“Enough,” Flyn choked. “Yield…I yield.”
There was a horrible moment when Rosheen feared she would hear the young coburn’s neck snap.
This needs to end.
“Corc,” she said firmly. “I know where Pocket is.”
The knight looked up at her, the feral ferocity of his race running rampant across his features. She stared him down, willing him back to reason, but the coburn only looked back at his captive.
“You,” Sir Corc hissed, “have a lot to learn.”
He pushed Flyn away contemptuously and snatched the greatsword from the ground while the squire coughed and wheezed.
“Tell me,” he said, looking up at Rosheen.
She gestured at the body of the goblin, still dangling from the mule’s harness.
“Look at his tunic,” she said.
Corc bent and ran the heavily soiled garment between his fingers.
“Pocket’s,” he said.
“I think he is trying to tell us something,” Rosheen said. “That he is with them…as one of them.”
“Clever lad,” Muckle muttered.
Sir Corc stood, facing her. “Can he hold the change?”
He needs hope.
“Yes,” Rosheen answered. “I believe he can.”
“Then we go after him.”
“I… do not wish to duel,” Muckle offered carefully. “But we cannot defeat that many Red Caps on our own.”
“We have no choice,” Sir Corc said.
“Yes we do,” Muckle countered. “I know where the Red Caps are going. You said it yourself, they are moving slowly. We still have time. With help, we can get the boy back.”
Rosheen looked at the goblin dubiously. “What help?”
“Oh, the best kind,” Muckle smiled broadly, showing every tooth. “The desperate kind!”
TWENTY TWO
Castle Gaunt.
Padric stood on the ramparts looking into the night, the glare from the dancing brazier blinding him to all that lay beyond and below the walls. The great fortress spread out around him, behind him, but he kept his gaze fixed on the familiar, star-filled sky, ignoring the ancient menace of stones. He could still feel it; a huge, blind, predatory weight ready to swallow him.
The steady strike of wood upon stone drew near, passed behind him, then faded as one of the sentries made his rounds, but Padric did not turn. There was only one person in the castle who could wrest his eyes from the freedom of the moon-bathed clouds, and she would come when she was ready. He fought the urge to seek her out, impatient for the solace she brought just by standing near, breathing.
The goblins thought him a king, and, having no tradition of courtship or betrothal, she was his queen. She held no power in their eyes, just a bedmate, a plaything, no more regal than a whore. To Padric she was neither queen nor harlot. She was a woman, gentle and soft; a smile, a smell, tangible and strong. He looked at her and saw the plough, the hearth, the stacks of cut turf, the simple aspects of mortal life once so reviled and now more desired than the embrace of her body. Padric was a farmer’s son. Svala’s father had been a fisherman.
They did not belong here.
The sounds of ringing metal resumed, bouncing off the stones of the great keep behind him, a chorus of screaming hammers. Padric clenched his teeth, but still did not turn. The goblins’ labors were as sickening to him as the source of their fire. Let them sweat over searing iron, shaping with hammer and tongs. They could not smelt the night nor shape the truth over the anvil. They could break their backs with work. It would not change who he was and who he was not. For now, in this moment, he was a king who could not sleep, standing a silent vigil on the walls waiting for his living lullaby.
His mind relaxed when she finally arrived, but he could feel a gentle nervousness running through his body. She was tall, so much taller than he had realized those first days. Torcan had heeded his command and provided her with clothing more suitable to Airlann’s climes. Padric knew her homeland was far colder, and he was more likely to die from chill than she, but the woolen dresses had given her something more than warmth. No longer was her head bowed, her eyes downcast. Like him, she was still afraid. They would be mad not to be. But at least now she could face the threats surrounding them with dignity. Padric had seen her supple flesh exposed in strumpet’s clothes, but he found her far more beautiful now.
In the harsh flicker of the brazier, it was difficult to see how blue her eyes were, but her smile was plainly visible as she drew up next to him, placing her hands upon the walls and following his previous gaze. Padric no longer looked out. Her long tumble of golden hair was bound against the wind in several thick braids and he stared for a lingering moment over the curve of her jaw. She must have been the envy of her village before it was burnt and she stolen away. Padric had never seen an Airlann born girl that was her equal. Mayhaps she was even wed. He hoped that her phantom husband had defended her to the death, spilling raider blood until his own spilled from him, making the slavers pay a heavy price for thrusting her into this life of fear, servitude and the ravings of monsters.
“Kederic?” he asked at last, hating to break the silence.
Svala looked over at him. “Svefn,” she said.
“Svefn,” Padric said, and she smiled a little, watching him puzzle through the few words Slouch Hat had been teaching him. “Ah, svefn. Sleeping…sleep?”
“Ja,” she said, nodding with approval. “Sleep.”
He smiled back, delighting in the accent of her people. She spoke again, maybe four words, but he only caught one of them.
“Kvila? Urn…illness? Sick? He is sick.”
She nodded, her face veiled slightly with a resigned sadness. “Ja.”
Padric turned away, not wanting his grimace of anger to fall upon her. At his insistence, Torcan had the Thegn brought to the castle from Reaver’s Meadow. He had arrived only a day behind their own party and was in a wretched condition.
Since obtaining Jerrod’s crown, Padric had found Torcan all too willing to please. The Thegn’s lies had never truly convinced the goblin warlord, Padric saw that now. The deadly test in the Tower of Vellaunus had always been part of his plan. Any previous courtesy had been nothing but a precaution, a show of respect, lest he actually prove to be the Gaunt Prince’s heir. And now he was, at least to Torcan’s mind, and the goblin’s uncontrollable hunger to give his devotion to that perverted lineage consumed him.
The clamor of the hammers in the yard below drove the peace away and Padric took Svala’s hand so that they might walk the walls together. For all their lies, the fortress was still a prison, and the only way to escape it was to get out under the night sky, and see that even Castle Gaunt sat dwarfed under the heavens.
The ancestral bastion of the Goblin Kings was a hulking citadel of towers and barbicans, linked by a chaotic web of walls, all atop the dominating hill known as Penda’s Rock. Even growing up in the shadow of Stone Fort, Padric found the construction of the castle mind boggling. Each of its rulers had built atop the Rock, adding a keep or tower or gatehouse at their whimsy until the compound beyond the walls was a hideous, disjointed mating of the minds of madmen. The oldest structures had been raised with knowledge now lost to time. The sharply pointed conical roofs of thin, round towers soaring up and away from the central keep made Padric’s skin crawl. Much of the castle had been shattered during the Rebellion and several of the inner buildings were nothing but rubble. The Red Caps had repaired most of the outer wall, but some of the watchtowers lay broken, their stones still scattered down the slope of the Rock.
He felt Svala squeeze his hand, and he turned to her. She looked at him, all trepidation and worry gone from her face. She knew him now, and he knew her, neither of them afraid to meet the gaze of the other.
“Hvila,” she said simply. There was no coaxing in her voice, no shyness nor boldness, she just spoke the word.
“Yes,” he agreed, suddenly exhausted. “Bed.”
There was
no passion in their coupling, no lusty cries of relief or surrenders to animal abandon. They had been forced together by terror, driven to companionship by their shared nightmare. She had not seduced him, and he had not taken her as the goblins wanted. They had laid together in comfort, merely holding onto each other in the blackness of strange bedchambers, each trying and failing to find peaceful sleep, listening to the other draw in and breathe out the air that would one day no longer fill their mortal bodies. Ghosts and goblins tormented their days with only a straw stuffed mockery of a man to call friend. But at night they were alone, clinging to their weak humanity, and finding in their union a reminder of the strength such weakness required. It was a ritual of comfort, always slow, deliberate and necessary. They did not take from the other, nor did they give. They clung to each other and became one, breathing together in the darkness, forgetting it was all around.
But, before they were allowed their succor, they had to cross through the Cog Yard.
Descending the stairs from the walls, they made quickly for the keep, the ancient stonework suddenly looming around them. The stars no longer held dominion. If Padric and Svala dared glance up, they would find the night sky held fast between the jaws of battlements and drum towers, gnashed by the teeth of spires before being swallowed down into a bubbling gullet of steam where motionless metal giants stood waiting.
They wound their way between the dead iron; the slumped bodies serving as their own gravestones. A sudden blast from the furnaces lit the yard, unveiling the towering silhouettes for what they were; the Forge Born covered in burial shrouds of rust standing in irregular rows, crowding the inner bailey.
Slouch Hat kept a daily count.
One hundred and nine currently stood and the Red Caps never stopped working, hauling a newly reconstructed warrior to its feet every few hours. According to the husk, only six hundred were ever made, and they almost destroyed all life on the isle.
The foundry sat in the center of the Cog Yard, belching flames and smoke from its chimneys and furnaces. Through the steam, the goblin ironmongers smote the anvils and pumped the bellows, reworking the separated limbs and bodies with heat and pressure, molding them whole. Padric and Svala flinched away from the blistering heat as they passed, the sharp hiss of cooling metal adding a painful note to the cacophony of hammers. One goblin emerged from the press of workers, staggering and coughing. He made it a few steps, then fell against the leg of a completed Forge Born, heedless as his skin began to sizzle against the iron. Wracked with spasms and choking, the wretch vomited blood on the Forge Born’s foot before slumping lifeless to the ground. Padric kept walking, his jaw clenched disdainfully.
For all their belief, Red Caps were still goblins, and goblins were Fae. Iron killed them, quickly if it pierced the flesh, slowly with exposure. The Red Caps defied this weakness with maniacal delusion, wielding iron weapons to better slaughter their kindred and wearing their heavy iron boots over layers of wrapping to keep the metal from their flesh. But the crafting of living iron was a taxing, noxious labor, and the smiths quickly weakened, collapsing into shriveled, blind, wheezing shells before they were dragged away and given to the Fire, feeding the flames of unnatural life to their last measure. New workers came to replace the fallen, and the labor continued uninterrupted, day and night, an ugly unending cycle of death and creation. The Red Caps gave their lives to birth the Forge Born, that they might bathe in the blood of the isle.
The Cog Yard was a horrifying garden, growing thick with metal monstrosities and its center was a hot, stinking, suffocating heart of industry and sacrifice. Padric defied his fear and looked, willing himself to witness the source of all this insanity, the creature he would risk everything to destroy.
The Flame Binder.
He sat in the center of the foundry, his body surrounded by a nimbus of near white flames flowing through stone channels and feeding the furnaces. The Red Caps needed no wood, nor coal to fuel their fires, not when they harnessed Fire itself. The wizard’s eyes looked up as Padric passed, his crazed smile distorted by waves of heat. The goblin’s flesh may have been untouched by flames, but his mind was completely consumed. He was less frail, less stooped than when Padric had last seen him that dreadful night in Hog’s Wallow. The night Faabar had died. He did not know how he would succeed where the fomori failed, but for the memory of their brief friendship, he knew to his soul that he must try.
Padric had been given a bedchamber high in the central keep, its window far from the noise of the Cog Yard. Two guards stood by the door, but they were no longer posted to keep Padric and Svala in. They stepped inside and Padric tossed the bolt on the heavy oaken door, closing off their shared sanctuary.
He awoke before dawn, dressing quickly in the dark chamber and leaving Svala to sleep. Passing his guards without a word, he made his way down the vaulted hall to another door. It was also guarded, and Padric had to wait for one of the Red Caps to unlock it before he slipped in quietly, making for the bed wrapped in deep shadows.
As he reached for the blankets, he was grabbed from behind, arms encircling him. Padric struggled, and his assailant fought to hold him. A wet, wheezing cough filled Padric’s ear, and he broke free of the quivering arms, spinning just in time to catch the thin, naked form of the man who had once been Thegn Kederic Winetongue. Padric laid him gently on the bed as he continued to cough violently. Lighting a candle, he grabbed a rag from the bedside stool and began wiping away the feverish sweat covering the man’s flesh. The goblins must have barely fed him, for the sinewy torso now looked shrunken, a patchwork of rib bones and raised scars. Svala had been forced to shave away the Thegn’s lice-ridden hair and beard, leaving him a pitiful, bald invalid, more corpse than man.
“This is an ill-luck reversal, my lord,” Padric said gently. “I do not have your gift for healing.”
Kederic’s eyes fluttered open at his words, clouded and slow to focus.
“Then send the girl back,” he replied weakly.
Padric grinned. “Tell me what to do.”
“Supplies?” Kederic asked.
“We have…,” Padric looked to the bedside stool, “…a basin of water.”
Kederic let out a congested chuckle. “Good news is often a balm,” he said wryly. “Tell me some.”
“You are alive,” Padric offered.
The Thegn accepted that with an approving nod. Kederic was not a man to wallow.
“And,” Padric continued, “clearly your strength is returning if you can attack your nurse. Fortunate it was not Svala. She would have hurt you.”
“Need to escape,” Kederic mumbled.
Padric reached again for the wet rag. There was no escape, but he could not say that to this man.
“Who is she?” Kederic managed as Padric placed the rag on his brow.
“Svala?” Padric shook his head ruefully. “The royal consort, thanks to you. Though I think that title is yours by rights if the true heir is your wife.”
Kederic’s hand darted from the bed, grabbing Padric by the front of his shirt.
“Do not say that.”
Padric removed the man’s hold. “Where is she, my lord?”
Kederic looked away, closing his eyes. “Better if you do not know.”
Padric could not let this rest. The knowledge would not help him, but he wanted to know. “You told Torcan I was your son. Did you have a child?”
The answer came quickly. “No.”
“Then we are stuck with your lie.”
Padric did not know why he was growing angry. Even if he knew who the heir was and where, he would not reveal it to Torcan, not even for his own life. He just wanted answers, some truth before the end.
“Do they still believe?” Kederic asked.
Padric thought of the crown and unease settled firmly over him. “Now more than before. But the truth will come out and when it does…”
“We are dead,” the Thegn finished.
Padric nodded, though the man’s eyes were still clos
ed.
“Is there a plan?”
“Slouch Hat is working on something,” Padric replied, knowing better than to say any more.
Kederic tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs rattled wetly and he succumbed to a fit of coughing.
“That husk,” he said after recovering, “was always too clever.”
“I should leave you to rest,” Padric said rising.
“No,” the Thegn’s eyes opened. “Help me stand. I need to be out of this bed. Are there garments?”
Choosing not to argue, Padric went back to his own chamber and fetched some of his spare clothes. Svala was awake and she accompanied him back to the Thegn’s room, finding the man already sitting up, his legs swung over the bedside. Svala said something to Padric and then to the Thegn, her face none too happy.
“We are being chastised,” Kederic told Padric, then spoke to Svala in her own tongue. She calmed a little, but still wore a concerned frown as she and Padric helped the Thegn dress. He was unsteady on his feet, his breathing labored, but the fever appeared to have broken. Together, Padric and Svala helped Kederic walk to their bedchamber, where the morning sun was beginning to come through the window. They sat Kederic in a chair by the fire and Padric told one of the guards to send for food.
Torcan Swinehelm arrived before their breakfast. The goblin bowed low to Padric as he entered the chamber.
“Your Grace,” he said solemnly. “I trust you slept well.”
Padric merely nodded. Torcan’s eyes scanned the room, ignoring Svala completely before fixing on the Thegn.
The Exiled Heir (Autumn's Fall Saga) Page 42
