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The sorceress looked burnt. As they watched, the woman’s eyes and mouth, her nose and ears melted away.
Inkeri gagged and turned away. Rhoden guided her several feet away. He planted himself so that she couldn’t see what happened to the sorceress. After a minute, he glanced at Gaulter and the men who stayed to watch.
The birds lifted from the pines then flew away. The jackals no longer barked.
The marshal looked up. “Gone,” he mouthed. “Dead.”
He looked over the waterhole. The rain had seeped away. The wrack torn from the trees by the chisoone littered the ground. He gauged the sun and the scant hour until dusk. Over at the edge of the circle of boulders, a few men had started to dig graves while others carried rocks. Time to re-direct Inkeri’s focus. “Will it be safe to stay here tonight? We can ride into the Archais tomorrow?”
Inkeri nodded. She still looked sick, and he knew what she’d done with her power had disgusted her. He needed to change her view of the killing.
“Good trap. One to remember.”
“It was a horrible death.”
“The choice was her or us. Isn’t that the way of it?”
She shuddered. But she stood a little straighter, and he knew he’d said the right thing to start her on the way to reconciling herself to the killing. Was that the first person she’d ever killed?
“I—I need to do something.”
“Carry rocks,” he advised and steered her toward the burial detail.
Gaulter waited to approach until Inkeri was involved in hunting rocks and Rhodren was resting after his turn at digging. “Melted right away,” he said quietly. “Both of them, the sorceress and the wizard. Even to the bones and the teeth. Just two stinking slicks in the sand.”
“Good. Two fewer graves to dig.”
“That yon lady is dangerous.”
“That’s in our favor.”
“As long as she stays our ally.”
“A better ally than Almandis. He wasn’t a wizard, just an adept.”
Gaulter chewed over that information then asked, “Think the king knew? Think he sent us an adept to investigate the lost caravan and the troop from the Verte?”
“Now that is an interesting question. Wouldn’t do to ask it too loudly.”
“No, my lord. Wouldn’t do at all.” They shared a glance. Then Gaulter stepped over to the hole Simins was digging. “I think that’s deep enough,” he judged, and the soldier stopped digging with a heartfelt sigh.
. ~ . ~ . ~ .
After how she had killed the sorceress, Inkeri expected the others to shy from her, but they didn’t treat her any differently, not even Rhodren or his marshal. The older man started addressing her more directly, meeting her eyes when he spoke to her. That was the only change she noticed.
The lack of change surprised her, then it didn’t. These were men of war. Even at her far border village, they had heard of the battles fought by the brave of the Bois Argent for their king, against the encroaching Cortes lords. Soldiers were practical in their goals. An enemy discovered, their goal became enemy gone. How she managed the death didn’t matter to them.
After years of guarding her power so no one would look at her askance, so no one would raise suspicions about her, their perspective was a refreshing change.
Rhodren and Gaulter spoke again at the burial, then they covered the graves with sand and soil. Each man helped pile rocks to protect his fallen brethren.
Two men had snared rabbits, and they supplemented the hard jerk with freshly roasted rabbit. Inkeri found greens with a subtle flavor, and the meat rolled into the greens made a tasty mouthful.
She warded the camp, careful to link her wards against mundane and magical. Then she walked through the camp, casting wards against snakes and lizards.
When she finished, only the two men on watch were still about, starting separate rounds inside her wards. As she came under the pines, she spied Rhodren sitting at the campfire. He wrote with a pencil in a small book. He frowned as he wrote, tilting the book so the fire illuminated the page. Inkeri watched him for long minutes, through several pages of close writing. Then he tucked the pencil inside the book, closed and wrapped it with a strip of leather before tucking it inside his brigantine.
What did he record? The facts of a report to the king? How would he forget what had happened so far on their journey? Or did he expect that someone else might carry the book to the king for the report?
At the last thought, she shivered and headed for her blanket.
He had unrolled his beside hers. When she approached, he looked up with that serious expression of his. Early on she had thought it held judgment against her. In two days, she had discovered that he guarded his emotions. Only rarely did she see a smile or a laugh shared with his men. He was more open with his marshal, but that man was one he trusted completely.
She had marked that his eyes often lightened when they landed upon her.
Inkeri offered a smile and was rewarded with the barest lift of the side of his mouth. “All warded?”
“Aye. All recorded?”
He frowned a little, a simple crease between his brows, then he nodded. “Notes for the king. In case anyone comes to find our corpses.”
“You think we will die on this venture?”
“We’ve lost nine men, including Almandis. Almost half gone, and we have not yet reached the Archais, where the true trouble is. Only today did we face a magical enemy.”
“You think the animals that attacked us were not driven by sorcery?”
“A point. I had wondered, but—.”
He hadn’t believed. She also wouldn’t have believed. The birds and jackals and lizards that had come while they waited for the sorceress’ final attack, those had convinced her.
She lay down and flicked the rest of the blanket over her. “What do you expect to encounter at the Archais?”
“I don’t know. The sorcerers of Frost Clime usually have wyre as slaves. I expected the shifters to attack my men while she fought you.”
“I did not expect shapeshifters. It would have been difficult for that many to come through the veil.”
“You still think a Dark Fae opened the veil so the sorceress could reach us?”
She didn’t answer that question. “I do not think she expected to lose.”
“She didn’t expect your trap, that is certain.”
Inkeri remembered that brief glimpse as the acid infected the sorceress’ blood, and she shuddered.
“Us or her,” Rhodren said softly.
The reminder helped. She swallowed then nodded. “What do you expect at the Archais? Do you think the sorceress was there? Do you think her wyre will be there, waiting for us ... or waiting for her return? That means the Kyrgy will also be there.”
“And another sorcerer?”
“Gods, I hope not. I pray not. That would be the worst.”
At those words, a chill ran across her. Premonition, but she didn’t know if the omen confirmed her words or not.
“Sleep. I do know we need that before we meet whatever our next trouble will be.”
They had no trouble in the night. The birds and jackals stayed away. The snakes and lizards remained in their nests and burrows. A single owl hooted from a pine, then it flew into the desert to hunt there.
Inkeri slept deeply ... when she slept. She startled awake three times, once to the hoot of the owl when it returned. Once because horrible images awoke her and she lay with her heart racing and sweat chilling her skin. Once she woke blank, not certain where she was, just aware that she was not in her bed in her little cottage.
On each waking the same thoughts rolled through her mind, an obsessive round of the same two questions.
Was that sorceress to blame for all the danger they’d encountered?
Or a harbinger of trouble?
They rode for the Archais at sunrise.
The morning passed and the sun reached its zenith before they neared the old citadel.
Even from a distance, Madriger Head loomed large, becoming massive the closer they neared. It dominated the western sky, its bulk spreading north and south, rising to obscure the spiky peaks of the Shining Lands behind it. Of hardened red rock, it remained a bulwark that had to be navigated around rather than crossed.
The striated lines of Helmed Forsis to its north looked as impassable. From old maps Inkeri knew that those traveling the gap between Forsis and Madriger would encounter a maze of wind-scoured passages. That route through to the Shining Lands had never been mapped. To find it was a matter of luck. Deep in the gap were abyssal crevices that smoked with the greater heat of molten rock.
The mapped passage to the Shining Lands and the Wastes beyond was guarded by Saet’Idros Archais, a fortress built into the sandstone and red rock that formed the steep ridge running south from the Madriger.
Men and Fae had guarded the fortress in the generations after Dragon Dark. Men were first to abandon the fortress. She did not know when the Fae had left, just that they had.
In leaving, Rossik found her mother and passed two decades with her before returning to Faeron. Other sentinels had also taken human brides, but the only child she knew from those pairings was herself.
Fae magic had formed the outer walls of the Archais. It was stronger than the durable red rock that only changed through time. Straight walls rose up from the desert flat, steep and straight, too tall for scaling ladders. Crenellated battlements echoed the castles that men built, with arrow slits in the lower stories. Windows dotted the upper floors, and a few towers had balconies that overlooked the desert.
Entrance was via massive gates, reached at the end of a narrow bridge that climbed steeply from the desert. Before the gates the bridge spanned an open drop.
The rock of the Archais protected the roof of the fortress. After Dragon Dark, Fae and men had been wary of the flying dragons banished into the great Wastes. The fortress hadn’t been carved from the top of the ridge but carved into the side and tucked within the protection of the resilient red rock.
Madriger Head dwarfed the Archais. Only as they neared it did they begin to appreciate the size of the citadel. Hundreds upon hundreds of men and Fae had guarded the passage from the Shining Lands. Hundreds upon hundreds had served the soldiers and sentinels. The fortress had to be massive inside.
It loomed above them, drawing all eyes to admire its long-lasting lines of walls and towers. They searched the battlements for any movements that would reveal enemies waiting for their arrival. They scanned the distant windows for any glint that would give away weapons. They kept their eyes on the fortress.
They didn’t look at the sand until their horses’ hooves crunched on something that wasn’t sand.
Bones littered the ground. Skeletons, picked clean by scavengers, bones scattered by animals that warred over them.
A few bits of clothing were strewn under the heaviest of bones. Brightly colored fabrics, drab colored linens, strips of leather. They had found the caravan and the troop, not dead inside the citadel.
Or not all of them dead inside the citadel.
Unburied.
Survivors would have tried to bury the corpses.
The horses hadn’t spooked. The chisoone and time had removed the stench of death.
They halted. Gaulter and two men dismounted to search across the bone-strewn field. After a few minutes they came back and silently re-mounted.
“Caravan,” Gaulter reported once they set their horses to a walk.
“Soldiers?” Rhodren asked.
“Guards for the caravan.”
“Not the troop from the Verte? Did you see the cause of their deaths?”
“No hack marks on the bones. No arrows.”
“What does that mean?” Inkeri asked. “Hack marks?”
“Swords that hit bones leave marks,” the veteran explained. “So do axes.”
“These weren’t killed by weapons. Was it magic, Gaulter?”
The marshal hesitated. Inkeri found herself craning toward him, her apprehension increasing.
“I’ve never seen people killed by magic, not until today. I wouldn’t know what to look for on their bones. None of these bones look like the men killed by the sorceress.”
“Then predators, like those that attacked us,” Inkeri hazarded.
“This close to the Archais? Why wouldn’t they shelter inside the Archais?”
No one had an immediate answer. They had crossed twenty more yards before Rhodren said, “Maybe whatever lurked inside the fortress was worse than what they faced outside.”
“What’s inside was worse?” Gaulter gave an old hex sign, one that Inkeri hadn’t seen in years.
She didn’t venture another answer.
For when she lifted her eyes to the fortress, she saw a flock of birds swirling in the air above the Archais.
Black birds. Flying silently.
A jackal barked, far distant, in the desert behind them.
