennis’s ears long after their mouths filled with water and their bodies sank deep into the harbor. Her mouth agape, Ennis stared at Larn, thinking Themin certainly made some with less stardust than others.
The man who clasped Ennis’s shoulders in his callous grip tightened his hold as he began dragging her back up to Highcrest. Each time she stumbled he dug his fingers into the tense flesh above her collarbone.
“Don’t try anything, milady,” he spat.
When she managed to look up, she tried to pick out her sisters and Lora. The only one she saw was Essa. Her sister’s captor was so large a man that, as he grasped her in his arms, she had no need to walk. Her toes skimmed the ground now and again.
They climbed a set of stone steps that she knew would bring them to the top of the castle wall. Ennis lost all her breath when she looked down at her city. Flames ate at anything that wasn’t stone, the once fine cobblestone streets lay strewn with the dead or dying, and the whitewashed walls of houses were painted with blood.
The man gruffly pulled her back into motion as they walked along the top of the high wall. To her right was the dark harbor, now cluttered with boats and bodies, and to her left, the burning castle. The two other peaks, to the south and east, connected to the vast castle complex by five wide stone bridges and dozens of smaller wooden ones, burned like great torches. Themin himself would surely see.
Ennis watched as men up at the Keep set their torches to the huge Courtnay banner hanging above the doors to the great hall. It immediately caught and fire licked up the blue cloth, nibbling at the golden lion’s feet.
When Larn’s men saw him strolling across the top of the wall, they raised a loud cheer, and he answered them with widespread arms.
“Gentlemen,” he said loudly, “welcome to the north!”
They came to another set of stairs carved into the wall and began their descent to the sound of cheering and carnage. The women were guarded jealously as the group followed Larn up the main promenade back to the Keep. Hands reached out to clutch at Ennis and her heart leapt into her throat. She pushed into her captor, who threw her over to his other side. Men called to share the fresh slavemeat, and Ennis winced each time one demanded to stick her.
The city soundly taken, the horde followed Larn back up to the Keep. They were a lively bunch, their base appetites whetted, their imaginations wild. Ennis started at each new face, painfully aware of her body whenever a man blatantly looked at the swell of her breasts beneath her thin nightgown.
The courtyard of the Keep certainly looked like a battlefield, arrows and axes sticking out of the dead. Some were fallen warriors from the horde, but most were her father’s soldiers. Many of the Highcrestan men wore little armor, the call to defend too sudden for arming. They had thought the black hordes further off; her father thought they hadn’t the audacity to attack Highcrest.
The men stopped as Larn continued into the center of the courtyard. He regarded the butchery around him with a contented grin.
Noticing her toes were wet, Ennis looked down at her once-white slippers, now stained red. Beside her Adena screamed in her captor’s arms, wriggling, trying not to touch the blood running down the cobblestone. Adena couldn’t stomach blood, not since four of the province’s finest physicians all confirmed she had consumption.
Ennis’s gaze followed the bloody stream dammed against her foot. She went rigid when she saw the body, familiar armor adorning it, lying in the doorway.
“No!” she screamed. She drew Irina’s gaze first, then everyone’s around them, when she managed to break free of the hands holding her to rush to the Lord of Highcrest.
“Father!” she wailed, slumping down beside him. He was broken and blood-soaked, his blue eyes looking emptily skyward. A large crimson line ran across the side of his neck, and the hands that had cradled her all the years of her life lay motionless, his gold-hilted sword resting in his palm.
She could barely hear the anguished screams of her sisters and other women of Highcrest as she watched her father’s eyes flick to her own. For a moment, there was a glint in his eye as he looked upon his daughter. Then he tried to take a breath, a horrible, tortured sound that gurgled, trapped in his broken throat, and he was still. Ennis put her shaking, blood-stained hands on her head and wept.
Four fingers grasped Ennis’s hair, the nub of the fifth making her stomach roll. Larn threw her from her father, and she crashed to the ground, rolling a few feet away. Larn walked toward her, his boots making horrible, grating vibrations against her cheek, and Ennis held her breath.
He picked her up and set her on her knees, facing the gathered crowd of surviving noblewomen, female servants, and the horde that had killed the rest.
“Well, we’ve found one Courtnay bitch,” said Larn, circling around her with one hand behind his back, the other resting on the pommel of his sword. “But I know there are four.” His gaze slid down to her and all the heat drained out of her. “Where are they?”
Every part of her shook as she tried to fathom something to say. She told herself not to look at her sisters. She quickly considered telling him that those he’d doomed to a watery grave in the harbor had been her sisters. But then, would that make a difference?
Taking her silence as her answer, Larn struck her with the iron side of his gauntlet. As Ennis doubled over, her hands thrown up to clutch her face, Larn made his way over to the other captured women. The men holding them hurriedly brought them forth, and others were pushed forward from deeper within the horde. The women were silent, none daring to look at Larn.
Her teary gaze found Essa as Larn began inspecting the line of captured women. Her sister was slumped in her captor’s arms, tears dripping from her eyes. Her pink nightgown looked so out of place against the dark, dented armor and black cloak of the man who held her. Her sister, already dainty, looked like a child in such muscled arms.
Ennis’s hands trembled as she wiped away the blood trickling from her nose. She bit her cheek and righted herself. Her eyes flicked to her father’s body. Then Lora caught her gaze. Lor
a shook her head, her mouth opening to—
Ennis stumbled on her first steps, her hands pushing off the ground each time to propel forwards. She slid to a stop against her father’s body, held her breath, tried not to look at his face. She grimaced at the feel of lifeless flesh against her fingers as she pried the gold-hilted sword from his slack hand.
It seemed everyone was shouting as she stood with the sword, its hilt still warm, grasped between her white knuckles. The sword was heavier than she was used to. She’d held her father’s sword before, had always been told it would be hers one day, but had never fought with it.
Larn looked at her from over his shoulder in amused disinterest, his little grin ghoulishly bright against his grime-darkened face. He pushed the woman he’d been looking over into waiting arms and strode forward, unsheathing his sword with an unnecessary flourish. One side of his mouth crept up as he came to meet her.
“I won’t be kind enough to spare you twice,” he said.
“I won’t be kind enough once.”
They glowered at one another, Larn’s left eye narrowed more than the other from scar tissue. She took her defensive stance, years of training guiding her movements, but it felt awkward with one sword when she was used to two. He bared his teeth in a smile as he drew back, and Ennis sucked in a breath, bracing herself.
“Stop! Ennis, don’t!”
Even Larn looked back at Lora, surprised. Lora struggled forwards, her hair wild and cheeks wet.
“Please,” Lora begged.
As two men pulled her back, Ennis stood alone. She felt the fight draining out of her, oozing out with the blood on the cobblestones. Larn looked at the sword then back to her. He smirked.
She took a breath. Let it out. She dropped the sword, heard it clang against the cobblestones. As Larn sauntered towards her, she drew herself up to her full height and squared her shoulders. She was as ready as she could be for the hard hilt of his sword against her temple, and she fell with blood bubbling from her ear.
“Are we quite done?” he asked.
He filled his fist with her hair and pulled, making her vulnerable neck long and exposed.
“It’s good to know when you’ve lost.”
“The king will stop you,” she hissed, awaiting cold metal against her throat.
At this he chuckled and shoved her away. “You stupid bitch,” he said, circling her again. “I am the king now.”
She drew her knees into her chest, fearing another strike. Seemingly pleased to see her like that, Larn once more attended to the captured women. Ennis looked over at her sisters with unfocused eyes.
As he came upon Irina, Larn’s attention snapped to her similarly golden hair and he turned to face her. Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and the look she gave him, her brows furrowed over eyes that burned with hate, seemed to convince him.
“You’re one, then?”
Her lips drawn in a line, Irina replied, “Yes.”
Ennis watched as the man holding Irina let her go after a nod from Larn. The eldest Courtnay daughter glanced at her father’s corpse before quickly going to Ennis, who she enveloped in her arms. Drawn into her sister, Ennis’s head sloshed painfully, and she used her hands to try holding everything still.
Irina turned back to the crowd and said softly with an outstretched hand, “Adena. Essa.”
Essa took a deep breath. Her jaw set, she raised her head and looked composedly at her sisters. She jerked one shoulder out of her captor’s grasp and began pulling her other arm away. He let go only when he saw Larn’s measured face. Essa wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and went to her sisters, Adena close behind.
Having found the Courtnay daughters, Larn called out for all the others to be pushed into the courtyard with them. The other highborn ladies, daughters and wives of captains, swordsmen, and rich men, were joined by other surviving women of the castle. Two hundred tattered women closed in together against the horde’s swelling ranks.
Ennis shivered as she looked out at the mass of hungry faces. The men came ever closer, pushing forward, their anticipation pulsing through the courtyard. Larn paced slowly, deliberately before them, putting himself between them and the women. They called out to him, told him to hurry up about it, that they weren’t going to stick themselves.
“Now,” said Larn, a smile playing at his lips, “I must decide first-choice.”
Shouts of approval echoed and names were called out in suggestion. Larn nodded his head, considering. For show he even stroked his chin.
Finally, he looked up at his men with his mouth stretched in a lopsided grin. Squaring his shoulders and again placing one hand behind him and the other upon his sword, he announced, “Manek!”
There were a few cheers and much murmuring. The noise grew again as a younger warrior made his way to the head of the group. Ennis took only a moment to glance at the man. She thought he looked tired, his dark eyes underscored by similarly dark crescents. Larn made a grand gesture, ushering the man over towards the assembled women.
Leaning into the man, Larn said, “You did help to reap, now three shall you keep.”
Nodding solemnly, and with gleeful shouts suggesting which women would be best, the man walked slowly over to the women. He was tall, but not terribly so, and powerfully built, his shoulders and neck broad. His armor shone in the flickering firelight, a half circle, the rising sun, etched across the breastplate.
Before he could look at them fully, Larn called, “And Manek—not too many Courtnays.”
The man turned back without response. He looked over each woman quickly until he came to the Courtnay daughters. His eyes fell upon Ennis. She barely heard him say, “These three,” and only remembered to breathe when Lora squeezed her hand.
Ennis opened her eyes and Lora helped her stand. Her heart beat painfully as she took a half-step forward with Irina and Lora, leaving Adena and Essa behind.
“No,” Essa sobbed.
Larn stepped up beside the man, a satisfied grin on his face. “Good. The prettiest for me.” Larn’s two other choices screamed and wailed, holding each other, but Adena stood quietly, quivering, her eyes wide with horror and her gaunt face hollow.
Ennis’s chest felt as if it would rip apart, a stabbing pressure that lodged between her ribs. Larn, his laugh like a boom of thunder, shoved his prizes into the awaiting hands of his men. She swung to her left, reaching out for Essa, as Larn’s remaining warlords descended upon the women. A great squabbling started, men wrenching women from one another, and Essa’s hand slipped from hers as the man who had brought Essa up from the harbor carried her off.
Ennis cried out, losing sight of her sister, and watched, horrified, as women were torn at, thrown over shoulders, and had their clothes ripped away. She couldn’t look away, no matter how she wanted to, from two men pulling either arm of a woman, not giving up even as she screamed.
She jumped back into Lora when a man rushed them. He stopped short, a sword pressed against his neck. He backed away as the warlord who had claimed them stared him down.
When the man scurried away, the warrior sheathed his sword in one fluid movement then turned to look at the three women. Ennis cringed away from him as he threw an arm over her shoulder, and she only realized what he was doing when they were ushered from the courtyard. What she assumed were his men gathered around them too, creating a circle as they headed from the Keep down into the lower levels of the castle.
“You’re safe for now,” said the warrior.
Ennis didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
They reached what seemed a suitable spot for the warrior and stopped. He had their hands bound and the most loathsome piece of cloth, a simple circle of black cotton, tied round their necks as a sign of their enslavement. Her skin chafing under the coarse rope, Ennis looked back only once. Just one glimpse of her burning home, burning life, made her very soul ache. And as she stood in the dark, the sound of laughing men and restless horses made louder by her near sightlessnes
s, she found herself wishing to be in her father’s company.
Two
Before Themin could sit peacefully upon his heavenly throne, the seas churned and boiled. Beneath the waves his son Balan did rage, wondering at the size of his realm. Balan cursed his father and his earthly realm and sent his waves and rains to conquer them. Themin turned the sun upon Balan and the seas dried up. Now with no realm at all, Balan gave in to his father and conceded the rivers to his brother Adain, the rain to his mother Ceralia, and the springs to his father Themin.
—Mithrian creation myth
Ennis Courtnay had been highborn and destined for a life of power and leadership. While not the eldest and therefore entitled to less of a claim upon her father’s holdings, she had nonetheless rose in prominence and respect among the people. With a head for numbers and predilection for fine swords, many saw her as the son Ehman Courtnay hadn’t had.
As the gray dawn harkened a new day and the reality of the night previous, Ennis raised her head. She wished she was a man at that moment—the son deprived from her father. Perhaps they, together, could have saved Highcrest. Perhaps together they could have slain a few more whoresons before dying honorably. But most importantly, she would assuredly now be dead alongside her father rather than bound and disgraced.
The only color Ennis saw was red, streaking the sky and staining the ground. They had spent the night on one of the lower streets, at the quartermaster’s house close to the curtain wall. She looked to her left to behold the Mountain Gate, twisted and grotesque, hanging by only a few remaining hinges.
She felt Irina shift beside her and looked over to see if her sister was awake. Though their backs and hands ached, they were nevertheless quick to draw together when they noticed the swarms of armed men walking this way and that.