by Sarah Zettel
No, the darkness was lifting, pulling back and away, making room for the silver mists to rise and envelop her. She would have been afraid, but the mist did not obscure the stone. She saw the solid, graceless way in front of her. The way home, to earth and hearth and kin, and she followed it eagerly and paid no heed to anything else.
Gradually, the mist thinned, and vanished, and the moonlight came back filtered through a haze of clouds. The rain had thankfully spent itself. She descended the steps and her shoes touched the honest earth of home. The living wind blew hard now, bringing the scents of smoke and the homes of man. It was cool, but not cold. Elen swayed on her feet. She could go no farther. Not even to get home. There was not light enough to see by, even if she had strength to make the journey.
Beneath the bridge, the bank sloped gently away. The grass there was sparse, but dry of dew. It smelled of clean water and the river murmured gently to itself. Elen took shelter beneath the stones of the Taken Bridge, wrapped her cloak around herself. Tomorrow would bring her safe home. She had been promised.
The memory of the unspoken hint in the Lord’s voice was washed away by the whisper of the river, and she fell asleep where no other sound could reach her.
Chapter Three
Elen woke with the dawn, stiff with cold and soaked with dew. Her hunger had subsided to a leaden ache, but the sound of the river in her ears woke the burning thirst in her throat. She emerged from under the bridge, blinking in the early sunlight. The morning was still, with not even the birds calling to each other.
Bleary-eyed and muzzy-headed, she made her way down the bank and scooped up great drafts of river water, drenching sleeves and cloak further in her haste to drink. It didn’t matter. She was home and safe, and everything else would be taken care of in its time.
Once she had eased her thirst, she picked her way back to the path and started up the way toward home. The sky was clear blue and it the day warmed quickly. No sign of the previous night’s rain remained.
Was it only the night before? That gave Elen pause. There had been no way to tell how much time had passed in that other country. It could have been two days, or even longer. She was certainly tired enough. The fae were known for the games they played with time. How long had she been gone?
Elen picked up her pace. It cannot have been too long, she told herself. The promise they gave mother saw to that. I was to be returned safe and to her. They could not have kept me seven years, or a hundred …
She was running now, her feet drumming against the dry and rutted road, her heart pounding in her throat and her breath coming in gasps.
It’s all right. It’s all right. Any moment now I’ll see Taf with his cows coming to the river, or Dai with the pigs, or Carys with the buckets. They’ll tell me I left last night … It’ll be all right …
But no one came. She had the forest track to herself. The birds still did not sing. Elen’s panic deepened. The sun was well up. The way to the bridge should have been busy.
Where are they all?
There should have been watchmen on the bridge, and there were not.
What’s happened?
Then, the breeze sharpened, and she smelled smoke. Not gentle hearth smoke, this was thick and acrid, the iron and ash taste of it filling her mouth. This was the smell of disaster.
Elen grabbed her skirt in both hands and raced up the hill, finding the shortest way by instinct rather than sight. She crashed through the encroaching bracken, swatting aside thorns and branches, never heeding how they tore her skin.
Hands yanked her off her feet, dropping her onto her back so hard her head spun and all the air left her lungs in a single rush. A filthy palm clamped itself over her mouth and another gripped her wrists. She kicked out desperately and bared her teeth, trying to bite down.
“Elen! Stop, stop, you’re safe!” hissed a raw voice. Yestin.
His head and shoulders blocked the sky as he leaned over her and all she saw for a moment was a blur of darkness. Then, the darkness resolved itself, and she stared into her brother’s face. He was smeared with blood and mud and his eyes were wide with fear and fury.
He removed his hand and let her sit up. “What!” she cried, but she got no further before he crushed her to him in a smothering embrace.
“All the gods be praised,” he whispered hoarsely. “I thought you were dead!”
Elen pushed herself away and stared at him. “What’s happened?” her voice was high and tight and the words came out almost as a squeak.
He stared back at her, disbelief dropping his jaw. Ash caught in the tangle of his hair. His chin was covered in stubble and sprinkled with yet more ash, as if he had rolled in a fire.
“You … you don’t know?” he croaked.
“I only returned with the dawn. Yestin, what’s happened?”
Stark disbelief bled away, replaced by sorrow. Tears welled up in the corners of her brother’s eyes. “Oh, Elen,” he whispered. “It … I … While you were gone … Urien came back.”
The scent of smoke, the sight of blood, the sorrow on her brother’s face, all these piled on top of each other in Elen’s mind.
“Mother?” she said, high and lost like a child.
Yestin’s face hardened instantly. “They left her where she fell.”
The tears came at once, a great, blinding flood. She pressed her hand over her mouth to silence her own screams.
No! No! No! howled her mind. It cannot be! It CANNOT! They said I’d come home safe to her! They promised I’d come home safe …
And she was safe, safe with her family, which was all she had been promised. She had been gone just long enough to ensure that she remained safe while Urien …
“They said …” Yestin’s voice broke as he said the words. “Oh, gods, Elen, they said they’d show all the West Lands the price for defying Urien.”
The world snapped into sudden, knife-edged clarity. Elen gripped both Yestin’s wrists hard. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “They must be searching …”
Yestin’s face was grim. “I will not leave her. Urien has said he’ll take her head.”
Anger and outrage tore through Elen. To take an enemy’s head was to trap their spirit, lest they rise to take their revenge on their killer. There were arts that could make that head speak, to advise their murderer. Even if such arts were beyond Urien, even if he could not make Adara serve him in death as she had refused to serve in life, even then, he still meant the ultimate desecration and he meant for Adara to be trapped for eternity.
“Madyn and Til are drawing the sentries off,” said Yestin.
Mother, mother dead. Dead at Urien’s hand. Dead while Elen stood in a hall of gold and dreamed of casting off her world and her family … guilt and shame burned with the rage in her blood.
Elen surged to her feet. Yestin reached for her, trying to find some comfort to give. “No, Elen, you’re …”
“No.” She slapped his hand away. “I’m going home.”
“You can’t. This is my …”
She rounded on him, her fury as reasonless as it was strong. “I was promised I be would returned safe to my home and family! I will not be safe home while my mother is defiled!”
Her tears had frozen inside her and her vision was perfectly clear. She strode ahead into the woods and let her brother follow, or not, as he chose. She could hear nothing but a strange ringing in her ears. Her face felt hot, as if she stood too near a great fire, but her hands were cold as ice. She was only distantly aware of her own motion. The trees seemed to pass by of their own volition, reaching out and touching her arms and shoulders gently, uselessly.
The woods opened before her, letting the cleared lands spread out. Where there should have been green rows of grain, there was black and trampled earth. She heard shouts, but they were distant, broken by the rumble of hooves, and a clash of metal, here, there. Bracken rustled and broke. Urien’s sentries were beating the bushes for Madyn and Til and whoever else followed them. Elen
barely thought of this. Instead, Elen began again to run. Yestin snatched at her arm, but she tore herself free and ran without looking back. She stumbled over the clods of torn earth but she kept going. She realized some marauders would still be prowling the edges of the village, that if they knew she was not among the dead they would be looking for her as well. They would surely kill Yestin as soon as they caught him. None of these thoughts slowed her down at all. Yestin swore and she heard the rasp as he drew his sword, not his gilded gift from the High King, but the keen and seasoned sword that had belonged to their father, and he ran behind her.
Shouts, clashes. Names shouted to the wind. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered but getting home. Home. Home. Mother. Mother dead. Mother waiting for them to mutilate her body and enslave her soul. No. No. No.
Fire had taken the village. It had clawed at walls and torn away roofs. Pens that had been filled with fat animals were broken and empty, and here and there among the ruin, her unwilling eye caught sight of the fallen. Familiar faces contorted by death, familiar hands covered in blood and dirt, reaching for help that never came. She did not let herself stop. She had to get to the house. She had to find her family.
Finally, her headstrong blindness was too much. Her foot caught some unseen piece of wreckage. She sprawled full-length in the mud and ash. She picked herself up, shaking her head to clear it, and she saw yet another hand stretched out, as if to snatch at her, and she could not help but look for the man.
Beven. Beven, their harper, lay curled over his instrument like a mother over a child. The harp too was broken and dead, its strings draped across the musician’s bloody hands as they lay together in the bright morning light.
They’d killed the harper. They’d broken the harp. They did not care for even that. Even that. Bile rose in her throat and she stared up at her brother, mute in her fear of it. But Yestin was staring down the hill, toward the shouts and the clashes.
Forgive me, forgive me. Elen left Bevan as he lay, scrambled to her feet and ran again, only dimly aware that Yestin still followed.
At last, the great house was before her, still whole despite the ruin around it. The hinges that had once held the great door hung loose and twisted from the lintel. The remains of the door lay on the floor so Elen had to step over them to enter her broken home.
She could smell the blood here, and all the stench of death. The pitiless sun shone in through the doorway behind her, casting its bright beams into the ruined hall, lighting up the scattered ashes, the smashed and shattered benches, the torn cloth, and the bodies. There had been a last stand here, and she could count all the dead and give them their names.
She found Carys just beyond the door. Her sister-to-be huddled on the stones, eyes open and staring. Her head had been all but torn from her neck. Her blood was smeared and trampled into the floor by the boots that had run past her to get to the treasury.
The wealth of Elen’s family lay in a heap in the middle of their hall, the gold, the jewellery, the silver, and the fine pottery and plate. The bright sword brought by Arthur’s messengers for Yestin stuck out of the pile, flaring like a torch in the sunlight.
Mother lay on her belly next to the plunder, her hair spreading out across her face and shoulders to trail in her own half-dried blood.
Utterly spent, Elen dropped to the ground by her mother’s corpse. She reached out and took Adara’s bloody hand. It was cold. The flesh was soft and slack. The blood was sticky against her palm. She did not cry, she only held her mother’s hand and stared stupidly into her dead eyes, blinking now and again.
“Elen, we need to go. Now.”
She barely heard him. Her head was too full of other sounds. It should have been quiet in this house, but it was not. She heard the echoes of the shouts, the screams, the laughter of neighbors turned marauders. They emanated from the stones. They reverberated in the scent of blood and death that was everywhere. She inhaled them with every breath. They filled mouth, throat and lungs. She absorbed them through her skin. They would never leave her, anymore than the sight of her dead would. She knew that with dreadful certainty, because they were all calling out for her.
Where were you? the dead wailed. They screamed, they pleaded, they cursed and they cried. Where were you when we needed you?
Their voices were so loud, she barely heard the scrape of bootsoles against the floor.
“There you are, Elen. I wondered when you would return to us.”
Rage burned hard in her veins. Elen laid her mother’s hand gently down, and she stood, turning slowly to see Urien standing behind her, his sword held casually in his fist.
Nor was he alone. Three of his men had come with him to see the bloodied children steal back into their ruined home. Yestin, white with his fury watched those three, wondering, Elen knew, how many he could kill before he died himself.
“Get out, Elen!” cried Yestin, but Elen could not make herself move.
“I would have spared you this sight.” Urien spread his hands in a dreadful parody of an apology. “But your mother left me no choice. She would not say where you had gone, and your brother …” he grinned in mockery at Yestin. “Well, I would have said he was too clever to be caught, but he too has come back, hasn’t he?”
A trap. They’d threatened desecration as a trap, so Yestin would come back, and so, if all went well, would she. They meant to end the line of Pont Cymryd, here in the house it had built.
Elen’s mouth was dry and filled with the taste of blood and ash. Her mind was too full of red rage to think clearly. “Why?” she croaked. “Why?”
“I could not let Adara bring the invaders into our lands,” he said flatly. “I could not stand by while she betrayed her own for the outlanders and opened the way for them to take the rest of us.”
Elen felt her jaw go slack. The bridge. Her family had been destroyed for the bridge.
“Come now, girl.” Urien held out his hand.
To her dismay, Elen laughed, a high, bubbling hysterical noise. “You think I’d go willingly with the one who murdered my mother?”
Urien shook his head. “Your mother taught you to be sensible. This place is mine now. You’re mine now and there’re uses for you alive yet.” He took a step toward her, his hand still out.
Elen drew herself up tall. She stood in the home of her ancestors, annointed with the blood of the fae and of her family. What made him think he could touch her here?
“What do you know of my mother’s teaching?” she asked, coldly. “Her curse is on you as her blood is on my hands!” Elen lifted her hands spreading her fingers, letting him see what he had done, what he called down. “Thunder and lightning take you Urien! Earth open where you stand! Night itself hunt you down and swallow you whole!”
She felt each word she spoke resonate in her bones and echo down into the earth. The air grew thick and heavy with her words. The smoke grew dense and pulled close, blocking the sun, bringing down the night to cloak the daytime sky. Before her, Urien grew pale. The hand that held his short sword that had drunk so deeply of her family’s blood trembled. His men backed uneasily away. Elen felt her power swell, felt her words become stone, become truth. She felt eyes on her, watching, measuring, judging. What did they see, those eyes? The thought was gone almost as it formed. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Urien before her now and the truth of the curse she levelled. The dark drew closer, grew thicker, thick as blood, thick as hate.
Then Urien threw back his head and laughed, and the power of Elen’s words crumbled away.
“Very good, little Elen. Very brave. But I too have my friends and protectors. You may not touch me by such means.”
Elen’s chest heaved with the force of her breath. The unspent curse surged through her blood, causing her hands and knees to tremble with its force. How could he have have turned her words here and now? What protection did he have? What friend had he who could do so much?
“Now, come here, girl, before I grow angry.”
Yest
in stepped between them both. “You will not have her.”
Urien sighed. “It’s time you remembered you were a man, Yestin.” He jerked his chin to the man on his left. That man was broad faced and broad shouldered and carried a knife and a club, and grinned as he came forward.
Yestin did not wait for him. He screamed and he charged, the sheer fury of him knocking the man’s defence aside to plunge his sword up to its hilts in the other’s breast. But the dead man’s companions seized Yestin by the shoulders, cursing, wrestling him off, even as he spun to face them, blade dripping gore.
Elen ran too. She ran for the treasure heap. Urien’s foot shot out and caught her ankle, sending her sprawling across the floor, skidding obscenely in the fresh blood. He lunged for her, but she rolled and she kicked, and he missed her, and she threw herself forward again. He lunged once more, but she wrapped her hands around the hilt of the gift sword. She could barely lift it, her hands were so weakened by hunger and failure, but she raised its tip to Urien’s belly.
Urien threw back his head and laughed at the sight of her, trembling and pitiful with the bright sword in her shaking hands.
He should not have. Elen dove, almost fell, but the long sword was sharp enough to do the work. Its weight drove the blade into his side, through his leather jerkin and planted into his gut.
Urien screamed, his back arched like a bow and he fell, blood oozing from the wound. Before Elen could raise the sword again, Yestin grabbed her by the wrist, causing her to drop the sword.
“Get her out of here!” he screamed.
The wider world came back in a rush of sound — shouts, screams, clashing metal — men and women rushed to fill the hall, some of them allies, other’s Urien’s men, riding straight in on their foaming, snorting ponies. Elen collided with Madyn, big, grizzled, a wound on his bald scalp pouring blood down his face. He grabbed her arm and hauled her away from the surge and storm of the battle.
