Chapter 7
Jesamin
“Long night?”
I looked up with a jerk, suddenly aware I’d been falling asleep on my feet while leading a placid mule, and realized…we were here.
Here being a field of low, marshy grasses nestled against the River Aurore, half a league or so from Owlhorn proper. An old watchtower crumbled before us, seemingly supported only by the thick holly trees growing at its base.
Marrion leaned against one of the wagons, cradling a steaming tin cup in her hands as she examined my tired face and muddy boots.
A low fire was burning in the watchtower’s overgrown courtyard, several of the porters crouched around a pot of rich red tea to warm their hands.
She wore simple black breeches and a silk shirt under her heavily-embroidered robe, her braid pinned into a heavy crown atop her head.
“You could say that.” I stopped in place, and the mule butted lightly into my hip, nearly sending me sprawling in the soft dirt underfoot.
Yes, it had been a long night. I’d been given guest quarters in Owlhorn’s Tower of Shells while we prepared, with a featherbed more comfortable than my own bed at home, and a window overlooking the frothy headwaters of the River Melusine. By all rights, I should’ve slept like the dead.
Instead I lay awake all night, staring at the mother-of-pearl-inlaid ceiling and listening to the Melusine roar, simultaneously exhilarated and terrified over this very moment.
And the thought of all the people of Lonmire, herded Below into the deeps…
well, thinking about it for too long ensured that sleep remained a distant dream.
The slightest of smiles crossed Marrion’s lips. “I know how you feel. Now that I’m here…I wonder if I was a little hasty in proving myself.”
She pushed off the wagon, somehow sliding through the cattails and mud with the grace of an eel, and knelt by the fire, speaking softly to the porters. When she returned, she was carrying another cup of tea.
She held it out to me, and I took it gratefully. “Thanks.”
“Drink all of it,” she said. “I got here early and put a working on it, for strength and stamina and bravery. All of which we’ll need in spades.”
I sipped the tea, trying not to think too hard about the deep crimson color now that I knew Marrion had a hand in its brewing.
It was rich and spiced, and I could almost feel my back straightening and shoulders squaring as I sipped.
I half expected the cloying copper taste of blood, but there was nothing of the sort, only the burn of cinnamon and cloves in my throat.
“It’s very good,” I ventured. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I sensed that Marrion understood my reticence about her kind, to a degree.
“Thanks.” She smiled again, this time exposing the pointed tips of her incisors ever so slightly. “This is not the bloodpowder tea my kind will be drinking Below. Just a little wake-up tea, safe for humans to drink.”
“So…your mentor. You said she went Below?”
Marrion nodded, leaning on the wagon again, watching as a small group of knights trooped across the field towards us.
I vaguely recognized Nikos, Wroth’s head lieutenant, and Silvain, who had organized the wagons.
“Aunt Wyn. She was quite the explorer in her youth. She has this story she likes to tell us about how she went into Liuridar with twenty knights and a butter knife and magically survived against all odds. It was the last expedition to ever venture there, and they sealed the path behind them.”
I raised a brow, but my gaze was across the field, focused on a pale, hulking form materializing from the mist. “And did she have any advice on surviving it?”
Wroth was guiding a wagon tied to a particularly recalcitrant mule, packed tightly with all the necessities we would need to survive an extended trip into the Below. All of the wagons had been painted with hundreds of blood sigils for protection, each one glowing faintly at the corner of my eye.
Wroth snarled at the mule, which dug its heels into the mud. A moment later he began pleading with it.
I realized I was almost smiling and quickly wiped the expression away.
“Well, her first piece of advice was—don’t go down there in the first place.” Marrion drained her tea. “But it’s better than moping about the keep and making life miserable for everyone else.”
Distracted by the sight of a fiend begging a stubborn mule, my mouth opened before I could think better of it. “Prince Demyan, eh?”
Marrion smiled wryly and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We’ve met. He’s sweet, I suppose. It wouldn’t be a bad match. But sometimes a person just wants…” She waved a hand vaguely toward the tower, somehow encompassing so much more than the tower alone. “More.”
I nodded. That, I certainly understood. That same desire had driven me to spend years in the Argent Collegium.
Marrion opened her mouth, but we were both distracted by a mule’s eager bray.
Wroth had produced a carrot from somewhere on his person, and the mule had finally started forward again. He led it past us, up onto the hard, worn track, and threw the carrot into the watchtower’s courtyard with a victorious, “Ha!”
Marrion sighed. “Oh good, he outsmarted it. We should join them. Everyone needs to hear this, or we’ll lose half the party on the first night.”
At last, we were all here. The porters were aligning the mules into a tidy row, the knights were gathered into smaller groups, and those who arrived last were receiving dippers full of the tea.
When the pot was empty and the tin cups stacked in a crate, I gestured to Talos, stepping closer to Wroth and scraping mud from my boots.
The courtyard was paved with stone, and before us the watchtower’s old wooden bones creaked.
Two vampires, each in bloodred armor, stood side by side at the gate set in the tower’s fractured wall.
Marrion was at my side, and I watched Wroth as the fiend spoke quietly to the guardsmen.
He was dressed in simple clothes, dark blue breeches that ended at the knee to expose his backwards legs, and a lighter blue workman’s shirt. A dark belt held not only several pouches and a waterproof leather cylinder, but dangling strings of Nord runes, and what looked like human fingerbones.
Wroth finally turned, looking out over every single face in the courtyard. “You all know where we’re going, and why.”
His voice, always a rumble, rolled like thunder through the field.
“Every moment that we are Below, remember that you are in danger.
Not for a single second—despite stone walls around you or a ceiling above you or a fire before you—are you safe.
But there are three essential rules to follow that have been the difference between success and failure for those living Below.
“First of all: if you come across a reflective surface, do not peer into it for long. Mirrors, glass, still water—avert your eyes. If you start to feel as though you are not quite yourself, cry the alarm. Better to live to feel like a fool, than die saying nothing.”
The knights and Marrion all nodded, as though this were common knowledge.
Nikos looked entirely relaxed, a soldier descending back into the trench he’d come to know like home.
I realized that this entire spiel was for my benefit alone; almost everyone else here had already been Below, and had these rules engraved on their hearts.
“Second of all, do not drink from or enter any body of water that has not been tested by our bloodwitch.” Wroth gestured to Marrion, and she looked around, meeting the eyes of our expedition with her chin raised.
“We will place fresh marks on those sources that have been determined to be more or less benign.”
Wroth took a breath, his pale eyes glittering like ice. I almost shivered when that gaze came to land on me.
“Finally…if we are cursed enough to come across it, do not eat the fruit. Starve before you allow it to pass your lips. In this case, it is better to die than to live, and should you disobey, I will ensure you are put down before you can cause further harm.”
I nodded jerkily, gazing into his eyes, unsure of how fruit could possibly grow in the endless night and yet positive that Wroth had seen it happen, and would happily slit our throats if he saw the juice on our lips.
In his icy eyes, I saw nothing but steel determination and absolute mercilessness.
“Will we come across Fae?” I asked abruptly. They had made much of the environment itself being a hostile factor—but his speech about never being safe made me think there was something else to be on guard for.
“The Fae themselves? No,” he said. “They are long gone. But relics…yes. Possibly.”
“Relics,” I repeated.
Wroth shook his mane out, casting a dark glance at the iron gate. “The things left behind when the Fae vanished. The pets they bred, abandoned to evolve in the darkness. Occult constructs. Human mutations.”
I stared at him, rendered speechless.
“We cleared the Below while we were in exile,” Wroth told me. “But it has been many decades since any of us ventured there. I would not be so arrogant as to presume that no relics survived, nor that they haven’t crept from their hidden nests and regained supremacy over their territory.”
“It’s almost a certainty,” Marrion murmured, twirling a thin blade between her fingers.
“They’re nothing we can’t kill again. You three, with me,” he commanded, and Talos nudged my arm as Marrion hefted her pack.
“Last chance,” I murmured to myself. Relics and mutations, indeed. I shouldered my own pack—all my essential tools, along with a bedroll, toiletries, emergency rations, and extra candles—and checked to ensure my pistol and cold iron-edged sword were at my belt. “But there’s no turning back now.”
I would not leave the Lonmirians to that fate. I trooped forward, Talos at my heels.
The guardsmen at the gate held out lanterns, each containing a scarlet candle inscribed with sigils, and a leather cord with a knot of cold iron for each of us.