Chapter 4 #2
“There’s nobody guarding the gate,” Fel said as he walked through the entrance and looked around. “Where is the gate?”
Syla imagined a dragon ripping the great wrought-iron portcullis from its mount and hurling it into the harbor.
“Something for a future wreck diver to find, perhaps,” she said without humor, remembering her discussion with the clerk.
Fel had to walk around huge mounds of rock and wreckage in the courtyard. The stables were completely gone. No, flattened.
Had the poor horses escaped? Syla hoped so. It was too dreadful to imagine them being snatched up and eaten by dragons.
And was that a body lying mangled amid the rubble? She couldn’t tell. Maybe she should be thankful that her spectacles were broken.
“I don’t see many wounded among the dead,” Fel said. “The dragons were either very thorough, or people escaped into the city or the tunnels under the castle. But if they did… I would have expected them to come out by now.” He looked down at something.
Another body? Though the sea breeze mostly kept Syla from smelling the odors of carnage and death, she caught a whiff of it for a moment, and her stomach twisted.
Fel glanced at her and moved quickly past the spot. “We’ll check the tunnels while we’re here. It’s possible people escaped down there but were then trapped, like we were under the roof of that shop.”
“Yes.” Dare she hope that her siblings were alive in the tunnels? Even her mother?
More and more, as Fel navigated around the wreckage and toward the keep where the royal family had their suites, Syla grew certain that she needed to find and fix the shielder.
She didn’t have mechanical aptitude, but she knew engineers.
There were even some in the family who used their moon-mark magic in the field.
Her aunt Tibby came to mind. She even lived in the area. Had she survived?
Not unlike Syla, her father’s sister had eschewed politics and having anything to do with governing the kingdom, and she worked on agricultural machinery, keeping everything in order on the farms that fed the royal family and staff.
Fixing magical devices left by the gods wouldn’t be Aunt Tibby’s specialty—since the shielders never needed repairs, that wouldn’t be anybody’s specialty—but she would know more than Syla.
Unaware of her planning, Fel circled the keep, looking for a way in.
Only portions of it still stood, and Syla didn’t know if her room had survived, especially if the riders had been targeting the royal family.
But everyone should have been at dinner, and if the stormers had somehow known about the gathering—if they’d had a spy—they would have attacked the dining hall specifically.
Before stepping through a doorway that remained standing, Fel halted and looked back at the courtyard.
Long seconds passed as he stood still, head cocked as he listened, then squinted toward the sky.
He shifted Syla in his arms and set her down so he could draw his mace. He kept one hand out to support her.
Fortunately, her body had recovered enough from her healing exhaustion that she could keep her legs under her.
“Someone is nearby,” Fel said quietly. “I haven’t heard anyone, but I’ve glimpsed a few shadows moving in the courtyard.”
“Staff who survived?” Syla asked. “The Royal Protectors?”
“It’s possible.” Why did he sound skeptical? Because allies would have called out to them?
“You think there may be spies or riders lingering?”
“Or assassins.” After another look around the courtyard, Fel gripped her arm, turning to lead her into the building, intending to keep her close.
That was fine. Assassins or not, Syla needed a guide until she found her spectacles.
Screeches came from the sky, and Fel swore and released her. He spun and sprang past her to return to the doorway.
“Wyverns?” Syla guessed, having heard the smaller cousins of dragons before. But she’d never had to worry about them in the past. The shield had kept them away.
“The scaled scavengers have been circling.” Crouched in the doorway with his mace, Fel peered skyward. “At least a dozen of them. They must have been drawn by the scent of death, but they’ll happily kill and eat the living too.”
His hand strayed to the crossbow strapped to his back, but maybe he didn’t think its quarrels would be sufficient against scaled enemies. He stuck with the hefty mace.
“We’ll be safe inside, won’t we?” Syla rested a hand on the stone wall. “They’re too big to come through doorways, right?”
“I wouldn’t bet on that, but better inside than out.” Fel pointed his mace toward something.
One of the wyverns landing on the courtyard wall? All Syla could glimpse was blurry movement.
“As much as I’d like to drive them away so they can’t harass the dead, I don’t have any way to do that.
Their scales are as armored as those of dragons, and they’re hard to kill.
” Fel’s grim voice lowered as he glanced back at her and added, “Everything that survives in the wilds outside of the shields is.”
“A reason for us to get the shielder working again.” Syla lifted her chin and waved for him to guide her to her room.
Movement in the courtyard—something landing on the ground—made Fel turn away from her again. But the wyvern, if that was what it was, had found something to occupy it.
Fel lifted a hand, as if to shut out the death and danger of the courtyard, but the door was gone. Ripped from its hinges. If it lay somewhere nearby, Syla couldn’t see it.
Fel grunted and pushed something heavy in front of the doorway—one of the marble pedestals she remembered from the hallway?—to partially block the entrance. That done, he turned and guided her down the hall.
The sounds of flesh being torn from bone followed them and horrified her. She’d known the staff all her life. If they and possibly even her kin were part of the wyverns’ feast…
Dear departed gods, she wanted to throw up.
“There were more wyverns landing,” Fel said quietly as they moved deeper into the keep. “We may have trouble leaving.”
“Let’s deal with one thing at a time.” The words came out sounding calm and reasonable, but Syla almost felt as if someone else had spoken them. Someone less numb and horrified.
Fel nodded and, when they reached an intersection, turned to lead her toward the royal suites. Now and then, he glanced down at rubble or maybe more bodies of the slain. Everything remained dark and blurry to Syla, and, for the first time in her life, she was relieved she couldn’t see better.
Despite her attempts to focus on what she needed to do, tears trailed down her cheeks as they walked, and her chest tightened with the need to break down and sob.
She didn’t allow herself to but couldn’t keep from stumbling often.
Each time, Fel was quick to steady her. What would she have done without him?
“How much can you see without your spectacles?” Fel asked after guiding her over a pile of stone half-covered by a smoldering tapestry that had fallen onto it.
“Very little.”
“The gods may have blessed you by taking away your eyesight tonight,” he said, maneuvering her past another obstacle.
A body that time, she feared.
“I was just thinking that,” she murmured.
“That one was stabbed. There must have been riders or other enemy agents inside the keep.” Fel gazed down a hallway and didn’t suggest that some of those enemies might remain, waiting to pounce on survivors. They both understood that without words.
As they neared the queen’s suite, an enormous pile of wood and stone from a collapsed ceiling blocked them.
Fel found another route, leading Syla past a window, the shutters torn free, the sounds of screeches and squabbling entering from the courtyard.
The wyverns fighting over who got what? When more ripping and tearing sounds followed, Syla stumbled a few more steps, then threw up.
This was too awful. She didn’t know if she could go on.
Fel rested a hand on her back. “That’s your room up there, isn’t it? The way is clear.”
Syla gripped her stomach, gulped in air that she wished were fresher, and managed to continue on. When they entered her old bedroom, it was almost laughable how undamaged it was. Maybe because she hadn’t lived there for years, no enemy had thought to target it.
Though she’d rarely spent time in the room the past ten years, she knew it well enough to find her way around without a guide. The ornaments and tools of her various childhood collections hadn’t even been knocked off the shelves.
“I’ll find a lantern,” Fel said.
Outside, full darkness had fallen, but Syla didn’t have trouble locating the cabinet where she’d tucked her old pairs of spectacles.
“There’s one on that shelf by the door.” Syla trusted her family hadn’t come into the room and moved things around in her absence.
“Found it. I’ll only put up a small light.” Fel covered the window before doing so, maybe worried about the wyverns. Or… whoever or whatever he’d glimpsed earlier, when the shadows had been stirring.
Syla found her spectacles and, despite Fel’s suggestion that the gods had been sparing her from the details of the carnage by removing her eyesight, put them on with vast relief. Not being able to see, especially when she was in such a vulnerable position, was awful.
Her room and Fel became clear with only a slight blur to the hallway behind him. He had set the lantern on the desk and stood in the doorway, keeping an eye on that hallway.
“Thank you for your help, Sergeant.” Syla waved to indicate she meant for everything.
Fel nodded solemnly at her. His stomach rumbled, reminding her of the dinner hour they’d missed.