The inn will survive just fine with one fewer barmaid.
It was later during her walk home when the idea struck her. The trees were like sentinels, watching her, judging her. The wind blasted her cloak and the misting rain wetted her cheeks, but her blood pounded hot as ever. Tomorrow will be different, she swore to herself. I will breakfast with Mother and apologize for my laziness. No woods. No wandering. No sleeping in the trees or haunting the hills. Symon was right. It is past time I found a proper lady’s work. I must find my future, else I will be an old crone without a coin to my name. The thought disheartened her, but so too did the thought of working in the Rockbottom forever. No more. She made an oath. I will not flit about the city a moment.
I will make something of myself, and men like Saul will never ignore me again.
Leaving
The night was cold, the shadows gathering. Little moonlight lived to illuminate Andelusia’s way, and yet she moved without misstep towards home. Nimble as a cat, swift as a sparrow, she slinked between the frost-barked trees and leapt across puddles of half-frozen mud. In half the time it would have taken another, she reached the hill beyond which her and her mother’s tiny cottage stood. Her new oath hung like a beacon of sunshine in her heart. All was quiet in her mind. All felt peaceful, better than any night before.
It was in the thickets just before her house she slowed and came to a stop. Swearing she had heard something snap in the dry branches behind her, she squinted into the darkness and tilted her ear to the night. A rabbit? A deer? One of my thousand kittens? She paused for a half-breath before continuing, but then another snap sounded, cracking the silence again. She stopped for a second time, whirling about and flashing her pale palm at the trees as if to ward the darkness away. “Hello?” She gazed without fear into the night. “Helllloooo? Who is there? I see you. Come out, come out!” she sang, though still she saw nothing.
She turned back toward home, but after just a few paces more she froze in place for a third and final time. The hairs upon her neck bristled. She spun about, glimpsing a predatory shape moving amongst the slender, leafless trees. She had always been a stranger to fear, having been fortunate to never encounter malice in her life, but at that moment, in the loneliest gloom of night, her body quaked with it. She gazed at the shadowy shape between the trees, and then, with one violent thrash, it came for her.
She screamed. From the darkness, terror took her. Forceful hands gripped her arms, hurled her to the hillside, and pinned her against the mud. She should have screamed again, should have wailed like the world were ended, but her fear gagged her. The predator lashed out at her. His punch to her gut knocked her breathless. His slap to her jaw convinced her that to scream was to die. As she gasped for air, the dreadful thing began to drag her through the brambles and across the cold, wet forest floor toward some unknowable place in the darkness. Fear slipped like a dagger into her heart, compelling her to finally cry out, but before she could summon a scream, her head struck a rock, and the only sound she summoned was a babbling string of nonsense. A last thought came to her, one that told her to use her hidden knife, but weakness washed over her, numbing her hands and foiling her fingers. She felt herself being dragged farther and farther away from home, her senses dulled, her mind slipping into unconsciousness. It was the end of her eve, the end of my life.
She awoke to a cold, dark place. Pain echoed like a hundred hammers in her head. Where am I? How much time has passed? Am I already dead? She cracked two raw eyelids open, expecting to be struck down, but nothing came. Whoever had taken her was gone. She glimpsed her surroundings. She had been discarded in a cluttered, two-doored chamber with bare walls and dirt for a floor. There was little light here, only the veiled glow of a nearby lantern, whose feeble glimmer flickered against rotted walls and ruined furniture, throwing shadows here and there. Thoughts innumerable spun though her mind. Why? She wondered. What have I done? What monster has taken me? How am I still alive?
There were no answers. All she knew was changed, and the hopes of yestereve turned to horror. After gaining some semblance of awareness, she wriggled and tried to stand, but found her hands tied and her legs trussed so tightly that the bindings cut like teeth into the soft flesh of her wrists and ankles. Her clothes were damp and ragged from the saturation of the slick forest floor, and her mouth was cruelly gagged. She was a captive, she knew, a slave to whatever fate the predator had in mind.
The longer she sat, bound and gagged, the harder her heart began to beat. The rotting room, so grey and gauzy in her bleary eyes, spun through her vision like angry winter clouds. She tried to stand again, but like two twigs in a winter storm, her legs shook uncontrollably. No sooner did she rise to her knees than she collapsed back to the floor, crashing in a loud, helpless heap. For nearly an hour afterward she lay where she had fallen, shivering, wondering when it was that her cold, cruel end would arrive. Sweat broke out upon her forehead. Needles of white light floated in the blacks of her eyes. She thought many times to cry out for help, but worried the sound of her helplessness would only entice her captor to return and put an end to her. Finally a new fear fell upon her, halting her tears. She became as still as death, for somewhere in the next room a door creaked open. The predator drew near.
* * *
Outside, away from the terrors seizing Andelusia, dawn crept over the world. The night’s winds slowed and the stars evaporated in the light of the rising sun. Saul of Elrain rose from his Rockbottom bed. His respite was at an end, he knew. He gathered what maps and provisions he needed, shouldered his battle-staff, and clomped down the stairs, demanding his breakfast be quickly made. He had lingered in Cairn too long, he knew. He could rest no more, not until his quest was complete and the Councilors of Graehelm given his message.
“You seem grim today, stranger,” remarked Symon, the only other soul in the Rockbottom awake at this hour.
“I suppose I am,” he grunted.
“They say you’re a soldier. They rumor Elrain sends you as a harbinger.”
“I would tell you everything…” He set down his tankard of water and strode to the door. “…were I not sworn otherwise.”
“So this is farewell?” Symon looked nervous.
“Indeed.”
He exited the Rockbottom and breathed the predawn air. The day promised to be warmer than the previous few, for the rain was gone, the clouds burned away by the sun. Striding into the woods, he put the Rockbottom behind him, and all concerns for the odd folk inhabiting the strange little town. He sauntered along an old, seldom-used path leading into the glens lying south and east of Cairn. The sky began to glow with soft, subtle shades of blue and orange, and the fires of the sun set the horizon ablaze.
He was not alone that morn. After a visit to Cairn’s stables, he walked in the company of his steed, a tall, proud stallion named Beref. Beref’s colors were black, brown, and pearly white, marking the beast as a prize from the royal stables of Elrain. He had been allowed Beref as his sole companion for his trip to Graehelm, and the stallion had proved unfailing thus far. My only friend on this damnably long trip, he thought.
The only company I need.
Once Cairn’s heart fell out of sight, he mounted Beref and doubled his pace, seeking the path out of the hills and into the prairies beyond. He wound his way through the old forest for about an hour, his cowl dropped low over his brow, his battlestaff bouncing in his hand. The path led into a narrow valley between two hills, a tree-hemmed hollow near the edge of Cairn’s boundary. It was in that valley, where the forest thinned and autumn’s dry, crackling grasses creaked in the wind, a shaft of sunlight glimmered through the trees, striking his eyes like an arrow. He cast his gaze downward, where he happened to glimpse a gully in the center of the valley. Ugly, he thought of the gully. Even for a hole.
The gully was a dark place, a dreary sinkhole of muck, rotting roots, and broken limbs. A decrepit house of wood and thatch lurched in its center, bleak and haunted as a tomb. He and Beref slowed
as they passed the hole. He would not have thought the place especially unusual, save for its semblance to a grave, and for the slender black mare pawing the earth near its door. Who would live in such a hovel? No one good, to be certain. He spared a moment’s curiosity, and then, after a puff of chill morning air, he moved on.
* * *
I am a dead woman, thought Andelusia. And worse, a fool.
She lay prone upon the filthy floor, straining her eyes at the creature entering the room. He was a man, sure enough, for all that his gangly arms and gaunt features had fooled her in the night. Though her arms were pinned beneath her, she mustered enough strength to rise to her knees and confront him. He moved closer. He raised the room’s lantern above her, shining the cold light upon her face like a spiteful moon. He was stern-faced and rigid, his mouth hardened in a cruel line. She turned her cheek at him, but he moved like a viper, gripping her chin and wrenching her jaw, forcing her to look upon him. She knew him at once.
“My fair girl, you’re lost,” he mocked. “What will you do so far from home?”
Wincing from the stench of his hot, stinking breath, she dared to look right back at him.
Aramar, emissary of Cairn’s Lord Mayor, had always been a private, secretive sort. She remembered him for his high cheeks and stone-grey eyes. And for his stares. He comes to the Rockbottom, always at night, always alone. He must have looked at me a thousand times, each time hungrier than the last. She cast her mind back far as it would go. She recalled he had many times asked her to join him in his carriage. She had always known what he wanted, and had always declined his invitations. As she gazed up at him, she saw the cruelty in his eyes. Like ice melting, a tear trickled down her trembling cheek.
“Alone with me at last,” he growled. “And still you’ll not speak. For one so pretty, you’re so like stone. How many of us have burned to be with you? Your skin, so soft. Your little body, so fresh. And yet you deny us.”
“Why?” she managed to say through her gag.
“Why?” he spat. “Why, you ask? For years, you’ve ignored me. You laughed at my wooing, you giggled when I walked by, and you rolled your eyes when I asked you to my manse. Why? Because out here no one’s near to stop me. That’s why. Because I’m a lord, at least as far as you are concerned, and I’m accustomed to acquiring all that interests me.”
“But—”
“There’s no but!” He gripped her face harder in his hand. “It didn’t have to be this way. You could’ve once, just once, danced with me. You could’ve graced my arm and joined me in my carriage, but you chose to flit right past me. You probably laughed about me, didn’t you? You and your Symon, your protector, always talking, always laughing. Who now is laughing? I hear no one.”
His grip tightened as he raged. In a fit of fury, he threw her back against the rotting wall. Pain rattled her body. The insides of her head felt soupy, sloshing about until she was half-senseless. She gasped for breath, her hopelessness deepening when she saw him retrieve the blade lying upon the mantle behind him.
Andelusia was not a powerful woman. Slender as a willow, she knew Aramar could snap her in half like a twig if he so desired. And he does desire it, she knew. He wants to ruin and slay me, and no one in Cairn will be any the wiser.
Flush with horror, she slammed her eyes shut. Her thoughts began to clear. A memory, half-forgotten, speared through the shadows in her mind. My knife…The thought exploded in her mind.
I still have it.
Aramar grinned and waved his dagger. A rotting couch and a tilted, three-legged table were all that stood between his blade and her throat. She shaped her mouth into a rigid, emotionless line. And then, like lightning striking, she twisted in her bonds and slipped her fingers into the folds of her dress, clutching at her thigh where her knife remained hidden. With a shallow breath and a nimble turn of the wickedly-sharp blade, she slashed the sloppily-tied bonds upon her ankles and sprang to her feet. Aramar gaped. He seemed not to believe such a thing was possible, that his cornered prey would dare resist. He came for her, but rather than run, she held her ground, the needlelike dagger trembling in her still-bound hands.
“And now what, little rabbit?” He sneered. “You think you can escape?”
The thrum of her heart drowning her, she held the knife outward and backed against the nearest door. The planks felt cold against her spine, like a coffin’s bottom. Then it came, the sudden rush of air and the sensation of falling. Aramar had not taken care to seal her fate. His murder-house was old and decrepit, its welfare long abandoned. The wooden bolt holding the door snapped under her meager weight, the entire portal falling from its hinges and caving into the morning light. The sudden burst of daylight startled Aramar. He paused, wide-eyed, before snarling like a wolf and leaping after her with murder frothing between his teeth.
She was swifter and surer of foot than he could know. Before he reached her, she pounced to her feet and sprinted into the dawn. The sun stung her eyes, the rattle of the leaves like a crowd applauding her escape. But the gully muck was her enemy. She tried to bolt up the side of the sinkhole, but her feet slid in the mud and gave way. She crashed in a heap to the ground and her blade tumbled from her grasp.
All her hopes of escape were gone.
Waiting for death, her world ground to a halt. She heard Aramar howling triumphantly behind her, and she smelled his rotten breath wafting near. A dagger in my ribs, she expected. A stroke to end me. Symon, help! Mother, please!
But death did not come.
A shout split the air just above her head. She heard something whirling, the crunch of bones breaking, and the sickening wail of a man struck mortally. Symon? She hoped against hope. The Lord Mayor? Or someone else trying to kill me? She stayed cheek-down in the mud. Her heart, fair breaking her ribs, thudded beneath her breast. She lay prostrate for what seemed an eternity, and then, like sunshine come to melt her, she felt fingers fall upon her shoulder.
“Rise,” said the voice above her. “You’re safe.”
Her heart skipped two beats. She recognized her rescuer’s voice. The stranger from the Rockbottom! The traveler from Elrain! Wide-eyed, she allowed him to peel her from the mud. He removed her gag and used her dagger to trim away her bonds, and he was far more tender than she thought him capable of. She grimaced when she saw the bruises left by Aramar’s ropes, but still managed the tiniest smile, peering up at Saul with sad, sad eyes. “Thank you,” she sniffled. “He was going to kill me. I was dead.”
“Was he the only one? No other killers in hiding?” He brushed a blob of mud from her cheek.
Her voice cracked. “No, only him. I think so, anyway.” She saw the stranger in Saul’s eyes begin to fade away. He helped her rise, looking at her like a father might, holding her shoulders square with his strong, wide hands. She was not afraid anymore. Saul felt like a friend, no longer just an outsider passing through.
“I saw the horse. And then I heard a noise,” he explained. “I knew something was wrong, though not for a second did I guess anything this evil was about to happen.”
He gestured toward the house, to its ruined door, and then to fallen Aramar. When she saw Aramar and the dark pool of his blood gathering in the muck, she backed away. “You…you killed him. What happens now? He has been in the service of the Lord Mayor ever since I was a girl. He will be missed.”
Saul shrugged. “All the same, I must leave. I can’t dawdle for a dead man. Imprisonment or interrogation would delay me. He’ll rot on the wayside. Seems he deserves it.”
“You do not understand,” she protested. “They will look for a murderer, and they will know you have done it. Worse yet, they will find me! Whom will they believe when they seek guilt? Women have no say in Cairn. I will spend my days in an iron cell or as bones hanging from the gallows!”
Her tears began to flow, draining down her cheeks like a sorrowful spring drizzle. Saul retreated to Beref, returning with an offering of water, but she shooed it away. “Do not try to console me.�
�
“Lady Andelusia.” He held out his palm as if to absolve her of Aramar’s death. “I wish otherwise, but I can’t help you. It’s not my place. You survived. It’s over. I don’t think you’ll be punished. If it comes to it, lay the blame on me. Let them chase me all the way to the capital. This was justice. Surely they’ll see it.”
She stopped weeping. She wiped the tears and grime from her face, and stared at Saul, pleading with her eyes. The only thought pounding through her head was that her life was changed, that she would never live as she had before. “Because you have killed him, you have fixed my fate.” She exhaled her words as though they pained her. “Even were I not a suspect, I will live in fear of the day when this secret is laid bare. I cannot stay in Cairn. You…you must take me with you.”
Saul looked to the sky, the earth, and all places in-between. “I hardly know you,” he said.
“Please.” She clutched at his shirt. “I beg you. If not for this, I might have asked for your help all the same. I cannot stay here. There is nothing good here, not for someone like me. And now this…this will only make it worse.”
He looked behind him, where the sun rose ever higher. He seemed drawn to it, and away from me, she feared. “I’m sorry, child,” he said. “I’ve done all I can. Go home and heal your wounds. Find what good in life you can. I have to leave. It’s my duty.”
Whistling to summon his horse, he leapt in the saddle. With one last look at her, he wheeled about and galloped up and out of the gully. She watched him crash through brittle brush and frosted limb. He did not look back to her, not even once, but left her standing there, dirty, cold, and alone.
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 4
