Netty considered telling them not to bother—after all, she doubted Ferrimore was the first village Feledias had burned and he probably had it down by now—but didn’t, deciding that if it helped them, if it allowed them to hold onto a little hope, then there was no point in stealing that from them. She did her best to offer comfort to the others, whispering quiet words, saying quiet prayers, but the fact was that they were scared, and so was she. It was heating up inside the inn, and already her face was covered in sweat, her clothes, like the clothes of those others around her, drenched with it.
Worse, more and more smoke was pouring into the inn by the moment, and it was getting difficult to breathe.
“What do we do, Netty?”
Netty turned to look at Emille, the girl standing beside her, her eyes wide and frightened. Perhaps some of Netty’s despair had made it onto her face despite her efforts to hide it, for when she met the girl’s eyes, Emille seemed to blanch, her skin going even paler. “W-we’re going to die, aren’t we?” she asked, keeping her voice low, quiet, so that the others wouldn’t hear. Not that there was any real fear of that, not the way the men were banging on the doors, desperately trying to find a way out when Netty was growing certain there was none.
Tears filled the girl’s eyes then, and Netty did the only thing she could think to do—she pulled her into a tight embrace. “It’s okay, lass,” she whispered, her voice feeling raw and sore from the smoke, “it will be okay.”
No idea whether such a thing was true or not, for Netty had never died before and so had no idea of what the land beyond the veil might look like. If it were anything like the world they were leaving behind, then she thought she’d just as soon not go there, but then it wasn’t as if she had been given any choice in the matter. Still, it was the best she could think of, the best she could offer to the girl.
There was a shout from one of the groups of men at the back door. What now? Netty thought, turning to see that, to her shock, the door—which had remained stubbornly closed despite their efforts—was suddenly open, and three men, Mack and Will among them, stood staring at it, stunned.
Netty understood that. It was too much to hope that the soldiers had decided that burning an entire village to death did not sit well with them and had chosen, instead, to let them go. More likely, they had decided to finish it quickly, perhaps to practice their sword work on innocents before they let the fire do its work.
The men must have thought much the same and decided that their only chance—the only chance for their loved ones—was to rush the men who came through, for they started forward, toward the opening. But when a figure stepped through the door and into the inn, Netty was shocked to see that it was not one of the prince’s soldiers. Instead it was a woman and a gray-haired man, ones who she did not recognize, though they could have been her closest friends and she still wouldn’t have, not with all the blood staining their clothes and faces. It wasn’t until the third person stepped through, a young lad that looked no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, that the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
“Hold, lads!” Netty shouted at the three men who’d started forward, wielding broken off chair legs. Not that she doubted they would have done much harm to the newcomers who, based on their grim expressions looked like death on two feet. Save the lad, of course, whose face held the dull, vacant look of someone who has felt such fear he has had become numb to it. She knew that look well, for it was plastered across the faces of many of those in the inn.
“Relax, Netty,” Mack said, doing his best at a menacing growl, one he’d tried to adopt from Cend but hadn’t gotten quite right yet. He turned back to look at the newcomers. “What do you want?”
“Well,” the woman said dryly, “we were considering saving you all from certain death, how’d that be?”
He looked a bit flustered at that, as well he should, and Netty used the opportunity of him being distracted by the fact he was a complete fool to step forward. “That’d be just fine with us.”
And then they were moving, the villagers, some of whom were crying with shock and relief that it appeared they were going to live after all, staggering out of the inn, coughing and waving hands at the smoke still gathering in the common room.
Moments later, they were outside, panting and gasping as the flames in the inn continued to grow. “Thank you,” Netty said to the woman, “for saving us, Miss—”
“Just Maeve,” the woman said. “And if you’re looking to thank someone…” She paused, nodding her head at the youth who was standing a few feet away, pointedly avoiding looking at them as if embarrassed. “Then that’d be Matt. He’s the reason we’re back here—him and Cutter, that is.”
“Cutter?”
“That’s right, though you’d know him by Prince Bernard or ‘The Crimson Prince’.”
“By the gods, you’re the ones that were with the prince!”
“Yes.”
Netty grunted. “Almost didn’t recognize you, what with all the…” She paused, staring at the blood. “Anyway. I saw him, your prince. He spoke a bit with his brother before they went on about the business of trying to kill each other.” A thought struck her, and she blinked. “Wait a minute, are you sayin’, he sacrificed himself to save us?”
“Yes.”
Netty grunted. “Doesn’t seem like the same Prince Bernard I’ve heard so many stories about,
