Sienne grumbled, but had to admit he was right. She tossed her apple core aside and ran her hand across the spellbook’s harness. It calmed her somewhat. Everything was going to be fine. It was just an old, deserted village, not a true ruin like they’d explored so many times before. Whatever she’d seen, they’d deal with it.
A cold wind sprang up around midafternoon, prompting Sienne to put up the hood of her velvet-lined cloak. The wind blew tendrils loose from Dianthe’s braid and whipped Perrin’s long hair around his face. Sienne ducked her head against it and was therefore surprised when she ran into Alaric, who’d come to a stop. “Sorry,” she said.
“I think that’s it,” Alaric said, pointing. Sienne looked and saw dark, regular shapes against the pale new grass. Beyond those rose a stone building that at this distance looked intact. No telling how run-down it actually was after eighty years’ abandonment.
Perrin was sighting along his arm as if measuring distance. “I think another half-hour’s walk will put it within the scrying blessing’s range.”
“All right,” Alaric said, and strode off across the fields. Sienne scrambled to catch up with him.
Half an hour later, when they’d once again reached a stretch of river, Perrin said, “Here is sufficient,” and stripped off his pack to rest it on the damp ground. He removed his riffle of blessings from his pocket and tore off one with a blue smudge on one corner. “Help me make a circle, if you please.”
They tore up grass to make a lopsided circle some three feet across. Perrin dragged his toe along its outer edge to define the flat, muddy area more precisely. He stepped close to the circle, gripped the blessing in both hands, and muttered an invocation. A bright blue glow filled the space, bright enough to make Sienne squint her eyes. She blinked away tears as the glow faded. Five sapphire dots of light, like glowing beads of water, were grouped at the center of the circle, which overflowed with pale blue fog that bubbled as if the ground beneath were boiling over. They all stepped back involuntarily.
“Odd,” Perrin said. “I do not know what the fog means. It disturbs me.”
“There are no other people around, correct?” Alaric said.
“No other thinking minds. That includes were creatures, but not carricks or wisps or other non-sapient monsters.” Perrin crouched and swiped his hand through the fog, which coiled around his wrist as if it wanted to drag him down. He pulled his hand away with no difficulty. “I think I should consult with Averran.”
“You don’t think he’ll be upset?” Sienne asked. She sidestepped a tendril of fog that caressed her boot before fading away.
“Oh, he will most certainly be upset, but he is always upset, so I choose not to let it disturb me unduly.” Perrin walked a short distance away and sat cross-legged on the ground. “O most cantankerous Lord,” he began, “I—”
He stopped, and his eyes flew open. “Danger,” he whispered. “We are in great danger.”
The other four drew closer together, back to back. “I don’t see anything,” Dianthe said.
Perrin shook his head briskly. His hair flew in every direction, blown by his movement as well as the wind. “I do not understand, o Lord of crotchets,” he said, and fell silent. The other watched him closely. Sienne clutched her spellbook, letting its hard edges anchor her. Finally, Perrin stood and brushed himself off. He was breathing as heavily as if he’d run ten miles without stopping. “I cannot tell if Averran will not answer, or cannot answer. I only know that his communication was of danger to us. We are not safe here.”
“But there isn’t anything here,” Dianthe said. “And I don’t want to turn around and go back when we don’t know what the danger is.”
“We’ve been in danger before,” Alaric said. “It’s not a reason to run away. It’s a reason to be cautious.” He shrugged, settling his giant sword, which he wore on his back, into a better position. “Let’s set up camp here, well away from the village. Then we’ll explore until just before sunset. We stay out of the place after dark, and we use the alarm blessing as well as setting watch.”
They nodded agreement and began setting up the tents. Sienne helped Dianthe put up their tent, but half her attention was on the distant village. It looked peaceful in the afternoon light. Danger, Perrin had said. She had a terrible feeling they’d all find out what Averran meant before the night was over.
7
The river was deep and wide where they’d camped, so they struck out westward until they found a place they could cross. At a narrow bend in the river, crumbling pillars of piled stone showed where a bridge had spanned it once. Alaric walked to the river’s edge, which was steep and muddy. “I’d like to avoid getting wet,” he said. “Any ideas?”
“I can jump from pillar to pillar, and probably Kalanath can too, but that doesn’t help the rest of you,” Dianthe said.
“I can think of a plan that involves only Alaric getting wet,” Sienne said, opening her spellbook.
Alaric eyed her dubiously. “How big can you make me?”
He was quick. “Fifteen feet? That should make the water no more than thigh-deep on you. You might want to take off your boots.”
“Do it.” His brusqueness concealed the fear she knew was there every time she cast a spell on him. The shadow of the wizard who’d enslaved the Sassaven was always over him, she supposed, and it made her heart ache for him. It was a constant reminder that if he hadn’t run away, he would be a docile servant of an evil master, robbed of free will and tasked to protect the one who’d enslaved him. She didn’t think she could endure having magic cast on her under those circumstances.
She read off the fit spell three times, avoiding Alaric’s eyes—it felt like an invasion of his privacy, seeing the fear he couldn’t quite control. Alaric stretched newly-elongated arms and legs, then picked up Sienne by the waist and ferried her across the river, setting her down gently and without comment on the far side.
She surveyed the terrain while waiting for the others to cross. Probably this area near the river had been cultivated fields, but there was no sign of them after eighty years of lying fallow, nor of a road leading away from where the bridge had been. The rush of water and wind were the only sounds Sienne heard; not even the sound of busy insects in the grass was audible. The noise was constant and unvarying, fading into the background to fill the world with an eerie stillness that had Sienne shivering with more than cold.
Something large came up beside her. “How long until it wears off?” Alaric said. His normally deep voice sounded like thunder.
“A minute or two. I cast it at the lowest dur—”
Alaric grunted, and a moment later, he was his normal size. “Good. Give me a minute to put my boots on, and we’ll move on.”
Ten minutes’ walking brought them to the first of the ruined houses. When they were whole, they’d had stone foundations and timbered frame upper stories with thatched roofs and stone chimneys peeking out of the thatch. Now, stone was all that remained, and not much of that. Sienne slowed to look at one of the houses whose walls had collapsed outward, as if removing the timbers had made all of them fall at the same time. Long ago, people had lived in these houses. It was difficult to imagine.
“Stay close together, and stay alert,” Alaric said. Sienne kept close to his broad back, holding her spellbook ready. It felt as if they were following a road now, though there was still no sign of one; it was just how they were passing houses on both sides in varying stages of decay. Having left the river behind, the incessant wind was all the noise they heard except for the rustle of their booted feet in the grass. It was so still Sienne could hear a thrumming in her ears, like the rush of the tide, and the gentle rasp of her breath, in and out a little faster than her walking pace could account for. She thought about singing to break the horrible tension, but her singing might drown out the noise of some monstrous creature approaching. She wiped first one, then the other hand on her trousers and took hold of her spellbook again.
“The ruins are la
rger now,” Dianthe said.
Kalanath prodded a wall with the tip of his staff and stepped back in surprise when some of the stones rattled down. The small sound was larger in the stillness. “We are near the center,” he said. “Still I see nothing.”
“Anything hiding here would have to be small,” Alaric agreed. “No were-creatures. Definitely not carricks. Midges, maybe.” For once, it wasn’t a joke.
The villagers hadn’t left anything behind, not even furniture, but Sienne agreed they’d passed the houses and had reached the village square. To the left she saw the remnants of a forge, the fireplace a crumbling heap of stones, the anvil missing from the oak stump near it. Posts indicated where a stable might have been.
“The road begins here,” Perrin said, “or, more accurately, the part of the road they chose to pave begins here.” He pointed at round cobbles making a path toward the keep, with fine new grass growing up around each stone, making them look like little bald men with green hair fringes hammered feet-first into the ground. It was an unsettling image for an unsettling place.
“Anyone see anything?” Alaric said. No one spoke. “Let’s move on.”
They walked slowly up the stone path toward the keep. It was a castle in miniature, with towers at three of the four corners and a peaked arch leading to the front doors. For the residence of a duke with so small a holding, it was impressively large, but by absolute standards it was little bigger than a typical Fiorettan manor. Unlike the village’s buildings, it was made entirely of stone, smooth-faced tan and gray blocks the length of Sienne’s forearm forming walls that rose three stories high. In this place, far from any mountains, the Figlari dukes must have spent a fortune having the stones hauled in.
Sienne stopped when the rest of them did, about a hundred feet from the keep’s front door, and stood looking up at it. Its foundations and walls seemed undamaged by the ravages of eighty years of neglect. The glass windows were gone, of course, with broken shards jutting from the window frames, but the main doors hadn’t shifted in all that time, and stood dark and forbidding before the companions. A frieze carved above the outer arch represented warriors going off to battle, with birds—falcons?—flying over their heads. “That’s not it,” she said.
“It was too much to hope it is,” Kalanath said.
“I’ll scout around,” Dianthe said, but Alaric put a hand on her shoulder.
“We stay together,” he said. “I know, that has its own dangers, but I don’t want anyone alone in this place.”
Dianthe nodded. “Let’s circle the keep and see what we can see.”
Apple trees grew close around the rear of the keep, an ancient orchard grown wild for almost a century. There were no windows at ground level, and arrow slits lay at intervals along the columns of the corner towers. It was a remarkably fortress-like keep, what with the arrow slits and the crenellations along the towers, which made sense to Sienne, given how far from civilization the Figlari dukedom was.
They ducked low-growing branches just budding with new growth, spreading out by necessity, which made Sienne nervous. Even here under the trees there were no animal noises, no birds singing or flying from one branch to another. She found herself straining to hear anything beyond the sound of their own passage, anything that might prove they were still in the real world and hadn’t slipped into some dream reality—or nightmare.
On the far side, a row of window holes left the keep open to the elements. “I wish I could fly,” Sienne murmured. “But I couldn’t find anyone willing to trade for it.”
“Let’s see if we can get in via the front door,” Alaric said.
The front door, two slabs of heavy oak, looked as if they weren’t made to open, but a single push from Alaric and Kalanath set them swinging. “That’s… unexpected,” Alaric said. Sienne drew closer to Dianthe, who stood nearest her. The ease with which the doors had opened had given her a momentary image of someone hunkered down in the darkness within, anticipating their arrival.
“It is not normal,” Kalanath said. “I dislike this place.”
“Let’s find the stone and get out of here,” Dianthe said, striding forward through the doors. Sienne hurried after her.
Gray sunlight was all that illuminated the hall beyond, a small space that smelled of old, wet stone and bird droppings. Sienne still couldn’t see or hear any birds, but the odor was unmistakable. She stood beside Dianthe, gripping her spellbook, and let her eyes adjust. Gradually, she made out stone stairs with no rail going up the left-hand wall to a gallery open on the front, and another door, smaller than the first, in the wall directly opposite. A rotting tapestry covered most of the right-hand wall, the details obscured by darkness and, probably, water damage.
“Up, or forward?” Dianthe asked.
Alaric considered. “Up,” he said. “Tonia said the stone was set in a wall, and it’s probably high up where it can be seen from far away. We need to see if we can get onto the roof.”
Sienne eyed the stairs. “Those don’t look safe, with no rail.”
Dianthe took a few careful steps up and bounced once or twice on the balls of her feet. “They’re sturdy enough, just narrow. I don’t think there was ever a rail. Odd.” She ran the rest of the way up and disappeared into the gallery. “This is empty.”
“I’ll go last, just in case,” Alaric said. Sienne guessed he meant “in case my weight is too much for them.” She edged up the stairs behind Kalanath, who went as easily as Dianthe had. The open space beyond the edge of the stairs sucked at her, giving her the crazy notion that if she leapt off its edge, she would drift to the floor beneath like a dry leaf. Behind her, she heard Perrin muttering under his breath something that might have been a prayer. Perrin hated heights more than she did. She pressed into the wall harder, keeping her eyes focused on the stone stairs in front of her, and almost bounded off the last step onto the balcony.
The balcony was deeper in shadow than the entry hall, prompting Sienne to make several magic lights and set them bobbing along after her companions. Their cold light revealed a long, narrow passage, its walls stained with old leaks and scabbed over with a greenish scaly growth. Closed doors at either end of the passage offered no hints as to where they should go.
“Left,” Alaric said.
He sounded so decisive Sienne asked, “Why left?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t have a coin to flip, so I chose the nearest one. Stay close.”
Sienne didn’t need the warning. The moss, or lichen, on the walls made strange patterns, almost faces, and she carefully avoided looking at them. Dianthe pushed the door open. It moved as easily as the front door had, with barely a creak. “This is disturbing,” she said.
“Don’t let your imagination take over,” Alaric said. “Keep moving.”
An empty room, nearly cubical in shape, lay beyond the door. Dust piled heavily in the corners and on the untenanted cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. Sienne brushed one aside and made her light fly higher, illuminating the room better. No windows, no furnishings, not even a stray centus, just another door in the room opposite. Dianthe opened that one as easily and they filed through. This room had a window with half its glass missing, turning it into a toothy maw. It, too, was empty.
“How many of these rooms are there?” Dianthe said.
“Old keeps were designed like this,” Sienne said. “No hallways, just rooms opening off rooms. I can’t imagine they had any privacy.”
They passed through three more rooms like beads on a string before coming to a heavier door that stuck. Alaric put his shoulder to it, with no result. “Is it locked, or barred?” he said.
Dianthe came forward and tested the latch. “Not locked. I don’t think there’s a bar, it wouldn’t make sense.”
“I have an idea,” Sienne said. “I can cast invulnerability on the hinges.”
“That…strikes me as a step backward,” Perrin said.
“No, invulnerability doesn’t work on metal. It just weakens it. Not so much
that it shatters, but it might be enough to break it down.” She stepped forward and rested her fingers on the frame, concentrating briefly and picturing each hinge. It was a simple piece of magic for something with so many uses. She stepped back and said, “Try shoving it again.”
Alaric once more put his shoulder to the door. It creaked, groaned, and gave at the hinges to sag open, revealing more sunlight and sending a breath of fresh air swirling past. Sienne breathed it in and relaxed. They were on the wall-walk between the main keep and its southwest tower, which rose high above the roof.
Alaric led the way across the wall-walk and forced open the tower door. Inside, stone stairs spiraled up out of sight. The arrow slits let in enough light that the tower’s interior was gloomy but not dark. Alaric tilted his head back. “This should give us a good view of the roofs.”
Dianthe began climbing the stairs. “Be careful, they’re slippery,” she said. Sienne swallowed and took a few steps after her, longing to hurry but conscious of what a bad idea that was.
She was sweating by the time she reached the top, not from exertion but from nerves, and was grateful to step away from the treacherous stairs. They hadn’t reached the tower roof, but rather a single round chamber with a number of gaping windows giving a panoramic view of the keep, the village, and the surrounding countryside. It was cluttered with all manner of debris the way the rest of the keep was not. Sienne shoved aside an ancient suit of armor to get out of Alaric’s way as he came last up the stairs. “By Sisyletus, look at this,” he said. “What a lot of junk.”
“Maybe,” Dianthe said. She held up a rusted mace that even Sienne could tell had once been a fine weapon. “Armor, weapons…this was someone’s armory once.”
“That is odd,” Kalanath said, picking over a couple of disintegrating leather jerkins. “This is not a place for an armory. Why bring these things so far up?” He prodded the suit of armor with his staff.
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