almost like pleasure. “Ah, but I’d scorch them first, wouldn’t I? I’d speak my mind and burn the skin from their ears! Hiding behind a baby like that, claiming to protect Olin’s throne when everyone knows they’ve been itching to get their hands on it since his poor brother died.” She waved her hand in disgust. “Enough. I will walk you to the door. It is time I get out of this room, before I start seeing the phantoms I’m speaking to.”
Merolanna bid her good-bye, offering her Eilis to walk back with her, but Utta politely refused. She wanted to walk by herself and think about what had happened.
Before she got two dozen steps down the hall, the door opened up again and Merolanna called after her in a cracked, frightened voice.
“Utta! Utta, come here!”
When she returned to the rooms, she let Merolanna lead her with trembling hand into the bedchamber. There, in the middle of the bed, lay another piece of paper—a torn scrap of parchment this time, but the writing was in the same crabbed, ancient style.
14. Hunted
Then Zmeos and his siblings reappeared, and disputed the right of Perin Skylord and his brothers to rule over heaven, but the three brothers met their scorn with peace. For a long time they all lived in uneasy alliance until the eye of Khors fell on Zoria, Perin’s virgin daughter. Khors coveted her, and so he stole her from her father’s house, taking her to his fortress.
Something was tugging at his hair.
Ferras Vansen had been lost in dreams of sunny meadows, but even in that fair place something dark had been lurking in the grass, and now it took him a few heartbeats to shake off the grip of the fearful dream.
“Master!” Skurn again took a clump of Vansen’s hair in his beak and yanked. The bird’s foul breath was right in his face. “Wake up! Something out there!”
Awake, dreaming, it made no difference—fear and misery were everywhere. Vansen rolled over. The bird hopped off him, flapping awkwardly back to the ground. “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”
“Us can’t say,” it whispered. “Smells like leather and metal. And noises there be, quiet ones.”
A tall, menacing shadow fell over Vansen, blocking the faint glow of the guttering fire. Suddenly very much awake, he snatched at his blade, tangling it and himself in the cloak he used as a blanket, but the shadow did not move.
It was Gyir, his hand held out in a gesture of demand, the eyes in his featureless face staring at Ferras Vansen with an intensity that seemed to glow.
“He wants his sword,” Prince Barrick whispered, sitting up.
“Give it to him...” “Give him...?”
“His sword! He knows this place. We do not.”
Vansen did not move for a moment, his eyes swiveling between the prince and the looming, red-eyed fairy. At last he rolled over and pulled the scabbarded blade out from under his cloak. The fairy-man closed his fingers around the hilt and pulled it free, leaving Vansen holding the empty sheath as Gyir turned and vanished into the undergrowth around their small hillside encampment, swift and silent as a breeze.
“This is mad...” Vansen muttered. “He’ll sneak back and kill us both.”
“He will not.” Barrick took off his boots and wiped his feet with the edge of his tattered, filthy cloak before pulling the boots back on. “He is angry, but not at us.”
“What do you mean, angry?”
Skurn fluffed his feathers in worry. Small fragments of sticky eggshell flecked his beak and breast. Whatever had startled the raven seemed to have caught him midmeal. “Them all are mad, the High Ones,” the bird said quietly. “Have lived too long in the BlackTowers, them, staring into they mirrors and listening to voices of the dead.”
“What does that mean? Have
“Gyir is angry because the raven heard the noises before he did,” Barrick said calmly. “He blames himself.”
“But why should...?” Vansen never finished his question. From farther up the hillside echoed a noise unlike anything he had ever heard, a honking screech like a blast from a trumpet that had been bent into some impossible shape. “Perin’s hammer,” he gasped, “what is that?”
“Oh, Masters, them are Longskulls or worse!” squawked the raven.
“Whatever the bird scented, Gyir found.” Barrick was still donning his boots, as calmly as if preparing for a walk across the Inner Keep back home.
Vansen struggled to his feet. “Shouldn’t we...help him?” The thought was disturbing, but he had little doubt there were worse things afoot in these lands than Gyir. He had seen one of them take his comrade Collum Dyer, after all.
“Wait.” Barrick held up his hand, listening. The youth still had that unthinking air of command—the inseparable heritage of a royal childhood—despite looking as disreputable as the poorest cotsman’s urchin, even by the feeble glow of the fire. His hair, wet and festooned with bits of leaves, stuck out as eccentrically as Skurn’s patchy feathers, and his clothes could only have looked more ragged and filthy if they had not originally been black. “It’s Gyir. He wants us to come to him.”
“Why? Is he...has he...”
“He is unharmed—but he is still angry.” Barrick smiled a tight, secretive smile.
“Your Higness, what if he tricks us? I know you do not fear him, but think! He has his weapon back. Now would be the perfect time for him to murder us—it is dark, and he knows this forest much better than we do.”
“If he wanted to kill us he could have done it any of the last few nights. He is not just angry—he is frightened, too. He needs us, although I am not quite sure why.” Barrick frowned. “I cannot hear him anymore. We must go to him.”
Without even a torch to light his way, Barrick started up the hillside in the direction of the scream. Vansen cursed and bent for a stick from the fire, then hurried after him.
The returning rains had washed the pall of smoke from the sky, but not the ever present Mantle, as Gyir called it: even in the middle-night a dull glow still bled through the closeknit branches above them, as though the murky skies had held onto a touch of the daylong twilight, soaking it up like oil so that it would sputter dimly through the night. But it was difficult to see even with the nightglow and the pathetic, makeshift torch: by the time he caught up to the prince, Vansen had scraped himself raw on several branches and had fallen down twice. Barrick turned to help him up the second time.
“Faster,” said the prince.
Skurn caught up with them in a moment—the raven could make faster time upslope than they could, hopping, sometimes flying awkwardly for a few yards at a time. The old bird seemed always to move in an odor of wet earth and a faint putridity: Vansen scented him a moment before he heard him flapping along behind them.
“Head down, Master,” Skurn hissed. Vansen narrowly avoided running face-first into a low branch. Thereafter he found the bird’s smell easier to bear.
Vansen gasped when Gyir abruptly stepped out of a copse of trees directly in front of them. The fairy-man’s sword was dripping black, his jerkin and gloved hands also spattered.
