“And yet it is the only thing that would make any sense of what happened next. One of the Skørnhäär came striding in after them, stepping over bodies and broken walls. We both saw that much”—he and Skerry exchanged a bleak, frustrated glance across the room—“but we didn’t know what they were after; even if we had guessed, we thought that Winloki was safe in the infirmary behind six more gates.
And in the confusion of organizing an orderly retreat, getting our men down from the walls and across the outer ward to the second gate, fighting every step of the way, we never knew until afterward that our cousin had been abducted.”
Skerry took up the story from that point. “Somehow the giant knew where to find her. Those who saw everything said that he led the strangers straight to the healers’ tent, where she was working. A dozen men rushed to defend her but it was no use; the riders and the ice giant just trampled them down. Then one of the creatures—the Furiádhin—snatched her up onto his horse, and away they all went as they had come, back through the gap in the wall.”
His jaw was bruised and his left arm in a sling. Like everyone else who had been holed up in this place for weeks, the two Skyrran princes were knife-blade thin, as haggard as ghosts, but there was also an unnatural pallor, an unsteadiness to their movements, which spoke of illness and injuries beyond the obvious ones Sindérian could see. They were probably on their feet at all only in stubborn defiance of their own healers.
Skerry balled up his good fist and slammed it against his thigh. “By the time we heard about any of that we were penned up inside, and we had no way of following after her—supposing we were foolhardy enough to try and carve a path through thousands of Eisenlonders and hundreds of the bloody giants and skinchangers.”
“But how, in the end, did you contrive to kill so many?” asked Prince Ruan, leaning forward in his chair.
“Or where did they go?” Aell looked equally intrigued by those same questions.
Kivik shook his head again. “Some of them left that first night, and I don’t know why. Otherwise, they killed each other as often as not. Once they were inside the walls this cursed place proved to be no more lucky for them than it had been for us—and more quickly fatal.”
Sindérian could well believe it. Even now there were evil spells at work here. Around the edges of the room darkness wavered, something shifted. In a far corner, a shadow vaguely resembling a rat sat up and chittered at her. No one but she seemed to notice—except perhaps Prince Ruan, who flared his nostrils and narrowed his eyes when the chittering was loudest.
“All day yesterday,” Kivik was continuing, “they divided their time between scaling our walls and fighting among themselves—and rather more often it seemed to be the latter. There were three different groups of them, so far as I could telclass="underline" the giants and skinchangers; the Eisenlonders; and those others we’ve been fighting this last year whose language we never understood. The trouble seemed to begin when the Skørnhäär and the Varjolükka took offense at something the Men did or said. They killed fifty or a hundred—just squashed men flat or tore them to pieces—and then loped off.” He grimaced at the memory. “That was the last we saw of them. But afterward, it seemed that the barbarians split into many warring factions and bloody battles kept breaking out between them.”
“Impossible, after all the things we’ve seen, to doubt that there is a curse on the fortress,” added Skerry.
Unshaven and ill kempt, they had little of the prince or lord about them. Everything they wore, everything that was not made of metal, was patched and mended, right down to their scuffed leather boots. “Though why we survived it so long, and why it turned on our enemies in the end, I don’t understand.”
Sindérian thought that she knew. Blood will have blood, that was one of the oldest and cruellest laws of magic, and however civilized and learned magicians and wizards became, it still held true. The Eisenlonders and their allies had initiated the violence here, and it was for them to pay the heaviest price.
“However it happened, the last group of them staggered off this morning, nursing their wounds. Either they knew that you were coming,” said Kivik, looking toward his father, “or they finally realized the Old Fortress had a deadly influence on them.”
“We would already have formed a rescue party to go after Winloki, long before this,” Skerry added,
“but whether to head north, south, or east, to go farther into the mountains or back to the flatlands again…” His voice trailed off in frustration.
There is only one way the Furiádhin will be taking her, said Faolein, leaving his place on Sindérian’s shoulder, walking sideways down her arm, and balancing on her wrist. They will be riding south by the easiest way, at least until they come to the sea.
Sindérian thought the same. “They will—they must—head south and eventually west, toward Phaôrax,”
she told the King. “They have no reason to go east to Eisenlonde, and they have no more use for the Eisenlonders, now that they have the Princess.”
Skerry drew in his breath sharply. His eyes moved from Sindérian’s face to the hawk, and then back again. She thought he was probably finding it difficult to make sense of things—particularly those things he had been told about her and her father. “That was the cause of it then, the entire bloody war—because Ouriána of Phaôrax wanted to abduct Winloki?”
“I think…” Sindérian hesitated, turning the idea over in her mind, then went on. “I think you may have been the victims of Ouriána’s mistake. She has her seers and astrologers, a certain degree of Foresight herself. She must have been conscious of a threat in the north, and until she learned that Winloki was alive—”
“She thought we were the threat? The whole Skyrran nation? Or that we would become a threat as she moved her armies north through the coastal principalities?” Another glance passed between Skerry and Kivik; it seemed the idea was not entirely new to either of them. “But this can’t be the end of it. There are too many old grudges between Eisenlonde and Skyrra. The barbarians won’t turn around and meekly go home, just because that woman on Phaôrax has suddenly lost interest in stirring them up.”
“No, it won’t end here,” Sindérian agreed regretfully. “There are some things that, once started, can’t be so easily stopped.”
An uneasy silence crept over the gathering and lasted until Prince Ruan asked the one question on every mind. “But can we really believe the lady is still alive? She’s been in their power for two days already.
They tried to kill her once before, when she was only a helpless infant. Would they hesitate to do so now?”
Another message passed between father and daughter. “They tried to capture her before,” said Sindérian. “What they meant to do to her afterward we only guess. And whatever Guirion might have intended then, this time it is Camhóinhann, the High Priest, who has her. He is wiser by far than any of the others—and therefore infinitely more dangerous. To kill the daughter of Nimenoë is not something he would undertake lightly, nor something he’s apt to attempt while still on Skyrran soil.
“If indeed Camhóinhann intends to harm her at all,” she added at her father’s prompting, “it may be that Ouriána has reserved that task for herself.”
“But can we rely on that being so?” said the King, wrinkling his brow. “Can we be certain that he will, in any case, not harm her immediately?”
“No. That is far from certain. Any rescue party would have to leave soon.”
Ristil hesitated; he seemed to be weighing matters very carefully. “We almost killed our horses getting here,” he said with a shake of his head. “Nor have we provisions enough to start a thousand men on the road again, not until the supply wagons come.”