46. Into the Belly
Into the Belly
Smoke from the burning buildings rolled across the practice yard in thick waves that stung my eyes and coated my throat. The air had that taste war leaves behind, copper and ash and the charred-meat stink of things that shouldn’t be burning.
The yard was a slaughter pen.
Bodies sprawled across blood-slicked cobblestones. Duke Hemmrich’s men mixed with the freshly dead of other houses. Dozens of noble houses had sent their promising youth for the tournament, and now they died with the rest.
A boy in training leathers stumbled past, clutching intestines that spilled between his fingers. He couldn’t have been older than I was. His mouth worked without sound, trying to form words that wouldn’t come. Then he fell.
Not from our house. I couldn’t stop to help him, couldn’t do anything but keep moving.
A crossbow bolt cracked into the dirt two inches from my boot. I didn’t slow. Angled left toward a collapsed section of burning wall that offered cover.
The heat was steady, fierce enough to make my skin prickle. Maise moved beside me, breathing controlled despite the smoke. Grit on the other side, silent as always.
Behind us, Perrin followed while Ygritte covered our rear, head on a constant swivel.
“Clear right,” Ygritte whispered. Her voice was all focus .
We pushed forward, hugging the wall of the junior barracks as flames devoured the structure. Fire roared through windows I’d looked out of hours before. Wood cracked and groaned as support beams failed.
A high, terrible scream tore through the night from inside the inferno. Not ours. We’d cleared those barracks before we moved. Some other house’s trainee who’d tried to shelter in the wrong building. We couldn’t stop. Couldn’t help.
The servants’ entrance sat fifty yards ahead, tucked behind the kitchen complex. Between us and safety, the main practice yard churned with scattered fighting.
I counted bodies as we moved. A dozen mercenaries down. Eight guards from visiting houses. Two face-down in spreading blood, training swords still clutched in dead fingers. One wore house markings I recognized. The other bore no markers at all.
“Grit, corners,” I ordered.
He peeled off without acknowledgment, moving to check angles I couldn’t see from here.
Another crossbow bolt sparked off cobblestones near Perrin’s feet. He dropped into a crouch, eyes tracing the shot’s trajectory back to its source.
“Second story window,” he reported.
“Leave him.” I kept us moving. Standing still made us corpses. “He can’t track all of us at once.”
The next bolt hissed past close enough to feel the wind. The crossbowman was adjusting for movement, getting better with each shot. Grit gave the signal. Two fingers. We broke cover.
◇ ◆ ◇
Twenty yards of exposed ground stretched ahead like an execution field. No cover. No concealment. Open stone and a crossbowman’s clear field of fire.
We ran.
My boots hammered cobblestones. Smoke burned my lungs with each breath. My legs already ached from an hour of fighting before this. The fire’s roar covered our footfalls but did nothing to hide us from someone with a crossbow and proper placement.
Ten yards to the door. The servants’ entrance grew larger. Five yards.
The bolt took Perrin high in the shoulder with a wet, meaty thunk. His legs buckled. Momentum carried him forward two more steps before he caught himself, hand flying to the shaft buried deep in muscle and bone. Blood welled instantly, darkening his tunic from shoulder to waist in seconds.
His face went white. His jaw locked so tight I heard teeth grinding. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t cry out.
He grabbed the protruding shaft for stability and kept moving. One foot in front of the other. Leaving a blood trail across stone.
“I’m good,” he gasped through his teeth. “Keep going.”
A mercenary lunged from beside the kitchen entrance, sword aimed at Maise’s exposed side. She caught the strike on her blade and steel sparks scattered across stone. The impact drove her back half a step.
She pivoted, using his momentum against him, and drove a fist into his face when she couldn’t follow up with steel. Cartilage crunched.
The mercenary reeled backward, hands flying to his shattered nose, blood spraying between his fingers .
Grit’s knife drew a line across his throat. Arterial spray painted the wall behind him in dark streaks. The mercenary dropped, clutching at the ruin of his neck, gurgling, drowning in his own fluids.
We stepped over him without slowing.
◇ ◆ ◇
Ygritte reached the servants’ entrance first. Her hand found the latch. Pulled. Nothing moved.
“Locked!”
“Perrin!”
He stumbled forward, blood streaming freely now, soaking through fabric and pooling in his boot. His good hand produced lockpicks from a pocket I’d never noticed, metal tools steady despite the tremor in his fingers.
He dropped to his knees at the door and went to work. Blood dripped from his elbow, pattering on stone in a steady rhythm.
Behind us, the battle at the main gates erupted into fresh violence. Men screamed. Steel rang. An explosion lit the sky orange and white from alchemist’s fire. The portcullis stood outlined against the flames. The Sword-Kin owned that chokepoint, and bodies piled at their feet several deep.
Metal scraped against metal as Perrin worked. His breathing came ragged and wet.
A girl in green burst from the smoke to our left, running blind, eyes wide. A mercenary followed a few steps behind, sword raised.
He brought the blade down between her shoulder blades. She pitched forward, face striking cobblestones with a crack I heard over the fire’s roar .
The mercenary put his boot on her back and wrenched his sword free. Blood sprayed from the wound. He turned toward us. Ygritte’s throwing knife took him in the eye before he’d finished his turn.
He dropped, dead next to the girl.
Click.
The lock gave.
“Inside!”
◇ ◆ ◇
We tumbled through into darkness and damp stone. I caught Perrin as he collapsed against the wall, face gray with blood loss, lips pale. The crossbow bolt jutted from his shoulder at an ugly angle.
The bolt head would be lodged in muscle, maybe bone. I grabbed the shaft and snapped it six inches from his flesh. Perrin bit back a scream, teeth grinding audibly. His good hand seized my wrist hard enough to bruise.
“I can fight,” he insisted through a locked jaw.
I met his stare. “Can you move?”
He nodded once.
The passage smelled of old grease and damp stone that never saw sunlight. Barrels lined one wall, grain sacks the other. Narrow and defensible. A servant’s route designed for moving supplies without being seen.
“Which way?” Maise whispered, sword still drawn, still scanning for threats in the darkness.
“Follow me.”
We moved deeper into the keep’s guts. Storerooms passed in darkness and the sounds of battle faded behind thick stone, replaced by the kind of quiet that made the back of my neck itch .
Frightened voices drifted from ahead. Kitchen staff, probably. Trapped between fighting and hiding.
I held up a fist. Everyone froze.
Two kitchen boys ran past our intersection, oblivious to our presence twenty feet away. They carried nothing and wore nothing that marked them as targets, just children running from violence they didn’t understand.
“Clear,” Grit confirmed once they’d vanished.
The corridor branched ahead. Kitchens to the left, warmth and firelight spilling through a doorway. Wine cellar to the right, cold and dark. Narrow stairs straight ahead, climbing into the keep proper.
Perrin wouldn’t make the stairs. Blood soaked through his tunic in a spreading stain that reached his belt, and his breathing came shallow and quick. Shock setting in.
“Kitchen,” I ordered. “Now.”
Maise understood immediately. She grabbed Perrin’s good arm and hauled him through the doorway before he could protest.
◇ ◆ ◇
The kitchen hearth blazed with banked coals from evening meal prep. Still hot. Hot enough for what I needed to do.
I grabbed a carving knife from the block, long blade with a solid tang, and thrust it into the coals. Then I turned to Perrin.
“The bolt comes out. Then I seal it.”
His eyes widened. He understood what that meant. Grit and Ygritte moved without being told, positioning themselves on either side of him and ready to hold him down .
I examined the shaft protruding from his shoulder, checked the angle, gauged the depth.
“Hold him. Don’t let him scream.”
Maise shoved a leather strap between his teeth, kitchen gear for hanging cured meat. Perrin bit down. His good hand seized the table edge hard enough to crack wood.
I gripped the shaft. Pulled.
The bolt came free with a wet sound and a gush of dark blood. Perrin’s body went rigid, every muscle locking at once, but he didn’t scream.
I checked the bolt head in the firelight. Smooth bodkin point. No barbs. Lucky. Barbed heads would’ve torn muscle coming out, would’ve needed cutting. This was bad but survivable if I moved fast.
Blood pumped from the wound in rhythmic spurts. Arterial. I grabbed the knife from the coals. The blade glowed dull red in the darkness.
“Breathe through your nose. This is going to hurt.”
I pressed the flat of the blade against the wound. Flesh sizzled. Blood hissed and steamed. The smell of burning meat filled the kitchen.
Perrin’s entire body locked up, shaking, his hands clawing at the table, eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his face. The muffled sound that escaped around the leather wasn’t a scream. More like something dying in his chest.
Grit and Maise held him down with their full weight. Five seconds. The worst five seconds of Perrin’s life .
I pulled the knife away. The wound was sealed, blackened and ugly but no longer pumping blood.
Perrin sagged between Grit and Maise, chest heaving, face gray and slick with sweat. But breathing. Alive.
I tore a strip from a hanging towel and wrapped it tight around his shoulder. Not perfect but it would hold.
“You’ll live. Move.”
He spat out the leather strap. Nodded once. Couldn’t speak yet but his legs held when Maise hauled him upright. The whole thing had taken maybe forty seconds.
◇ ◆ ◇
I chose the stairs.
Steel rang from somewhere above us, close enough to be a problem.
The landing held several doors, each unmarked except for small details. The center door bore a ladle carving, probably marking food storage. The left door sat plain and anonymous. The right door showed scratches around its handle, fresh gouges in old wood. Recent use. Heavy use.
I pointed right.
Grit forced the latch with his shoulder. Wood splintered with a crack too loud for comfort.
We moved. Carpets softened our footfalls. Noble territory.
“Main keep,” Ygritte confirmed, her voice tight. We were exposed now, far from our element.
A scream carried from ahead, then silence. Sudden and complete. The kind of silence that follows a blade through flesh.
We couldn’t slow down. Couldn’t rest. Not yet .
We rounded a corner into a narrower passage. A servant’s door stood ajar, warm light spilling through the gap. I peered inside, blade ready.
Betta sat at a small table. Ledger open before her. Quill in hand.
She looked up without surprise, her weathered face calm despite the chaos consuming the estate. Her eyes tracked across us one by one, lingering on the blood, on Perrin’s wound, on the weapons in our hands.
Maise shifted her stance, sword still ready. Grit moved to block the door. Ygritte’s hand rested on another throwing knife. Betta watched it all without flinching.
“Lady Clarissa’s boy,” she said.
“I need to find my brothers.”
Betta studied me for a long breath. “The heirs scattered when the attack started. The Duke’s men herded them toward the Amber Hall.” She folded her hands on the ledger. “Said it was for their protection.”
She set down her quill.
“Protection. While the barracks burned and the gates sealed.”
“Where’s the Amber Hall from here?”
“Two floors up. North wing.” She stood. “I can get you there. The servants’ passages will keep you out of sight.”
“Why help us?” Ygritte asked, her voice flat with suspicion.
Betta’s eyes found mine again. I saw the calculation there, plain as a ledger entry: the old woman weighing whether the armed children covered in blood were more likely to get her out alive than the men currently burning the estate.
Practical. Good. But there was something else underneath.
The way her gaze lingered, the way her mouth tightened when she’d said my mother’s name.
“Because Lady Clarissa’s boy deserves to know what happened to her.”
She moved toward a hidden panel in the wall. Pressed. Wood swung inward into darkness.
“And because the Duke betrayed every oath a host can make.”
She looked back at us.
“Follow me.”
◇ ◆ ◇
「Hel’s Ledger」
Vessel: Danarre de Blaise | Year 828 | Age 13
House de Blaise | Status: Bastard (Unacknowledged)
Location: Duke Hemmrich’s Keep, Servants’ Passages
「Knight of Swords」 — Raging
「Emperor」 — Sleeping
「Magician」 — Sleeping
Active Charge: Find the Hierophant. End what was begun.
The vessel cut a boy’s wound shut with a kitchen knife.
Cauterized flesh and gave the order to move before the smell had cleared.
The pack follows him now, bleeds for him, and he carries them the way the Red Gale carried his Wolves.
Hel remembers what that cost the first time.
She’s curious what it’ll cost the second.