8
HE WASN’T DEAD.
Celedin wasn’t.
Aerhril saw him, lying in a pile of bodies outside the chapel, all of them lined up in a row along the hallway there. There was an entrance to the chapel out of the main hall. Not every keep had an attached chapel, but Foxglove Peak did.
The bodies themselves were all bloodied and still, and she supposed that was why she noticed him.
Because he was moving.
He was breathing, that was. His chest was rising, barely rising, and then falling.
She did not know who it was at first, but she moved closer, thinking to herself that she did not know what she was going to do if someone was alive, because she had no means to help them, and that anyway, she was just meant to be looking for the children, that was what she was doing, because they had to find them, and certainly the children would have seen this grim and gory pile of dead elves and run the other way, horrified.
Then she realized it was him.
There was blood on his face, and his neck was open, cut open, a red glistening gash exposing all sorts of tendons and muscles and ever so much blood. She could hear his breath now, hear the wheeze of it, in and out.
She stood over him, shaking, and thinking to herself that she would simply run away, because he was Celedin, after all, and she hated him.
She despised him. He was everything she hated on land and sea, and she did not care if he slowly choked to death on his own blood, if he suffocated there on his back, slowly dying in pain, she did not care.
Then his eyes opened.
Oh, by the yellow-haired dawn, must he have seen her? She hated him, but she was not so made of stone that she could simply walk away now, not when he lifted a hand and reached up to her, wheezing her name, barely audible.
She shook.
“Aerhril,” he wheezed.
She peered down at him. Her voice shook, too. “Celedin, I cannot lift you. There is nowhere to take you, anyway. There is no one to help you. There are orcs on all the doors.”
He touched his neck. He lifted his hand and looked at the blood on his fingers. And then, clumsily, gasping noisily for air all the while, he sat up. He slapped his bloody hand against the wall, leaving a handprint there, and he got to his feet.
She backed away from him.
He stood over her, wheezing, his long dark hair falling around his fine, elvish features. She had often thought he was cruelly beautiful, his nose so sharp, his eyebrows dark slashes over his blue eyes. He did not look cruel now.
He pitched forward and she caught him, allowing him to lean against her. “Top of the steps,” he wheezed. “His room.”
The small room where Dathor had slept as a child, the one she used to run to when she was frightened, that room. Yes, it might be a good place to put Celedin for now. “There are orcs on the way there,” she said. “They will see us.”
He gasped in air noisily, leaning against her, hair in his face, thinking. “Tell them…” A wheeze. “Yell that they are being attacked.”
She considered. “No, why would I do that? I would not alert them. I hate them.”
“They… won’t think.”
Perhaps they would not. But she propelled him backwards and leaned him against the wall and went over to the bodies.
They were mostly men, but there were women, too, women who had fought too strenuously, who’d had weapons, who’d stabbed and were subdued. She pulled a long black shawl off one of the women and then a black cloak off a man.
“Around your head,” she said to Celedin. She gestured to the cloak. “And this, you wrap it around your legs, like skirts. You lean against me, and I shall say you are an old woman I must help up the stairs.”
He curled his lip.
“Either pretend to be a woman or I leave you to fend for yourself!” she said. Even in this, he was horrible. She should have run, she should have left him here. By the dawn, she should have covered his mouth and smothered him herself.
He reached out a hand, beckoning.
Together, they wound him up in the cloak and the shawl, and he was entirely disguised. He leaned into her, and she clutched him and they hobbled down the hallway together.
At the end of the hall, she stepped outside and the orc on the door looked her over. “You went in alone,” he said, his voice accusatory.
“She is old, a grandmother,” she said, wondering at herself. Should she simply give Celedin up to the orcs? What good came of keeping him alive, of saving him? She could tear off the shawl, expose him right now. This orc had a revolver, and he could shoot Celedin down, shoot him dead.
But no, she couldn’t have his blood on her hands. She hated him, yes, but it was one thing to hate a man, and it was another to bring about his death.
“She must lie down,” she continued. “She is quite overcome. Your commander says we women have freedom inside the walls, but that we cannot venture outside.”
“Nice of the commander to tell you that and not us,” said the orc. “How did he know you? Who are you to him?”
She met that orc’s gaze. He was not one of the orcs who had witnessed anything between her and Dathor. “You gossip worse than women, I see.” She tucked that away, that anything she said would be spread amongst them quite quickly.
The orc sneered at her.
“Apologies,” she said. “I must see to this grandmother. May we go?”
The orc waved them off.
Together, she and Celedin labored up the stairs. He wheezed loudly. There was more blood. He was bleeding all over her.
Eventually, they came to the room where Dathor had once slept.
They pushed the door open together, and she was struck by how very small it was.
It was not a bedchamber. It was just some little cranny of the keep, too small for a person.
The bed, of course, would not be long enough for Celedin to stretch out. It had only been a child-sized bed.
But Celedin collapsed on the bed, knees bent, on his side, and moaned out an oath to the shadows, giving thanks for having made it here. His eyes closed, and he did not answer when she spoke his name again.
He was breathing. She could hear his noisy breath.
She thought he might be asleep.
She did not know what to do.
She covered him with a blanket that was folded on the floor below the bed, just a small scrap of fabric. It did not entirely cover him. She looked up at the window overhead, which let in light.
She backed out of the room and shut the door.
Then she went back to her chambers to change her clothes again, because he had bled all over her.
SHE WASN’T SURE if she should tell someone about Celedin.
The truth was that, of the people at the Peak, she was closest to a maid.
Though she was about to be a stewardess, she did not have her own maid, but instead shared this woman with both her sister and with the kitchen as well.
Her name was Hafindel, and Aerhril had not even seen the woman since before the wedding that morning.
But Hafindel was the only person she would wish to speak to about this.
She wondered if she should go and seek her in the kitchens.
She wondered if the orcs had killed servants.
Perhaps they would not, wishing to keep the servants around to do their bidding.
On the other hand, the orcs would know that the servants were probably less likely to do the bidding of orcs than the higher classes of elves.
The servants hated the orcs intensely, likely because they were the only people below them.
They would never lower themselves to serving orcs.
She was quite worried that all of the servants had been defiant and gotten their throats slashed for their trouble.
And she still had not found any of the children.
She had told the other women to look. She had let them out of that room where they were gathered in the bottom of the tower. Well, she had opened the door, anyway, but the women had all stayed inside in a clump, gazing out into the hall with trepidation. They had not come after her.
She had said she was going to look, and she had left.
She supposed she could look for the children on her way to the kitchens. She set off, in her third—no fourth—dress of the day, thinking of how she had begun the day with dread, for she had no desire to marry Celedin, but that she’d had no idea what a day it would become.
The kitchens were a series of interconnected rooms on the bottom level of the keep, just across from the dungeons, and one had to descend a steep stone staircase to get there. As the lady of the Peak, she almost never went down here.
There were orcs everywhere. They were taking things out of the kitchens, removing food stores, barrels of ale, things of that nature. They looked her over, contempt written on their gray-green features. All of them were taller than she was, broad and muscled and lethal.
None of their own servants were down here.
She ascended the steps only to be stopped by Dathor, who took her by the arm and told her that he had found the children, that they’d been huddled under the stairwell.
“Oh,” she said. “Why didn’t I think to look there?”
“Good hiding place, as we well know,” he said.
For they had played hiding games as children, often, and the stairwell hiding place was one that was used so often that no one bothered to hide there.
There was a little room under the stairwell, one with a small door.
There wasn’t anything in the room. It wasn’t tall enough for adults to even stand in.
But its small door and small ceiling made it quite enticing to children, and she could see why they had gone in there.
“I tried to get them to come out, but they are frightened of me.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said with a sniff.
“You’ll go and take them to the women,” he said. “We’ll have dinner at six o’clock. Make sure everyone is there. That’s when we’ll discuss how things are going to work around here.”
“All right,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
She rushed off to the stairwell.
The children were solemn. She had expected them to be crying, quite distraught, begging for their mothers, that sort of thing. They were not.