Leola could think of only one reason that would be the case. Trydar had fled, perhaps because he possessed knowledge she did not: the provenance of and danger posed by the approaching horde. “The coward,” Leola muttered, in spite of her own fear.
“Perhaps,” Datharia agreed. “And yet with him gone that leaves…”
She didn’t have to say it. It was at once clear that this would be Leola’s duty. To greet whoever these tormentors were and discover why they hadn’t slaughtered Ryken or his men. Why had they marched them back to the keep?
She froze as the procession halted in front of the drawbridge. The brutish fur-clad warrior sitting atop his beast opened his mouth and bellowed up the wall at the sentries. “Bring the keeper!”
Two sentries huddled together and whispered. They shook their heads. One of them shouted a reply. “He is gone! Missing!”
The warrior furrowed his brow.
Leola, fear coursing through her veins, couldn’t bring herself to look away from the leader. He stood at least two heads taller than the largest man she’d ever seen; this was plain even though he rode atop the enormous beast that was larger than any horse. Beneath his bearskin pelt his chest and stomach were bare. Her eyes wandered along the ridges of muscle the tunic covered. He is a beast, not a man, she thought, and fear snaked through her, cold and liquid.
“Then who commands these walls in his absence?” the warrior shouted.
Leola sought out Ryken. Even in the flickering torchlight, she was able to see his face clearly, and his posture. He looked broken. His face was pale and his eyes glassy, focused on some point far away. While he was standing, and clearly alive, he radiated a lifelessness akin to a dying man.
Datharia gripped Leola’s hand.
When Leola looked to her, she was staring out at the sentries on the wall. Leola turned her head slowly. A new fear, like a cold iron fist, gripped her. The sentries were staring at the window. At her and Datharia standing there.
“Sedrak doesn’t wait!” the warrior shouted. Swinging a tree trunk of a leg over the neck of his beastly animal, he dismounted and unsheathed his blade. Two steps backward brought him standing next to Ryken’s sunken figure.
Leola sucked in a sharp breath as she watched the blade’s edge touch her uncle’s neck.
“One hundred times I say my name,” the brutish Sedrak growled. “Then the earth will taste his blood.”
The scream left Leola’s lips before she could think. Her hands shot up to cover her mouth.
There had never been any love lost between her and Ryken. But he had raised and kept her these nineteen years, as he’d promised his brother he would. She did not love him, or claim to even like him, but watching him die would haunt her for the rest of her days.
The warrior Sedrak turned to look at the window. “You scream for him?” he shouted.
“Please, don’t!” Leola said, holding out a trembling hand helplessly, palm forward, as if she could stop the warrior with such a futile gesture.
Sedrak turned to face Ryken. “On your knees,” he ordered.
Blood drained from Leola’s face as she watched her uncle sink to his knees without so much as a moment of hesitation. Not an ounce of resistance seemed to remain within him. Or so it seemed from his expression, his eyes so still they lent him the appearance of a corpse.
Sedrak took the sword by the hilt and drove it into the earth in front of him with both hands. It entered the nearly frozen ground as though he had sliced into a vat of butter “One hundred times I say my name,” he repeated, his eyes, intense and burning, staring up at Leola.
Her skin crawled from his menacing stare.
“One hundred times I say my name and if you are not standing here before me his head shall sail through that window there.” He lifted a thick, muscled arm to point at her with hands that seemed to be cut of granite.
The threat cracked through the icy fear that froze her in place. Ryken’s life was in her hands, the way hers had been in his, so many moons ago. She owed him… something. Without knowing what she would do, without thinking through her actions, she spun on her heel and broke into a run, toward the chamber door and the stairs beyond.
“My lady, no!” Datharia called out but Leola was already halfway down the round staircase. Only at the bottom did she remember that beneath the fur she’d wrapped around herself she wore only her sleeping shirt. The impropriety of it fluttered through her thoughts, but disappeared quickly with each rapid pulse of her heart. Getting dressed would have to wait.
Or maybe soon there’d be no need? Maybe she, Ryken, and all the others within the castle walls would come to their end at the foot of the drawbridge.
This thought flew from her mind before it was even completed. Running out into the courtyard she screamed at the sentries in the tower. “Lower the bridge! Lower the bridge!”
The sentries exchanged worried glances, and Leola stopped, the cool air swirling around her bare, freezing feet. Her face must have conveyed her resolution, or perhaps the sentries had resigned themselves to their fate. A moment passed as Leola’s thin sleeping gown snaked about her calves in the stinging cold air that she could not even feel. The sentries, as if of a single mind, turned without looking at each other and began spinning the massive wheels. Chains clanked as they walked around the center of the wheel. and the massive oak planks of the drawbridge tipped toward the water in the moat.
“My lady!” Datharia called out, running after her. “What if this is just a trap? If they are Northern raiders they will kill everyone in these walls! Please! I beg you to reconsider!”
Leola stared at the yawning gap between the drawbridge and the great timber that formed the
