Laurelle shifted. Orquell leaned near the flames, close enough that she was surprised the old man’s eyes didn’t boil in their sockets. He stared long-then a keening wail escaped his throat.
“No…”
She reached out and found Kytt’s hand. He clasped hers tight.
Orquell finally rocked back away from the fire again, almost falling in a panicked scramble. He tossed a fistful of something at the fire, and the flames instantly doused.
As darkness fell, a few last words were whispered.
“I will do your bidding, mistress. I am in all ways your servant.”
Kytt edged Laurelle back with him, still holding her hand. They retreated, stepping carefully. Now it was their turn to flee. Kytt guided them unerringly and swiftly. Once well enough away, certain they were out of earshot, Laurelle slowed him.
“We must not let the master out of sight when he’s away from Hesharian. I’ll inform Delia. She’ll get word to the castellan.” Laurelle’s confidence grew as they returned to the well-lit passages. “We’ll have to dog his steps. Watch him after he leaves the fieldroom.”
Kytt nodded.
There was no need to argue.
Both could guess the mistress to whom the master bowed as a servant.
The witch below.
Mirra.
Kathryn faced the window with her sword. Behind the heavy drapery that closed off her balcony, the scratching had gone silent. She heard Gerrod strain, fighting his locked armor, its alchemies bled of Grace.
“Go,” he said between gritted teeth. “Leave me here.”
Cold permeated the entire room now, misting white her heated breath, freezing her cheeks. The hearth’s embers had gone black.
Then glass tinkled, breaking and falling from paned frames. The drapes billowed toward her as a fierce gust swirled into the room through the broken window. Cold enough to make Kathryn gasp.
Backing a step to guard Gerrod, she drank the shadows. Her cloak swept to either side, its edges blurring with the darkness. She wrapped the power through her, making the flow of time slow.
Past the billow of the drapery, the balcony was shadowed by the towers that framed the courtyard. The sun had risen to a gray slate morning, casting enough light to reveal a dark shape outside her window.
Then the drapes fell again.
Behind them, wood cracked with a loud snap of latch and lintel. The bottom hem of the drapery stirred in the breezes, then flapped wide. Through the part, it crept into her chambers.
It came low, naked, knuckling down on one arm, cocking one eye toward her, then the other. It bore wings like a bat, skeletal and sinewy. It was bare of any hair or fur, except for a thin mane trailing from crown down the spine of its back. Its manhood hung limp and hairless.
“Wind wraith,” Gerrod said behind her.
Except Kathryn knew this was no mere Grace-bred man. He had been ilked, too. More beast than man any longer. Drool seeped from its snarled lips. Nostrils pinched open and closed.
Eyes found her buried in the shadows and fixed to her.
In the gloom of her chambers, with all flames guttered, she recognized the glint of Grace, but not the purity to which she was accustomed, more an oily gleam.
Kathryn prepared to dispatch the creature. How many more were out there? She had to keep Gerrod protected. But the wraith approached no closer. It hissed at her, still crouched low, in some bestial parody of a bow.
Then it spoke-something she had believed was beyond the ilk-beast’s ability. Its voice trilled out its throat, mouth barely moving, sounds shaped from somewhere beyond lips and tongue.
“Castellllan Vaillll…”
She stiffened, sensing a dark intelligence in her presence.
“Come. To parlllley. In town. Blllackhorse tavernhouse. In one belllll.”
Kathryn found her own voice, ringing it clear. “Who requests this parley?”
“Lord Ullllf willlls you to speak to him.” The creature shifted to its other knuckle, cocking its other eye toward her. “Onllly you. Come alllone.”
Despite the terror of the moment and the twisted messenger, Kathryn could not keep a spark of curiosity from flaring. Still, she was no fool.
As if sensing her hesitation, the creature bowed its head. “No harm willll come.” It sank away, pushing back through drape and broken glass.
Then was gone.
The drapes fluttered as it took wing from her balcony.
She waited a full breath in the dark, cold room. Finally she straightened, but she did not sheath her blade. She swung to her door, sidestepping Gerrod.
“No, Kathryn,” he moaned in his frozen suit, his voice echoing in his helmet.
“I must go,” she said, both apologetic and certain. “I will send word to Master Fayle. To replenish the air in your alchemies. It won’t be long.”
She pulled her door open and slid out. She considered the rashness of her decision, but she did not dismiss it. She had waited for days, been cast aside by Argent, and bided her time while the tower dallied with its defenses. Something more needed to be done. Even if it meant putting one’s own neck on the block.
“Kathryn!” Gerrod called to her, hollow and angry. “It’s a-”
She snapped the door closed, but not before hearing his last word. Though it failed to sway her, she did not doubt it.
“-trap!”
A TWISTED ROOT
Horrors surrounded them.
Brant did not know where to look. The mists had risen into an arched roof overhead, lit from below by the fiery flippercraft. Some alchemy in the oiled arrows had sped the conflagration. The flames had already burned through the outer hull and exposed the inner ribbings. Smoke choked upward, darkening the mists further. Heat chased Brant and the others up the slope of the hollow.
Everywhere stakes sprouted from the weedy ground. Skewered upon their fire-blackened points were the heads of hundreds of his fellow people. The poles seemed to shiver in the flickering glow of the flaming flippercraft.
Brant shied from looking too closely at the faces, but they were inescapable. He caught glimpses of mouths stretched open in silent screams, of gouged eyes and bloated tongues, of seeping wound and sloughing skin. Black flies rose in silent swirls as the fires stirred the air.
He did not resent their feast. It was the great turn of the forest, the returning to the loam of all that had risen from it. It was the Way taught to all in Saysh Mal.
Only here was no mere decay of leaf or a gutted beast’s entrails left to feed the forest-nor even a loved one’s body gently interred beneath root and rock.
This was slaughter and cruelty, a mockery of the Way.
“Many children here,” Rogger muttered, sickened. “Babes, from the look of a few.”
“And elders,” Tylar said.
Krevan followed with Calla. “Culling the weak,” he grunted.
“But why?” Dart asked. She walked in Malthumalbaen’s shadow, the giant’s arm over her shoulder, hugged near his thigh.
“There is no why here,” Lorr said sourly. “Only madness.”
Brant risked a glance at a few of the stakes. He saw the others were right about the dead. A gray-bearded
