by Court Ellyn
Dagni snorted, shook her head at Thorn while jabbing a thumb in Kelyn’s direction. “ ‘Is it hutza,’ my arse.”
“Look closely at the steel,” Thorn said. “That’s not Elaran metallurgy.”
Kelyn turned the blade toward the windows and the waning light. Colors, like oil on water, rippled deep inside the steel. “During the siege of Ulmarr,” he said, “Brugge used hutza to mine under the gatehouse, but he never let me inspect one of the pickaxes.” Supposedly, anything forged from this dwarven steel was nigh unbreakable.
“Aye, we guard that secret above all,” Dagni said. “It’s infuriating that our enemies have learned our formula. You may not remember, but some years ago a couple of our kinsmen were abducted.”
“I do remember. Your cousins.” Bear tracks in the mud. The throats of two mules gashed open, not by blades but by something duller and crueler. If only he’d understood the signs. If only Brugge had told him the truth.
“Aye, Helsi and Hammer,” said Dagni, “along with a shipment of iron ore. Hammer was one of the few who knew the spells for making hutza. It’s clear now that the Elarion pried the secret from him. I can’t imagine what they did to poor Helsi to convince him to talk.”
Kelyn’s glance strayed toward the ceiling and a set of chains still hanging from the rafters. He could imagine quite clearly. “I didn’t think dwarves could use magic. I thought your hutza came from a smelting or tempering process.”
“Well, it does, in a way. But certain chants are involved.” The dwarf wasn’t of a mind to elaborate. “For us, hutza has always been a last resort. We would never tromp around in it daily as this fool has done.” She nudged Solandyr’s dangling ankle. “We prefer to win the glory on our own merits, instead of letting magic take the credit. No offense, avedra.”
Thorn smirked, too tired for anything more.
“But that time is past,” Dagni added. “Our enemy raised the bar, so we must swallow our pride.” She gestured at her own suit of armor. It lay on one of the defiled trestle tables and gleamed with the same oily light as Solandyr’s. “We could fight fire with bare hands, but I’m sure you know how that would turn out.”
“All too well,” Thorn said.
“We’ll do what we can to arm your people, Commander, but understand that this might change everything between your people and mine.” She lifted Solandyr’s breastplate from the table, offered it to Kelyn. “Try this on for size.” Horses and oak leaves intertwined in the molding. Delicate-seeming scales cascaded down the shoulders and abdomen, making the armor lightweight and mobile. Subtle lavender and green ripples danced inside the steel.
“If it doesn’t fit, well, the forge is lit.” Despite the dusk deepening inside the Hall, Kelyn detected a smug challenge in the dwarf’s eye. He shrugged into the scales and plate. A bit long in the torso, a trifle narrow in the waist, and like an expert armorer, Dagni saw it straightaway. “To the smithy with you, Commander.”
Kelyn’s fingers stroked the fine scales, and he chuckled. “The sons of Keth wearing elven armor and wielding elven weapons. It’s too ironic for words.”
Thorn followed them out, pushing the wheelbarrow that groaned under the weight of one last casualty.
The courtyard thrummed. Life and order had returned to Ilswythe’s walls. The clinking of hammers came from the smithy. Torches burned against the night. Sentries walked the battlements. The gate had been dismantled and the old shoring piled around a sprawling mound of ogre corpses. Laral doused the mound with cooking oil and tossed in a barrel of pitch for good measure.
Thorn and Rhian lifted Solandyr from the barrow and counted one, two, three, then flung him unceremoniously atop the mound of flesh, wood, and fuel. “All clear?” Thorn called. Dwarves edged away from the mound; Laral retreated with the jar of oil, and Thorn spread his arms. The oil burst into flame.
Long into the night they watched the bodies burn. Everyone took a turn with the spades. There was something inexplicably satisfying in the act of reducing Ilswythe’s conquerors to a bit of ash and wind. Fear, rage, defeat seemed to lift skyward with the greasy smoke.
Laral spat on the embers. “They could’ve told us where they took my son.”
“But would they have?” Thorn asked.
“You could’ve gotten it out of them.” The light from the bonfire revealed the resentment on Laral’s face.
Thorn’s expression chilled. “The avedrin have been buried in a hole in the ground. Is that what you want to hear? That’s all I’ve been able to determine. Even Solandyr knew what the pit was, but he didn’t know where it was. His thoughts indicated several possible locations, some of which we’d already searched. It’s likely the avedrin have been relocated many times over the years.”
“You mean my son could still be alive?” Laral demanded. “Then how can you stop searching?” His large hands balled into fists.
Thorn glared in reply. He’d spent the last four years doing nothing but searching for the stolen avedrin. He had even admitted to stooping to torturing ogre captives to secure answers, but that too had yielded nothing. Laral’s accusation touched on his failure.
Kelyn eased in between them. He had never seen his former squire lose control, but if Laral was to seek an outlet for his pain and rage, tonight might as well be the night. A brawl could escalate fast if Thorn defended himself with fire.
But it was not to be. Laral grit his teeth, about-faced and stomped off into the night.
Thorn watched him go, mournful, then resumed turning ashes. After a while Kelyn heard him humming one of the dwarves’ chants. The deeps of night didn’t deter the dwarves from working, and they seemed to have a song for every task, from marching to mending hinges. One of the melodies had high-centered in Thorn’s head. The humming paused long enough for him to say, “And to think, they were made from harmless toads and slimy little salamanders.” His shovel uncovered red embers; he pushed bone onto them.
Kelyn shielded his eyes from the glare of the bonfire and asked, “Made? Ogres?”
“Aye, thousands of years ago.” Thorn stopped shoveling and leaned on the handle for a rest. “An avedra woman had a vendetta and made herself one hell of a weapon, wouldn’t you say? Too bad we can’t just…” He went motionless, startled, and stared down at the ashes as if they had spoken.
Kelyn tried to pluck any sense from his brother’s tale.
Thorn dropped the spade and paced madly, raking ash-coated hands through sweat-matted hair. “Is it possible?” he asked anybody and nobody.
Kelyn put himself in his brother’s path. “Is what possible?”
The spark of excitement in Thorn’s eyes dulled. “No, I’m just delirious. I haven’t slept in three days. Never mind, forget it.”
“Forget what?”
Thorn backed away, shaking his head. “I wished I hadn’t thought of it. Now I…I don’t know.” Delirious, indeed. He had grown pale and wild-eyed. Without another word, he fled into the keep. The idea that had fired his imagination had frightened him badly.
~~~~
3
Andryn’s legs felt boneless, like jelly poured into sausage casings. He had never walked so far, didn’t know he could walk so far. Mum and Da had never let him walk to Brengarra Town, all of thirty yards from the castle gate, much less thirty miles, and after six or seven days he had walked far more than thirty miles. Ninety, he reckoned. All the way to Nathrachan and beyond. The hills of home, striped with vineyards, had long ago given way to rugged foothills and an encroaching view of the Drakhan Mountains. Long lines of captives trudged the length of the highway, strung on ropes like beads, like bones. Monsters drove them.
The humid, late-spring air and the dust kicked up by hundreds of feet made Andy wheeze. His chest felt too tight to draw breath. Sometimes his lips tingled and black spots buzzed in his eyes, but the tug of the rope didn’t let him stop to rest. The hemp rubbed his wrists raw. Yesterday he saw that his sister’s wrists were bleeding; his mother’s were swollen and black with bru
ises.
Every time a captive fell down, Andy felt proud that he was still on his feet. Him, the weakling, the sick one. What did doctors know? Still, there were times, usually late each day, when he was grateful the rope kept pulling him forward. Else, he would have sat down by now, and those monsters would’ve snatched him up and ate him. The gray-skinned giants referred to themselves as ‘naeni.’ Andy hadn’t known such ugly, enormous creatures existed, and it seemed none of the other captives had either, so they called the monsters ‘naeni’ too.
The naenis had some purpose in mind, some reason for troubling with hundreds of human prisoners, but they weren’t inclined to explain their motives. They just cracked whips, bellowed threats, and drove the captives onward.
The highway dragged on forever. The jelly-feeling spread into Andy’s spine, his arms, his shoulders, until his head bobbed on a wobbly neck. “I’m tired,” he whined, as if he were the only one who minded the endless trudge to nowhere.
A voice prodded him from behind, “Think of something else, m’ lord.” Arvold, his father’s steward.
So Andy dreamed about snatching a sword from one of the naenis and slicing the rope that bound him to his place in line. In his imagination, it was no struggle dancing with the blade, evading the monsters and their whips, and freeing everyone.
The line of captives trudging along beside Andy stumbled to a stop. An old man had crumpled to his knees. The rope tugged hard, causing the woman ahead of him and the man behind him to fall down too, but they scrambled back up again. “Get up,” hissed the woman and tugged the rope with all her strength. Her hands turned purple with the effort, but she only succeeded in pulling the man’s arms from under him. He rolled onto his back amid the highway. His chest heaved; his open mouth sucked in the dust.
A whip cracked, laying a gash across the damp air. A great muscled brute of a naeni stomped down the road; the whip dragged after him like a broken tail. White paint smeared his blunt, broad face so that it resembled a skull. Screamface, he was called, and Andy hated this naeni most of all. He had killed Sedrik with one swipe of his massive arm.
“Why dis worms stop?” Screamface bellowed.
The man raised a hand for patience. “Need … just a moment … to breathe.”
Screamface snorted, wrapped both hands around the man’s skull, and twisted. Bones snapped. The body dropped limp as a rag. “Dese slaves not wait for sick old worms.” A long flint blade cut the ropes binding the man’s body to his neighbors. The whip popped inches from Andy’s left ear. “Move, worms!”
The worms moved.
Hurrying past, Andy couldn’t help but peek at the body. The eyes were half-closed, the head laying against a shoulder and facing the wrong direction. The man had joined the train yesterday, after the naenis raided Nathrachan. Well-dressed and fine-spoken, he’d said he was tutor to Lord Nathrachan’s children. “They’re dead now,” he’d said. “Those monsters threw them from the tower. Brats, they were, but I loved them.”
Andryn couldn’t decide why the naenis spared some and slew others. At twelve, he was among the youngest of the captives he’d seen; babies were immediately dispatched alongside their wailing mothers. When the naenis raided Brengarra and took Andy and his family captive, they were herding a couple hundred prisoners from Brynduvh and Haezeldale and the surrounding villages. In Ulmarr Town, the naenis took the cows and horses from the livery, the flour from the granaries, and the meat from the butcher’s shop, but only a handful of humans. In Nathrachan, however, they had ignored the granaries and livestock and snatched every fisher and fishwife they could clamp their hands on. “No sense in it,” Arvold had said, watching the new captives sob their way into line. “No sense at all.” Maybe the naenis didn’t understand either. They didn’t seem to be great thinkers, only doers. They fought a lot, Andy saw. Mostly over food.
Another naeni scampered from the back of the train, somehow racing on all fours, his belly skimming the grass like a lizard. His tongue flicked out greedily as he snatched the old man’s body from the ditch, ran ahead with it, and tossed it into a large lumbering wain. Several bodies joggled around inside.
“Eyes forward, m’ lord,” said Arvold.
Andryn did as he was told. Aye, like a soldier on the march. Head up, shoulders back, eyes front. He might be bound like a criminal but he didn’t have to sacrifice his dignity. He focused on posture, on breathing, on ignoring the pain in his toes, which only made him more conscious of his throbbing feet. His fancy boots were too small. He’d outgrown them since the Turning Festival. Every step made him wince. He tried walking on his heels, but that slowed him down, and Master Arvold kept nudging him. “Keep up, m’ lord. Give your sister some slack in the rope.”
Knights can handle pain, he told himself and grit his teeth.
When they were taken, he and Arvold, Mum and Lesha were dressed to the hilt in their court velvets. Andy’s doublet was plush silver-gray with Brengarra’s tor and lightning bolt picked out in black and gold thread. Now, Arvold’s livery was coated in dust and darkened with sweat, and he had lost his hat somewhere. The top of his balding head was red with sunburn. Ahead, the hem of Lesha’s gray gown was spattered with mud and grass. She panted in fear and ducked her face away from the naenis. She did that every time they killed someone. Andryn decided she was trying not to scream. Mum had warned them both not to bring attention to themselves. “Don’t give them a reason to notice you,” she’d whispered. “Keep your eyes down and stay quiet.”
In front of Lesha, Lady Bethyn peered over her shoulder to make sure Andy was doing just that. Her dusty cheeks had clean streaks down them. Mum had been crying, but he never would’ve guessed. She hadn’t made a sound. He had never seen her cry before. It scared him. He wanted to sob too, but he had to remember that he was the squire and the oldest son of Laral, Lord Brengarra. He was going to be a knight one day, and knights were never afraid.
Da will find out we’re missing, Andryn told himself. He’ll come after us. But Da had ridden north days ago to look for King Arryk. He was probably bashing down the gates of Bramoran right now or beating up the Black Falcon to convince him to release his friend. Once he’d found Arryk, Da would come home and find his family was missing. It wouldn’t be long now. Just keep marching. Don’t fall down. Ignore the pain.
The highway led the slow, bedraggled train along the southern shore of the Brenlach. Stretching out of sight, the waters of the inland sea were the color of tarnished pewter under the flat gray sky. Fishing villages and lumber mills perched on the banks. The streets were empty, smoke absent from the chimneys. Where were the people? Had they fled? Or had the naenis raided these settlements weeks ago?
At last, dusk settled like a frown across the hills. Whips and bellows brought the train to a halt. The captives knew the routine; the new people caught on quickly. Spread out, sit down, no talking. They eased off the highway and into a broad, empty pasture. Once situated, the encampment stretched for a quarter mile. A lot of captives to keep under control. But the naenis numbered a hundred easily, and their whips didn’t mind taking a bite out of someone. They seemed to enjoy hunting for anyone bold enough to break the rules.
Andryn made himself comfortable on the cool grass with just enough slack in the rope to itch his nose. It was hard to catch his breath; the wheeze had been constant since yesterday morning, whistling deep in his lungs. A cough erupted before he could stop it. Mum turned to check on him. “It’s just the dust,” he told her, but she wasn’t fooled. Sadness, worry darkened her face.
He pried off one boot, then the other. The toes of his stockings were stained red-brown. Blood pumped back into his feet, and there was no ignoring the pain. He doubled over clutching his toes, whimpering. The tug in the rope dragged his sister’s arm like a fishing line.
“Andy!” she snapped, jerking the rope for slack, then gasped at the sight of his bloody stockings. “Mum, look.”
He tucked his feet out of sight. Mum didn’t need to see. When she worr
ied, she coddled, and Andryn had been coddled all his life. Knights weren’t coddled. He nudged away his sister’s attempts to help. What could she do about it anyway? After a while, the cool night air and chilly grass eased the pain anyway.
Campfires sprang up along the highway. Half a dozen naenis congregated about each one, rumbling in their guttural language. The meat wagons made their rounds. Teams of naenis drew the wains like oxen. Thick shoulders leaned into the yoke; leg muscles strained. They stopped at each campfire, and their brethren rummaged through the bodies for choice morsels.
Tonight, a wain stopped only feet away from Andryn. He shifted back as far as the ropes allowed. The mud-encrusted wheels didn’t care who they crushed.
“Look away,” Mum said. Lesha buried her face in her skirts and covered her ears. It was easy to hide from the sight of bodies being butchered and hung over the fires, harder to block out the sounds of bones breaking and blades cutting. The naenis ripped the clothes off legs and arms as if they were butcher paper and tossed them into untidy piles, then spitted the meat on sharp iron rods.
Master Arvold gave the rope an insistent tug. Andy uncovered one ear and opened one eye. The steward’s bushy gray eyebrows jumped, and a jut of his chin indicated the meat wagon. Andryn looked it over, but saw only limbs and a woman’s long pale hair dangling over the side. He replied with a shrug.
Arvold glanced pointedly at Andy’s feet, then repeated the eyebrow-chin gesture.
One of the bodies had small feet and wore sturdy boots. Andryn looked for the nearest naenis, found them occupied at the campfire, then edged toward the wagon. Arvold gave him all the slack he could, but Lesha tugged him hard the other way. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Mum overheard. “Andy, sit down!”
“Boots, Mum!” He pointed, making Arvold’s arm move like a puppet.
Mum’s mouth tightened. Her hands flapped, waving him down. He was sure to catch the wrong kind of attention. “Your boots are fine. Sit still.”