Chapter 14 #2
Unfamiliar voices at our backs caught my attention.
I turned, catching sight of a group of men on horseback towering over Silas.
There were five in total, four of them flanking a hulking beast of a man with a shaved head and golden rings looped through his earlobes. Their captain, if I had to guess.
They had clearly been on the road for some time, their horses thin and their skeins deflated.
Cloaked in muddied furs, they could be trappers if not for the fact that they were armed to the teeth with a chilling array of crude weapons.
Rusty blades, splintered arrows, and stocky axes that could have been lifted from a farmer’s wood stack were tucked into their belts.
Their voices grew louder, and when they turned their eyes onto us, Willa shrank away, placing a swollen hand on her belly. I wrapped my fingers around my grandmother’s arm, unsure of what to do. “Where’s the tavern?” barked the man with the shaved head.
“Now see here,” said Silas, standing in the man’s way. “What is your purpose in Wealdstone?”
“This dump has a name?” laughed one of the gang, a short creature with a braided beard.
“All visitors must announce themselves upon entering the village,” said Silas.
“And before coming into my establishment,” grunted Mr. Farrow.
Although he was nearing old age, he had once been as formidable as any of these men, according to Gran.
He had served as Captain of the Guard in Bard for a time before retiring to the village to run the tavern.
The band of men laughed heartily in response to Mr. Farrow’s words, save for one, whose lips pulled into a tight line as he twirled a blade between his fingers. His eyes were as watery as his nose.
More and more villagers were leaning out of their windows and doorways, a small crowd forming in the streets.
I imagined that Silas would have chastised them for their unhealthy curiosity if he wasn’t frozen where he stood.
“We mean you no harm,” said the one with the shaved head.
“We are simple trappers from the east looking for a place to lay our heads.”
“There is no inn here,” Silas replied in a shaky voice. “So I’m afraid you’ll have to be on your way.”
I didn’t hold Silas in particularly high regard, but I could almost respect him in that moment for standing his ground. The man with the shaved head leered over him as if he might flay him alive and eat him for lunch.
“I’m sure we can make arrangements,” he said.
The strangers slid off their horses, weapons drawn.
I nearly jumped out of my skin as a bloodcurdling scream sliced through the silence like a knife.
Mr. Farrow clawed at his gut, his insides spilling out of him and onto the earth.
He fell to his knees, a meat cleaver sliding from his hand into the street.
I hadn’t even seen him draw it, nor had I seen the man with the beady eyes stick him in the gut like a pig.
He stood over him now, calmly wiping blood from his blade.
A shock of scarlet spilled across the dirt as Mr. Farrow slumped onto the street, unmoving.
“Letlas protect us,” croaked my grandmother, invoking the king of gods. Her gnarled hand was clapped to her mouth.
“Get comfortable, lads,” shouted the man with the shaved head. He turned toward where we stood, rooted to the spot. “You there, you can warm my bed.”
My eyes snapped from Mr. Farrow’s corpse to the stranger as he stalked toward us. Behind him, the townsfolk watched me, transfixed. When the man reached me, he shoved my grandmother to the ground. Her skull hit the stairs with a crack.
Willa screamed.
My breath stoppered in my throat. Blood pooled beneath Gran’s head, leaving a gruesome stain in the earth. Her body curled into itself, like a fawn left behind by its mother. If I allowed myself, I could believe that she would get back up. If not for her eyes. Her unblinking eyes.
My ears buzzed with whispers, but not of the folk who watched us. No, they remained silent and frightened. The whispers were strange. Otherworldly. Their words were garbled, but the sound, the sound would stay with me for years to come.
“Gran!” I croaked. I stumbled toward her, but the man trapped me where I stood, wrapping his fingers around my wrist. He burrowed his fingers into my skin, blood welling beneath his nails.
“Don’t touch me,” I snarled, struggling in his grasp.
“Hear that, lads?” he shouted over his shoulder. “I love it when they put up a fight.” He tugged me close, his breath hot against my cheek as he spewed his rot. “You’ll enjoy being my whore.”
I didn’t have time to react as my ears were flooded with the otherworldly whispers. An unnatural heat spread through my veins, like I had trodden too closely to a burning pyre, and my heartbeat slowed. I raised my hand as if to strike my assailant, but I did not touch him.
Instead, a stream of cobalt-blue light erupted from my palm and hit him square in the face. No, not light, I quickly realized. Fire.
The man howled as his skin blistered and shriveled like vellum that had been tossed into a flaming hearth.
The fire encircled him like a viper around its prey, snapping its jaws in a flurry of sparks and horror.
The ground beneath our feet shuddered violently as if it were about to erupt.
When I glanced down, the sight that met my eyes chilled me to the bone.
A fissure had formed in the earth beneath the man’s feet, splitting the dark soil of the high street into a fiery crevasse.
A groan reached my ears as if a living creature lurked in its depths.
Our gazes collided for merely a moment before the man was swallowed, still screaming, by whatever demons I had unwittingly summoned to this place.
“Hellfire!” Silas fell to his knees, beseeching the gods to save him and the village, in that order.
Had I been able to speak, I would have called him pathetic.
Instead, I watched in silence as the flames grew, pouncing on the men who had threatened us and dragging two more of them into the depths of the earth.
My nose stung with the putrid scent of burned hair and flesh as the skin melted from their bones.
They screamed for their mothers. They screamed for their gods.
Their prayers went unanswered.