14. Middle Ages Architecture
People died all the time and in all sorts of places, but the knowledge that this was where Ferrin had committed four murders in one night sent a chill through the canyon.
The Keep of Realta Fiel itself reminded me of a corpse—darkened and crumbling, with muggy air wafting, all while moss and lichen clung to its side, feeding on what was left of it.
“And how do you know Ferrin won’t look for us here?” Iseult asked. “He doesn’t seem like the type to avoid a place because of lingering guilt.”
“He thinks I’m soft. He doesn’t think I’d come to the place where my parents died,” Orla explained. “That, and the Keep is holding back a lake. If he tries to come here, he knows we can open the dam and drown him.”
Ciarán snorted, and his doubt at Orla’s resolve to drown her uncle reverberated against my own misgivings.
We stood in a line, and I knew none of us wanted to be the first to enter the Keep. I looked down at Jonquil, wondering if she might take one for the team and lead the way, but Iseult finally stepped forward.
“We’ll sweep the premises for animals and set up camp inside,” she said. “Rest, and then after we’ve slept, you may try to explain what is going on.”
She marched up the steps and pushed a curtain of ivy back from the dark entry into the Keep.
Steam-heavy air swirled through the antechamber, alight with a dull Skal-like glow that lit the corridors to both our right and left. Ahead, the edges of a heavy wooden door glowed with light that bled from the next room.
Water bubbled somewhere out of sight, and Una cut through the sound with a heavy sigh. Hot air from her snout blew across my neck, and I started towards the glowing door ahead. Ciarán murmured for her to sit and wait, patting her nose.
Orla, meanwhile, stepped ahead of me to push open the heavy wooden door.
The hot air of the antechamber pushed my hair forward as it escaped ahead of us into the cavernous room.
The circular space made me feel like I was sitting at the bottom of a massive grain silo.
Buttresses supported the distant ceiling, interspersed with streams of Skal that spilled down the walls with a slippery hiss and disappeared through grates along the room’s perimeter.
At the far end of the circular room, a copper gate glinted against the stone wall. A series of levers jutted from the wall at its base.
“Is that the dam?” I asked. “That copper wall?”
“Yes, I think so.” Orla frowned at the walls in the ambient blue light of the falling Skal.
Ivy obscured sections of the stone in sheets of leaves, but charred scars peaked out between the vines.
“This is where my people settled when we first came to Skalterra. Quill himself helped carve it, but he disappeared one day, so we moved to the mountain to keep a better look over the Frozen God.”
“He disappeared?” I repeated.
“Yeah, it’s a strange—oh.” Orla’s voice cracked before she could finish the thought. I followed her gaze to where it had landed in the center of the room.
I reached for her hand, and she accepted my touch, her chin trembling.
Most of the blackened marks around the room looked like the haphazard marks of battle, but the beauty of the room’s architecture had distracted me from where bones, only halfway reduced to ash and still recognizable as horribly human, sat at the room’s center.
“Orla,” I whispered. “Your parents…”
Orla shook her head. “My mother and father, Ferrin brought their bodies home. But the Grimguards—”
Orla let go of my hand.
Her parents hadn’t been Ferrin’s only victims that night.
Slow footsteps echoed behind us, and Ciarán, with his cowl pulled down away from his face, staggered forward.
Orla and I parted to make room for him, and he limped the length of the room to kneel on the darkened flagstone in front of the copper wall.
He scraped at the residual ash with tentative fingers.
An unfathomable grief pulled at my mind, and a tiny voice echoed in my head, though I didn’t think he meant for me to overhear.
“Mother. Father.” Ciarán pressed his hand against the floor and bowed his head. “Mother. Father. Mother. Father.”
I wanted to go to him, to console him, to hold him, but the overwhelming weight of his grief rooted me to the spot. It hurt to breathe through the tightening in my throat, and my eyes burned with the tears that Ciarán refused to let fall.
His thoughts persisted, repeating those two words over and over in his head and mine, until they dissolved into a new mantra.
“Alone. Alone. Alone. A—”
Ciarán’s voice cut off as Orla dropped beside him. She wrapped her long arms around Ciarán and let her head rest against his shoulder. He tensed at the touch.
“I’m sorry,” Orla rasped. “And I’m sorry I stopped you from hurting Ferrin and you got hurt and—”
“Where are their heads?” The words scraped at the back of his throat, as if it took him all the effort in the world to drag them forth.
“What?” Orla pulled away.
“My mother,” Ciarán hissed, “and my father. Where are their heads?”
My vision shifted as Ciarán’s quiet rage blurred the line that separated my consciousness from his. Instead of watching Ciarán and Orla, I was looking down at the ashen, skeletal remains of Ciarán’s parents.
My hand—no, Ciarán’s hand stroked at the years-old soot. From behind his eyes, I could make out fragmented bones that hadn’t quite burned hot enough to break down. Femurs, vertebrae, ribs—but no skulls.
My churning stomach snapped me back into my own head.
“Their heads, Orla.” Ciarán’s whisper was more broken, more desperate, this time.
“He brought them home.” Orla had the sense to remove her arms from around Ciarán, and she kept her head bowed. “As proof, I think. Or as trophies.”
“And what did he do with them?”
“He threw them off the mountain, towards the Frozen God.”
The hissing of the Skal streaming down the walls echoed louder in the silence that followed.
“Then I’m sorry too, because when I kill your uncle, it will not be quick. It will not be painless. I will draw it out as long as I can, and I will make him beg for death.”
Orla curled her fists in her lap and looked down at her knees.
“I understand.”
“And if you get in my way again, I will kill you too, even if we can’t reseal the Rift without you.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she insisted.
“I would like to be alone now, Lady Quill,” Ciarán murmured.
Orla nodded and hurried to her feet and towards the door. She kept her head down, avoiding my attempt to meet her eye.
I stood there, unsure of what to do, for several, long moments.
“You too, Blue.”
“Ciarán—” I tried to start, but he spared me having to find the right words to say.
“Please.”
I nodded too, though he couldn’t see me, and hurried to follow Orla. The heavy oaken door creaked shut behind me, and I stood in the warm steam of the antechamber trying to determine if Ciarán’s soft cries were echoing through our mental link or through the walls of the Keep of Realta Fiel.
The upper floors of the Keep revealed empty rooms, copper pipes that hummed with moving liquid, and no nesting animals.
Iseult had discovered the Keep’s bath house in the basement, and while running water heated by the mountain’s thermal energy sounded amazing, I remembered the lack of modesty held in Skalterra when it came to bathing.
I excused myself to one of the empty rooms upstairs, away from my naked friends and the grieving Grimguard.
Jonquil padded after me, chasing the shadows cast by the bottle of Skal I used to light the room.
The moss that clung to the stone walls and hung from the copper ceiling pipes carried its own faint glow that made the space feel a little more welcoming, and I laid out my backpack and cloak to sleep on.
This floor of the Keep lacked the heavy steam of the entry room, but it was still warm enough that I wiggled out of Liam’s old Von Leer hoodie and balled it under my head for extra comfort.
Ciarán’s thoughts and emotions continued to play at the corners of my mind, but he’d regained control over them, so they remained amorphous and unknowable despite their presence in my head.
“You and me,” I sighed at Jonquil when she curled next to me and allowed me to scratch between her ears. “Sharing a room again. You don’t have to stay here, you know.”
The ghost of a purr rattled from the depths of her long fur, and I smiled. Perhaps she just liked that I had Liam’s hoodie—she’d always preferred him—or maybe the cat was growing to like me after all.
And then Jonquil stood up and padded away, leaving me to glare at the dark ceiling.
“Hello, Jonquil.”
I startled at Ciarán’s soft murmur and tried to sit up, but he held a finger to his lips as he carried in his pack and cloak. Una huffed where she lay in the corridor outside, and her eyes tracked Ciarán’s path from the door to the stone floor beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I turned away when he dropped his cloak to reveal his bare chest. “And where is your shirt?”
“I’m getting ready to sleep, just like you.
And my shirt is hanging to dry. I washed the blood out.
” He lowered himself to the floor next to me, and Jonquil trotted to make herself comfortable in the crook of his elbow.
The glow of his eyes played against the edges of her fur, and her purring resumed, louder now that her favorite human had arrived.
“You’re sleeping here?” I asked.
“I can sleep in the corridor if you prefer.”
“Oh. No, that’s okay.”
He’d just been sobbing over the charred remains of his decapitated parents. It would be cruel to make him sleep in the hall, which I knew he would do instead of finding his own room.
I lay back down, watching Ciarán. He pulled his cloak over himself like a blanket and stared up at the ceiling, his finger tapping against a glass bottle that he held at his side.
By the light of the glowing moss, it appeared Ciarán had replaced the Skal he typically carried in the bottle with something dark and flakey.
I gulped, thinking of his parents.