Later that night, she dreamt of her ghosts-Mar-ishka with her white wolf, Dark with the girl she'd seen in the camp, the rebels she'd poisoned in the dungeon, even the soldiers in the guardhouse. They were together, moving toward her across the mist-covered Arvid River, up the narrow winding staircase that led to the room where she lay, tossing in the nightmare.
She screamed and tried to fling off the covers and run from them, but the mists were all around the bed, the room. She was lost in them, lost in the horror of what she had done. She forced herself awake and with a broken cry reached across the bed for Jorani. He had gone. She was alone, and the dreams had somehow followed her into the waking world. She saw the shifting forms of her victims floating through the dark room, their white hands reaching out to brush her face.
She cringed back, but the ghost of Marishka moved closer to plant a frigid kiss on Ilsabet's cheek. 'You must not destroy him, Sister,' she whispered, 'or you will destroy yourself, as well.'
Pulling the covers over her face, Ilsabet lay in the bed, her heart pounding, her body shaking, terrified like the child she almost was.
Emory's father had been a rebel, captured and executed in the last days of the fighting. After the failed invasion and the fall of Janosk, Emory had done his best to take his father's place around the farm, but found it impossible. Before, he had managed the flocks in the hills south of Pirie while his father and younger brother tended the barn and the fields. Now Emory wished his family were larger.
Even a little sister would be welcome to help with spring planting.
By spring, he conceded to his mother and took on a Kislovan soldier. The man worked as diligently for the family as he had for Janosk, and a few months after arriving, married Emory's mother. In time, Emory saw the soldier as just a man, worthy of respect, and abandoned his hatred for his mother's sake.
Then came the guardhouse massacre, where a boyhood friend of Emory's was slaughtered by a Sundell officer. Some said the officer had gone mad, others that the murdered soldiers had stumbled onto a Sundell plot and were killed to keep them silent.
Emory wasn't certain which theory he believed, but he finally had an outlet for his anguish and hate. He would slip from the house at night and meet his comrades at an outlying farm, where they would sit and talk of independence from Sundell.
Emory knew it was only a matter of time before their plots were discovered. When he heard the soldiers riding toward Pirie, he woke his brother. They grabbed scythes and ran to the neighbors' houses, rousing their friends. The group of four fanned out, moving through the little town, waking comrades, who armed themselves with whatever was handy. If they were to be taken, they'd go down fighting.
They assembled on the docks. The few tiny fishing boats behind them provided a ready means of escape, and the river mists were thick enough to hide their flight.
They waited silently as the sounds of the patrol's horses grew louder, until they saw the soldiers ride out of the mists.
Shaul held up his hand, a signal for the others to stop, and stared down at Emory and the rest of the band. 'Catch anything?' he asked.
'We haven't gone out yet,' someone replied. A few of the men chuckled. They'd expected to be attacked, not to bandy lies with the enemy.
'We're on our way to the border guards. If any of you know the men, I'd be happy to take them a message,' Shaul said.
The offer deflated nearly everyone. But in the back of the crowd someone, probably from the group who'd left the tavern, called out loudly, 'Tell them to go home. We don't serve Sundell.'
A few of the men hooted.
Shaul turned his horse toward the crowd and advanced. Someone stabbed with a pitchfork. The horse reared and in an instant the battle was on.
The townsfolk were no match for the well-armed soldiers, and the battle turned into a rout. As Emory dragged a wounded comrade toward a boat, soldiers pulled him back and wrestled him to the ground.
That was all he remembered until he woke, tied and tossed with prisoners and wounded alike into the back of a cart rolling slowly down the road to Nimbus Castle. In the dim light of the cart's lamp, he saw that the man he'd been helping lay beside him, his hands also tied behind his back. The man's shoulder wound had opened and his shirt and Emory's were soaked with blood.
'Help him please,' Emory called to one of the Sundell soldiers. The man moved ahead in the line without a word.
A lamp flared in a cottage on the edge of town. Emory raised his head and saw the man's father standing in the door, the worried frown on his face accentuated by lamplight.
'Leka is here,' Emory cried out. 'He's been…'
At the first sound, the soldier returned, kicking Emory hard on the side of his head. He lay back and listened to Leka's moans, his labored breaths, until finally, mercifully, Leka trembled as death touched him and the terrible noises stopped.
By then, the walls of Nimbus Castle were rising above the mists. They rode through the fog on the narrow peninsula. Emory raised his head enough to see the doors swing open like the great jaws of some half-formed misty beast, swallowing them all as they rode inside.
Emory got only a glimpse of the castle before he was pulled out of the cart and dragged to the dungeons. He heard two other boys from Pirie talking in an adjoining cell. He wanted to call to them, to tell them he was all right, but he'd become too frightened to say a word. Rats, his father used to say, loved the scent of blood, and his shirt was soaked with it. He pulled it off, wiped the blood from his body, then flung the dirty cloth through the bars of his cell. With his back to a corner, his knees tight against his chest, he tried to sleep.
Jorani had left Ilsabet's room just after midnight and returned to his tower rooms. He wanted no scandal, no hint that they were anything but an aged teacher and his apt pupil. He'd just dozed off, thoughts full of her, when a soft knock at the door roused him.
'Come in,' he called, and a stableboy entered.
The youth wiped sleep from his own eyes, then said, 'I was told not to rouse the house, but to come directly to you and say that four of the soldiers have returned. They bring two of their own wounded and three prisoners. Lieutenant Shaul wishes to speak to you.'
'I'll inform the baroness,' he said.
Kashi already had. Jorani found Ilsabet in the kitchen, sitting with the healers as the wounded soldiers had their cuts bathed and wrapped.
Without kohl and rouge, her features seemed younger, more delicate. What was I thinking last night, he wondered, then realized ruefully that he'd hardly been thinking at all.
Shaul drew Jorani aside and described how the prisoners had been captured, adding that he believed the men on the dock were acting in self-defense when the clash occurred. 'One Sundell soldier is dead, along with two men from the village,' he concluded. 'It's a serious matter, but the prisoners are scarcely more than children. I request that you take their age into account when you decide their punishment.'
'I'll discuss it with the baroness.' Jorani returned to where Ilsabet was sitting, whispered a few words to her, then asked, 'Do you want to see the prisoners?'
She nodded and followed him to the dungeons, her hard-soled slippers making sharp clicks on the damp stone stairs.
The dank lower levels of the castle were as familiar to her as the upper floors. She could have walked these passages in total darkness, yet she listened dutifully as Shaul warned her about sinkholes, places where the hall narrowed, where the next set of steps were, where the passage became treacherously slippery.
The two prisoners that shared a cell were a little older than Ilsabet. The bravado had left them in the last hours, and they were more than willing to petition for their ruler's mercy. The third and youngest prisoner did not move when they came to his cell. Though his eyes glowed with a fierce pride, his face was a mask of fear, both emotions so intense that either might underlie his refusal to come forward and greet the baroness.
'The man beside him in the cart died on the way to the castle, Baroness,' Shaul said. 'This one hasn't moved from that place since we brought him here.'
