Chapter 22
22
Lyra
Two hands took hold of my shoulders before my mind could even fathom what had happened.
Roark ripped me from the seat, knocking the table filled with horns, and shoved me toward the back door of the tavern. His gestures were collected, calm. But I did not need his voice to know he was barking commands at the Stav Guard.
I did not need to hear him to feel the way he demanded I be taken out of sight at once.
The Sentry drew his sword. He did not look at me before careening into the frantic mess of the crowd trying to flee from the fallen guard.
A ram’s horn bellowed and the tavern went hauntingly still.
My shoulders rose and fell in heavy breaths.
“To the gates!” Baldur the Fox stepped across the threshold, not sparing a single glance at the dead Stav beneath his boots.
At once, the Stav Guard maneuvered into organized lines—axes, blades, bows—ready to defend the walls of Stonegate.
“Melder Bien, this way. Hurry now.” The Stav left to look out for me urged me into the back rooms of the tavern.
There, we were met with another battle.
“I will defend these walls as well as you.” Prince Thane was surrounded by a trio of guards, but his ire was pinned on the cowled face of his Sentry.
Roark gestured wildly at the prince and shoved— shoved his palms —against the prince’s chest when Thane tried to follow.
“Roark,” Thane shouted, but the three guards stepped in front of the prince in the same moment Roark disappeared into the main room of the tavern. Thane’s eyes flashed with heady rage at the guards. “Your orders come from the royal house, not the Sentry.”
“Apologies, my prince. Not when the royal has a desire to get his throat slit.”
The prince cursed and spun around. His features were contorted in unmanaged anger until he caught sight of me. “Lyra.”
Without a thought, I reached for the arm of the prince. “What’s happening?”
“Damn ravagers. They’ve been getting bolder in recent seasons.” The prince’s jaw worked. “But I fear rumors might’ve reached them, and they are beginning their retaliations.”
For me. Because Stonegate took me, just like the night I lost my past, blood would spill.
I swallowed through a scratch in my throat and tightened my grip on the prince’s arm. “Then I hate to tell you, my prince, but I agree with the Sentry and you must get into the palace.”
Thane returned a narrow look. “I’ll never forgive you for saying that.”
“I’ve been banished too.”
“Well, that makes it a little better.” The prince looked about, then took hold of my hand. “Come with me. The melder will be guarded in my chambers. Now get us to the palace,” he commanded the Stav.
I tucked in close to the prince’s side the whole of the journey back. Shouts and the stretch of leather from rushing guards surrounded the outer walls. Doors slammed and locked, the heavy iron around the portcullis clanked into place the instant we passed under the arch.
“Lyra! No, please!” Hilda gripped the bars of the heavy gate, tears glistened on her cheeks, and the watchmen shoved her back with the ends of wooden spears.
“Wait, let her in.” I spun back, trying to shove past the three guards escorting us forward.
“Gates are closed, Melder Bien, we—”
“You can’t just leave her out there.” I looked for Thane to help. The prince wouldn’t leave Hilda, but he was no longer at my side.
Thane shoved a Stav Guard against the bars of the gate. “You’d leave a woman alone in the streets? She is under the protection of this fortress, and you will let her in.”
With a jumble of apologies, the Stav Guard signaled for the men on the walls to lift the jagged gate just enough for Hilda to slip underneath.
She fell against me, trembling. “Edvin left. He just left with the Stav. I can’t lose my brother, Lyra. I can’t…lose someone else.”
“Hush.” I stroked a palm down her braids. “It’ll be all right. Edvin is skilled with the blade, you know that.”
“Come, my ladies,” Thane said. “We must get out of the open.”
Hilda sniffled, but followed closely, keeping her hand in mine.
Inside the palace was quiet—oddly quiet—like we’d stepped from the chaos of reality into the peace of a dreamless sleep.
“My mother and father will be barred in their personal wings,” Thane explained when we reached his door. The prince moved like a man who’d done this too many times. “Their guards will be standing watch behind their doors, not in passages. When the horn blares, servants know to remain in their quarters.”
The three Stav positioned themselves outside Thane’s door. Wooden sofas with fur pillows were neatly arranged inside the prince’s sitting room. A heady scent of pine and leather filled the room. There was an empty inglenook coated with dark ash, and the prince’s windows were arched and painted like a wild forest with ivy and aspens in the glass.
I wrung my fingers together. “Kael would’ve gone with them.”
Thane paused near the back wall. “Darkwin is a Stav and a man of honor. I have few doubts he was one of the first to run out.”
Hilda hiccupped and hugged her middle.
The prince plucked a hunting bow from a peg on his wall and slung it over his head so it fell across his chest. From behind the inglenook he took out another one. “Any experience with bow hunting?”
Hilda shook her head.
I lifted my chin. “I’m not a fair shot, but I’ve done a little to keep the hares from Jakobson’s gardens.”
The prince handed over the second bow. “Good enough. If the thought of remaining barred and clueless behind the walls drives you as mad as it drives me, then follow me, ladies. I’ve something to show you.”
I was in a damn tree house.
While our unsuspecting Stav Guards remained outside Thane’s chamber doors, the prince led me and Hilda through a passageway in the wall. He explained it was built half a century ago, a better way for kings and advisors to move about the palace unseen before the stone walls were securely in place.
The corridor opened to one of the numerous back gardens with towering oaks and maple trees. Tucked behind walls of thick leaves and branches was a small fort. Childish in many ways, but useful in the fact we were now high enough we could see over the wall and still keep concealed.
“Built this with Roark when we were stupid boys who wanted to be watchguards.”
Strange to think of Roark Ashwood as a boy, maybe smiling with the prince as they built their war tower.
Thane removed the bow from his shoulders and unearthed a quiver of bone arrows beneath a dusty tapestry. With a nod, he urged me to take one as he set his own arrow and aimed out a small oblong window. “Godsdammit.”
“What is it?”
Breath caught in my chest.
Beyond the walls, just where the wood began and Stonegate ended, pikes with bloody heads were aligned in front of a torchlit evergreen shrub. Arrows with blue and gold fletching had pierced through each skull.
They were the Stav Guard who patrolled the wood.
From this position, the clang of steel on steel sent a shudder down my spine. The guards from the revel flung blades at men in dark cloaks. The gleam of the white wolf on the Stav Guard flashed here and there.
“What a cunning queen Elisabet has become.” Thane tightened the bowstring again, his eye ticking as he tracked movement. “This is an act of war, but she will deny involvement since they fight ravagers down there. They’re considered rogues, not under her command.”
“You think the Draven queen commands them?” My voice was hardly steady, nothing more than a rough whisper.
“I do. Along with that bastard assassin of hers.”
Skul Drek . Hair lifted on my arms. Was the unkillable assassin out there?
“Once we fire,” Thane said, a touch of warning in his tone, “Dravens in those trees will fire back. They always have a few archers hidden in the dark. Watch your heads.”
I kept low beside the prince. Hilda knelt on his other side, frantically tugging at the end of one braid.
Thane cursed when a Stav Guard ran past the wall, a ravager with a long, bearded ax three paces behind. The prince let an arrow fly; the point split through the side of the ravager’s neck.
“By the gods.” I stumbled back when he loaded another arrow.
Thane winked. “I’m more than just pretty, Lyra Bien.”
Hilda let out a scream when—as promised—the thud of a stone arrowhead pierced the side of the hut in the trees.
Thane fired below, unable to see an archer in the trees, but reeled back inside the protection of the hut in the moments before two arrows returned, missing the window by two fingers.
“Let us pray they do not light the tips,” the prince said, quickly loading another bone arrow.
I blew out two sharp breaths, then spun toward the window and steadied my borrowed bow. The trees were haunting and dark, and this range was wickedly far, nothing like I’d done on Skalfirth.
With the string taut beside my cheek, I scanned the branches. A hum of warmth brushed against my face, and for a moment I could’ve sworn a glimmer of gold burst in the trees and along the arrow shaft. Like the threads of my craft.
I aimed for a tree near the wall and let the arrow loose. The point struck the soil ten paces from the trunk. A poor shot, but it drew a nearby ravager’s attention long enough a Stav Guard was able to strike his knee and bring him to the ground.
“Don’t overthink the shot,” Thane said when he fired another. “Be quick, be steady, and trust your eyes to get that arrow where it must go.”
Warmth bled from the second arrow I nocked. Now there was a distinct glimmer of threaded gold coiled around the bony tip.
A wicked sort of grin teased my lips. A bone arrow could meld to other bone.
In position to fire again, I scanned the tree line.
I blew out a breath, embracing the heat off the arrow until it glimmered like the fealty bone shard. My pulse slowed, and for a heartbeat, it seemed as though the entire world grew darker, colder. The mirror land.
Golden filaments erupted from the towering limbs and branches across the wall. By the gods, I could make out the Draven archers’ every movement, their every bone was a brilliant burst of gilded light, there to guide my arrows in the dark.
Threads of craft floated eerily around the sharp tip. With one finger, I touched a thread and pointed at the nearest pine where a ravager sat poised to fire another shot into the madness.
The thread shot forward, a tether of light from the point of my bone arrow to the skull of the distant attacker.
I let the bowstring go.
“Lyra, by the gods.” Thane’s voice shattered the dripping shadows of the mirror land and snapped me forward into the moment. The prince looked at me when an archer fell from his perch in the trees. “Woman, now that is the proper way to shoot an arrow.”
I blinked, stared at my palms for a breath, then grinned as I nocked the next arrow. More than rank melding, more than fealty bones, I could meld damn arrows to the bones of our enemies.
“There’s Edvin.” Hilda’s fingers curled into fists. I wasn’t certain she even breathed.
True enough, her brother stood among the Stav, one of the only men who wore nothing but a loose tunic and a leathersmith jerkin. Edvin swung a stone mallet, cracking jaws and spines and knees.
Never had I seen the quiet-spoken bone crafter with such hatred in his movements.
My muscles clenched with every arrow the prince shot over the wall from his childhood hut. I took longer to fire since I guided the strands of my craft to my targets, but the shots were clean. Deadly.
It was a mark to Thane’s character and devotion to his folk that he was here, fighting unseen for them. The more the fighting raged, the more violence coursed through me. Not so long ago, I would keep to the back of the great hall, head down.
Now I wanted to stand beside the prince and charge into battle to defend this keep.
“Last arrow,” I said when Thane’s hand brushed mine on the quiver.
The prince handed it to me. “Your accuracy is impeccable.”
I pushed it back toward him. “But these are your men. You do the honor.”
The prince studied me for a breath, then winked and nocked his weapon, firing into the battle.
In the frenzy of searching for Kael, I found Roark instead.
Gods, the Sentry was mesmerizing in the way he moved. Like a secret on the wind, he fought with a finesse and agility the ravagers could not meet. In one hand, Roark had his battle-ax, in the other a short blade.
He spun and ducked and jabbed. The Sentry dug fissures through skulls in one breath, then turned and opened chests in the next.
The Death Bringer.
It was no wonder so many looked upon him with a sort of reverent fear.
Ravagers fled toward the trees. The Stav pushed them back, cheering and calling out their threats.
I looked nowhere but at Ashwood.
The Sentry stalked a ravager, a man who was scrambling backward on his hands and heels. He was shouting something I could not hear, but it was enough to bring Roark to pause for a breath, two. Then, with a mighty heave, the Sentry swung his ax, catching the curved blade between the ravager’s eyes.
With a jolt, the ravager’s body went slack.
The siege was over.
Thane let his shoulders slump and his bow fall to the floorboards. “Not how I planned for this night to go. Damn Dravens always pissing on us when the ale is flowing.”
Hilda let out a nervous chuckle and Thane grinned, rather pleased with himself for managing to have his wits in such a dire situation. He helped Hilda to her feet, going on about how they’d be wise to safeguard the woods before his future bride arrived for the wedding festivities in coming weeks, then something more about bone blades for the princess to use. I wasn’t listening anymore.
I could not peel my gaze away from the weary units of Stav returning to the gates. Behind them all was the Sentry. At this distance, I could not make out his features, I could hear only muffled shouts and the rumble of voices in the lines.
No one would see us even if they glanced our way. The same moment the thought crossed my mind, my blood heated.
Roark paused a pace from the arched gate, one pace from stepping out of sight, and turned. His gaze was aimed at the tree house, as though he knew we were here.
His gaze was aimed at me.