by Tim Akers
“Darkness and the songs of war,” the maiden said.
“I would rather not wait until dawn,” Sorcha answered. “Gather what blades you can. Are the fords open?”
“The Suhdrins hold the western ford. They were able to hold out against Rudaine’s assaults until joined by Halverdt’s spears from the south. They have built a new bridge with the dead of Drownhal, my lady.”
“You have a horrific way with words, girl.” She turned. “We go east, then, and pray that Ian has gotten away or been ransomed.”
The maiden bowed and ran away, her bare feet thumping in the grass. Sorcha freed her hair from its impractical braid and started binding it together into something her helmet could accommodate. She walked as she worked. As she approached the eastern ford, her ears were met by a cataclysm of crashing metal and shouting men.
“The fight has shifted?” she asked one of the guards who were watching the ford in horror. She didn’t recognize the man, and when he didn’t answer she took him by the shoulders and twisted him around.
There was a slash across his forehead, and blood dripped down his chest. His eyes were wide and empty. He stumbled back from her, then dropped his sword and started stumbling north.
“Home,” he muttered. “Going home.”
Sorcha snatched up his blade and looked around. Most of the men milling around this end of the ford showed some sign of combat. A steady stream of soldiers was crossing on foot, some of them carried between two or three of their fellows. Many wore the black and white of Houndhallow, but there were also soldiers in Rudaine’s green and Jaerdin’s bright yellow and blue.
The opposite bank was absolute darkness.
“Bring me torches,” Sorcha yelled, “and a shield wall! Men of the hound, rally to me!”
Those coming across the river ignored her, but several dozen men who had already reached the north side stirred from their stupor and came to her side. Her maiden joined them, with a handful of her attendants. They began to shuffle into a defensive position, their spears pointed in the direction of the ford. The battle moved, like a storm of clamoring shields and swords.
Then the storm broke. The darkness swirled, and a great company of horses thundered across the ford. They bowled through the injured and the lame. At their rear, a smaller force of knights fought a retreat. Behind them came a tide of Suhdrin blades.
Malcolm Blakley fought at the center of the Tenerran retreat. He had lost his horse, his helm, and his banner, but he was alive. When he reached dry ground, Sorcha signaled the charge. She and her spears closed the gap, sealing the ford. In the darkness, the enemy assault faltered. Quickly they fell back across the river, content at having driven Blakley’s men out of Suhdra.
Sorcha turned to her husband. He was smeared in ashes. Malcolm collapsed heavily to the ground, barely staying seated in the mud.
“Is there anyone else?” she asked.
“Rudaine sought to fight across the western ford,” he gasped.
“No one crossed in the west.”
“Then they are lost. We are all lost,” Malcolm murmured. He slid onto his back and stared up at the night sky. “Sound the retreat.”
“I am commander of this army,” Sorcha said to him. She knelt at his side, making certain he still breathed, that there was no blood seeping from his armor or broken bones in his skull. Then she stood and signaled to her maiden.
“Sound the rally,” she said, “and then the retreat. We march for the Fen Gate.”
29
GWEN CLUNG TO the mists, her group of a scant seven men snaking behind her like a river of metal, every hoof fall hushed, every word a whisper. Though this was her home, these woods her birthright, the land felt alien. Something stalked through the night. Something waited for Gwen and her men in their dreams. It was killing them. Little by little, terror by terror, heartbeat by heartbeat, and there was nowhere they could run to escape it.
A week had passed since they had rushed through Volent’s camp. At first, they had ridden hard and fast through the forests, putting as much of the Fen as possible between them and Halverdt’s pet monster. A day or two of that, Gwen had thought, and there was no way Volent would find them. She thought they would be safe.
Whatever was pursuing them, it was not Sir Henri Volent. Their hunter was not bound to flesh and blood.
They came to a river. Trees continued a few yards into the water, their roots clinging to the slick mud of the banks, moss creeping up their trunks and dripping from their branches like curtains. A blanket of fog hung silent and thick over the river, the current beneath stirring the air above.
Gwen pulled the column to a halt.
“There’s nothing to like about this,” Sir Brennan murmured. He leaned forward in his saddle like a sick man. The first few deaths had come as a shock. The subsequent disappearances, madnesses and hauntings had worn their spirits to the nub. They were following Gwen out of numb determination, and nothing else.
“Not much to like, no,” Gwen agreed. “This is the Castey? Maybe somewhere near the headwaters?”
“Gods know. I haven’t seen a familiar plot of land since…” He paused. Wellem had been the first, his silent body submerged in slick mud that bubbled from his mouth when they hauled him out. “It’s like the earth has turned beneath our feet.”
“This is Adair land,” Gwen said stubbornly. “Adair land, and Adair blood. I will not be driven to fear my birthright.”
“The land, aye,” Brennan allowed, “but the night belongs to something else.”
Gwen didn’t answer that. Truthfully, she had begun to doubt her hold over the spirits of her home. With the Allfire well past, the days were slipping closer to the equinox. Her family’s faith in the old ways was no guard against the gheist, especially when Gwen rode as the huntress. Yet she had trouble believing that the old gods would turn on her so bitterly.
Besides, the spirit hunting them didn’t feel like the old gods. Yes, the feral spirits that haunted Tenumbra were mad. Yes, they were unpredictable, and in some ways utterly incomprehensible to the mortal mind, but they rarely hunted. They were rarely so persistent. The god that followed them was clear of mind and purpose. It was driven.
It hungered.
Hungered for Gwen’s blood. She could feel it at night, stalking the edges of her dreams. Each morning she woke up to find more of her men dead, and less of her own mind in place.
“I would rather not test the horses in unknown depths. We’ll follow the bank until the fog clears, and hope we can find a ford. If this is the Castey, then we can’t be that far from the river road.”
“Then we’re farther north than I expected.”
“Which is why we’re going south. Give the men a minute to rest their mounts, then start them along the bank. We can’t be that far from midday.”
Brennan nodded and went back to the column. The men slid from their saddles and jangled through the underbrush, relieving their bladders and their fears. Food was growing short. If they didn’t find a settlement soon, Gwen would have to devote time to hunting. She might do that anyway, just to give the men something to think about, something to focus on besides running—which didn’t seem to be working, anyway.
Gwen knew exactly how far north they were. She must have been subconsciously driving them closer and closer to the witches’ hallow, hoping to slip into the wives’ protective wards, and to serve as another line of defense should Volent be pushing for the hallow. She couldn’t imagine that the knight-marshal of Greenhall had uncovered their secret after so many generations. Then again, something was pursuing them.
She worried that her flight north had put the Redoubt in danger. Gwen knew that she should have sent riders east the minute she discovered Volent’s force. Her duty to Tener, however, was outweighed by her sworn allegiance to the hidden god of the Fen. She prayed Houndhallow would understand. She prayed the old gods would reward her faith. Mostly she prayed to see the light of day.
The men began forming up into a c
olumn. Sir Brennan claimed the lead, then began the slow process of picking his way along the river. Gwen followed at the rear, letting the fog drift over her as she rode. The tree line was close to the bank, and where it blocked their path by the water, Brennan led them into the forest.
On one occasion they lost sight of the river, stumbling through darker woods until, suddenly, the Castey appeared in front of Sir Brennan’s mount, masked by mist so thick that none of them saw it until his horse was up to its chest in water. Several minutes of backtracking got them back to the bank, but the mud and cold were taking their toll. The horses were exhausted. The men were faltering in mind and spirit.
The fog frequently betrayed them. Swirling streamers of gray cloud rose slowly from the water, immersing the men in a thickness that turned the sky into glowing pewter, and hid one rider from the next. As soon as the darkness rose, Gwen stood in her stirrups and called forward.
“Close ranks,” she instructed. “Don’t lose sight of the man in front of you.”
The column tightened, but even with their horses nearly on top of one another, it was easy to feel alone. Thick bands of mist twisted between the men of Adair, and then it stirred. The swirling eddies sped up, faster and faster, until they were riding through a silent storm.
The mist became a knife. The wind tightened into blades, and their blood joined the air.
The fog muffled the screams of man and horse, and then shapes loomed in the murk, tall, thin figures formed of shadow, their bodies barely etched in ribbons of darkness. Gwen watched as the man in front of her was torn to pieces, his armor worthless against the shadowman’s scything blades.
She drew her bloodwrought spears and charged the demons. Her horse shied away from the terrified screams of its mates, but Gwen lashed forward, spurring the beast into the fog. They vaulted through the remains of the closest rider, ignoring the grinning bones and slick blood, the tree roots that writhed in the mud like snakes. The path widened, and another rider stood crosswise on it, staring blindly into the fog. Gwen rode past him.
There was something seeping down the man’s face—blood from a wound that crossed his eyes, or perhaps something darker.
One of the demons drifted toward her, and she struck. The red-flecked blade of her spear passed through it, turning shadow into ash. It flickered back into the mists with a shriek, though not before raking icy claws down Gwen’s leg. She felt blood spring up from the wound, though the leather and steel of her armor was unblemished. She was staring down when her horse balked and stopped short, nearly throwing her from the saddle.
They were alone in the fog. The trail was gone, and the trees. There was no sound. Shapes shifted in the gloom, far then near then gone, in silence.
“Hyah, then,” she whispered to the horse. “Hyah, get on.”
Her mount broke into a slow trot. The ground beneath his hooves hardened, the sound of his steps sharper and clearer with each yard. Black pillars resolved into trees, and then the mist began to thin. The pewter sky split open, and the sun came rolling out. Gwen spurred her mount forward, and then they were riding through high grasses, and the trees were gone. They were alone in a clearing.
Gwen looked back. The bank of fog churned behind them, a solid wall with a thin prickle of treetops poking through the top. Of the rest of her riders, there was no sign.
“Hello!” she called. “Sir Brennan! Riders of Adair!” She stood in her stirrups, a quiver of spears clutched in her fist. “Iron in the blood!” Her words fell empty into the forest. She settled back into her saddle. What price had she asked of her men? What price had they paid?
A tangle of darkness moved in the fog bank. Shadowy tendrils lashed out from the murk, snaking through the grasses, slithering toward Gwen and her mount. She caught her breath and prepared to fight, and then the whole, monstrous god roiled out, a coiling mass of dark ribbons, form without form, sharp and fast as thought.
Gwen turned her horse and prepared to run.
A semicircle of robed forms stepped out of the forest at the other end of the clearing, cutting off her escape. They wore the black and gray of Cinder, and carried the darkwood staffs of the inquisition. The man at their center threw back his hood. His face crawled with pagan ink and hatred.
“Gwendolyn Adair,” he hissed. “So good to finally meet you.”
Clenching her jaw, she couched her spears and spurred her horse. At a canter, then a gallop, the wind and grass rushing past her, the deaths of her men on her heart and hatred in her blood, Gwen bore down on the broken men of god.
30
THE ROPE THAT bound her hands was hung with icons of the inquisition, and the wounds across her face and shoulders bore the brand of Frair Allaister’s staff. The shadow priests had thrashed her within an inch of her sanity, their attacks taking their toll more on her mind than her body.
Such was the way of Cinder’s faithful.
That first night had been awful. The priests had dragged bodies into the clearing, shriving their souls and burning their flesh. Gwen counted only five, and of Sir Brennan there was no sign. That meant two of her riders had escaped, or perhaps they had been destroyed by the gheist and their remains lost to the everealm. The priests seemed to hold no animosity to the dead, and afforded them the full rites of the Celestial faith, even adding their names to the evensong dirge.
It was Gwen they shunned.
Allaister had asked his questions. She had told her lies, and when morning came, another of the priests had dressed her wounds and bound her to the saddle of a broken-down nag, having taken her destrier for themselves. They rode slowly through the trackless Fen, making little progress for their efforts and jostling her injuries mercilessly. Every once in a while, Frair Allaister would ride back to the middle of the column where Gwen was kept and perform some kind of ritual with her blood. He never said why he was doing this, but Gwen knew.
He was looking for the witches’ hallow. The inquisition knew of the heresy of House Adair, and rather than bring charges before the celestriarch, the frair was hunting for the hallow on his own. Which meant he either had no idea what he was looking for, or he knew all too well, and had his own ambitions. Neither possibility comforted her.
They were on the trail for days, camping in absolute darkness, with neither campfire nor torch and the wild insect life of the forest roaring all around them. Gwen could feel the pull of the wards trying to steer them away from the hallow, and every time the vertigo of paths soared into a fever pitch, Allaister would come back for a visit and some blood.
“It’s no wonder your people never settled out here,” Allaister said after finishing one of his painful rituals. “Nowhere to plant or build, the roads forever decaying, the valleys as damp as lakes and the hilltops scoured by this damnable wind. Though I think that was not always the case, was it, my lady?”
“The Fen is as it has always been,” she answered. He had been like this since her capture, casually friendly and yet always threatening. His questions of the previous night had seemed nonsensical at times. Gwen truly wondered if he was mad.
“Yes, yes, but I’ve seen more than a few ruins during my travels here.” He gestured broadly to a limestone ridge that framed their path. “Unless I’m mistaken, that was once a wall, or perhaps a tower… and here, the remnants of a well. But they are long abandoned.”
“Life can be difficult. Perhaps the people moved on to easier climes.”
“That is hardly the Adair way, though, is it? What is it you’re so fond of saying? ‘Iron in the blood’?” Allaister slid a wedge of apple into his mouth and crunched loudly, chuckling to himself. “Doesn’t leave a lot of room for comfort.”
“These are more civilized times,” Gwen said. “We have cities now, just like your fancy Suhdrin masters.”
“Oh, I would hardly call a place like Beckwright or Fenton a city, my lady,” he said. “But you’re a faithful Celestial. Surely you’ve made the pilgrim’s walk to Heartsbridge.” He looked at her out of the corner of his
eye, that crooked smirk on his mouth. “You know what a real city looks like.”
Gwen folded herself into her saddle, refusing to engage the priest any further. Allaister had been feeling out the edges of her heresy since they began the trip. The less she said, the better, especially in her current foul mood. The frair continued on, however, opining at length about the fate of the ruins they passed, the pagan henges they saw in the distance. Eventually he lapsed into silence.
That night they made camp in a narrow gorge that led into a field of grass and streams, rare in the Fen. She knew exactly where they were. These streams would twine together a short distance north to form the Glimmerglen, the river that bounded the hallow’s southern border. The hidden and deceptive trails, revealed by the ritual of Gwen’s blood, were coming together to show the true path.
Only a few days on horseback separated them from Allaister’s goal. The wards were failing, and there was nothing she could do about it. The hallow recognized her blood, her history, the oaths that bound her to the old ways. The slumbering god was welcoming Gwen home, and the inquisition with her.
She eased herself onto her bedroll and tried to relax. Hours in the saddle left her grim and sore, made worse by the bonds at her wrists. At night the priests loosened them but hobbled her ankles, and four priests stood in a loose circle around her tent. They gave her privacy, at least, but there was no question as to her captivity.
Had it been Frair Lucas who had seen evidence of her heresy and sent this Allaister on her trail? If it was revealed that House Adair was true to the old ways, that the inquisition and Halverdt were justified in their accusations, what would that mean? They were already at war with the Suhdrin. Would the faithful Tenerran houses turn on them as well?
Ever since the Celestial church had dissolved the reign of kings in Suhdra, the priests of Cinder and Strife had freely used the noble houses of the south to wage war on the pagan tribes. It was only Tener’s conversion to the faith that had spared them total war, generations ago. Would any of the Tenerran houses risk that sort of war again, just to stand beside one house that had never foresworn their beliefs and had betrayed their trust?