by Greg Curtis
Greenlands. Sophelia stared at it in the distance, her heart sinking. Her new home was in sight.
A journey that had begun in shame, more than she could have imagined would ever be hers, had finally reached its end. And it had begun so badly when Iros had told her of what he had heard in the Royal Chamber. Her brother in danger. Their marriage merely a reprieve in a war that Finell had no intention of ending even if she finally had some overheard word that he was still alive. Her father lied to with a forged document. She had wanted to call Iros a liar. She’d needed to doubt him. But deep down she’d known he spoke the truth. She only hoped that her family had known it too. She’d told them what she could, between tears, and in the short day between their marriage and their leaving the following morning. But to believe such evil of one of their house was hard.
Now that had been a day from the demons. Even the Father would have wept. Iros, even as he’d tried to tell her what he knew, had been dragged away by the healers for another night in their clutches, leaving her with her family and friends. Her friends had vanished quickly, they simply couldn’t face her. Her family had cried rivers of tears. And out in the city everyone had known her shame. They’d said nothing to her, but they’d stared as she’d made the long walk back to her family home, their embarrassed eyes letting her know of her fall.
And House Vora had been punished even on that first day. House Allel had revoked its promise as was always going to happen. And by the time she’d boarded the wagon, threats of legal action had already been made. And as for her promised, she hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t expected to. Berris had been humiliated by her actions. Cast aside for a husband of no house and not even of the people. Spurned. Feuds had begun for less. She didn’t love Berris, barely even knew him, but the disgrace cast upon him and his house was enough to make her want to run and hide.
All the other houses, both great and small, had immediately begun reconsidering their relationships with House Vora. Trading agreements, promises of marriage, contracts for everything from hunting rights to positions of authority, all were being reviewed. Many would be rewritten, and not in their favour. Others would be torn up.
Until her marriage House Vora had been a house of unsullied honour and unchallenged virtue. Since then neither was true. Everything their house was, all that it stood for, had been tarnished by her marriage.
In the end boarding the wagon the following day had almost come as a relief. Anything was better than staying. And yet maybe not the town in front of them.
“Sophelia?” Rial was concerned for some reason by their stopping, but then her attendant was very young and journeying through a strange land when she had never before left Leafshade. Everything worried her. But Sophelia was less concerned by the fact that they had stopped than by what she could see in front of them. Greenlands.
The town that the province was named for. Though the scholars had told her before she left that it was actually a small city. Up to thirty thousand people lived within its walls at certain times of the year. But for some reason the humans refused to even call it a city. They believed that too grandiose a title in a land of small towns, hamlets and villages. They refused to even give the city a name of its own. The city was Greenlands. The province was Greenlands. Even their scholars didn’t know why that was. They just said it was a human thing. That it had been that way for a long time.
She wished she’d studied more of the human lands. Of Irothia. But she hadn’t. Her parents had always thought it was best to stick to the traditional ways. And so as a girl she had been taught of poetry, history and art. Of gardening and tradition and keeping a house. They had shown her a little of the sciences and magic. And of course the elders and priests had instructed her in the ways of the Mother. Meanwhile as a member of House Vora she had been taught mathematics and book keeping. By most standards she was well raised. Properly educated. But nothing in her life had taught her of what life would be like in Greenlands. The most she knew of the province was the likely tariffs a trader would have to pay to set up a stall in the local markets and the goods most prized by the people.
This was her first time in the human realm. Her first time anywhere out of Leafshade, just like her worried attendants. She should have looked forwards to the journey, but she hadn’t. She had feared it. Feared the thought of shadow monkeys in the trees, and dire wolves in the grasslands. Feared brigands too, since she had heard they wandered the borderlands. But none of those had shown themselves. And yet the journey had been still more frightening than she’d expected. More terrible.
So many towns destroyed. Elven towns, human towns, it made no difference. The short war had destroyed them all.
In many of the towns though, the people had fled leaving behind only bodies. So many bodies. A few in the elven towns, so many more in the human ones. Exactly as the envoy had claimed. So as they’d journeyed from Elaris into Irothia, the reaper’s touch had grown steadily heavier.
Many of the dead were blackened by the sun and bloated with the diseases of death. Many were in pieces, the scavengers having got at them. And many were mercifully blackened by fire. But still they were obviously bodies. Men, women and children, human and elf, all dead, and through no fault of their own. These were not the soldiers who had fought the war. They were the victims.
With each new town that they had come across, the smell had struck at the nose, and the sight had torn at the heart, and she’d begged for the drivers to hurry through. There had been nothing for them to do save leave.
The same was true outside of the towns. The province was a land of rolling green hills and valleys, fields of crops. But now it was filled with burnt out farm houses, blackened fields, and dead animals. Its blue skies were darkened with carrion crows for as far as the eye could see, while wild dogs and jackals prowled the land. Why had the soldiers killed farmers? They posed no threat. Or the children? And so many of those bodies were far too small to be anything else. What possible reason was there for that? For burning their homes, killing their animals and setting fire to their fields?
It was madness. Surely the soldiers had breathed of the moon mist daily. But what had Finell breathed? He had denied the reports even though he had to have known the truth. He had cast Iros of Drake out of the Royal Chamber for speaking that truth. And at the time she like the rest had applauded his expulsion. Now having journeyed through Greenlands, she could finally see that terrible truth for herself and she knew that her husband had been right. It was her cousin that should have been expelled.
But still there had been nothing to be done on the trail. There had been no one to help. She could not say a prayer for the dead because these people were not followers of the Mother. They could not bury the bodies because they were just too numerous. And the crows and vultures would have been upset at being denied their food. And when she arrived in the city there would still be nothing she could do. She could not send a letter home, because she was a shamed woman. No longer a high born. No longer a member of House Vora. Unnamed. Her word would mean nothing. It could not be used as evidence in the court. And it would only cause her family more pain.
Maybe she could finally send a message to her brother though. Now that she was no longer in Elaris. Though she really didn’t know why the messages between him and the family had stopped. She suspected it had something to do with her cousin and not the war as he claimed. He had already lied about so much, that it was hard to believe any word that had come from his mouth.
It had been a journey of nightmare. But finally now that they’d reached Greenlands, the heart of the province and its largest town or city, and also the home of the only castle in the region, she could hope it was ended. Here at least she’d thought, the war would not have touched the people. Here at least she’d hoped that she would find a place she could one day call home. But when she finally set eyes upon the walled city she knew she was wrong. Her journey into misery had barely begun.
“Please Mother!” Sophelia whispered the small pr
ayer as she looked ahead at the distant town on the gentle green hill and the castle that crowned it for the first time in her life and her heart sank. This was the heart of Greenlands, and it was every bit as terrifying as she’d feared. A strange city in a strange land.
She could see massive stone walls and the gigantic stone fortress in the distance, and she wanted to weep for the very wrongness of it. It was crude and ugly, oversized and it sat upon the hill like a sleeping giant, crushing the land underneath. It was everything that Leafshade was not. Brutish and coarse, a town not of beauty but war.
But what made things worse was that she could see that Finell’s armies had been through the province, even this far north, just as the guards had said. As Pita had reported. And they’d done harm to the land every bit as terrible as that which they’d already passed through. As awful as could be imagined.
The fields were no longer green. They were black. For as far as the eye could see, from the crest of the hill they’d just crossed to the town and the castle on the other side of the huge valley, it was black. League upon league of burnt crops. It seemed that when they’d finally reached the heart of the province, Finell’s watchmen had decided to destroy everything. Even the land. It was a monstrous evil. How could elves do such things? How could he have ordered them to? But of course that was barely the beginning of what the soldiers had done.
Here and there, dotted among the blackened fields she could see more houses. The homes of the crofters and farmers who had made this huge valley their home. All of them were black too, burnt out, just like all the others they had passed. But in this valley at least, someone had been out to visit them after the fighting had ended. And from the yellow flags flying beside all of the houses, people had died in them. Hundreds of homes, hundreds of yellow flags, hundreds of deaths. And this was just one valley in one province.
The city too had been attacked. Even in the far distance she could see how the stone walls were blackened. Huge black scorch marks painted over the dull grey stone. She could just make out tall buildings with their tops missing, roofs eaten away by fire. Sophelia was certain that as they drew closer, it would only get worse.
And this was now her home.
Sophelia wondered how Iros must have felt as he took in the sight. If he was even awake. First the terrible news of his family, news that the high lord had delivered to him in person as they’d left the city bound for their new home. Finell had been all but gloating as he told Iros that both his parents and his sister had died in the war. Pretending sympathy, but no one was fooled by him. He was black blood.
Something had broken in Iros that day. Something deep within him. A part of his soul had crumbled away before her eyes. And yet he had still somehow found the strength to thank Finell for his kindness in breaking the news to him. He was not of her people, but in that moment she’d realised one thing. He was better than them. Or maybe their high lord, the one who was supposed to be the very embodiment of an elf, was worse. Maybe her cousin was actually a changeling.
Some claimed that the Father sometimes sent them among them. Cuckoo’s eggs to be raised in unsuspecting homes, so that they could in time become more attendants for him. But even attendants weren’t evil. They weren’t good either. They simply didn’t care about such matters. Finell though, he was a monster.
Since then, she’d hardly spoken to Iros. He’d spent most of his time either asleep in the wagon he had been given, or grieving. Hopefully healing from his dreadful wounds, though in the weeks that they had travelled north she had seen little sign of that. He just lay in his wagon, looking more and more like a corpse with every day that had passed, even as the healers tended to him. She had feared as they’d ridden over the weeks that his wagon might soon become a funeral carriage.
It had frightened her to think of it, but she’d known that she could have arrived in this human land, an elf, the Lady Sophelia of Drake and Lady of Greenlands in a land that surely hated her kind, and a widow all at once. The Mother only knew what would happen to her then. But now at least it seemed that Iros would live long enough to see his home again. To see the graves of his family. That was surely a mercy.
Of course before then things had to be done. She knew that as she watched the healers - physicians they were called in this strange land - trying to rouse her husband in the lead wagon. They were pushing strange herbs under his nose, slapping his cheeks and lifting him up. They had tried the same many times before, and each time she’d wondered if they would fail. If her husband was finally dead. But each time they had somehow roused him, and this time was no different.
“Mistress Sophelia?” Rial was still worried, though she had no reason to be. Sophelia understood everything that was happening as she saw the guards removing a shining steel cuirass and green cloak from a trunk on the back of the pack horse. She knew why they had stopped. Sophelia hushed the girl quietly.
The Lord of Drake had finally returned home. The people had to know. But did Iros know? She looked in to his eyes, and saw a frightening deadness in them. The reaper had claimed a part of his soul early.
And yet she knew he would do his duty. He looked at the city, his dead eyes filled with nothing, and she saw duty. In the hard line of his jaw, the purposeful set of his shoulders, the rigid posture, she saw duty. A part of Iros the man might be dead. Murdered by her foul cousin. But the Lord of Drake still lived.
It did not bode well for a marriage, but maybe it did for a peace. Yet even that was a lie. Iros had told her on that first day, before the healers had dragged him away, of what he had heard in the Royal Chamber. She hadn’t believed him, even though she’d told her father. She hadn’t wanted to. But after weeks in the lumbering wagons, travelling through the lands that her cousin’s soldiers had destroyed, she knew the truth. Her cousin was evil. He was never of House Vora. And he had sold her in to an unworthy marriage only to save his neck. Not for peace. He’d never had any intention of honouring the peace. To him she was even less than a bartering chip. She was simply something he could throw away when he needed to.
And still there was nothing she could do.
Sophelia dried her eyes, there was no point in tears when everything she could fear had already happened. She straightened her clothes, took a deep breath, and prepared to be driven into her new home.
The Lady Sophelia of Drake was home.
Chapter Thirty Nine.
Sophelia entered the castle nervously, not knowing what to expect.
Nothing about this land had been as she’d imagined it. And everything about the town and especially Castle Drake had surprised her thus far.
Mostly it was for its scale. Everything was too big. Far too big. This was supposed to be a town or at best a small city and yet in sheer size she thought, it could rival Leafshade as it spread itself out over the gently sloping hill. It sprawled at least a league in all directions, and the buildings were larger and closer together. There weren’t vast swathes of grass and gardens separating them.
The shops and smithies and other buildings were all oversized. All were two and three stories in height, sprawled out for surprising lengths along the streets, and made of huge stone blocks that the masons must have spent years chipping to shape. The houses behind them, those few that she could see, were the same as well. Why so big? Why did everything have to be so massive? Or so crude?
The streets were actual streets, wide and straight, but never cared for. These were not the elegant stone paths of Leafshade running through gentle green lawns, they were broad tracks of hard baked earth that ran all the way up and across the long hill, the shops lining them on both sides. And they were impossibly straight, set out by men with rocks in their hearts, not artists.
The whole town was like that. Too many straight lines and right angles, too many dark stone walls, and too much dust. It seemed that every horse and wagon that walked down the clay streets kicked a little more of it up into the air, and the breeze then carried it away to settle on a house or building. There
was a layer of fine dust over everything. Even over the scorch marks that adorned far too many of these ugly buildings.
The scorch marks of course were another surprise. A bad one. As just like the blackened fields and burnt out towns they’d passed through on their journey, they proved the lies of her cousin and his black blooded advisor. The watchmen had struck deep into the southern lands of Irothia. This was never the work of watchmen defending Elaris.
Worse though had been the large piles of black armour that she had seen thrown against walls along the streets as they’d ridden in. The armour of the Royal Watch. Her people. Silver chain, blackened with pitch. They had come here at the direction of the high lord. They had fought their way into the city and they had died. And too many parents would still be sitting in their homes, impatiently awaiting the return of their sons and daughters, worrying that they might never step through their front door.
She wondered what had become of the wearers. Had they been buried or burned? Or had they just been left somewhere for the birds to feed on? Like all the farmers and their families that they had killed. Had the proper blessings been said?
Each time they had passed another pile of elven armour she’d turned her eyes away, not wanting to see. But there were so many.
