by Tony Daniel
He planted his palms and elbows and humped the rest of the way through the corpse door. Wulf tumbled out onto the flagstones and quickly rose to a crouching position. Suddenly there was rustling behind him.
Wulf spun, his hand moving toward his dagger.
It wasn’t there! Of course. He’d put it through first.
But then a questioning “meow” rang through the castle courtyard.
Great.
It was Grani, his sister Ulla’s cat.
She meowed again. Grani was going to wake up the whole keep if she kept that up.
Had a servant accidentally left Ulla’s door open?
Well, he could worry about that later when he—
Wulf turned to find the hilt of his own dagger poked into his face. Its round metal pommel, the part at the end of the handle, scraped against his nose. Startled, Wulf gasped and backed up against the bailey wall. A dark form standing in front of him chuckled.
“Figured I’d find you here,” the form said in a low voice.
Chapter Two:
The Escape
The voice belonged to Rainer Stope, a boy who was a year older than Wulf. Rainer was a commoner, but he lived in the castle as Wulf’s foster brother. Wulf’s father had taken Rainer in to fulfill a bargain he’d made with Rainer’s family. Wulf didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew it involved Rainer’s father lending a lot of money to the duke.
Rainer was not only Wulf’s foster brother; he was Wulf’s best friend.
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
“You kidding? You had that look all day,” Rainer said.
“What look?” Wulf replied as he scooped up Grani, who had come through the corpse door and was rubbing his leg.
“Like you’re about to vomit. Or like you have the flux.”
“I guess I was pretty out of it.” Wulf pushed Grani through the corpse-door opening, back into the castle. “Go find Ulla,” he whispered to the cat.
Grani looked at him as if he were the dumbest rubbing post she’d ever seen. Then she turned and made her way back inside.
Rainer knelt beside Wulf. The two boys quickly bricked back up the corpse door.
“Blood and bones, why’d you have to scare me?” Wulf mumbled.
Rainer shrugged and smiled. He was not somebody who liked to explain things.
Wulf figured that Rainer had opened the wood shutters on his bedroom window and climbed down from the third story on the stone wall. Rainer had learned how to climb so well while capturing hawklings in his hometown of Kohlsted, a town deep in the mountains to the west of Raukenrose. It was surrounded by high granite cliffs where hawks loved to nest. Rainer usually visited home once a year in summer and stayed for a month. Wulf had returned home with Rainer a couple of times, and they’d gone climbing for hatchlings but hadn’t found any.
Rainer had a broad face and a reddish complexion that seemed to be always rosy. There were rumors he had Skraeling blood, but Wulf knew Rainer was completely ignorant of his own ancestry. Rainer’s hair was brownish black and curly. Rainer drew it back in a ponytail and bound it behind him to keep it from escaping in all directions.
Wulf’s own features were nearly the opposite of Rainer’s. His hair was blond and, except for the cowlick in front he couldn’t seem to get rid of, straight. Despite the new sixteen-year-old muscles he hadn’t quite gotten used to, he was lean and rangy. He figured he probably always would be. Rainer, on the other hand, appeared to be a seventeen-year-old mountain of strength. He was at least a hand and a half taller than Wulf. But being big didn’t slow him down. Rainer could move with the speed of a raptor.
“Saw you checking Grer’s charcoal chute today.” Grer Smead was the castle smith. Although he was far beneath them in status, Wulf and Rainer thought of him as a friend. They’d spent the late afternoon in his shop, allegedly getting a shield rivet mended, but mostly just hanging out. Rainer clapped Wulf on the shoulder. “So let’s go.”
“No. You can’t come,” Wulf said. He tried to put a commanding tone into the statement, but this was hard to do while speaking barely over a whisper. “I’ve told you before, I forbid it.”
Rainer shook his head and smiled a know-it-all smile. “Figured you didn’t mean it.” The moonlight glinted off his teeth.
Suddenly, boots clomped and chainmail clinked from across the bailey. A guard was crossing the courtyard. Rainer yanked Wulf down behind a stone column. The base of the column was carved in the shape of a coiled snake, and the snake’s hissing face startled Wulf. He put his hand in over his mouth to hold in a gasp.
They sat still until the guard had passed and the sounds of his footsteps died away.
“It’s Morast,” whispered Rainer. “Going to the latrine.”
“He’ll be there half the night,” Wulf replied. They both grinned and made sure not to laugh—at least too loudly. Captain Morast might be the toughest soldier on the guard, but he was famous for the moans and groans he let out when in the latrine and for the loudness of his gassy emissions.
They stood back up.
“If we get caught,” said Wulf, “I’ll be in trouble. But you’ll get yourself kicked out of the castle for good.”
Rainer shook his head. “You’re in that dragon-spell thing that happens to you. You need somebody to watch your back.”
“And that has to be you?”
“It does.”
Rainer stood up and pulled Wulf with him.
“Curse it to cold hell, all right then,” Wulf said. “Let’s go.” The truth was Wulf felt relieved. He really did like having somebody he could trust along with him. He’d gone to the tree both alone and with Rainer before, and having Rainer along definitely made him feel safer.
The two circled the bailey, moving quickly and hiding in shadows along the edge of the courtyard, each taking turns at the lead.
Rainer reached the shop first. He unsheathed his own dagger and poked it through the slit between the wooden door and its frame. He lifted up the latch on the inside of the door. It wasn’t locked. You could pull a cord to raise the latch, but this would also set off a bell that was rigged to let the smith know someone had entered. Opening the door with the dagger kept the bell from clanging.
The two pushed the door open just wide enough to squeeze inside. They let their eyes adjust for a moment. The room was lit in faint red and orange by a bed of banked coals in the forge. A large set of bellows was nearby, its blowing end pointed at the forge fire.
Near to the forge was an oak barrel full of charcoal. And behind the barrel was the chute where the charcoal was delivered from outside. This chute would be their way out of the castle, and it was another reason that both of them—Wulf noticed that Rainer had dressed the same as he had—were wearing cloaks.
It took some twisting and turning, which Rainer, in spite of his greater size, was better at than Wulf, but eventually both of them worked their way through the narrow chute. They were now completely outside the castle—and also covered with charcoal dust. Wulf knew he would need to scrub his face like crazy before letting anyone see him in the morning.
Raukenrose Castle did not have a water moat, but it did have a barrier of iron-tipped wooden spikes pointing outward. This was called an abatis. The spikes were four elbs long and were set into the ground to point away from the castle. The abatis circled the entire castle like a crown, except for one opening at the main entrance, and was three layers thick. The stakes were set at a height to bayonet a charging man or horse. The points were checked for sharpness once a month, and one of Grer’s duties was to forge replacement tips when they got too dull or rusty.
Fortunately, even though it was a good barrier against horses and men in armor, the stakes were not much of a problem to crawl under. Wulf and Rainer got down on their bellies and snaked beneath.
Finally, Wulf stood up.
I’m out of the keep. I’m free, he thought. The dragon would know he was on his way.
As if in answer, he f
elt some of the pressure ease on his mind, like a headache that suddenly stopped throbbing.
That’s right, Wulf thought. Curse it, I’m coming.
Wulf turned and took a final look at the castle. It was impressive in the pale moonlight. Each of the stones of the castle wall was about the size of a man, and was made of granite from the Dragonback Mountains.
The wall stretched upward over a hundred-fifty hands. High above, cloth banners and flags popped in the chilly, early winter breeze. It was too dark to see them, but Wulf knew there were two sets with their staffs set in holes along the castle battlement. Every other one held a flag that would have the shape of a red war hammer stitched to a black background. The Dragon Hammer of Shenandoah. Wulf had a cape and a tabard with the same symbol on it. Next to each flag was a banner with the von Dunstig coat of arms on it. This was the buffalo passant argent, a silver buffalo with the right front leg raised as if stepping forward, stitched onto a green background. For six hundred years the humans, otherfolk, and Tier of Shenandoah had been ruled from this stronghold.
Raukenrose Castle. The place that had been Wulf’s home for all his life.
Wulf shifted his gaze back down. He and Rainer stood for a moment adjusting themselves, straightening cloaks and daggers that had gotten crooked after the crawl under the barrier.
Suddenly, a grunting, bulllike bellow filled the air. It seemed to come from the castle.
“Did you hear that?” Wulf exclaimed.
“Hear what?” Rainer replied.
Wulf spun around as a dragon dream-vision surged into his mind.
Instead of the castle, there was a starlit hilltop. On that hilltop stood a huge buffalo looking up at the sky. It bellowed again. The eyes of the buffalo flashed, and moonlight glinted off its curled horns.
Then the vision faded away, and there was just a castle there. Wulf shook his head and turned back around. The dark streets of the sleeping town of Raukenrose lay ahead of them.
The buildings of the town were three, four, even five stories tall, each floor a little bigger than the one below. They leaned. At their tops, they were close enough to touch and sometimes did.
This made for very dark streets during the night.
Which was supposed to be all right, because it was long after curfew bell and no one was allowed to be out.
Yeah, right.
The kind of person who would ignore the curfew was usually the kind of person you did not want to meet on a dark street late at night.
Not all of them were human lawbreakers, either. There were also creatures who were bad news among the Tier and the otherfolk. Some of those had claws or teeth as long as daggers.
The two boys slipped into the shadows of the township.
Chapter Three:
The Chapel
Ravenelle Archambeault sat alone in the Chapel of the Dark Angel. She reclined on a padded pew reading a dark romance from a scroll. The scroll was thin, but long. Its parchment draped down over her red and black dress and almost touched the floor. The tale she was reading was in verse, and when she finished a stanza, she rolled the scroll up with one hand and with the other kept her spot. The truth was this particular romance, The Red Rose Dies, was one of her favorites, and she’d read it so often she practically had it memorized.
Ravenelle sat partly sideways on the pew, with one foot up on a prayer bench so that her dress and the scroll made a pretty curve flowing over her hip and leg down to the chapel’s stone floor.
She took her mind from the poem and moved into the eyes of her bloodservant Madgel, who was also her lady’s maid. Madgel had been sitting quietly nearby finishing up some sewing repairs, but Ravenelle had her stand up and walk in front of her so she could get the best view of herself through Madgel’s eyes. The maid quickly set the sewing aside and did as her mistress commanded.
Ravenelle looked at herself through Madgel’s eyes, then had the maid arrange her dress a bit more pleasingly to show just the toe of the silk shoe on the leg she’d crossed. The idea was to appear nonchalant but elegantly reading when Gunnar entered the chapel for his visit. Like Elania, the heroine of another favorite romance of Ravenelle’s, The Tower Falls, always advised: it never hurts to make a pleasing impression when meeting a guest, especially if that guest is a prince. She had Madgel step to one side, and she looked at herself at the angle he would probably approach from the door.
Her hair was springing loose from its pins again. It was a raven-black tangle of tight curls and looked like a briar bush sitting on her head when she didn’t brush it, and sometimes when she did. Her skin was brown from her Aegyptian ancestry, lightened by a Kalte grandmother thrown into the mix. This wouldn’t have been unusual in her real country but stood out in Raukenrose, where everyone who wasn’t a Tier or a tree was some variation on pale.
She tucked a curl behind a hairclip then moved back to Madgel’s awareness and took another look at herself through her maid’s eyes.
Yes, there, that will do. Thank you, Madgel, Ravenelle said. She didn’t speak aloud but in the mind-speak of communion, so that Madgel heard her words as a voice within. Take your things and go to my chambers. I’d like to be by myself when he comes.
Yes, mistress, the maid replied. She gathered her sewing and left.
Ravenelle did care what her bloodservants thought, but she did not dip into Madgel’s concerns over what her mistress was doing. She was afraid Madgel wouldn’t be able to hide her worry that Ravenelle was making far too much of this appointment with Prince Gunnar, and feel sorry for her.
Ravenelle couldn’t abide anybody, even a bloodservant, feeling sorry for her. She was a princess. She was going to be queen. She considered herself the last person someone should pity. But it was kind of ridiculous to be worried about the impression you might make on some barbarian princeling.
The train of thought made her uncomfortable, and she returned to The Red Rose Dies. She was near the end, where Zara, a noble maiden locked inside a cold, dark keep by her jealous father, loses all hope of rescue. She dies young, and her father buries her in a graveyard inside the keep, so that even dead, she can never leave.
This was the kind of bittersweet ending Ravenelle preferred in a romance. The final stanza always made her shudder.
Her knight is gone these hundred years.
Alone and pale she lies.
And where it reaches for her grave
The red rose dies.
The chapel—her chapel—was a pretty place. At least she thought so. And it was peaceful, usually. It was the one spot Ravenelle could go in Raukenrose Castle where she didn’t feel constantly irritated.
She’d had the chapel decked out to look just like a mini version of the Chantry of the Dark Angel in the great cathedral of Montserrat. Well, as much like it as she could, given that she’d never actually been to the Chantry of the Dark Angel. She’d had to rely on taking secondhand recollections during communion when her mother made her yearly visit.
But she’d done everything in her power to get it right. There was the same white marble from the Sylacauga pits, the same ebony altar fixtures carved out of the hardest wood. It came from the true south beyond the equator. The wall hangings were thick and gorgeous drapes sewn from the deep red cotton-velvet and delicate black cotton lace that Vall l’Obac was famous for. Her communion cups were pure silver from Tenochtitlan, and the storage box where the celestis was kept was made of beaten gold.
Above the altar was the Dark Angel, chiseled out of a huge block of black obsidian from Mount Aetna, and completely life-size. Saint Ravenelle was the namesake saint of Ravenelle Archambeault. Her wings were extended in the V-shaped symbol of the Empty Hands of Talaia. Ravenelle loved reading here.
She was still reading when Prince Gunnar von Krehennest of Sandhaven entered from the transept. He closed—and latched—the door behind him. Ravenelle pretended to continue reading her book, but she watched him from the corner of her eyes as he walked toward her. His hard leather boot soles echoed on t
he flagstone floor.
“Princess, I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all day,” Gunnar said.
“That’s funny, I’ve been looking forward to you,” Ravenelle replied.
“What are you reading?” Gunnar stood so he could gaze over her shoulder at the illumination on the page. It showed a red rose withering on a gravestone. “It appears sad.”
“It’s a story about a woman who was kept in prison by her father.”
“Why do you read things like that, Princess? You should only fill yourself with happy thoughts.”
“But it does make me happy,” Ravenelle answered. “I may be a prisoner, but at least I am not her.” She closed the book. “I’m allowed to love men other than my father, for instance.” She gave him a sly smile. “Which is good, since I haven’t seen him in five years.”
“It has to be hard living here when your kingdom waits for you in the south.”
“Oh, I manage,” Ravenelle replied. “There are…benefits, even in dire situations. Not that I am in a particularly dire situation, since I am well treated, even if I am in most ways a captive. Anyway, you and I would’ve never met otherwise, and that’s a benefit.”
Gunnar smiled and put a hand gently on Ravenelle’s shoulder.
“Put away your words, Princess,” he said.
Ravenelle let the scroll drop gently to the floor of the chapel. “Would you like to commune, Prince Gunnar?”
“Very much,” he replied. “I brought you something.”
“Oh?”
The prince reached behind his neck and pulled a silver chain from beneath his black silk shirt. There was a small leather pouch attached to it by a jewelry bale. He took the chain off and held it out to show Ravenelle.
“I thought you might like your own supply of the new celestis,” he said. “This will let us be together whenever we are nearby.” He found the chain’s clasp and undid its latch. He offered his other hand to help her stand up. “May I?”