1. Chapter 1 #2
More come behind him. A rush of bodies filling the corridor, men and women both, all wearing the same salt-stained furs and leathers, all carrying weapons Indrie can only half-identify in the flickering torchlight.
They are wind-bitten and wild-eyed, the salt still crusting their clothes, moving with the confidence of veterans.
None of them spare Indrie a glance. He flinches back against the wall, makes himself flat, makes himself small, the way he's learned to do.
But they pour past him without breaking stride, following the red-haired man toward the sounds of fighting and shouting.
Indrie stands with his spine pressed to the cold stone of the wall and his heart trying to break through his ribs. He waits until the last of the footsteps fades. Then he turns and runs down the hall.
The servants' quarters are underground, tucked into the foundation of the castle's east wing where the stone sweats with moisture and the air carries the permanent chill of earth.
The room is large, housing thirty or more bodies on stacked bunks and threadbare pallets, but today it feels impossibly small, crammed full of terror.
Every servant in the castle seems to have found their way here.
They're pressed into corners, wedged beneath bunks, huddled together on narrow mattresses with blankets pulled over their heads.
The sound of them is what strikes Indrie first. Not screaming, not wailing, but the awful, compressed quiet of people trying desperately not to be heard.
Whispered prayers. Bitten-back sobs. The wet, fast breathing of barely contained panic.
No one is attacking them. The room is undisturbed, no overturned furniture, no blood, no sign that anyone bearing weapons has set foot here. The fear in the room is anticipatory, a held breath before a blow.
Indrie moves through the cramped space, stepping over bodies that flinch away from his boots, scanning faces until he finds the one he's looking for.
Senli is in the far corner, pressed against the wall with her knees drawn to her chest. She's gripping the arm of Mara, one of the laundry women, so tightly her brown knuckles have gone ashen.
Her dark eyes are wide and glassy with unshed tears, and when she sees Indrie picking his way toward her, her whole body sags.
"Indrie!" She reaches for him immediately, grabbing his wrist and yanking him down beside her with more strength than her small frame suggests possible. "Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick—"
"I'm all right." He settles beside her, covers her hand with his own. "Senli, what's happening? Who are these people?"
"Northmen." Her voice drops to barely a whisper. "They came from the sea. The watchmen on the docks, they're dead. All of them. The ships landed before dawn and they breached the lower walls before anyone could raise a proper alarm."
Indrie absorbs this. Northmen. He's heard the word before, the way one hears about distant storms or far-off plagues, something terrible that happens to other people, in other places.
The kingdom of Kalkoa sits at the southern edge of the continent, far from the cold seas where the Northmen are said to originate.
They shouldn't be here. This far south, this far from anything worth taking.
"They're savages," whispers a voice from nearby.
Indrie glances over. One of the grooms, a reedy young man named Tomás, pressed flat beneath the nearest bunk with only his face visible.
His eyes are too wide, showing white all around.
"Everyone knows what they do. They rape and pillage whole kingdoms. They burn everything. They take slaves and..."
"Tomás," Senli says sharply. "Enough."
But the damage is done. A fresh wave of whispered panic ripples through the room, bodies pressing tighter together, someone near the door letting out a thin, frightened moan.
Indrie hears the fear. He feels it, undeniable, physical, pressing against his skin. But he also remembers the man in the corridor. The red-haired giant with his absurd axe and his furrowed brow. The hand held out, palm open. The careful lift back to his feet.
Are you all right?
"Senli." Indrie squeezes her hand. "Has anyone come down here? Has anyone threatened the servants?"
She blinks at him. "No. No one's come. We just... we heard the fighting and everyone came down here. Bram told us to hide. He said..."
"So, no one has been hurt. Here, I mean. None of us."
"Not yet," Tomás hisses from beneath the bunk.
Indrie doesn't argue with him. He might be right. But there's that nagging thought, that image he can't shake. The man who knocked him down and looked sorry about it. Who helped him up and made sure he was steady before moving on.
"Stay here," he says, and releases Senli's hand.
Her grip tightens before he can pull away. "What? No. Indrie, stay. Whatever you're thinking, don't."
"My satchel." He meets her eyes and watches understanding dawn in them, followed immediately by disapproval. "I left it in the king's chambers. It's the only... Senli, it's everything I have."
"It's things," she says fiercely. "Things can be replaced. You can't."
"The vials alone took me three years to collect.
" He doesn't tell her about the mortar and pestle, the one his mother pressed into his hands on the day the slavers came, the one thing of hers he has left.
He doesn't tell her because if he does, he'll lose his nerve.
"I'll be quick. I know the back ways. No one's up there.
They're all at the front of the castle and the treasury. "
"You don't know that."
"I'll be careful."
"Indrie..."
He takes her face in his hands, the way she used to do to him when he was new here and frightened of everything and she was the only person who was kind. He presses his forehead to hers, brief and warm.
"Stay hidden," he tells her. "All of you. Keep the door closed. I'll be right back."
She doesn't let go easily. Her fingers drag against his sleeve as he pulls away, and the look on her face is one he'll carry with him.
Fear and frustration and the specific kind of love that says if you die, I will never forgive you.
But she lets him go. She's always let him go, even when she shouldn't.
Indrie slips back out the door and into the corridor, and the silence swallows him whole.
The back passages of the castle are narrow and poorly lit, servant's routes, designed to be unseen. Indrie doesn’t need lighting to know the way.
He knows these passages the way he knows the herbs in his satchel: by feel, by instinct, by years of repetition.
He climbs the winding stairs to the upper floors without encountering a soul, his unlaced boots whispering against the steps, one hand trailing along the damp stone wall for balance.
The king's chambers are in the west wing, on the highest floor that isn't a tower.
Indrie pauses at the top of the servants' stairs and listens.
Nothing. The sounds of fighting have moved deeper into the castle, toward the treasury like he thought, and the great hall where the guards would have made their stand.
Up here, the corridor is silent and still.
He moves quickly. Past the closed doors of abandoned guest chambers.
Past the alcove where a suit of decorative armor stands gathering dust, relics of a military history this kingdom can no longer lay claim to.
The castle is old and crumbling in ways that Armond refuses to acknowledge, let alone repair.
Cracks web the stonework. Mortar crumbles from between the blocks.
The tapestries on the walls are faded and moth-eaten, their heroic scenes made ghostly by time and neglect.
The door to Armond's chambers is open.
Indrie slows, peers inside. The room is empty.
Bed unmade, sheets tangled and thrown aside in a panic.
The water basin has been knocked from its stand, a dark stain spreading across the stone.
Armond's night robe lies crumpled on the floor beside the bed, and his slippers are gone, which means he was at least partially conscious when he fled.
The remains of the previous evening's medicine still sit on the bedside table, the half-empty cup of sleeping draught, the poultice wrap Indrie had prepared for the king's chest.
And there, draped across the settee beneath the window where the morning light falls gray and cold, is his satchel.
Indrie crosses the room quickly, across the thick rug that covers the center of the floor, one of the few luxuries in the castle that still looks new, because Armond prioritizes his own comfort above all else.
He scoops the satchel up with both hands and presses it against his chest. The familiar weight settles against him.
The clink of glass vials, the rustle of dried herb bundles, the firm line of the small cutting knife in its leather sheath.
Beneath it all, wrapped in a square of oilcloth at the very bottom, the mortar and pestle.
Smooth stone, pale gray, small enough to fit in one palm.
He holds the satchel tight and allows himself one breath. Two. His eyes fall shut.
All right. You have it. Now go back.
He turns to leave.
There is a man standing in the doorway.
He is somehow even taller than the red-haired one. Broader in the shoulders, though leaner in the hips, but definitely built from the same cloth. His hair is blond, the pale gold of summer wheat, and it's braided close to his skull in tight, intricate rows that sweep back from a face that is...
Indrie's mind stutters on the details.