The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 02 - The Yellow Palace

by Jeffrey Quyle

  Kestrel ran back down to the field of bodies around the manor and pulled a knife from a dead guard’s body, then held it in front of him as he entered the house again. The heat and smoke were no worse than before, and Kestrel realized that the structure itself was not on fire; apparently the guards had set malicious fires to destroy the family’s belongings at various locations in the structure, smaller fires that were beginning to burn themselves out. He found a dim stairwell in the back of the kitchen, and slowly descended the stairs, his eyes beginning to water in the smoky atmosphere.

  “Philip!” he called out. “Philip, it’s Kestrel!”

  There was a rustling sound in the far corner of the basement, furthest from the murky light of the staircase, and Kestrel cautiously dodged around the crates and old furniture in the clammy storage space to finally see Philip, tied and gagged, sitting in a corner. Kestrel used his purloined knife to slit the cloth gag, then cut the ropes around Philip’s wrists and ankles.

  “Kestrel! Thank Kai you’re here! We need to get upstairs; they’re doing terrible things,” he started to rise, his steps hobbled by the uneven circulation that was not yet restored to his feet.

  Kestrel reached out and grabbed his shoulders to steady him, then silently walked him to the stairs.

  “Kestrel,” Philip said, sensing the deadly calm that had come to pervade Kestrel and the home, “it’s over up there, isn’t it?”

  “It is over. It’s bad Philip, very bad. I haven’t let Margo come down to see things yet,” he told his friend.

  They began to climb the stairs, one at a time.

  “It was Clarce,” Philip said. “He came riding up in a palace uniform, just a couple of hours after I got here myself; I thought the uniform must be some kind of disguise he had used to escape from the city, and he had two men with him, also in the uniform.

  “He acted friendly until they were off their horses, and then the two men grabbed me as we were talking, and suddenly a dozen more seemed to be everywhere at once, and they tied me up and took me downstairs,” Philip relived the horror of the events.

  “Philip, stop,” Kestrel said. “Don’t think about it. Just go in the stable yard, and find the dead guards there. Take them all to one place where we can bury all their bodies. “I’ll go around front and take care of the worst things there, then we can go spend the night in the woods, and come back tomorrow to,” he paused, not sure what they could do.

  “How many dead guards are there?” Philip asked.

  “Three or four in the back, three or four in the house, and the rest are in the front. I killed them all, all but Clarce,” Kestrel said emotionlessly.

  “Where are my parents?” Philipwanted to know. “Did you rescue them?”

  “I didn’t get here in time. They’re dead,” Kestrel reluctantly answered. “Clarce had them killed.”

  “Did Clarce get away?” Philip asked.

  “No, he’s waiting out front. He can’t get away. We’ll deal with him later,” Kestrel promised.

  “Good – I want to deal with him myself,” Philip said, and they went their separate ways.

  Kestrel found Greysen out front, looking very pale as he waited for Kestrel. “Greysen, we need to get these bodies down, and laid in the house respectfully,” Kestrel explained, pointing to the swaying corpses. I’ll climb the tree and cut the ropes; you help lower them to the ground gently,” he said. “These were Margo’s parents, so treat them as well as you can.”

  “What about him?” Greysen pointed at Clarce. “What about your arm?”

  “My arm hurts, but it will be fine; we’ll deal with him later,” Kestrel said, as he went to the tree trunk and climbed awkwardly, even his elven skills diminished by the wounded shoulder. One by one he cut the ropes and lowered the bodies to Greysen.

  Kestrel led Greysen inside and introduced him to Philip. “Now go get a bucket, keep filling it with water, and go put out all the fires you can find in the house,” Kestrel told the boy. The sun was getting low in the sky, and he knew there was little time left for them to do much more that evening.

  Kestrel carried the family bodies into the house and laid them all in the dining room, then covered them with sheets. “Bless their spirits, Kai,” he spoke a quick prayer, then resumed his work. He went and gathered several lanterns, then called Philip and Greysen together, and led them to where Clarce still lay on the ground, moaning in pain.

  “Here, take this lantern and go find the women,” Kestrel told Greysen. “Tell them Philip is fine, and we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Philip, if you need to question him, we can leave him until tomorrow,” Kestrel said as he watched Greysen leave. “If you have no use forhim, we should put him away tonight.”

  “Philip, have mercy, and I’ll help you. I can help you get into the palace to kill the prince. Philip, in the name of our friendship that we had, please have mercy,” Clarce beseeched.

  “Kill him,” Philip said simply, then turned away, as Clarce began to scream, knowing that his life was about to end; Kestrel picked up a bow and shot an arrow into his heart, ending the shouting, and then he dropped the bow in disgust – disgust with Clarce’s betrayal, and disgust with his own callous ability to kill the man, wondering what he was becoming as he fell deeper and deeper into the world of spying and warfare.

  “Where are my parents?” Philip asked.

  “They’re lying in the dining room,” Kestrel answered, and he waited as Philip went inside alone and said good bye to his parents.

  “Thank you, Kestrel,” Philip said with a heavy sigh. Together they walked along the road, until they saw the glow of the fire in the woods, and silently approached it.

  “Philip! Oh Philip,” Margo cried when she saw their lanterns approaching, and she and her brother fell upon one another in a tearful reunion, as the others clustered around Kestrel.

  “Yulia, grab a knife and the skin of healing water and come cut this arrowhead out of my shoulder,” Kestrel called.

  “Why her, Kestrel? Don’t you trust me?” Picco asked, clearly upset by the events surrounding them.

  “You know me too well, little mouse,” Kestrel said affectionately. “You’d resist cutting into me the way this has to be dome. It’s not for the squeamish. Yulia will cut my flesh,and won’t wince away from doing the right thing, will you princess?” He wanted tomove the group’s focus past the atrocities on the other side of the hill; he wanted to distract them and restore some semblance of life to them all so that he could feel the warmth of their presence and humanity. As much as he needed his arm tended to, he also needed to wipe the images out of his own soul after all he had seen and done at the manor house.

  “And Greysen would be too enthusiastic about slicing me up, wouldn’t you?” he asked the boy, who half-heartedly grinned at him, his spirits rising somewhat from the shock of what he had seen at the manor house.

  Kestrel whimpered briefly when Yulia inexpertly slid the knife into his shoulder, but after that he simply squeezed Picco’s hand and turned his head away, until Yulia said “Done!” and laid the arrowhead on the ground.

  “Now dribble a little healing water into the wound,” Kestrel instructed. “Thank you your highness,” he said afterwards, and they all sat silently around the fire pit as Margo and Philip came over to join them.

  Yulia brought out the sack of food that was left from the gifts Runnel had given them, and they each took something to eat, then sat is silence as they chewed on their food.

  “Picco, you take first watch with Greysen,” Kestrel spoke at last, breaking the silence of the gloomy group. “Then wake me to serve the second watch, and Philip, you and Yulia will have the last watch of the night.”

  “What about me, Kestrel? Shouldn’t I serve a watch too?” Margo asked.

  “Only if you want to. If you think you can, then tell Picco to wake you when she wakes me,” Kestrel said. “I’m going to go sleep right over here,” he indicated, finally releasing his hold on Picco’s hand, w
hich he had held ever since the operation on his shoulder.

  “Let her sleep in if you think it would be best for her,” he whispered to Picco.

  She reached up and placed her arm around his neck, holding him in place momentarily. “She needs to be with you Kestrel; she needs to feel there’s someone strong and powerful, able to make sense of a terrible world right now. You and Philip are the only things she can cling too.” She relaxed her hold on him and let him pull away, then looked him in the eye momentarily.

  He bent down again and kissed Picco’s cheek in admiration for her compassion towards her friend, then went over and unrolled his blanket and fell quickly asleep on the forest floor, exhausted by the physical and emotional stress of the day.

  His nightmares were thankfully interrupted when Picco woke him up for his shift. “Margo’s waking up,” she said softly. “Take good care of her tonight, Kestrel,” the girl implored him, then crawled into his blankets as he arose. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” Kestrel told her as he stretched, then grunted from the pain in his shoulder, “go right ahead.”

  He wandered over to the glowing coals of the fire, and took a seat, as Margo walked over too, and sat down next to him. “What do we need to do while we’re on watch?” she asked.

  “Let’s walk around the camp perimeter once, to see what our situation is,” he suggested, giving her a hand to help her up, then carefully picking a path that his eyesight detected was clear of obstacles around the outside of their friends.

  They resumed their seats minutes later, and Kestrel began to break and throw small twig fragments into the fire. “Margo, tomorrow morning I want you to let some of us go to the house ahead of you and pick some things up,” he said, thinking of the dead guards whose bodies still littered the front yard of the house, particularly Clarce’s.

  “I was so stupid about Clarce,” she said, seeming to immediately sense the directions of his thoughts.

  “No stupider than I was, or Philip,” Kestrel answered. And so began a long, meandering monologue by Margo, as she talked about Clarce, and her parents, her home, and everything else that her heart struggled to understand and accept. She leaned her head on Kestrel’s shoulder and continued to talk as he looked around the camp from time to time.

  He listened to her pour out her broken heart, and murmured his assent from time to time, until she fell asleep. Kestrel held still, and let her sleep against him until their shift was at an end, then he guided her back to her blankets and woke Philip and Yulia so that they might take the final shift.

  “Wake me in the morning first,” he told Philip. “I’ll take Greysen and Yulia and we’ll go move the dead bodies out of the yard before you bring Margo and Picco to the house.”

  “Good idea,” Philip agreed as he rubbed his eyes. Kestrel left him and went back to his blankets, where he discovered Picco soundly sleeping. He was too tired and too sore to care about appearances, and he gently eased his way into the blankets next to the girl and fell back to sleep.

  When he approached Kestrel at dawn, Philip found them asleep together, Picco’s arm wrapped around Kestrel as he lay on his uninjured shoulder. The elf gently slid out from under Picco’s grasp, as she stirred enough to sleepily say, “Good night,” then drifted back to sleep.

  Kestrel took Yulia, and they awoke Greysen, then the three of them followed the road back to the dark, deserted manor house. “Why are we doing the dirty work? The boy asked sleepily.

  “Because this is home for Margo and Philip, and the bodies inside the house are their parents and friends,” Kestrel said. “There’s enough sorrow here for them; they shouldn’t have to see death spread all over their lawn.”

  “He’s right, Greysen,” Yulia concurred. “I do not relish thinking about what I may see when we go back to Hydrotaz.

  “Who did all this?” she asked, as they stopped and looked at the scattered bodies.

  “I was berserk yesterday,” Kestrel admitted. “I knew the traitor who killed this family, and I went mad. Greysen and I will take these bodies around to the back, if you’ll try to make the house look presentable inside, especially where the family members are laid.”

  Yulia looked at him as though she wanted to say something, but then turned and left without comment.

  They went to work without further comment or pause, except when Greysen turned sick twice, but shortly after the sun was all the way above the horizon all the bodies of the Graylee palace forces were in a pile behind the stables, and a fire was burning in the kitchen stove, with water on the boil for whatever might be needed. The three workers followed the road back to the campsite, and then helped pack up the supplies and lead the group into the tragic setting on the other side of the hill.

  Philip left before noon to go to a nearby village and bring a priest back, while Kestrel and Greysen dug graves and Picco and Yulia tended the horses of the family and the soldiers that were crowded in the stables. Margo dressed the bodies, and by sundown they had buried the dead family members and servants.

  That night they slept in the house, and Kestrel pondered what to do next. He had the goddess’s instructions to take Yulia and Greysen to Hydrotaz, but he saw the state of shock his friends were in, the loss of purpose that had overcome them in the face of the murders at their home, and he hesitated to leave them.

  “Philip was working in the city to develop support to name father as the new prince,” Margo told him the next morning as the two of them sat alone in the dining room eating the simple food they could prepare from the pantry. “That’s what he had been working on in the city all summer long, and of course Clarce knew, and said he supported him. That’s why they rode up here– to kill father so that the opponents to the princewouldn’t have anyone to rally around.

  “What do we do now?” she asked Kestrel.

  “I don’t know, Margo. That is a big question that you and Philip need to discuss. I wish I could stay here and help you do what is best for Graylee, and best for your family, but I have a mission to carry out in Hydrotaz,” he answered. “I will stay here a couple of days if there is anything I can do to help.”

  “Kestrel, I wish you could stay with us forever, until this entire nightmare is over,” she told him. “You’ve come out of nowhere, and saved our lives over and over, like a guardian.”

  “And likewise, all of you have taken care of me,” he answered, aware of her presently fragile heart, but wondering once again if there could be a place in it for him someday despite his pending departure.

  “You and Philip are two of the best people I’ve met, among humans or elves or sprites, for that matter,” he made her smile for a moment, “and I want to do as much as I can for you, and for Picco. Let me know what you and your brother want to do, and when I am done in the east, I’ll come back here if I’m allowed, and be your guardian again for the duration,” he told her. He was trying to let her know how committed he was to her, trying to delicately express his admiration for her without ignoring the terrible state he knew her emotions had to be in from both the death of her family and the fact that her own boyfriend had been the murderer.

  “There you are,” Yulia came in at that moment. “I slept better than I have in ages. That was the most comfortable mattress I’ve laid on since leaving home, better even than your aunt’s estate,” she told Margo. “Is Philip awake yet?” she asked.

  “No sign of him yet,” Kestrel answered.

  “Would you like some tea?” Margo asked, rising. “Let’s go in the kitchen and brew a cup for you, and fix some breakfast,” and the two of them walked away, leaving Kestrel alone at the table.

  Philip came in minutes later, before the women returned. “Have you seen any sign of Yulia yet this morning?” he asked Kestrel.

  “She’s in the kitchen with Margo, getting a cup of tea,” Kestrel told his friend.

  “Yulia tells me that you say she’s now the monarch of Hydrotaz. Is that true?” Philip sat down and asked.

  “When
I went to the Yellow Palace to get her, the officer I spoke with told me she was to be executed because her brother the prince had been killed already, and she was the last of the family left,” Kestrel retold the story.

  “You are going to be number one on the wanted list the prince and Poma have,” Philip told Kestrel. “You broke us out of the palace, after escaping yourself. You set Yulia and the boy free, and now you’ve wiped out an entire assassination squad.

  “If we had a dozen more like you we could take the palace,” he added, “not that we would have anyone to put on the throne now. Father would have been perfect – a good leader for the nation, someone who would stand up to Uniontown, someone who everyone would support and rally around.

  “I’ll bring you two dozen elven archers if you need them someday,” Kestrel jested.

  “How quickly could you bring them here?” Philip asked seriously.

  Kestrel stared at him, then tried to imagine the length of a ride across all of Graylee, plus Hydrotaz, and estimated a journey of at least two weeks, then remembered that his countrymen would probably not ride on horses, but would run at nearly as good a pace.

  “If they would really listen to me, it would be almost three weeks from the time I left the Eastern Forest until we were in Graylee,” he answered. “If we could safely cross the human lands without being butchered along the way.”

  “Your ears are really growing,” Philip observed, as Kestrel unconsciously brushed the hair away from the side of his head.

  “They’ll keep doing so, and my eyebrows will rise. There’s no going back now that I’ve used the spring water,” Kestrel said. “Fortunately I’ll be able to travel to Hydrotaz with my hood up more often now that the weather is starting to change, and hopefully Yulia’s status will protect me while I’m with her.”