Chapter Twenty-Eight. A Chilling Husk Presents Itself.
Twenty-Eight
A Chilling Husk Presents Itself.
“Get under my surcoat.”
The sharp words rouse me from a doze I’m unaware of having fallen into.
As I jerk to attention, I look around. Long gone are any trails or even landscape I might have been familiar with.
Now we are on a broad swath of road that cuts through a dense forest, and the shoulders of the packed route have been cleared, as if to prevent kidnapping and the thievery of carriages.
There are no more thimbe trees with their autumnal foliage, but rather prickly statchz set in a craggy and sparse undergrowth.
The sun is low in the horizon, on the verge of setting—
Hide.
For a moment, I’m confused. The voice in my head doesn’t sound right—
Merc twists in the saddle and hisses, “Duck under, will you. You’ve got to hide.”
The gathering cold flushes out of me, and in what has become a practiced maneuver, I pull up the back of his leather coat and dive beneath the heavy weight.
The next breath I take is heaven. All I can smell is him, and as I turn my face to the side and rest my cheek against the valley of his spine, I slip my arms up the rippled flanks of his torso.
The first time I did this, we were approached by a brisk pair of riders dressed in royal garb.
When Merc gave the order to go under the surcoat, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
As I fumbled, he solved my problem with an under-the-breath order to just disappear them, he didn’t care where.
So I ran my arms up the sides of him, and was shocked by how the thin material of the long shirt he wears hid nothing.
And it hides nothing now. I’m just used to fitting myself to him, and feeling his torso.
He’s so warm. And hard all over.
Closing my eyes, I pray to the crescent moon for our safe passage, and realize that’s such a stupid entreaty given we’re going to a place that I’ve heard is more dangerous than the treacherous roads and territory we’ve got to cross to get to it: The Outpost in the Badlands is a savage place.
But at least Merc’s authority and control have never wavered yet.
Though I bow to the aches and stiffness all over me, though I have flagged and fallen into exhaustion in spite of our precarious situation, he’s remained alert and prepared to fight.
Pride’s the only reason I haven’t asked him how much farther—
Three horses pass us—or at least it sounds like more than a pair. Merc says something to whoever it is, the rumble in his chest transmitting into me, and my panic returns. Word will have spread throughout Prosperitus about what happened at the Fulcrum with those boys—
“All right,” Merc clips.
With reluctance, I release my hold on him and leave the cocoon. When the cold air hits me, I tremble from the temperature change and a curse floats back from him.
“We’ve got to stop before it gets too dark.”
“Here?” I offer. Even though I have no idea where we are.
“Somewhere.”
The blooming of peaches and pinks in the western sky announces the day’s grand finale of illumination, and soon enough, a moody gloaming takes over. With every blink, more light drains, and even though my eyes adjust, there are way too many shadows in those spiky, evil trees on our periphery.
And then the true darkness arrives.
My instincts prickle and my stare scans the borders of the road, seeking sets of glowing red eyes while my ears drown out the sounds of hooves and leather tack, in favor of a growl or a snort.
What do demons sound like—
“Trust the horse,” Merc says. “He’s going to alert before we do.”
I must have spoken that out loud.
We press on because we must, the road seeming to go on forever, the landscape offering us no true shelter or coverage.
Time condenses into a focal point of the persistent present, no future ahead of us, no past behind.
Only the single heartbeat of each moment repeating to the beat of the horse’s plodding gait.
At least the tension that coils in my gut chases away the chill that’s settled into my bones.
Overhead, the three-quarter moon rises, but offers little illumination to go on, as if it’s determined to remain neutral with regard to our travel and destiny.
A strange desperation grips me, unlike anything I’ve felt before: I know the safety I yearn for will not magically appear whenever we find a place to shelter ourselves for the night.
We will still be out on our own, and in the best course of things, we’ll only be attacked by robbers or a landowner defending his—
All at once, we round a curve and the forest gives way to a meadowed valley that seems big as Anathos itself.
The terrain change is so abrupt, I wonder if I’m dreaming as I look out over the fields that unfurl like carpet to the base of a mountain range far to the southwest. In the moonlight, the long grasses are cast in shades of palest blue, and I know it’s not just because of my veil.
In the autumnal daytime, the thread-thin stalks are yellow instead of green, the seasonal change having come upon them.
The lunar light, however, is an artist who paints with platinum and steel rays, and along with those delicate blades, the road ahead, and even ourselves, glow in the cool palette of the night sky.
“There.”
Merc points with his broadsword to a settlement cluster halfway between where we are and the first of the snowcapped summits.
The farmhouses are too small in number to count as a village, too many to be a single homesteader, and I’m hoping the inhabitants have it in their hearts to welcome strangers.
Given the tenor of things, I doubt it—so I don’t bother to ask if it’s safe to approach. The answer is no.
It’s a better shot than risking demons in the forest, however.
Merc stays at the ready as he urges our tired horse on. He doesn’t ask for a trotting, just as he’s stopped twice at streams to make sure that the chestnut is offered a drink. We all need a rest and some food.
“I don’t want to steal anything else,” I warn.
“We’ll see.”
The farther along we go, the more exposed I feel out in the open. And yet when we were surrounded by trees, I was surely stalked.
Spoiled for choice.
Merc scans the fields, and here in the open, the moon does give the eye something to work with.
After I measure that bright star that nearly throws its own shadows, I vacillate between jerking my head over my shoulder to make sure there’s nothing coming up behind us, and fixating on the outcropping of buildings as it grows larger and larger.
And then I only look at what’s coming.
There’s something wrong with the settlement, and as I narrow my eyes to tease out what it is, a chill of warning tickles the back of my neck. And then a strange scent blows our way, the acrid sting in the air making me sneeze.
It’s not until we are halfway across the meadows that I realize it is a proper town. But most of the structures … they’ve been—
“Quite a fire,” Merc remarks.
“Oh … dearest fates…”
So many of the homes and stables have been burned to the ground, only a couple of surviving structures remaining at the far edge of what turns out to be quite a large community. And then it dawns on me.
“Is this Fielkirk?” I whisper. “How can this be?”
“You know the town?”
“I do—I mean, I’ve never been here. But they would come to us on market days with grains and hay on offer. Crafts and clothing, too. What happened?”
I try to recall what the men and women looked like, but of course, I didn’t spend much time on their faces. I do remember thinking that their clothes were just like our own, and so were their accents, and now I wish they’d had a wall to protect them, even if its mortar was breaking down in places.
And a moat. And balas.
Soon enough, our horse’s hooves cross over onto scorched earth, the flames having spread out from the core to the grazing fields on the perimeter.
Yet the stink of ash and smoke is not too overpowering.
This happened a week ago at least, and there has been plenty of cold rain since.
Fates, though, the fire must have been an inferno.
The burned carcasses of cattle and sheeplings break my heart, their charred ribs still retaining shape, the ghostly spaces where internal organs had once been like the rafters and chimneys that are the remains of the homes in the distance.
“Who did this?”
Merc offers no answer, but as if he’d have any?
He pulls up on the reins, and the chestnut docilely halts.
Then, for the first time since we started out, he twists in the saddle, and I’m forced to turn with him or risk getting pushed off by the breadth of his shoulders.
In a slow swivel, he pivots all the way back around, like an owl.
“We have to stop, but I don’t like this.”
“Has any part of this journey been enjoyable,” I mutter.
“Oh, I can think of one.”
As I flush under my blue veil, he sets us off once more, and soon we are passing by the first of the burned-out homes.
The stony foundation remains in place, charred, but otherwise solid, and the same is true for the hearth and its spine of bricks.
Some boards and rafters have survived, although they are burned into ragged points.
Personal belongings, however, are almost exclusively reduced to ash, although a cluster of overturned kettles and pots around the fireplace undulate beneath the blanket of soot, the table they were on no match for the inferno they were able to withstand.
We pass a couple of variations of this, but then less and less of the structures remain, until we arrive at what must have been the center of the fire. Here, not even the mortar could beat the heat, the foundations naught but rubble, all the wood and textiles consumed, even the chimneys crumbled—
The snort of our horse makes me jump, and the chestnut shakes his head as if the pungent stink is irritating his nose, too. As the reins jangle loudly, I look to the snow-covered peaks far to our west and wonder if the sounds will awaken the dragons in their moonlit lairs.
At last, we come out to the far side, reaching the houses that are still standing. It’s obvious the blaze was carried by a northwesterly wind, for here, the damage is nothing but blackened stucco and closed, toasted shutters.
Merc pulls us to a halt in front of a two-story home that, given the flashes of paint up under the eaves of the tile roof, was painted with an elaborate pattern of lozenges. Everything else on the exterior has been stained with soot.
“Stay on the horse,” he orders as he throws a leg forward over our steed’s mane and drops to the ground. “We can’t lose him, not that he’s got any run left.”
The reins are pushed into my hands, and I gather them on reflex.
He frowns. “You hold them right for someone who’s never been in the saddle before.”
“I…”
My voice drifts into a tense silence as Merc squares off at the front door, his broadsword up.
Just as he makes his approach, the smoke-stained panels open.