His gaze floated up to the carving in the stone above the arch: a wolf, a river, the mountains and stars. He let out his breath and muttered, “Eusiron...”
He jumped like a cat as the gate rattled on its hinges, and then screeched open. Gulping, he rallied his wits and entered the opaque darkness of the corridor inside. The gate slammed behind him like the door to a tomb.
Chapter 19
Shade of Attachment: No death is mine.
Despite the growing insistence of Leda’s warning on his mind, Lorth again used his favorite potion, liberally dousing the lonely feeling of isolation in his heart. As a spider in a corner, a flickering torch, a cat, and finally a Faerin captain who, while relieving himself on a terrace, had met his end and given the hunter a visage to use, he moved here and there, either unnoticed or too busy for talk or reports as he gathered numbers, formations and details about the Faerins’ presence here.
In the dungeons, where he had spent the night upon his arrival here a season past, Lorth found empty chambers. This didn’t surprise him: Forloc didn’t take prisoners. But the warlord was prudent enough to spare those who would serve him—in return for their lives, of course—priestesses, herbalists, stablehands, kitchen folk and the like.
Blackthorn, thistle. The now eerily familiar presence had intensified since Lorth entered the palace. It leaned on his mind with subtle insistence, a hand on his shoulder, a face in the back of his thoughts.
Intent on remaining unnoticed, Lorth didn’t realize until he stepped through a door that he had come to the kitchens. Entranced, he grabbed a torch and passed into a storage room with high ceilings and walls lined with crates and earthen containers. On the far end, shelves held jars of dried plants, roots, mosses and bark, amid other things less recognizable.
Blackthorn, thistle.
The chamber contained a long table cluttered with knives, mortars and pestles, clay pots, glass tubes and iron burners, books and a small lamp. A stove crouched beyond the far side of the table. Someone had banked the fire.
Blackthorn, thistle. Lorth moved forward and held up his torch to illuminate the jars, hundreds and hundreds of them, many unlabeled, and some with labels so old they couldn’t be deciphered. Their arrangement made no sense. He closed his eyes and grew calm, and then released his mind into the jars to see what drew him.
Blackthorn—
He spun around in a crouch, knife in hand, as something moved behind him.
A Faerin soldier leveled a sword at him, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Who’re you?”
Only then did Lorth realize he had resumed his own form. Under normal circumstances, he would have dispatched the man and been done. Instead, he contemplated the dimensions of the room, the space between objects, the passage of time, the knife in his hand and an earlier comment by a warrior about the paleness of northern women. By the time he came to his senses, five more men rushed in, trapping him with bows drawn, arrows nocked and pointing.
He hurled his flaming torch at them. As the room darkened, he hit the ground, rolled under the table and shoved it up on its side in a single motion, sending everything on it crashing to the floor. Arrows splattered against the tabletop, whizzed over his head and rattled the jars, and skittered along the floor. Some of the jars fell and shattered. Swords hissed from their sheaths.
“Find him!” someone shouted.
Lorth uttered his shapeshifting command and blurred with the darkness. He killed three men before another came in with light. But they didn’t find the hunter there. The men he had killed had been between him and the door.
He moved through the corridors like a wraith, slipping in and out of shadows and objects to avoid the crush of swords and the shouts of running, searching men.
Blackthorn, thistle. Absurdly, he was still thinking about it.
Why had he gone down there? Foolish! Now the Faerins knew he was here. His focus on things had gone wild, hollow and scattered. He melted into an alcove and caught his breath. He blinked and shook his head to clear the noise from his mind, a dull, draining drumbeat. He had to get above, find Leda, deliver what he knew and discover what had happened to Eaglin.
Under his potion, Lorth reached the wide corridor to the South Hall, which stood adjacent to and one level above the Great Hall. An enormous staircase spanned the hall and the upper reaches of the palace. The stairs and corridor had become a battlefield where the forces Morfaen had left behind held the upper reaches of the palace. Blood splattered the walls, the trees had been burned and uprooted, and bodies lay everywhere. As a moth, Lorth fluttered through the fray, past hungry men-at-arms in white and gray and up the stairs. He had limited perceptions aside from sensitivity to sound, vibration and cold, and a deadly attraction to torchlight. He flapped into a large room thick with warriors. Assuming he had found the command center, he let himself fall to the floor on his own feet.
Dizziness swept over him, spinning the astonished faces of the men around. He collapsed to his knees. Men shouted, feet stomped, and someone swore. As the maelstrom calmed, Lorth looked up to a ring of sword points.
“Well look what the bloody cat brought in,” Eamon said. He spat. “Disarm him.”
Lorth didn’t protest as they wrestled his bow, longknife and sword from his body. A risky move, revealing himself like this. But he couldn’t bring himself to dishonor these men by sneaking off to find their Mistress without telling them he had returned.
Prederi came forward and gathered the weapons, and tossed them onto a nearby table. Another rustled the pack from Lorth’s back, slammed it to the floor and began to paw through the contents. “Food!” he said.
“Hand it around!” said another.
Lorth tried to stand, but the surrounding blades prevented that. He looked up at Eamon through the tangles of his hair. The tall Northman glowered down from wild eyes and a gaunt face. All of them wore heavy clothes, and only a table and a few chairs filled the large room. Lorth surmised they had burned the rest of the furniture for heat.
For whatever reason, they lacked focus. They had forgotten about Leaf.
“What happened to Eaglin?” Lorth rasped.
Before he could rally his guard, Eamon kicked him in the chest and sent him crashing through the men behind him. The edge of a blade hit him in the shoulder, slicing through his cloak and shirt. He clutched at the bleeding cut and rolled over, gasping for air.
“Kill him,” the guardsman said.
“Not yet,” said another. Lorth looked up as Regin entered the room. He had gone thin like the others, with unkempt hair and a filthy guardsman’s cloak. “How did you get in here?”
Lorth coughed. It hurt to breathe. He craned his head like a wounded animal and said, “Just tell me Leda is safe.”
Regin glanced at Eamon. “We’ll tell you nothing.”
Garen emerged from the group, his tunic stained with blood. “You dare use her name!”
“Traitor!” someone shouted.
Lorth closed his eyes and ground a curse for Barenus between his teeth. “I didn’t desert Eusiron. Four days after the council in which we swore vengeance, the Mistress sent me after Asmat. Within the day, I was attacked by a siomothct under orders from Eyrie. He trapped me, and by the time I got out, a month had passed.”
One of them snorted. “Nice story!”
“Ballocks,” Eamon growled. “Master Eaglin would’ve known of such orders.”
“The Aenlisarfon acted without his knowledge,” Lorth returned. “I fulfilled my duty. I took Asmat and his commanders in Mrin not three days past.” He pointed to his scabbard, lying amid the mess on the table. “On my blade, that’s the truth.”
Regin regarded him with steely blue eyes, his jaw flexing. The guardsman knew Lorth’s blade was identity marked; no warrior in his right mind would swear falsely on it. He held out his hand to Prederi, who still stood near the table. “Give it to me.” The warrior rustled it free and tossed it. Regin caught it, grasped the hilt and slid it partway from the sheath. Aft
er studying it for a moment, he said to Lorth, “Get up.”
Lorth rose to his feet, clutching his chest with one hand and the bloody wound on his shoulder with the other.
Regin gestured. Two men hustled Lorth at sword-point towards a door on the far side of the room. Lorth looked over his shoulder. “What happened to Eaglin?” Someone pounded him on the back with the pommel of a sword, sending him to his knees.
“Dead,” Regin said.
As the men hauled him back up, Lorth choked, “You think I killed him?”
Eamon looked around at his men. “Back to your posts.” He cast the hunter a blank gaze, moved to the table and poured himself a cup of wine.
~ * ~
Lorth lay on the floor in a small storage chamber with no windows and a sturdy bar on the outside that appeared to have been added recently. Regin had left him here hours ago with no word, no explanation. Lorth had tried to sleep, but cold and pain made that difficult. His senses had become too muddled to discern the time of day. But dawn had to’ve come and gone by now.
Dead. Lorth’s heart withdrew into his chest as if to hide. After losing Icaros, what had made him think even the son of Ealiron was immune to treachery and war?
Lorth was not in the habit of trusting information to anyone, and yet here he had thrown the truth before the High Guard and watched it die. What did he expect? They might have thought him dead, at least, instead of alive and in the joyous throes of treason. He didn’t know whether to feel flattered that they assumed he had eluded capture or harm, or insulted that they assumed he would betray them. Had they ever trusted him? He envisioned their faces, the men who had once shown him friendship. Not a glimmer of that remained. Only walls of strong conviction that had pressed him into the shadows and forced him silent.
Lorth lowered his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t exactly given these men enduring reasons to trust him. His disappearance and the Faerin occupation had happened too closely together. War didn’t tend to soften men’s hearts or make them reconsider the obvious.
He pushed himself up and felt his way to the door. Leda’s potion had worn off, and the vial containing the rest of it had been in his pack. He would never see that again. He drew deep breaths against the boot-shaped bruise on his chest. He stilled his mind and called up everything he knew about escaping an enclosure. But he didn’t know any commands powerful enough to move an oak bar, and even if he had, he no longer possessed but a faint glimmer of his former ability.
He thought back over the last couple of days. His powers had grown weaker, and driven him bit by bit to Leda’s shapeshifting potion. Even now, the loneliness it left behind threatened to crush him. He withdrew from the door and leaned against the wall. What had Leda said about the potion? He envisioned her holding the vial to the candlelight. Take care with this one, beloved. Use it only when you absolutely have to. Don’t use it often. She had pressed it against his heart with a kiss and added, in the softest whisper, It will consume you.
Leda! He moved his fingers through his hair and grasped it by the roots. He hadn’t realized the potion’s subtle effect; like Leda herself, a smile, a look, the movement of her hand, and she had captured his heart before he figured it out. Who could have warned him about that?
He huddled there by the faint line beneath the door, sick, sore and utterly miserable, until he began to drowse. He drifted in the cold water, a burning leaf, swirling, crying out as a ripple doused the fire. The water flowed and sang to him of the endless sea. His heartbeat wept in his breast. Darkness grew around him, blotting out the trivial and swallowing the light of his thoughts like the silence that follows shivering, a long descent to another place.
Blackthorn, thistle...
“Go away!” Lorth groaned. He grasped for the wall, the floor, anything he could find to prevent him from being dragged into the vastness of the figure standing at his feet. “Eusiron?”
Lorth! the apparition said. Wake up! I’m in the Omefalon.
The hunter started awake as if cold water had been tossed in his face. His heart pounded wildly. What did he just hear? Omefalon? He groped for the fading image of a man, cloaked in black, ghastly pale, with terrible eyes the color of moss. The scent of crushed and decaying leaves surrounded him.
Eaglin. As Lorth’s consciousness returned, it brought intense certainty that the Raven still lived. The apparition possessed the same presence as the one he had seen in the wilds north of the bridge, and in the Haunt, tormenting him with whispers of blackthorn and thistle. But what did that mean?
Omefalon. Where was that? Lorth had never heard the word.
Shouts rang out beyond the door. Lorth moved back into the chamber as stomping feet filled the corridor outside. Someone wrenched the bar from its place and opened the door. Cold wind hit his face.
“Get him out,” Eamon said. Lorth lost his breath as two men grabbed him by the arms and hauled him to his knees. They bound his hands, and then dragged him out into the hall like a sack of grain. Hurt, weak and disoriented, he couldn’t get his feet under him, let alone fight them off. They dropped him twice and ordered him to stand before he managed it.
They didn’t bring him back to the same room in which he had arrived. Instead, they brought him to the landing above the main staircase. As the warriors there parted to Eamon, Lorth heard a woman scream.
Below, a heavyset Faerin lieutenant with balding black hair gripped a young priestess. No more than a girl, her white shift had blood on it, and tears streaked the dirt on her face. Five men moved around the pair. One of them reached out and took a fistful of her pale blonde hair.
“Surrender now or we’ll rape her till she’s dead,” the lieutenant called up.
Lorth wondered why the Faerins would bother with this drama, given that the people above were starving; it couldn’t be long before they gave it up. Forloc must have received a report from the south. His time was running out.
Eamon crowded through his men and said, “Hold! We have an exchange!”
The Faerins laughed and shouted like a pack of hounds. “Bitch-loving fools!”
“What do we need with another wolf?” the lieutenant yelled. “Send down the witch! Then we’ll talk.”
“I’ve as good a one!” Eamon replied, shoving Lorth to the edge of the steps. He drew his blade and held it near Lorth’s throat. “Her filthy lover! Killed your Lord Asmat two days ago!”
The leers on the Faerins’ faces faded to empty stares as they took in this information. One of them sidled up to the lieutenant and said something into his ear that caused his expression to change, as if he had just linked Lorth’s actions over the last two seasons to the same man.
It couldn’t have helped that Lorth put a Destroyer’s spell on Asmat’s head preventing anyone from disturbing it.
After a moment, the lieutenant looked up. “If he is who you say, you wouldn’t be handing him over for a mere woman.”
Good point, Lorth thought dryly.
“Och! He serves no one but himself!” Eamon spat. “He snuck up here looking for sanctuary.” He kicked Lorth very hard behind the knees, sending him down onto the steps. “He’s unarmed and clean out of tricks! Let her go and he’s yours.”
Lorth got to his knees, glanced at the guardsman sidelong and thought, They’ll just bring up another one after I’m gone you fucking idgit... But Eamon had decided this to be a convenient way to bring him to justice. Regin was conspicuously absent; Lorth doubted he knew about this. It didn’t matter. If Eaglin did live, Lorth would need to get below to find him.
The lieutenant tightened his grip on his prize and raised his chin with a guarded stare. “Your witch queen agrees to this?”
Lorth laughed inwardly. Answer that one, you bastard.
“He’s a deserter!” Eamon said. “Can’t be trusted.”
“Mistress fell prey to his charms,” Garen added. “This isn’t up to her anymore.”
Lorth had a brief image of Forloc popping a cork on a fine bottle of wi
ne. Ignoring the curious mixture of shame and astonishment that washed over him, he knelt there and counted the holes in this ratty transaction. Only he knew the guardsmen were serious. Indeed, had he known they believed he had killed Eaglin, he wouldn’t have trusted them with so much information.
The lieutenant gazed at Lorth with an intense, calculating expression; clearly, he suspected a trick. Lorth’s sudden appearance after so long should have eased the man’s suspicion, given how differently things would have gone had the hunter been working his arts for Eusiron over the last month.
“Agreed!” the lieutenant called up. Apparently, a man didn’t rise to lieutenant in the Faerin army by missing important connections.
Eamon gestured to the girl. She glanced around at her captors as she realized they were too enamored by their new prisoner to bother with her. But the lieutenant held her tight.
“Get out of here,” Eamon said to Lorth. As he rose to his feet, a dozen archers on both sides lifted and drew their bows, leveling the tips in his direction. When he got halfway down the stairs, the lieutenant released the girl. She didn’t look at Lorth as she ran past him.
He kept going. He half expected a guardsman to sink an arrow into him before he reached the bottom.
He didn’t look up as the brown-cloaked warriors surrounded him. In his boot, Leaf huddled with as little consequence as the woman herself on the night her father had murdered her. The warriors shoved him forward.
He didn’t get far before a familiar woman’s voice rang out from the stairwell.
Leda. He looked over his shoulder. She struggled in the grips of Regin and Cael, who shouted at men to defend the stairs as they tried to wrestle her to safety. A volley of arrows shot up from the Faerin guard at the bottom. Leda fought in the guardsmen’s arms like a wild thing, her long hair flying around her face. “Unhand me now!” she cried. “Lorth!”
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