Controlled mayhem swirled and eddied around Dradus as the men who accompanied him from Castagher set up camp on the edge of the forest not far from the deep chasm that separated them from the land on the other side.
Dradus sat his horse and stared at the wall of trees across the gorge. They were no different than those at his back, yet something hid in their concealing depths, vague silhouettes that were more than the slant of the sun through the trees. The odd hum that had flickered across his senses when he stood at Niamh’s grave sang a continuous melody in his head now, a tuneless canting without words that had grown stronger the closer he got to the gorge.
The girl remained out of reach. His scouts should have easily tracked her, following signs such as footprints, broken branches and crushed leaves. Nothing. There was nothing to mark her passage through the forest. She might as well have been a ghost.
She wasn’t, and it had taken the words of one to guide him here. The men who dug up Niamh’s grave fled the moment they shoveled away the last pile of dirt to reveal the blanket-wrapped body. The reek of decay made Dradus’s stomach heave but didn’t deter him from his task. Dark spells muttered in fading daylight dropped the air’s temperature from chilly to frigid. His breath steamed from his mouth in wispy clouds as he spoke the words that made Niamh’s body sit up, stand and shake off the blanket.
The horror that faced him made him stutter the words for a moment, but he completed the incantation and asked the all-important question. “Where is the daughter of Varn of Berberi and Selene of Castagher?”
Silence reigned long enough for Dradus to fear the spell hadn’t worked. He could hardly look at the rotting wreck of Niamh’s body as it stood just below him in the grave’s shallow pit. Her mouth didn’t move, but a woman’s voice finally answered him in dull tones.
“Where you can’t reach her, mage.”
Dradus scowled. He’d phrased his question carefully, or so he thought. Ghosts, like the fae, were bound to tell the truth, but sometimes their truth omitted important information. “Tell me her name and where she is at this moment.”
“Her name is Imogen, and she stands before the king of Tineroth.”
His eyes widened before narrowing to annoyed slits. “You cannot lie, spirit.”
“I do not lie.”
Tineroth and her last king were nothing more than fable. A favorite tale told by mothers to children and bards to villagers and townsmen, everyone had grown up with the story of old King Cededa, corrupted by immortality and doomed to imprisonment in a city caught between worlds. Dradus had been fascinated by the story as a child. He had no time for fairytales now.
He recited another spell, this one a geas of truth. “Tineroth isn’t real. Where is Imogen now?”
Niamh’s rotting, broken body shuddered a moment but remained upright. “Tineroth is real,” she insisted. “Imogen stands before its king.”
Dradus stroked his chin as a pulse of excitement shot through him. Maybe, just maybe the ghost told the truth. His eagerness to find Varn’s daughter trebled, spurred on by the possibilities of discovering the lost city. And all the treasures hidden within her. “Who is Tineroth’s king?”
“Cededa the Fair.”
He fired off several questions after that, no longer bothered by the reek emanating from the grave or the sharp scent of smoke filling his nostrils as the soldiers set fire to Niamh’s hovel. By the time he extracted the information he wanted from her revenant, Dradus had to bite his lip bloody to keep back the howl of triumph welling in his throat.
He reversed his spells and Niamh’s body crumpled in a heap in its resting place. The stench intensified, and he backed away to whistle for his makeshift gravediggers to return. They approached reluctantly, covering their mouths and noses with their hands. “Rebury her,” he ordered. “And do it right. I may have need of her bones later and don’t want some scavenger spreading them through half the woods.”
Their muttered curses fell on deaf ears as Dradus strode back to the clearing where fire consumed the last bits of the witch’s house, sending black plumes of smoke into the sky. Caught in visions of wealth untold, he hardly noticed. He’d return Varn’s daughter to Hayden, humbly accept the monarch’s gratitude and promptly disappear with treasure to make Hayden look like a pauper by comparison. This fool’s endeavor had suddenly turned in the right direction.
The troop’s captain approached him. “Nothing much to loot and no girl to be found. What do you wish to do?”
Dradus smiled. “Mount up. Thanks to a dead woman, I know where she is.”
Frustration blunted his initial giddiness now. Niamh’s answers to his questions had gotten him this far but no further. He had ridden to the cliff’s edge, expecting to find a lost city rising up from the landscape, an easy ride to its gates, an easy conquest once he and his men stormed through them. He hadn’t expected a wind-blasted gorge or an endless forest undisturbed by a village much less a city.
Another man might accept defeat, but Dradus hadn’t risen to the status he occupied by giving up so easily. Somewhere, on the other side of the gorge, Tineroth hid in plain sight. He was certain of it, felt it in his bones, heard it in the strange, wordless cant filling his ears.
He turned his horse away from the edge and back toward the newly erected camp. Nothing stayed hidden forever. He would find Tineroth and the girl who hid there. He had time.