by Zoe Marriott
A gourdin charged out. His sword flashed. A young hill guard, who had put away her blade to carry a wooden crate, fell with a scream, clutching at her neck.
“’Ware! ’Ware!” the gourdin yelled. “Men, to me!”
The man went down under Arian’s sword, but two more doors had already burst open. More rebel warriors spilled into the courtyard. Some wore full armour, others only shirts and breeches, but all were fully armed. I cursed as I realized we had wasted our chance at a nearly bloodless victory. A glance up at the fortress showed me that the small windows were beginning to flicker with lights as the gourdin’s shouts woke the occupants. The time for silence and stealth was done.
The hill guards ran to meet the rebels with battle roars. I drew my axe and flew into the fight. The hours of training took over and my weapon rose and fell, body spinning and kicking, on instinct alone. Arian fought at my back, sword in one hand, a weighted wooden baton in the other. We carved a swathe through the rebel warriors. I saw the fierce hope on the faces of the hill guard around me. We’re winning. We can win. We can defeat them.
“Frost…” A familiar voice at my elbow brought me spinning around.
It was Hind. Her face was the colour of ash, the front of her tunic soaked with blood. One arm hung uselessly at her side. She sagged, and I caught her around the shoulders before she hit the ground. “Arian! Help!”
Arian dispatched the gourdin before him with a ringing blow to the head and turned, eyes widening when he saw Hind clinging to me. He shoved his sword into its scabbard and the baton into his belt and eased his arm around Hind’s waist. Together we dragged her out of the tide of the battle and carefully lowered her to the ground by the wall. A dead gourdin had collapsed there, his face still twisted into an expression of horror. I looked away.
“Luca—” Hind said. “He went in there. I tried to stop him…”
“Luca did this to you?” I whispered, disbelieving.
“Only the arm,” Hind said between her teeth. “Punched me in my shoulder. Arm went numb. I couldn’t hold my sword. Gourdin got me.”
I swore aloud.
“He went into the House?” Arian asked urgently. “Alone?”
“He’s going after him,” Hind said. Her good hand gripped Arian’s arm. Her eyes bored into us. “He’s not thinking straight. Ion will kill him.”
“You need a healer—” I began.
Hind shook her head. “Rani will find me. No time. Go after him.”
Arian hesitated, looking at the battle. Then he nodded sharply at me. “Let’s go.”
Hind closed her eyes as we got up and ran. I prayed that she was right and that someone would find her before it was too late.
We skirted the battle in the centre of the courtyard and headed towards the wooden door set into a new section of bricks at the front of the House of God. A gourdin was blocking the entrance. His massive shoulders nearly touched the frame on each side, and he held a small war-axe in each meaty fist. There were three bodies in hill-guard uniforms lying near by. I didn’t let myself look at their faces, but none of them had Luca’s short, golden hair.
“No further,” the rebel warrior said to us, voice rumbling like thunder. “You won’t step one foot further into our home.”
Arian drew his sword with a metallic rasp. “This isn’t your home, Sedorne. This is stolen property. Now move – or die.”
Thirty-two
I went in low, swinging at the gourdin’s leg. Moving fast for such a bulky man, he brought his right axe down, catching my axe blade on his pick. His other axe flicked up to catch Arian’s sword in exactly the same way. The rebel twisted and pulled his axes expertly. I staggered forward a step, fighting to hang onto my weapon.
Arian let go of his sword and leaped away. The sudden release of tension made the rebel lurch off balance. I wrenched at my larger axe. Metal screamed, and the weapon went flying from the gourdin’s hand. I bared my teeth in a grin of triumph. One axe down, one to go.
Arian reached under his jerkin and pulled out his weighted baton as the gourdin took his remaining axe in both hands and aimed a side blow at my gut. I got my weapon down just in time, deflecting the blade with the iron langet.
Arian surged into the fray and drove the end of his baton into the rebel’s stomach. The rebel went white and stumbled backwards and Arian smashed his baton into the man’s knees.
The gourdin bellowed as his legs buckled. He crashed to the ground. At the same moment, I jabbed the iron-bound head of my axe into his temple. There was a crunch as the metal met the rebel’s skull, and he slumped to the floor, lying half in and half out of the doorway.
Arian got to his feet and retrieved his sword. Together we jumped over the giant’s legs and landed in a large, echoing space, full of shadows.
The room was oddly shaped, with many sides, and was mainly taken by roughly made wooden furniture. It looked for all the world like the hill guards’ mess tent. I had braced myself for more enemy soldiers, but the room was empty.
“They left only one man to defend the doorway? That’s crazy.”
“They didn’t believe attackers would get this far,” Arian said, his gaze searching the room. “The inbred belief that they were invincible was the reason the Sedorne lost the war. Come on, we need to keep moving.”
We searched the room cautiously, keeping our backs to the wall, until we found a doorway. There was no door in it – a rail above indicated a curtain had once hung there, but no more. Arian eased through the gap, still plastered to one wall. I took the other side. The corridor was wide, with a towering ceiling that disappeared into darkness. The only light was from thin window slits high up. I still couldn’t hear any movement; there were no voices or footsteps. It was eerie.
Arian was running one hand over the wall. Then he ducked down and seemed to be touching the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“There are sconces here for lamps, but they’re empty. And I can feel dust on the floors. I think this part is disused,” he said.
“That makes no sense. It’s directly off the main room,” I said, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck lift. “Can I have your baton? There’s no space for an axe here.”
“Take the knife instead,” he said, handing it to me hilt first. “You’re more used to an edged weapon.”
We moved forward, weapons ready. I expected to see light at any moment, but instead the place grew darker. It was like venturing into a cave.
“This place is massive,” I whispered as we came to a circular chamber with four more empty doorways leading off it. Even lowered, my voice echoed off the walls.
“We’re going to have to risk a light,” Arian said. “I’ve got a candle in my belt pouch. Hold this.”
He pushed the baton into my free hand, and, after some muttered swearing and scraping noises, a light flickered to life. He took the baton back and let some of the molten wax drip onto the end before sticking the candle to it. Now the baton was a candleholder as well as a weapon. He held the light up high, but the tiny flame didn’t offer much illumination – just enough to keep us from stumbling over our own feet.
“Maybe we should go back and try another exit from the main room?” I suggested.
There was a muffled cry from one of the corridors and without another word we both rushed forward.
Almost immediately an acrid stench reached my nose. Urine. Hot fat. Blood.
The flicker of Arian’s candle showed us a man’s body. A gourdin, fallen across the corridor. He had been carrying a tallow light when he fell. It lay beside him, the flame extinguished by his blood.
“Luca’s work?” Arian muttered as we passed into the space at the end of the corridor.
It had once been a large, circular room. Now crude wooden bars divided it into cages. People were huddled at the corners of the cages, revealed by the pale light coming through the high window slits and Arian’s candle. The stink of unwashed bodies and the sight of skinny arms and legs poking out of ra
gged clothes told me that these prisoners had been here for some time. They were all Rua.
“Slaves.” The word tasted vile in my mouth.
Arian stepped towards the first cage. A woman, her face so lined with dirt that she might have been eighteen or eighty, was crouched there with a small child. The child let out a tiny whimper and the woman hushed him, the faint glimmer of light in her eyes revealing that she was watching Arian intently.
He yanked his sword from its sheath.
The woman cringed back, her arms going around the child.
Arian sliced through the wooden bolt that held the cage closed and yanked the door open.
“It’s all right,” he whispered, voice more gentle than I had ever heard it before. “We’re the royal hill guard. The king and reia sent us. You’re safe now. You can come out.”
The woman stared up at him, motionless apart from the panicked panting that made her chest heave. The child whimpered again.
“A man went past just now,” the woman whispered, her voice hoarse and dry. “He had a uniform like yours. He killed the guard, but he didn’t stop to let us out…” Her eyes travelled over Arian and me again, and she seemed to relax. “He was Sedorne, though. I suppose he didn’t care about us.”
Burn you, Luca. My jaw ached from keeping the words in. Around the room the other Rua prisoners were beginning to stir, murmuring with fear or sudden hope.
“We’re going to let you all out,” Arian said firmly.
Working as quickly as we could, we smashed open the locks on the wooden cages. “You’re free now,” I whispered to each prisoner. “You’re free.”
“Does anyone here know their way around the fortress?” Arian asked, when everyone was out. “There’s fighting outside. I don’t want to send you out there.”
“I can fight,” said a bent old man, peering fiercely at Arian through a fringe of white hair. “I’d like to kill a few Sedorne.”
“We don’t have weapons to give you,” I temporized hastily. “Anyway, some of the Sedorne are on our side. We can’t have you killing them.”
The old man snorted. Some of the others chuckled tiredly. Most just stared, mute with shock and not sure whether to believe in their sudden release.
“We’re the scum,” the first woman said. Despite her skinniness she had managed to hoist the little boy – not her boy, she said, but his ma was long gone – up onto her hip. “Ones too sick or young or ugly or old to sell on. They march us out to do the labouring that’s too dirty for them. We know our way about. We can hide until the fighting’s stopped, one way or another.”
“Stay out of sight. We’ll send someone to look for you if – when – we win,” I said.
The woman nodded and moved towards the corridor, the others trailing more slowly after her. As she reached the doorway she looked back. “That Sedorne boy. He went up those stairs like a rat down a sewer hole. If you’re interested.”
“We are. Thanks.”
“Give him a few lumps for me,” the woman said, turning away.
Arian opened his mouth, but I put my hand on his shoulder and shook my head. How could he defend Luca’s actions to these people?
Arian went up the stairs first with his guttering light. I followed closely behind him, knife point aimed carefully at the ground so as not to stab him if he stopped suddenly. The foul air of the slave pens clung to my skin.
When we reached the top of the steps we found ourselves in an empty corridor identical to the one that had led to the room of prisoners. There was another set of stone steps directly ahead of us.
“I don’t like this.” Arian stared at the corridor. “We could wander through this place for hours and find nothing. It’s immense. Where is Luca heading? He can’t have any more of an idea where Ion is than we do.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He must have some idea, or he wouldn’t have turned on Hind like that. Where would he look for Ion? That’s the question. Where is Ion likely to be in a place like this?”
The candle on the baton had burned down while we were freeing the prisoners and the hot wax had hardened into yellow rivulets on the sides of the weapon. As Arian stood thinking, the flame finally went out, leaving us surrounded by shadows. He lowered the baton, and the last of the wax splattered onto the stone flags.
“Luca told me once that Ion always liked to look down on people – to pretend that he was an eagle and everyone else was a mouse.”
I nodded, remembering how Ion had stared smugly down at Arian and me when he had caught us by the brook. Even when the Wolf had started slaughtering his men, he hadn’t bothered to climb down from his perch and help. “I don’t think he really likes fighting much. Not if his opponent can fight back, anyway. I’ll bet he’s hiding somewhere high up, where he can watch but not get involved. There’s a tower here. That would be the first place Luca would look.”
“Then we need to keep going up too.”
We headed up the next flight of stairs at a run – but as Arian reached the top he stopped dead. I steadied myself on the wall with my free hand, and peered over his shoulder. This corridor was different to the previous ones. There was a long, faded rug laid on the flagstones, and a table with a chipped jug and ewer. An oil lamp burned in a sconce above the table.
People lived here.
We hurried towards the next set of steps. Our tramping footsteps sounded unbearably loud. I turned to keep our backs covered.
“Mama?”
A small girl, her hair standing out around her face in a dandelion halo of blonde curls, toddled into the corridor. She froze when she saw us, clutching handfuls of her too-long nightdress as her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise.
“Go!” I cried.
I heard the little girl wailing behind us as we dashed up the stairs and came out onto the next floor to find a corridor fully lit with oil lamps. A middle-aged man with curling grey hair rushed out from a behind a curtain, buckling on a sword belt. He gaped when he saw us. Then his hand went to his sword.
Arian’s baton lashed out and caught the man a solid blow in the temple. Dried wax flew everywhere. The man reeled back through the curtain. A scream – a woman’s this time – filled my ears. Arian started to go after the man, but I dashed past him towards the next flight of stairs. Taking them two at a time, I almost ran face first into the wooden door at the top.
An icy blast of air made my eyes water as I wrenched the door open, waiting only for Arian to follow me out side before I slammed it shut behind us.
“Give me your baton!” I snatched it from him and forced it through the iron ring of the door handle, twisting it up so that its handle was jammed into the door frame. No one would be able to come after us now.
I wiped the sheen of cold sweat from my forehead as I looked around. We were standing on top of a rampart – an immensely thick, curving wall that seemed to form the front edge of the building. Behind us there was a sloping slate roof. And to our left was the tower we had been searching for. A small wooden door, level with the rampart, was set into its base.
From this vantage point, we had a perfect view of the ruined walls of the former House of God and the ferocious fire that was consuming the remains of the palisade, sending out a pall of smoke that hung over everything. Below, it was a twenty-foot drop to the great courtyard where we had left our friends fighting. I could hear weapons clashing, people screaming. I took a step forward to look down at the battle, but Arian put his arm out to stop me.
“Not now. Let’s do what we came for and search the tower.”
I nodded, pulling my axe out again. I handed the borrowed knife back to Arian, who sheathed it at his thigh and drew his sword. We made for the tower door.
“I should go first,” I said. “I don’t want to be behind you with my axe.”
“Not a chance,” he said grimly. “I know you. If Ion’s up there you’ll end up getting yourself killed.”
I ground my teeth. It was like he had become a shorter, grumpier version of
how Luca used to be. “You don’t have to protect me.”
“Well, I’m going to. Squawk about it all you like.”
“You—”
I closed my jaws with a snap as we both heard a familiar voice ring out overhead. It might have been a shout of triumph or pain, but it was unmistakeably Luca.
Arian’s head snapped back. “He’s in there.”
The shout came again, and this time there were words in it. Luca was calling his brother’s name. I flung open the tower door.
The small chamber beyond was dark and mostly taken up by a set of winding stone steps. Luca’s voice was echoing down from somewhere above. Not giving Arian a chance to argue, I pelted up the steps first. He was right behind me. Our footsteps rang through the tower until the entire structure seemed to shake. The tiny slit windows flashing past gave me dizzying glimpses of the courtyard below, of sky, of rooftops.
“… hear us … coming,” Arian said between his teeth.
“Too late now,” I gasped, trying to keep my axe blades from hitting the wall. A bad rebound would cut my throat. Arian was having the same trouble. The sound of his sword scraping off the rock made my teeth ache. I looked up and saw wooden planks overhead.
Another twist of the stairs and I reached the top. I stumbled out into a surprisingly large space – not a room but a wooden platform, with the stone blocks of the tower reaching only to waist height. Above that the chamber was open to the elements. Wooden posts held up a conical roof, and a bronze bell hung in the roof space, its thick rope falling down to coil in the centre of the room. The place was a shambles. A chair and table had been overturned, papers, books and pens lay scattered on the floor, ink pooled in glossy puddles over curling parchment maps.
Luca stood with his back to us on the other side of the tower. There was a knife in his hand. The point of the knife was pressed to his brother’s throat as Ion leaned back against the low wall of stone, his arms held out on either side of his body to try and keep his balance. If he moved the slightest bit forward the knife would pierce his neck. If he leaned back another inch he would topple over the edge of the wall.
