Iris reached the ground in moments, Lucan arriving in time to receive her. It took Padraig a bit longer, for while he knew the shock had taken much of the pain of his injured leg, putting any weight at all upon it was akin to torture.
He and Iris, Lucan, Rolf, and Ulric joined the silent crowd watching Darlyrede House burn, while liberated animals roamed the lawn in confused freedom. Marta cried silent tears, wiping at her face occasionally with her apron. Peter and Rynn clung to each other.
Iris broke the solemn silence with a wary question. “Where is Lord Hargrave?”
Padraig looked to Rolf, who only shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line within the dark frame of his beard.
* * * *
Searrach staggered through the blazing pillars of the great hall from the eastern corridor, the grand space so bright, so hot now with flames. The rippling, hungry sheets of fire crawled across the ceiling, turning the cavernous room into a chamber of hell, its roar that of a multitude of insatiable demons released from the very walls of Darlyrede House by the flames and now crying out for their victims.
Even so, she heard the weak yelp coming from the rear of the hall, from the floor before which the lord’s dais now crackled with wicked fire, resembling some hellish altar. She walked toward the sound and soon saw Vaughn Hargrave lying amid the wreckage of the flight of people, the broken table legs and planks of benches. His torso was twisted, his legs lying oddly thin and awkward on the stones, as if he’d dragged them behind him. He was bloodied and black with soot, his usually coiffed hair falling over the side of his face, revealing the bald spot Searrach had never known existed.
He looked old. But he was old, she supposed. He only looked his age, now—his skin sagged on his face, his eyes nestled in a pool of recently acquired wrinkles, deepened by soot.
He saw her, and his bloodshot eyes widened. “Searrach. Searrach, my dear girl,” he gasped. “Help me. My back—”
Searrach only stared at him and shook her head.
“Please,” he sobbed in his warbly, old man’s voice.
She was fascinated by what he had become, this man who had hurt her, tortured her so. He was just a man now. No demon, as she’d thought. He’d been able to hurt her because she had offered herself up to his depravity in vain hopes of a future. But the only future he had brought her to was a painful death in this strange land. She walked toward him, wanting to better see the agony on his face.
“Please,” he repeated as she drew near. “We can escape this together, you and I.”
“I’m nothing to you,” she reminded him, kneeling near his head.
“No, no, that’s not true at all,” he rushed. “It was our plan all along, remember?”
She leaned down. “I’m going to watch you die.”
“No,” he said on a quavering breath. “We can escape if you help me.”
Searrach shook her head. “I doona want to escape. I’ve naught to escape to.”
Hargrave gave an animal cry of rage and frustration. “Help me!” Then he quivered with fear, the stench of it rolling off him, and Searrach leaned even closer to smell it fully, wondering if this moment was what he craved from his victims. Searrach would not have thought it pleasing before, but now…
“Help,” he repeated in a whisper.
“I am helping,” Searrach replied, equally as quietly, as above their heads the unmistakable sound of a beam cracking exploded through the roar of the flames. “I’m just nae helping you.”
Hargrave’s hands shot out then, and his fingers tightened around Searrach’s throat, pulling her down to him with all his remaining strength. She remembered then how strong he had always been, unusually so for his age. And so although his legs may have been rendered useless, his iron fingers tightened around her throat.
Searrach stared into his eyes as she grasped at his wrists, but she knew she had not the strength to free herself, and so she satisfied herself with the knowledge that she was succeeding where so many before her had failed.
Lachlan Blair.
Lucan Montague.
Thomas Annesley.
Padraig Boyd.
Countless men had sought to put an end to Vaughn Hargrave’s terrible reign. But it was she—a poor, beaten Highland lass who had naïvely allowed herself to be used in such heinous ways by this monster—Searrach, who was here now. Alone. She was the representative of all those other girls, all the forgotten people Hargrave had used and tortured and then discarded as rubbish. No matter the things she had done in the past, no matter her own mistakes, Vaughn Hargrave would never hurt another soul, and she could be proud of that at least.
Her vision was dimming now, and she worried that she would be dead before she saw the proper end of him.
But then another crack sounded above their heads—a loud creaking and moaning of timbers. A shower of sparks rained down like fae fire with a triumphant roar, and then a shuddering crash filled the hall as the entire ceiling collapsed.
Chapter 20
The sun came up slowly over Northumberland, as if it was loath to see the carnage its rays would reveal.
Iris sat against the same tree under which Padraig had deposited her hours before, the effects of the poison lingering after the energy her fear had given her was spent. Padraig still limped through the crowd on a makeshift crutch, speaking to soldiers, to servants, to the king’s men, to Lucan. She watched him with a bittersweet pain in her heart, a combination of pride in his caring for the people of Darlyrede and sorrow for what was left of his birthright.
Darlyrede House was a blackened, smoldering shell in the gray light of dawn.
