The old man scowled at him. That was more like it. Real anger, real emotions. He’d been locked up in the dark for so long Kurt had been worried he’d lost his mind. Or had it tortured out of him. It happened to more than a few of them, especially the mageborn. Celeste had been experimenting, or so the rumours went, using them to try and break whatever spell Bastien had laid on her. And the Master Atelier himself had made the sigil that had bound Celeste Larelwynn. Zavi Millan should have been the greatest prize of all. Kurt had never met anyone he couldn’t get any sort of agreement out of before.
Except maybe Grace.
‘You still haven’t explained what you want of me. The queen had many demands. So did the Lady Celeste. Their ideas were… less than palatable.’
Kurt could imagine. Aurelie wanted her addiction fed. Celeste had wanted power too, power and control. She had wanted her freedom, something no one in their right mind would allow. They were both of them insane in their own ways, and terribly dangerous. Just one of them now, he supposed. He hoped.
The news that Celeste Larelwynn was dead had come as a surprise.
They all knew Kurt hadn’t killed Celeste but no one else was owning up so he was getting the blame. And the story was that Aurelie had taken the severed head home with her. What for remained to be seen. Maybe madness was catching.
Aurelie had killed a goddess. A broken and crazy one, sure. But still… What did that do to someone? Kurt shuddered at the thought.
‘Look,’ he tried again. ‘There’s something happening to the mageborn in the city. I don’t know if it’s them, or if it’s something else but – surely, some of the imprisoned ones went crazy too? Far more powerful, but not like someone who has gone hollow. Worse. They know what they’re doing. They don’t care any more. It isn’t insanity. It’s malice.’
Zavi chewed on his lower lip and tightened the grip on his folded arms. His shoulders tensed.
‘Nightborn,’ he said. ‘We call it nightborn. A lot of people think it’s an old story, a myth. The Lord of Thorns always kept it under control. But the story persisted. A warning from long ago.’
‘Well the Lord of Thorns is gone. And if the queen has her way he’s never coming back. She’s sent that Asher Kane after him. And others too, I don’t doubt it. And if they do bring Bastien back, he’s going to be her creature, at her beck and call. We can’t rely on him. It’s up to us now. No other bugger is going to save us, are they?’
Zavi walked forward, studying the workbench with its clutter of treasures, royal and mundane. Kurt had told his people to scour the city for whatever they could find, if it had a story or even a half story attached to it, if it had ever done something odd or someone had reacted weirdly to it. And then there were the things Syl and the mageborn escapees had snagged from the Treasury after her royal psychopath had finished with him.
‘Half of this is rubbish,’ Zavi said at last. ‘But…’ He sighed and brought his hand up to squeeze the bridge of his nose, like someone trying to dispel a headache. ‘There are some things here which could help some of my people. Or stop them. It’s possible…’ He turned to Kurt then, his gimlet gaze fixing him to the spot. Honestly, in all his life, Kurt had never met anyone who made him uncomfortable like this. Except Grace.
Now he figured he knew where the Duchess learned that glare.
‘Possible, but?’ Might as well offer the opening. This was going to be a delicate balance, managing this man. Syl had told him that the Master Atelier was difficult, but he had given no indication how difficult. And Grace Marchant was the only person he listened to. Kurt couldn’t even play that card because everyone knew Grace had no patience with him at all. They were not friends, but there was no one he respected more. Especially now.
‘Parry, how do I know whatever I make will not be used against my people? The queen wanted such tools. I refused. She was displeased. But I still refused.’
They’d tortured him. Kurt knew that. Killed people he was close to. Tortured anyone even remotely connected to the Academy. The few surviving cadets they had freed had been candid enough about it. There were scars, visible and invisible, marking all of them.
Some of them had broken down and wept. Most were just kids.
But still Zavi had refused.
‘Master Atelier.’ Kurt kept his tone as calm and respectful as he could. Melia stared at him as if she didn’t think he was capable of it. He’d have to have words with her about that. ‘We have to find some way to protect our people. All of them, mageborn and quotidian. Most of the threats I can deal with.’
‘Oh, you can, can you?’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in demurring. He didn’t have the time. Besides, most of them, he could, one way or another. ‘The nightborn are something else. They’re people’s family, their children, their friends. Or they were, until… until they weren’t any more.’ All the words that occurred to him were not quite enough to describe it.
But Zavi continued for him. ‘They’re beyond dangerous. They don’t care who they hurt. They don’t care if they die. They exist only to serve the Deep Dark and they only want to kill.’
That pretty much summed it up. But he could add his own details too.
‘The other day there was a teenage girl who set fire to everyone she came close to in the marketplace. I locked her in a metal room and she burned herself alive. Her parents and her sister came to beg for her life. I couldn’t even let them see her because she’d have killed them too. Do you know what they did afterwards? They thanked me.’ Well, the mother did. Bella though, the sister… if you can’t get him back, what good are you?
What good was he, indeed?
Zavi’s eyes closed, the thought of it paining him. Kurt knew that feeling. He was still disgusted with himself.
‘And then,’ Kurt went on, ‘they asked me to get Bastien Larelwynn back here. So he could sort it out for us.’
The Atelier thought about that for a moment and then shook his head. ‘Bastien Larelwynn is not the answer.’
At last, something on which they could agree.
‘No, he’s not,’ Kurt told him. ‘We are. Are you willing to help us?’
Chapter 26
The road crawled up the ridge and then dropped away, down into a lifeless valley. Thorn bushes covered it, tall as houses, black as charcoal, as if they had recently burned. A path ran down between them, narrow and ill-omened. They stopped at the edge of the grim forest. Grace reached out to touch a branch but instead of old burnt wood, she found it smooth and hard as glass. Her horse skittered to the side, spooked by something, and she snagged her finger on an ancient, petrified thorn. Her blood splashed onto it, bright and glossy.
Thorndale. They had finally reached the valley where the Lord of Thorns had been born. Somewhere in there lay the ruins of his home, and the cave containing the Maegen. Once it had been the Valley of Roses, until the Hollow King came, until the Magewar, when the nightborn had marched on his last hiding place and burned it, transforming it into this wasteland.
‘It’s not far,’ Bastien said. ‘I’ll ask no one to come with me the rest of the way.’
Grace looked at Ellyn and Rynn. There was no way she could remain behind without him, but this was their chance to back out. She only hoped they would take it.
‘We’re going with you,’ said Daniel. ‘All of us.’
Common sense seemed to have taken its day of leave.
‘It could be dangerous in there.’
Daniel laughed. ‘Just like everywhere else then. We’ve already discussed it, Larelwynn. We’re with you. Let’s go.’
Trust Daniel to make a vote of support sound like an insult.
So that was that. Bastien turned the horse’s head downhill, and they plunged into the half-light of the petrified forest.
The further in they travelled the darker it got. There was no sound but that which they made. Nothing lived here. What was there to live on? Grace shuddered as the shadows pressed closer. The Deep Dark seemed nearer tha
n ever, and stronger inside her. So strong in fact she was sure she could sense it peering out from behind her eyes. She was surprised the others hadn’t tied her hands together but for some reason they left her free. She would not have been so trusting.
The warrant was cold as ice, all the time. It weighed her down, dragging at her senses. But it hadn’t stirred, hadn’t tried to seize control of her again. Perhaps it didn’t need to. Perhaps she was doing what it wanted anyway.
The atmosphere darkened around them with the fading light. The curling branches of black thorns blotted out the sun overhead. Within them Grace began to imagine she saw movement, heard other noises, laughter, soft cries. She was certain now that this place was haunted. How could it not be?
The things that had happened here, the death, the sheer, raw magic unleashed on this land…
They were less than halfway there when Misha began to sing. Hesitant at first, shaking off the oppressive atmosphere, his voice rose clear and bright, and for a moment she thought a host of glories had descended. The song wasn’t one she knew but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the song itself that mattered but the magic behind it. The morose atmosphere lifted with the sound.
When he finished, Bastien glanced at him. ‘Keep going,’ he said. So the harper did, swinging the harp around so he could play as well. Daniel snatched up the reins to lead the Lyric’s horse in case it bolted or stopped and Misha closed his eyes, singing and playing tune after tune.
Just as suddenly as he started, the harper stopped.
‘Bastien?’ he said. No ‘your majesty’, or ‘my lord’… Bastien looked back at him, frowning.
‘What is it?’
‘Something’s coming.’
The ambush came from both sides. Figures lurched up through the branches, flinging themselves forward heedless of thorns and stone. Their eyes were black and the skin clinging to their bodies putrefied. Dead creatures, human and otherwise, launched themselves at the group.
With a cry of terror, Bastien’s mount reared up, but he clung to it grimly as it danced around, kicking at this new threat. The other horses bolted down the track and Grace raised her hands as something came at her from the upper branches. With a sickening crunch it took her from the saddle. The ground hit her hard and then there was nothing she could do as the dead thing pinned her down. Her instincts took over.
Fire ripped through it, igniting all along the animated corpse, so intense and bright that one moment she was staring into a long-dead face that was more than half skull, and the next ashes were raining down on her.
She twisted around, drawing her sword and her knife as she rolled to her feet. There were more of them, tearing their way through the branches, the dead rising, dead from countless years ago and newly dead and everything in between. Her horse was gone and she didn’t blame it. She wished she’d had the wits to hang onto it.
Her sword seemed to take on a life of its own in her hands. The impact of bodies on its blade shook down her arm and she fought through, desperation making her keep moving. To stop was to die. Clawed hands grabbed her hair, raking along her scalp, and the stench of the dead and decaying made her throat close. But she had to keep going. Lunging, twisting, hacking through them, body after body. The only blood was her own and still they kept coming.
Like they were coming for her and her alone.
‘Grace!’
Thunderous hooves drowned out the beating of her heart, the gasps of her breath. Her limbs burned, but still she slashed at the things coming for her. A huge black beast trampled through them and, from its saddle, Bastien stretched out his hand.
A desiccated grip closed on her throat. She drove her knife through an eye socket, the creature reeling away from her, clawing at it.
Damnation, she thought, I loved that knife. But she grabbed Bastien’s arm, his hand locking above her wrist, and swung herself to relative safety behind him. Wrapping her free arm around his waist, she kept slashing at those still attacking her.
Bastien yelled something at the horse and dug his heels into its sides. Its muscles bunched and released, a huge leap forward, taking them down the path at a gallop. The poor animal heaved and strained, running for its life and carrying them both with it.
They burst out of the thorn forest and into a clearing in front of great tumbling ruins of black stone, sheer as glass and dark as obsidian. The others were there, all of them, shaken and scared, but alive. That was all that mattered. She slid from the horse’s back as it slowed, but Daniel caught her deftly. Grace pulled herself free of him, understanding now what she had to do.
She drove the sword into the ground. She didn’t need it now. It was no longer the best weapon for this task. She knew what she needed. It coiled down deep inside her, dark and insidious, waiting. It knew her, knew her needs and her drives, knew that when the situation became desperate enough, when her friends were in danger or when she had no other choice, she would reach for it. She hated herself that she was so predictable, so transparent to the evil inside her. And yet, she still did it. Grace reached for the power of the Deep Dark and it laughed as it tangled its way up through her and poured out into the world. Standing her ground in front of the forest and the wave of the dead surging through it after her, she unleashed every iota of magic still inside her.
The white-hot flames leaped up at her command. They roared along the trail, incinerating anything in their path. The dead died again without a sound except for the rushing wind of incandescent flame.
Grace dropped to her knees, crushing the magic back inside her before it could slip free of her control, smothering it with every scrap of strength she had, and Bastien was with her, his hands on her shoulders. When she opened her eyes he was studying her face again.
She swallowed hard, waiting to see for herself if she’d gone too far, but after a second he gave an apologetic smile.
It was an unexpected relief. The warrant was still cold and heavy, but it wasn’t in control. Not yet.
‘Still me,’ she told him. ‘Just about.’
‘You can’t keep doing that.’
‘No one else was going to.’
He smiled at that. ‘No one else could, love. Not even me.’
She almost laughed but it was a broken, rusty sound she didn’t quite recognise.
‘What were they?’
‘The dead. All those who died here in the Magewar, I think, and since. Mageborn, nightborn and everyone else.’
‘Didn’t like me, did they?’
He shook his head. She could guess why. It was some sort of defence mechanism, a spell to stop the Deep Dark getting anywhere near the source of magic. And she was still carrying it. She couldn’t doubt that, not with the Flint in her stronger than she would ever have thought possible. Even if it didn’t still whisper to her, laugh at her, make promises of what could be…
The warrant was a curse.
She pushed the thought away. ‘Are we there yet?’
Bastien helped her stand again, steadying her before turning her around to face the ruins of Thorndale Castle.
‘Home sweet home,’ he said with that sardonic tone that masked his inner pain. Grace knew him too well now. It wasn’t bitterness or cynicism that made him sound like that. It was regret and loss.
The castle had been huge once. More than a castle, she realised as she looked at what remained of its towers and pillars, those still standing and those which had fallen spilling black rocks across the scorched and dead land. It would have been beautiful, she could see that too. Before the destruction, the ruin and decay. But it wasn’t a palace. It wasn’t a fortress or a stronghold. The layout was strangely familiar and for a moment she couldn’t tell why. The idea that it might be a memory from the Deep Dark made her shudder, but then she realised it wasn’t that either.
She knew it from Rathlynn.
It had been a temple, an exact mirror image of the Temple of the Little Goddess where Celeste was imprisoned.
‘Your home,’ she whispered.
Not to Bastien. He had never lived here, not really. They knew that now. This was the realm of the Hollow King.
Bastien swallowed hard, the movement in his throat the only indication of his mixed emotions at standing here, in this desecrated place.
‘Its towers reached to the sky,’ he murmured suddenly. ‘Red pennants flew from each one. The roses all around it reflected in the walls and when the rising sun hit the surface in the morning… it was magnificent.’
He did remember then. Or rather, the being inside him did. Grace didn’t even know what was Bastien Larelwynn, what was the Hollow King and what was… whoever he had been before it all. When he’d been just a boy who was loyal to a fault. Someone who would give his life for those he loved. That had never changed, had it?
But she couldn’t let him do it again. Not this time. Bastien was hell-bent on sacrifice and she now had a suspicion who he intended that sacrifice to be. Because of course he would do it himself rather than ask anyone else to lay down their life.
‘Where now?’ she asked.
‘There’s a tunnel, under the ruins. It leads to a cave.’
She was ready to hand out orders but Lara was there ahead of her. The marshal had already staked out a perimeter, Daniel and Misha were seeing to the exhausted horses and everyone seemed to have a job except the two of them.
‘Bastien, we should go. Just the two of us. Now. There’s no need to drag them along with us.’
‘I saw Rynn down there with me.’ His vision. She’d forgotten about that. She cursed softly and he pressed his hand to the side of her face. ‘I wish it could be different, Grace.’
‘So do I.’
She couldn’t let him do this. Not to Rynn. Not to Ellyn. Not to himself.
With deft and sudden movement, she scooped his legs out from under him. He went down with a cry of alarm and she ran for the ruins. True, she had no idea where she was going but that didn’t matter. She just needed to reach the tunnel before he did.
Nightborn: Totally addictive fantasy fiction (The Hollow King Book 2) Page 24
