Innocence Lost

by Patty Jansen

  Chapter 12

  JOHANNA’S HEART still beat high in her throat when she came back into the main hall, where the festivities continued as if nothing had happened. The air was heavy with the smell of sweat and alcohol. Waltzing couples filled the dance floor. The music, talk and laughter drowned out the shouts and neighs from outside. The doors on the far side of the hall were closed, so none of the stewards had yet come in to warn their masters and no one had seen the fire.

  Don’t trust any easterners. There were easterners everywhere in the crowd, amongst the guests and the servants, and in the distinguished party at the dais. There was no way that they were all bad, and there was no way to determine if any of them had knowledge of what was happening outside.

  The king sat alone at the dais, flanked by two empty chairs. Why didn’t Queen Cygna warn her husband about the fire?

  Father sat on the other side of the hall, talking to Master Deim. He didn’t look like he’d missed her, but she was sure he had. She felt guilty and horrible all in one. It was not good for business to let feelings rule your actions, Father would often say, and she had well and truly done that. However, there were more urgent issues to deal with now.

  Johanna pushed herself across the dance floor. “Excuse me, excuse me. Please let me through.”

  That earned her a few turned heads and surprised expressions. One nobleman said something lewd about the prince, but fortunately he was too drunk for his words to make sense.

  Johanna was about halfway when the doors to the hall burst open and a couple of palace guards ran in. The panicked neighs of horses drifted into the hall through the doors which the guards had left open. People stopped dancing. The orchestra played on, but several of the musicians were looking at the open door instead of the conductor. A couple of noblemen ran into the foyer.

  One of the guards was talking to the king, who nodded. His face looked pale and old. He dismissed the guard with a wave of his hand and rose.

  The music stopped. Now even the last couples stopped dancing. Some people made complaining noises, others wondered aloud about the time.

  “Friends, family,” the king said. Even his voice sounded tired. “It seems like it is time to end the festivities. Please go home and be safe.”

  Two guards accompanied him down the steps.

  People around Johanna protested.

  “What? It’s too early.”

  “What’s going on?”

  The king said no more. He made his way through the hall surrounded by the royal guards to fend off the questions.

  Johanna felt revolted. How had the country ended up with such a weak man for a king?

  He was not going to tell the people of the predicament he was in? He was not going to warn them about what he’d done or apologise? Pray for their safety? Even tell them that the city was on fire?

  The orchestra members were packing their instruments and the first people were already leaving the hall.

  She’d better go and find Father.

  But now that everyone was agitated and looking around for their friends and family, she couldn’t see him anywhere. Not in the hall and not in the entrance foyer, where courtiers were playing business as usual, handing the noble lords and ladies back their coats and cloaks. A line of people filed out of the entrance. A concerned murmur filled the space where previously there had been music and merrymaking.

  Johanna pushed through the crowd, looking for Father’s blue coat. She called him and asked people if they’d seen him. No one had.

  Then a man on the front porch yelled, “There!”

  A woman shouted, “Oh, look! Is that near our house?”

  Another woman shrieked.

  Several people started yelling at once.

  “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a work of evil magic.”

  Johanna was in the back of the crowd and could only see the orange glow of the fire against the pillars of the entrance porch, but she’d seen the fire devil.

  There was a commotion outside, voices shouting, horses neighing, the crack of whips.

  A gust of wind brought a wave of heat from across from the city. It filled the foyer and blew open all doors in the entrance hall. Curtains billowed; the candles blew out. A scent of fire wafted on the wind. People around Johanna pushed and screamed. The wind pricked with magic.

  Several people turned around and ran back towards the palace, but the palace guards were just shutting the doors and wouldn’t let anyone in.

  One guard called, “Everyone go home, go home now!”

  Outside on the steps, groups of nobles were still waiting for their coaches to turn up. A long line of them filed out the gate. The horses were nervous and several grooms had trouble keeping their charges under control.

  The animals could smell magic. They had been smelling magic all day.

  Johanna walked up and down the stairs, yelling for Father, but she didn’t see him and no one knew where he was. She couldn’t imagine that Father would have gone home without her. Where was he? Father was the only family she had left. Panic clamped around her heart.

  She ran up and down the stairs along the line of people waiting to be picked up by coaches.

  All the nobles were agitated, looking around for family, craning their necks to see if their coaches had arrived yet. She spotted Julianna Nieland, crying on the shoulder of her brother. At least they were together. Other nobles, too, were in panic, wondering aloud about the safety of their houses. Older people talked about legendary fires of the past, most of which had resulted in significant damage to large parts of town. That did nothing to ease people’s minds.

  Some people were too nervous to keep waiting and walked out the gate. The church bells were still ringing. Horses neighed and their handlers shouted. Over the top of all that noise came the occasional pop of flames.

  Father had to have been left behind inside the palace. That was the only conclusion Johanna could reach. Maybe if she asked the guards, they would open the door for her.

  The moment she decided to go back, there was a tremendous crash, followed by a growl, and splintering of wood. One of the solid palace doors had burst open in a jagged hole of splinters. Metal flashed in the darkness underneath the porch. A guard shouted, his voice suddenly cut off in a snarl.

  A woman screamed. Several dark shapes came out of the wrecked door and bounded into the forecourt. They were soft-footed and agile like cats, but much bigger.

  People were pushing back up the stairs. Johanna was in the middle of the mad crowd, barely able to see where the steps were. She stumbled several times, each time afraid that she would fall and that the crowd would trample her.

  A young woman fell and couldn’t get up because other people were stepping on her dress. Nobody seemed to care. Johanna tried to reach out to the woman, but her arm wasn’t long enough and the crowd swept her away.

  A horse in the forecourt reared, kicking its front legs. The coach behind it tipped on its side. The cabin splintered. Several of the dark creatures ran to it. One grabbed the horse by the throat. There was a woman’s high-pitched scream—cut off. A snarl.

  “Oh, by the Holy Triune,” a man called out.

  It was surely a sign of despair that nobles were invoking the Triune.

  Johanna gathered the folds of her dress around her, but the awkward hoops made it hard to move. She couldn’t see her feet. Couldn’t see where the steps were. People pushed her in all directions. Some were trying to get down, others, like her, wanted to get up. There was screaming. There were snarls. Harsh voices of men in a foreign language in the forecourt.

  Johanna reached the porch, ran between the marble columns and stepped through the wrecked door. The bottom of her dress caught. The wind had blown out all the lights in the foyer. Snarls and growls and screams continued behind her.

  She ran across the foyer with its floor covered with glass and splintered wood, into the big hall where it was dark but where mere moments before everyone had been dancing and
laughing. She went out the side door into the garden room, dark, too, with a lingering scent of perfume where Queen Cygna had been. A sharp breeze cut in through the open doors on the far side of the hall. The glass lay in shards on the ground. Someone ran in, carrying a sword. He stopped.

  “No! Go back!” His voice was rough with fear.

  Johanna pressed herself against the wall in an alcove. She didn’t think his shout was directed at her.

  Several figures ran into the gallery from behind her, over Princess Celine’s gravestone. Three—four men with long spears. With them was a dark, round-backed and long-haired creature that broke into a flat-footed run. It spotted the guard and grabbed him around the throat before he could run. He screamed as he fell, and the animal snarled, shaking its head vigorously so that the dead man’s legs flopped from one side to the other like a rag doll.

  One of the bandits whistled hard. The creature lifted its head and loped back to its owners. It halted in a rectangle of moonlight that fell into the gallery through a window. It had small, furry ears, little beady eyes, and a long nose that wriggled as the animal turned its head and looked from side to side. A bear.

  It passed not a few steps from where she hid. She pressed herself into the alcove as much as she could. The door to the main hall was at her back and it could open at any time. Worse, the wood showed her what was happening on the other side of the door.

  A couple of citizens had entered the hall. Silhouetted against the glare from the fires outside, she counted two men in uniform and a group of five or six nobles, judging by the clothing. A woman in the group was crying, holding her companion, a man in a ruffled shirt. Another group followed them, these ones running from whatever pursued them outside.

  A second bear bounded into the entrance, followed by two tall men in furs with long hair.

  “It’s following us!” one of the women screamed.

  A men yelled, “Be gone with you, demon!”

  But the bear jumped for his throat with a snarl. The man’s shout turned into a scream. While the two bears rounded up the nobles in the far corner, the bandits who had walked past Johanna had entered the hall where they met up with their comrades with claps on shoulders. One of the men whistled.

  As one, the two bears leapt into the group of nobles.

  Johanna hardly dared breathe.

  People tried to run, but the women wore stupid dresses that were not suited to running. The men were unarmed, had never held a weapon and had no idea how to defend themselves. None had any magic, except Johanna, and she had no idea how to use it to help them. She couldn’t stand it any longer; she had to step away from the door.

  In the chaos of the garden room, the panicked shouts became screams of terror, mixed with unearthly snarls. Something fell with a thud across the open doors into the hall, a few steps away from her. It was one of the nobles, dressed in court finery. The side of his head hit the ground hard. He twitched and didn’t move. A dark stain spread out from under him.

  Johanna pressed herself against the wall, careful not to touch the wood. She didn’t dare run towards the garden. Once she was there, she was trapped because with this dress she couldn’t even begin to try climbing the walls as Kylian had done. But the bandits would discover her soon.

  The screams became less and trailed off altogether. The only sounds now were the foreign voices, and the snorts and sniffles of the bears.

  Those voices became, too, became softer, as if the bandits were walking out of the other side of the hall. Johanna pressed her hand to the wood once more, just in time to see the silhouettes of bandits and the bears in the doorway as they walked into the foyer.

  What now?

  Johanna sneaked to the door and looked around the corner.

  A single torch still burned in the hall close to the door. She stepped carefully around the body of the nobleman and slipped the light out of its bracket.

  Holding it aloft, she slowly turned around. The floor of the hall was covered in bodies, noblemen in their finery with bloodstains spreading on their white shirts, noble ladies with their dresses ripped.

  A wave of dizziness overcame her.

  Father. She desperately didn’t want to look at the dead, but took her torch to each body on the floor. All those fine clothes covered in blood. Several victims had their faces ripped off.

  Father was not there.

  Dazed as if in a bad dream, she went into the entrance hall, where she found the bodies of five guards in puddles of blood. No one left alive there either.

  The palace steps were empty, orange in the glow of the fire.

  In a corridor off the hall, she found another body in brown robes. One of the Shepherd’s helpers. Her head reeled with the idiocy of it all. Who in their right minds would kill a harmless priest?

  But a chill took hold of her. Priests were probably what the attackers had been after.

  The door to a room on the right stood open. Johanna went inside. Her footfalls were soft on luxurious carpet. This appeared to be an audience room of some sort, with a number of chairs around a low table.

  Even before she saw them, Johanna knew by the tang of blood that there were dead people in this room. Part of her wanted to run away. She had seen enough blood to last her a lifetime, but part of her had to know who the victims were.

  On the couch, a red stain spread out from the body of a woman in a long black gown with lace. Queen Cygna’s veil had fallen off, and her open-eyed face looked surprised. There was a second body on the carpet. Johanna didn’t need to see the Carmine cloak to recognise the king.

  She brought her hand to her mouth to stop herself crying out. Her head was reeling. What had King Nicholaos done to justify this carnage?

  Worse, somewhere in the palace, the men were still on their rampage. They would find Roald. He would not be able to defend himself.

  Saarland was finished. Everything was lost.