Sons of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga) (71 page)

One of the bronze doors lurched
open. Rhian stumbled from the keep, as pale-faced and glassy-eyed as the dead.
He took no note of Kelyn or Laral, but hurried down the steps, found an obscure
corner by the barracks, and threw up.

Kelyn scrambled over corpses to
reach him. “Are you wounded?”

Rhian managed a shake of the head.
“You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t see…”

“Is my brother inside?”

The avedra nodded. Kelyn turned to
go, but Rhian seized his arm. “Don’t go in, m’ lord.”

Kelyn blinked in astonishment, both
at being accosted by a pearl fisher and what he implied. What could possibly be
worse than the carnage here in the courtyard? He turned to consider the bronze
doors and found his brother standing on the threshold. Fury transformed Thorn’s
face into something that could barely be called human. A feral creature raged
free inside his skin. The gentle brother who liked a good laugh had been locked
up behind eyes gone cold. Slowly, Thorn raised his arms, and the bodies in the
courtyard began to steam, seethe, smolder. Gray skin bubbled and strings of
saliva boiled. Rhian grabbed Kelyn and hauled him into the barracks. Laral had
sense enough to duck inside the gatehouse.

The courtyard became a pool of
fire. Black, greasy smoke and the stench of burned flesh wafted through the
barracks. The stone wall became too hot to touch. Kelyn and Rhian took refuge
on the far side of the mess hall. Bones littered the tables. A moment passed
before Kelyn realized they were not those of pigs or sheep or elk. “Goddess’ save
us,” he muttered and hid his face behind a hand. “All of them, Rhian?”

After a silence, the avedra said,
“Yes, m’ lord.”

Kelyn wept unashamedly. His people.
In his care. Maegeth, Yris, Nelda, they stayed and fought because of him,
believing that’s what he would have wanted. Was it? Would he have fought and
died alongside them had he not gone to Bramoran? Probably. Just like Morach of
Longmead. Died a brave and stupid death on an axe he never saw.

Angry that he allowed himself to
consider useless possibilities, he smashed the sorrow from his face with the
heels of his hands.

The fire in the courtyard diminished.
Once the heat waves cooled from the cobbles, they ventured out of their hiding
places to find piles of ash drifting in and out of scorched armor.

Thorn remained on the landing,
staring down at the waste, hands heavy and limp at his sides. “Kelyn!” he
bellowed, but his expression quickly softened. “What are you doing here?”

Shoulders hunched, Kelyn admitted,
“Disobeying orders. I’m sorry, brother. You know I had to come.”

“Did you find my boy?” Laral asked,
approaching from the gatehouse. His boots left tracks in the ashes.

Thorn raised empty eyes. “No.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything,
does it?”

Thorn shook his head. “He’s not
here, Laral. They will have taken Jaedren where they took the other avedrin.”

“But you don’t know where that is.
You don’t know what the ogres have done to any of them. You don’t know shit!”

Thorn didn’t feign a defense.
“You’re right, Laral. We may never find them. But we have one ray of hope. We
captured their commander. An Elari named Solandyr.”

“He might know,” Laral said.

“He might. And he might not tell
you.”

Kelyn cleared his throat, glanced
between Rhian and his brother. “Will you question him out here or … in there?”

Thorn raised his chin in a
supremely arrogant fashion. “You had to follow, War Commander. Why should I
spare you anything?” With that, he about-faced and strode away into the keep.
An open invitation.

Kelyn looked at Rhian. The young
avedra’s face was full of doubt, but he raised a hand. “After you, my lords.”

The ogres had turned the keep into
their den. The stench was enough to gag a maggot, like someone had splashed the
contents of the middens about and left the leavings of a hunt to rot in the
sun. Little was left intact. Mother’s fine furniture had been broken up for
firewood. Her rugs and tapestries, too. Campfires smoldered in the middle of
parlor floors. The stained-glass lamps that lined the Great Corridor had been
smashed. Ogres saw well enough in the dark, apparently. The avedrin conjured
little balls of light to show them the path between corpses littering the floor.
The battle appeared to have been as fierce within the keep as it was without. “Stay
to the middle,” Thorn said.

Just past the ring of light, heads
lined the walls. Human heads. Kelyn stopped and stared. He couldn’t help it. Bled
out, they had turned yellow-gray like faces carved from wax. Faces he knew. Villagers,
household staff, soldiers. Everyone who hadn’t fled with Rhoslyn. Kept as
trophies of victory and displayed where highborns paraded to launch the
Assembly. The statement was a bold one. At the foot of the great stair he found
Yris. He barely recognized the steward, her fair hair matted black with blood,
features sagging.

“Unforgivable,” he muttered.

“M’ lord?” said Rhian, catching up.
“Please.” Keep moving. Don’t look. You’ll get sick, too. All implied in that
one word.

Kelyn stared awhile longer. He owed
it to his people to see and to remember. Farther ahead, the globes of avedra light
provided a brief glimpse into the family dining hall. A mountain of something
that looked like discarded clothes had grown where the table once stood.

Thorn waited at the doors of the
Great Hall. Some sick son of a bitch had tied Maegeth’s head to one of the lamp
sconces by her long black-and-silver braid. Thorn unsheathed his dagger, cut
the knot and tenderly laid it on the floor. He whispered tender words Kelyn
couldn’t understand.

“Where is this Elari?” Laral asked,
voice gruff. Maegeth had trained him, too, and thrilled him with the same
stories of ghosts in the dungeons. Ghosts were everywhere now.

Thorn stood and pushed open the
doors to the Great Hall. Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows to
either side. Kelyn soon wished for darkness. Rows of chains were draped over
the ceiling beams and secured to the walls. The bodies had been prepared like
deer carcasses. Uneaten portions hung from meat hooks and turned black from rot.
Flies swarmed. Compared to this, what did it matter that Ilswythe’s banner had
been torn from the wall, that some of the windows bore cracks like spider webs,
that ogres had gouged a fire pit in the middle of the tiled floor?

On the steps of the dais lay a
figure neither human nor ogre. Kelyn ventured closer, cautious. Oh, if Da were
alive … a true-to-life elf in his feast hall. He’d die of apoplexy. Kelyn
struggled with a dose of loathing and revulsion himself. How could such evil
live inside such beauty? Fair skin shimmered like a pearl in the slanting
sunlight. Golden hair splayed across the steps. Long, lean limbs had stiffened
in unnatural positions, as if he suffered from a seizure. Pale lavender eyes
stared at the ceiling.

Alarmed, Kelyn asked, “He’s not
dead?”

Thorn glared at the Elari. “No.
Paralyzed. All dardrion have an arrest spell in their arsenal. I used it on
him. He can breathe and his heart beats, but that’s all. Some even wet
themselves, as poor Solandyr did. Can’t be helped, but it does hurt the
dignity, and Elarion value dignity above all else.” He leaned close and shouted
as if at a deaf man, “Don’t they, Solandyr?”

A fly crawled across the Elari’s
unresponsive eye.

Kelyn flicked a hand at the
prisoner. “Well, get rid of it. Let’s get this over with.”

Thorn unbuckled Solandyr’s belt,
rolled him onto his face, and bound his wrists. A sign made with curled
fingers, a whispered word in a foreign tongue, and the Elari fell lax with a
grunt. He coughed and squirmed and raved at the floor. Thorn answered him in
the same language, forcefully, as if issuing an order. Solandyr snapped off
something that sounded like a curse. Rhian even cringed.

A spark of lightning jumped from
Thorn’s fingers and prodded the Elari in the ribs. “Yes,” he insisted. “In duínovan,
please, so my friends can understand you. I’m not in the mood to translate for
them.”

Solandyr flopped around
ungracefully on the steps until he righted himself. “Fuck your bones with an
ogre’s tusk, Dathiel! Better?”

“Oh, lovely. Do show them how
uncouth you are. Methinks you’ve been living among ogres too long. I doubt the
Lady would’ve stood one with such manners among her guard.”

Solandyr glared at each human face
and spat, then his glance fell heavily on Kelyn, chilling him. “
Friends
,
is it, Dathiel? Ah, no. The Sons of Ilswythe, here together, and Rhian too. Regards.
We wondered where you had run off to, War Commander. I didn’t expect you to
show up here, however. My mistake.”

Thorn waved away the notion. “Never
fear, Solandyr. You won’t be around long enough to make another one.”

A low chuckle rose from the Elari’s
throat. “I’m not sure why you ever thought yourself clever, avedra.”

“Clever? Did I? Awkward, I remember
that one, but not clever. Tell me, where
have
you been keeping
yourself?”

The Elari’s grin turned sly. “Here
and there. Until we decided to take up residence here.”

Kelyn wished the Elari would look
at someone besides him.
Nothing colder than an elf’s eye…
Where had he
read that? He saw that it was true.

“We broke through your gates in a
matter of hours, War Commander. If we had known it would be so easy, we would
not have waited a thousand years. We never found the duchess though. I’m still
not sure how she slipped out.”

Relief washed through Kelyn. If an
ogre scouting party had found the tunnel and followed it to Bransdon, the rest
of Ilswythe’s people would surely have suffered the same fate as these. The
chains swayed in a breath of air, clinking, creaking on the beams. Kelyn paced,
raked a hand through his hair, uprighted a chair, anything to drown out the
sound.

Thorn let Solandyr go on talking,
taunting them. Perhaps he hoped to glean something useful from his thoughts.
Rhian, too, listened with eyes half shut. “You never would have retaken the
place had three-quarters of my ogres not been removed to Tírandon. You mean to
hold Ilswythe, do you, the four of you?” He laughed and shrugged. “We’ll just
take it back.”

“The hell you will!” Kelyn roared.

“We’re a flood you can’t stop,
Commander.”

Kelyn lunged and drove a fist
across the Elari’s cheek. Solandyr struck the floor, laid there spitting blood,
then rolled to his knees again. “Typical brutish behavior, dwínovë.”

“Brutish?” Kelyn jabbed a finger at
the bodies hanging from the ceiling. “You accuse me of brutality? Thorn, how
long will you stand for this? He’s mocking us.”

Laral pushed past Rhian. “Where’s
my son, curse you!”

Solandyr replied with a guileless
lift of the eyebrows. “Lose your cub, did you? Was he the avedra child living
here, perchance? Not my job. That task belongs to Ruvion. And he succeeded, I
hear.”

Laral sprang forward, wanting a
taste of flesh himself, but Rhian held him back. “Wait, m’ lord! Listen.”

Thorn eased in like a serpent stalking
a rat’s nest. He sat on the step near Solandyr and examined his fingernails in
casual fashion. “You know where the avedrin are being held?”

The Elari grinned at Laral. “Who
says they’re being held?”

“What’s the pit, then?”

“Pit? First I’ve heard of it.”

Thorn nudged his ribs with a toe. “You’re
a lying sack of shit, Solandyr. Who leads you?”

He looked genuinely confused at
that. “That’s not even an intelligent question. What do you mean?”

“Who gives the orders? It isn’t
you. Tréandyn, maybe? Lasharia?”

The elf’s laughter rang from wall to
wall. “You have got to be kidding. Does Aerdria not know? Or did she simply not
tell you? You must be the blindest avedra who still has eyes.”

Thorn’s hands lashed out and
clenched Solandyr’s skull. The Elari shrieked and convulsed, kicking, twisting,
flailing. Kelyn feared his brother meant to kill him over a petty insult before
they learned anything, but Thorn suddenly released him and staggered away. He
stood over a pile of bones, panting, trembling, as terrified as if he had run
into a dead-end alley where a nightmare waited. “Lothiar.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar,
but Kelyn couldn’t place it.

Rhian shook his head. “Sure he’s
lying, Dathiel. He has to be.”

“Lothiar is dead!” Thorn bellowed,
rounding on the prisoner. “He was slain by an ogre in the Gloamheath.”

Solandyr recovered from the
brain-search slowly. When he found his tongue again, he asked, “Is that what
you thought? No wonder you’ve troubled so little all these years. Blind, I
said, and so you are, Dathiel. The Captain paid us a visit only a few days ago.
Right here in these halls. I must admit, he seemed to find the halls of the
Sons of Ilswythe greatly lacking. When he returns he means to tear down your
walls and erect the ring of white stones again.” How smug his smile. “In the
meantime, you can be assured he’s watching you, Dathiel, and your niece.”

Raw terror left the gateway open
for that feral creature inside Thorn’s skin. At mention of Carah, it broke
loose. A hand swept forward.

“No!” Laral cried, but too late.
Thunder shattered against the stone walls, and a blade of lightning tore
through Solandyr’s armor. The body danced with sparks, then fell still.

A
short while later, Kelyn
found his brother atop the gatehouse, high above the ashes and the stink. The
view from the battlements proved just as grim. Charred ribs of a desolated town
crumbled to dust across the heedless waters of the Avidan. In the fields, weeds
grew alongside rye and peas. Thorn saw none of it, only the horrors in his
head.

Kelyn leaned on the crenels, breathing
the clean southern wind, and asked, “Who is this Lothiar?”