Chapter 4
Wroth
The walls of Lonmire loomed before us, bristling with ancient stakes like a porcupine.
Some of them were eaten away by insects, but others remained as brutally sharp as the day they’d been chiseled.
Wolfsbane grew over them in a profusion, vines entangling with the stakes and violet blossoms sending their faint, earthy fragrance into the air.
I kept one eye on the Artificer as Abelard fel Arron’s men moved from the path, giving me brief nods of acknowledgement, but none of them disarmed themselves or relaxed.
The ride to Lonmire had given me plenty of time to think. I knew of Abelard fel Arron—by all accounts a good man, a decent man, who didn’t overtax his tenants and put as much money back into the settlements of his lands as he collected. I had met him only once, and had been favorably impressed.
His daughter, however…
An inkling had struck me when I learned her name.
Fel Arron—not only a good man, but a name associated with prime Artifice.
Perhaps Bram had a point, and I was spending too much time mired in my own misery, if I hadn’t known immediately that the woman Jesamin was responsible for the intricate clockwork creations that had the lais in a frenzy.
She looked the part, as well. My first impression of her had been one of madness. It was only when she drew closer, the stink of fear-sweat saturating her clothes, the dark circles under her eyes, that I realized she was close to a panic and only holding onto calm by sheer force of will.
But washed, with her dark hair freshly braided and wearing Kajarin’s old riding habit, it was clear she was not only a noblewoman, but the Artificer of whom the markets were buzzing.
A bold move, for one her ilk—in the Rivers, it was now considered unfashionable among the high nobility for a woman to attend the Argent Collegium, much less stoop to the menial task of performing physical labor or engaging in commerce when she should be quietly sitting at home, growing her husband’s brood like a well-bred lady.
Flintlock pistols were a rare commodity.
Hers was one-of-a-kind, of polished ebony and brilliant engraved brass, no doubt every inch shaped by her own hand.
A watch ticked about her neck, the face of cut-crystal gleaming to display its intricate innards.
Even her spectacles, formed of round gold wire with dainty chains and charms dangling from the sides and glimmering about her face, spoke of skill and effort.
A Master Artificer, to have a chthonium coin in her pocket and be familiar with the material.
When she’d held it to my face I’d breathed deeply, but her own sweat had soaked it, drowning out all other scents. I praised her father’s quick thinking in blocking the road to the village, preserving the scents rather than trampling them.
So. A talented woman, a stubborn woman—possibly a reckless one, if she was willing to cross the Iselaine Blind and shout at me—with an intelligent father.
And polite. When she’d met me at the gates of Owlhorn an hour after our first inauspicious meeting, she’d apologized, looking me dead in the eye the entire time. “I apologize for my outburst, my lord. There was no excuse.”
And I had accepted it gracefully, knowing the journey to Lonmire was a good eight hours of hard riding to come. Allowing the nearest Artificer to simmer with resentment was a recipe for disaster. But mostly…it was the fact that she had bothered to apologize at all.
An errant thought bubbled to the surface, and I forcibly suppressed it. Her mother was a Forian merchant. This woman was, as Esteri had said, ineligible, and it did no good to pretend otherwise.
Besides, she could have any man she wanted at her beck and call.
I sneered at her back, and the back of the man beside her: a fel Arron man-at-arms, wearing their livery of malachite green and black, with the lion rampant, over his leather armor.
He was older than she, but handsome despite his gray hair and weatherbeaten skin, and he kept close to her.
Once he reached out to touch her shoulder, and I swallowed a snarl as she smiled at him.
A woman like any other. There was nothing special about her.
Never mind the full lips that smiled easily despite her clear exhaustion, or the cloud of wavy hair, or how she had reported all the relevant details at speed, and kept a tight grip on the panic smoldering beneath her skin.
Or those enormous brown doe eyes, so greatly magnified by those lenses that I could see every little speck of amber in them and the frame of thick black lashes.
Nothing special at all.
She elbowed the man-at-arms, chuckling at something he said, and I felt the urge to break something.
But it pleased me to see her sitting ramrod straight, her cheeks still wearing red flags of shame.
Good. Of course she was nothing to look at twice; like all others, she looked upon me as an idiot creature, a beast of no high intelligence, and didn’t consider for a second that I had listened and heard, and made my plans as she spoke.
Just like Esteri, seeing only what she wanted to see.
She had likely only apologized out of fear she’d be cut from the investigation.
It was a relief when Lonmire came into view and I could finally drag my eyes from her back. They kept drifting there, lingering on her burned, scarred hands, because there was nothing else to look at.
Now I had a whole village to investigate.
Fel Arron’s men moved aside, and I looked at the wide-open gates, breathing deeply.
“All of you, stay out until I order otherwise.”
Bram brought his horse next to a halt near the fel Arron woman. She rode one of ours, a white stallion whose coat still dripped the bloody sigils for speed and stamina Bram had painted on him the night before.
Fel Arron herself gazed at the gates longingly. Those circles under her eyes had grown darker, after riding for a full day and night, but she was practically quivering with the need to go inside.
She leaned over to the man-at-arms, murmuring, and in the silence, with only the River Nicla’s burbling and the wind through the trees, I could hear her clearly. My ear flicked her way.
“Stakes and wolfsbane. Interesting to see the more antiquated defenses still in use. I suppose they make a good trade of the dried flowers, though.”
Antiquated, indeed. Since the death of Thurn Hakkon, the leader of the cult of Wargyr, fifty years ago at the hands of Bane, most villages had removed the stakes and palisades that had once been critical accoutrements to any human settlement.
The man-at-arms shuffled closer to her, offering her a flask. Fel Arron reached as though to take it, then shook her head. “I drank an awful bloodwitch potion to keep myself awake through the night. Better not mix the two.”
“It’s here if you want it, my lady,” he said quietly, tucking the flask away.
She smiled at him, and I turned my back, prowling through the gates.
Once inside the walls, the silence struck me.
There was nobody here. An empty house has a certain soul to it, or a lack thereof; this was that same hollow, echoing feeling.
It was like a theater, devoid of life, nothing but set dressing. I inhaled again, sorting through the scents: rotting food, the cold ashes in dead fireplaces, the vaguest suggestion of skin oils and sweat on worn clothes.
No animals cried out. No boards creaked. Every door gaped wide open.
House to house I went, touching nothing as I peered in. Here, in this small but cozy house, there was a table laid out for five. The half-eaten food, now growing a fine fuzz of mold, was still on the plates, forks dropped as though the diners had stepped out for a moment.
There, in a more prosperous home, where the cabinets held china and the floor was covered with a woolen rug, an embroidery hoop sat alone in the middle of the floor, needle stuck through a half-finished flower.
Shoes were left in doorways. A bath was full of cold water, a bar of soap untouched at its side.
A loaf of bread in the oven had burned to a blackened lump before the fires went out.
A fish-drying shed lay open, the rows of fish gleaming with salt above a single empty crate, and I paused, catching a whiff of something strange yet familiar.
All over Lonmire, in every house, people had simply dropped whatever they were doing at the time and disappeared into thin air. Not a single sign of struggle, of violence or coercion.
I finally came to the smithy. Another relatively prosperous house, with real glass panes in the windows, and a neatly swept stoop.
Inside, the blankets had been thrown back from the beds, indentations still in the feather mattress and a small rocking crib where bodies had lain before whatever had happened, happened.
I growled under my breath, inhaling deeply. The scent of an infant, mother’s milk and a father’s sooty hands.
Finally I moved to the smithy attached to the house. A glass window was near the door, and I paused to look down at the dry dirt beneath it.
Faint prints, impressions of toes in the ground.
With a frisson, I pushed the door open, and iron bits jangled on a string.
There was the forge, now cold. And all over the brick floor were scrap iron pieces, melted and twisted, arranged in what had once been a game of Lord’s Castle. An oilcloth blanket, reeking of terrified children, sweat, and piss, lay in the midst of the mess.
I thought of my brother Bane again, struck by the sight.
The people of his hold, the Rift-kin, lived their lives by superstition.
No Rift-man would enter the mines without a necklace of cold iron.
The Rift-women grew holly trees around their homes, and trained primroses to climb up over their walls.
These people relied on stakes and wolfsbane, but the only two survivors of this vanishing had been surrounded by cold iron.