The council, it would seem, had not been put back to the way it should have been.
Nonetheless, she ignored him and instead pressed her demands to the rest of the council. In turn, Prince Fyren stood and accused her of treason against the Midlands. He had the unmitigated gall to accuse her of the very thing of which he was guilty.
Further, Prince Fyren assured the council that Kelton was committing no aggression but was acting only in self-defense against a greedy neighbor. In a tirade, he lectured them on the evils of women in positions of power. The council took his word for everything. They allowed her to present no evidence.
She stood stunned and speechless as the council heard Fyren’s charges, and without pause found her guilty, sentencing her to be beheaded.
Where was Kahlan? Where were the wizards?
Lady Bevinvier’s vision had proven true. Cyrilla should have listened, or at least taken some precaution. Kahlan’s warning, too, had proven true; Kelton had first tried to strike out of jealousy, and now, years later, they had renewed the attack when they saw tempting weakness.
The Galean guard stood in the great courtyard, ready to immediately escort Cyrilla home. She had needed to set about readying Galea’s defenses until the forces expected to be sent by the council could arrive. But it was not to be.
At the pronouncement of sentence, she heard the terrible shouts of battle outside. Battle, she thought bitterly. It was not a battle, but a slaughter. Her troops had waited in the great courtyard without their weapons, as a sign of respect and deference, an open gesture of acquiescence to the rule of the Council of the Midlands.
Queen Cyrilla stood at the window, a guard at each arm, shaking in horror as she watched the slaughter. A few of her men managed to take up weapons by overpowering their attackers, and put up a valiant struggle, but they had no chance. They were outnumbered five to one, and were, by and large, without means to defend themselves. She couldn’t tell if in the chaos any escaped. She hoped they had. She prayed Harold had.
The white snow that lay upon the ground was turned to a sea of red. She was aghast at the butchery. There was mercy only in its swiftness.
Cyrilla had been made to kneel before the council as Prince Fyren took up her long hair in his fist, and with his own sword sliced it away. She had knelt in silence, her head held proudly up in honor of her people, in honor of the men she had just seen murdered, while he cut her hair as short as the lowest kitchen scullion.
What an hour before had seemed to be the near end of her people’s ordeal had become instead the mere beginning.
The powerful fingers on her arms jerked her to a halt before a small iron door. She winced in pain. A crude ladder twice her height lay on its side against the wall on the opposite side of the corridor.
Again the guard with the keys came forward to work the lock. He cursed the mechanism, complaining that its lack of use made it stiff. All the guards seemed to be Keltans. She had seen none of the Aydindril Home Guard. Most, she knew, had been killed in Aydindril’s fall to D’Hara.
At last the man drew back the door to reveal a dark pit. Her legs felt as if they wanted to turn liquid. Only the hands gripping her arms held her up. They were going to put her in that dark pit. With the rats.
She willed her legs solid again. She was the queen. But her pulse would not slow.
“How dare you put a lady in a rat-infested hole!”
Prince Fyren stepped close to the black maw. One hand on a hip held back his unbuttoned, royal blue coat. With his other hand he hefted a torch from a bracket.
“Rats? Is that what worries you, my lady? Rats?” He gave her a derisive smile. He was too young to be so well schooled at insolence. Had her arms been free she would have slapped him. “Let me allay your fears, Queen Cyrilla.”
He tossed the torch into the blackness. As it dropped, it illuminated faces. A husky fist caught the torch. There were men in the pit. At least six, maybe ten.
Prince Fyren leaned into the doorway, his voice echoing into the hole. “The queen worries there may be rats down there.”
“Rats?” came a coarse voice from the pit. “There be no rats down here. Not anymore. We ate them all.”
A hand with white ruffles at the wrist still rested on Prince Fyren’s hip. His voice taunted with feigned concern. “There, you see? The man says there are no rats. Does that ease your apprehension, my lady?”
Her eyes darted between the flickering torchlight below and Fyren. “Who are those men?”
“Why, just a few murderers and rapists awaiting their beheading, same as you. Quite vile animals, actually. What with all I’ve had to attend to, I haven’t had time to see to their sentences. I’m afraid being down in the pit for so long puts them in an ugly disposition.” His grin returned, “But I’m sure having a queen among them will mellow their mood.”
Cyrilla had to force her voice to come. “I demand my own cell.”
The grin vanished. An eyebrow lifted. “Demand? You demand?” He suddenly struck her across the face. “You demand nothing! You are nothing but a common criminal, a loathsome murderer of my people! You have been tried and convicted!”
Her cheek burned with the sting of his handprint.
“You can’t put me in there—with them.” Her whispered entreaty was hopeless, she knew, but she couldn’t keep it from her lips.
Fyren rolled his shoulders, straightening his back and coat as he regained his composure. His voice rose to those below. “You men wouldn’t defile a lady, would you?”
Soft laughter echoed up from the pit. “Why, course not. We wouldn’t want to be beheaded twice.” The coarse voice deepened into cold menace. “We’ll treat her real nice like.”
Cyrilla could taste warm, salty blood at the corner of her mouth. “Fyren, you can’t do this. I demand to be beheaded at once.”
“There you go again: demanding.”
“Why can’t it be done now! Let it be done now!”
He drew his hand back to slap her again, but then let it lower as his simper returned. “You see? At first you proclaimed your innocence, and didn’t want to be executed, but already you are reconsidering. After a few days down there, with them, you will be begging to be beheaded. You will eagerly confess your treason before all those gathered to witness your punishment. Besides, I have other matters to attend to. I can’t be bothered right now. You will be put to death when I deem I have the time.”
With rising terror, she was only now beginning to grasp the full extent of the fate that awaited her in the pit. Tears burned her eyes.
“Please . . . don’t do this to me. I’m begging you.”
Prince Fyren smoothed the white ruffles at his throat and spoke softly. “I tried to make it easy for you, Cyrilla, because you’re a woman. Drefan’s knife would have been quick. You would have suffered little that way. I would never have allowed a man in your place such mercy. But you wouldn’t have it the easy way. You allowed the Mother Confessor to interfere. You allowed yet another woman to infringe on the dominion of men!
“Women don’t have the stomach for ruling. They’re ill suited to the task. They should never be allowed to command armies or to meddle in the affairs of nations. Things had to be set right. Drefan died trying to do it the easy way. Now we do it the other way.”
He nodded to a man behind him. The guard hauled the ladder to the doorway to lower an end into the pit as the hands on her arms moved her to the edge. The other men drew swords, apparently to prevent any in the pit from thinking to come up the ladder.
Cyrilla could think of no way to stop this. She voiced a protest, knowing it was foolish, but unable to check her panic. “I am a queen, a lady, I will not be made to scurry down a rickety ladder.”
Prince Fyren blinked at her ludicrous objection, but then motioned with his hand for the man to pull the ladder back from the doorway.
He gave a mocking bow. “As you wish, my lady.”
He rose, giving a slight nod to the men holding her arms. They releas
ed her. Before she thought to move a muscle, he rammed the heel of his hand into her chest, between her breasts.
The painful blow knocked her off balance. She toppled backward through the opening. Down into the pit.
As she plummeted, she fully expected to strike the stone floor and be killed. She resigned to it with a last gasp as the futile flow of her past glory whirled before her mind’s eye. Had it all come to this? All for nought? To have her skull cracked like an egg fallen from a table to the floor?
But hands caught her. Hands were everywhere upon her, unexpectedly upon the most indecent places. Her eyes opened to see the light of the doorway go dark with a loud, reverberating clang.
Faces were all around her in the haunting, flickering torchlight. Scruffy, whiskered faces. Ugly, sweaty, wicked faces. Cunning black eyes played over her. Hungry, humorless grins showed crooked, sharp teeth. So many teeth. Her throat clenched shut, locking her breath in her lungs. Her mind refused to function, and flashed with confusing, useless images.
She was pressed to the floor. The stone was cold and painfully rough against her back. Grunts and low squeals assailed her from every side. Men were tight together above her. Against her struggles, her limbs were pushed and pulled as the men willed.
Clutching, clawlike hands ripped at her fine dress and pinched brutally at suddenly, shockingly, exposed flesh.
And then Cyrilla did something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl.
She screamed.
Chapter 27
Except for her thumb and forefinger idly turning the smooth, round bone on her necklace, Kahlan stood motionless as she studied the sprawling city. The surrounding rugged slopes seemed to tenderly cradle the buildings that filled nearly the length and breadth of the gently rolling valley. Steeply pitched slate roofs pricked the land within the ribbon of wall, with the higher peaks of the palace off to the northern end, but not so much as a wisp of smoke rose from the hundreds of stone chimneys into the clear air. She saw no movement. The arrow-straight south road leading to the main gate, the smaller, meandering roads that branched off to end at the lesser gates, and those which bypassed the outer walls altogether to lead north, were deserted.
The sloping mountain meadow before her lay buried beneath a white winter blanket. A light breeze liberated the burden of snow from a sagging branch of a nearby pine, freeing a sparkling cloud to curl away. The same breeze ruffled the white wolf fur of the thick mantle snugged against her cheek, but she hardly noticed.
Prindin and Tossidin had made the mantle for her, to keep her warm on their way northeast through the bitter winter storms that raked the bleak land they had traveled. Wolves were fearful of people, and rarely let themselves be seen, so she knew little of their habits. The brothers’ arrows had found their mark where she saw nothing. If she hadn’t seen Richard shoot, she would have thought the shots impossible. The brothers were almost as good as he.
Though she had always held a vague enmity for wolves, she had never actually been harried by them. Since Richard had told her of their close family packs, she had come to feel an affection for them. She hadn’t wanted the two brothers to kill wolves to make the warm cape, but they insisted that it was necessary and, in the end, she had acquiesced.
It had sickened her to watch the carcasses being skinned, revealing the red muscle beneath, and white of bone and sinew, the substance of being, so elegant when filled with life and spirit, so suddenly morbid when left with neither.
As the brothers went about the grisly task, she could think only of Brophy, the man she had touched with her power, only to have it prove him innocent. He had been turned to a wolf by her wizard, Giller, to release him from the power of a Confessor’s magic, so he could start over in a new life. She had wondered at how saddened these wolves’ families must have been when they never returned, as she knew Brophy’s mate and pack must have been when he was killed.
She had seen so much killing. She was weary nearly to tears of it, at the way it seemed to go on without an end in sight. At least the three men had felt no pride or joy at having killed the magnificent animals, and had said a prayer to the spirits of their brother wolves, as they had called them.
“We should not be doing this,” Chandalen grumbled.
He was leaning on his spear, watching her, she knew, but she didn’t take her eyes from the silent city below, the too-still scene. His tone was not as sharp as it usually was. It betrayed his awe at seeing a city the size of Ebinissia.
He had never before been far from the Mud People’s lands, had never seen this many buildings, especially none of such grand scale. When he had first taken in the size of it, his brown eyes had stared in silent wonder he could not conceal, and his acid tongue, for once, had forsaken him. Having lived his whole life in the village out on the plains, it must look to him as if he were seeing the result of magic, not mere human effort.
She felt a small pang of sorrow for him and the two brothers, that their simple view of the outside world had to be shattered. Well, they would see more, before this journey was ended, that would astonish them further.
“Chandalen, I have spent a great effort, nearly every waking moment, teaching you and Prindin and Tossidin to speak my language. No one where we go will speak yours. It is for your own good that I do this. You are free to believe that I am being spiteful, or that I am doing as I say: being mindful of your safety outside your land, but either way, you will speak to me in the tongue I have taught you.”
His tone tightened, but still could not disguise how humbled he was at seeing a great city for the first time. It was far from the greatest he would see. Perhaps, too, it betrayed something she had never before sensed from him: fear.
“I am to take you to Aydindril, not this place. We should not be using our time at this place.” His inflection implied he thought a place such as this could be only evil.
Squinting against the blindingly bright sun on white snow, she saw the two figures, far below, starting up the slope. She let the round bone slip from her fingers. “I’m the Mother Confessor. It’s my duty to protect all the people of the Midlands, the same way I work to safeguard the Mud People.”
“You bring no help to my people, only trouble.”
His protest seemed more habit than a heartfelt challenge. She answered it in a quiet, tired murmur. “Enough, Chandalen.”
Thankfully, he didn’t press the argument, but turned his anger elsewhere. “Prindin and Tossidin should not come up the hill in the open like that. I have taught them not to be so stupid. If they were boys, I would strike their bottoms. Anyone can see where they go. Will you do as I say, and come out of the open now?”
She let him shepherd her back into the shroud of trees, not because she thought it necessary, but because she wanted to let him know she respected his efforts to protect her. Despite his animosity at being forced to go on this journey, he had done his duty, watching over her constantly, as had the two brothers, they with smiles and concern, he with a scowl and suspicion. All three made her feel like a precious, fragile cargo that must be tended at all times. The brothers, she knew, were sincere. Chandalen, she was sure, saw his mission only as a task that must be performed, no matter how onerous.
“We should go quickly from here,” he pressed, again.
Kahlan withdrew a hand from under the fur mantle and pulled a stray strand of her long hair back from her face. “It is my duty to know what has happened here.”
“You said your duty was to go to Aydindril, as Richard With The Temper asked.”
Kahlan turned away without answering, moving deeper into the snow-crusted trees. She missed Richard more than she could bear. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face as it had looked when he thought she had betrayed him. She wanted to drop to her knees and let out the scream that seemed to be always there, trapped just below the surface, trying to find a way past her restraint, a scream born of her horror at what she had done.
But what else could she have done? If what sh
e had learned was true, and the veil to the underworld was torn and Richard was in fact the only one who could close it, and if the collar was the only thing that could save his life and give him the chance to close the veil, then she had had no choice. How could she have made any other decision? How could Richard ever respect her if she didn’t face her responsibilities to the greater good? The Richard she loved would eventually realize that. He had to.
But if any of it was not true, then she had delivered the man she loved into his worst nightmare, for nothing.
She wondered again if Richard often looked at the lock of her hair she had given him, and thought of her. She hoped that he could find it in himself to understand and forgive her. She wanted so much to tell him how much she loved him. She yearned to hold him to her. She wanted only to get to Aydindril, to Zedd, for help.
But she had to know what had happened here. She stiffened her back with resolve. She was the Mother Confessor.
She had intended to skirt Ebinissia, but for the last two days they had been coming across the frozen corpses of women. Never any men, only women, from young to old, children to grandmothers. Most were half naked, some without clothes at all. And in the dead of winter. While most had been alone, a few were together, huddled in frozen death, too exhausted, or too frightened, or too disoriented to have sought shelter. They had run from Ebinissia not in disorderly haste, but in panic, choosing to freeze to death rather than remain.
Most, too, had been badly abused before they had scattered in every direction into the mountainous countryside. Kahlan knew what had been done to them, what had made them make the choice they did. The three men knew, too, but none would voice it aloud.
She pulled her warm mantle tighter around herself. This atrocity couldn’t have been at the hands of the armies from D’Hara; it was far too recent. The troops from D’Hara had been called home. Surely, they wouldn’t have done this after they had been told the war was ended.
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