Wynn couldn’t make out anything that he might have seen.
“That will be Pérough,” Nikolas said quietly from the wagon’s back. “It’s only the first along this road. We have another league before reaching Beáumie Village below the keep.”
“The village was named after the family?” Wynn asked.
“Yes, like the keep,” Nikolas answered, his voice strained. “It might have been called something else once, but the Beáumie line goes back more than two hundred years.”
The wagon lurched, and Wynn gripped the bench’s edge. Chane pulled up the pair of horses, as the right-side horse had shied and lurched away, almost drawing the wagon off the road. Chane hissed at the team and jerked the reins with more strength to bring the wagon to a halt.
Wynn lurched forward. She grabbed the bench with both hands as someone grasped the back of her cloak and pulled her upright.
“What was that about?” she asked.
When she looked to Chane, he was glowering over his shoulder and behind her. The grip on her robe released, and she already knew at whom that look had been aimed.
“A hare,” Osha said from behind her and pointed ahead.
Shade pushed in on Wynn’s other side, at the bench’s left end, and let out a low-throated growl. Before Wynn could even ask ...
“It not right,” Osha whispered in his broken Numanese. “Shade knows, too.”
Wynn might have been pleased to find Shade more accepting of Osha’s presence, as the two stood close together behind her. But as Shade’s hackles rose, Wynn looked ahead. At first she didn’t see anything but the road in the dark.
“To the left ... near the road’s edge,” Chane whispered, and now he was staring as well.
She followed his gaze ... and something moved on the road’s packed earth.
A small, furry creature half hopped, half dragged itself across the road. It didn’t appear wounded, though it favored a rear leg. Slowly Wynn made out that a good deal of its fur had fallen out. Its back looked malformed, twisted, as if it had been born with some deformity. The sight of it made her uneasy, and as it approached the road’s far side, she shuddered.
When it hobbled into the brush, she spotted something worse protruding from its backside: not a tail, but a shriveled fifth leg.
“What happening here?” Osha whispered.
No one spoke, and Chane got the horses started again and drove them onward. In less than a hundred yards, Wynn saw the first huts, made from logs or planked wood with thatched roofs.
When they rolled through the village of Pérough, only a few people were out and about. But those few seemed in a hurry, as if they did not wish to be outside any longer than necessary, though it wasn’t raining.
There were several dozen structures, at a guess. One nearest the road had to be a smithy with an attached livery and stables, though Wynn didn’t see or hear any horses. The wagon soon passed a broad area that could have served as an open market when needed. However, Wynn didn’t see any stalls.
And neither did she see nor hear any animals—no dogs, let alone mules, goats, or cattle brought in for the night.
“Is it always this quiet?” Chane asked, looking around.
Nikolas was slow in answering. “Not that I remember.”
Wynn noticed a young man ahead dragging a small girl child along the roadside beyond the village’s far limits. They were perhaps hurrying toward the nearest dwelling. The man stalled, likely spotting the wagon, and he veered sharply, jerking the girl along as they ducked into a stand of trees. Neither of them made a sound.
Wynn pulled out her cold-lamp crystal and swiped it harshly across her thigh to ignite a pale light from it. It wasn’t until the wagon passed near the trees that she saw anything more.
The man peeked out at her from behind a tree.
He looked pale in the crystal’s dim light. His face was more heavily lined than she’d have guessed, as his quick movements moments before and his fully dark hair suggested a younger man. His right eye twitched at the sight of her, as if she frightened him.
“Shade?” Wynn whispered, and immediately memory-words rose in her head.
—Not—you— ... —He—remembers—dark robe—but not like—your—blue one—
In a blink both man and child vanished deeper into the trees.
“Another sage?” Wynn asked. “Has he seen someone else like me?”
Shade rumbled but didn’t huff or raise memory-words in Wynn as an answer; that meant Shade didn’t know.
“Something is wrong here,” she said, feeling foolish for stating the obvious. Master Columsarn had alluded to that in his letters. But it was likely not a good idea to go poking about right now.
Once the village was too far behind to see, and Wynn was still lost in worry and thinking of the deformed hare, Osha tapped her on the shoulder.
She almost squeaked in fright.
“This place ... land ... sick ... die,” Osha whispered.
He didn’t have to point at anything, for she saw the brush, bushes, and trees along the road. Too many appeared wilted or dying. Wynn closed her hand over the crystal to smother most of its light.
No one spoke for a long while, until they approached the outskirts of another village.
“Beáumie,” Nikolas whispered.
In size it was similar to Pérough, though this place appeared nearly deserted, with even fewer people visible as the wagon rolled through. They ran for doorways while holding hoods low over their heads to hide their faces.
“I don’t like this,” Nikolas said. “It’s nothing like I remember.”
As the wagon passed beyond the village, a cold drizzle began to fall. Shivering and pulling her cloak tighter, Wynn tried to clear her head to form a proper question for Nikolas about anything else that was different from in his youth. Then she heard him suck in a breath, and she glanced back.
He was crouched low, looking up ahead of the wagon.
“The keep,” Chane said, and Wynn turned forward again.
The road rose up a thinly forested slope, growing steeper near the top, and she heard the sea from somewhere beyond. But her gaze locked on what was visible at the crest far ahead. The first thing that caught her eye was the light of flames. In the deepening darkness, she spotted the keep’s outline first, constructed on the rise and likely with its back to the sea below it. Some form of gate in a surrounding wall faced the road’s far end. Whatever braziers burned there were on the inner side and set high upon the gate’s sides. She made out only one large square structure beyond the gate, rising to about twice its height. As they rolled up the incline, even closer, she spotted a single tower that rose above the keep’s left corner. The whole place looked so stark—so unwelcoming—against the starless skyline.
Chane suddenly pulled up the horses, and as the wagon halted, he sat there gazing upward. “Do we go on?”
Right then, instinct told Wynn to tell him to turn around. “We have to.”
Chane flicked the wagon’s reins, urging the horses up the road’s rise toward the gate in the darkness haloed by orange-red light.
As the wagon rolled up to the iron-lattice double gate, several things surprised Chane and several did not. He did not find it odd that the gates were closed and that two guards stood peering out at newcomers with unwelcoming suspicion. He was surprised to find no gatehouse or tunnel or portcullis.
Beáumie Keep was surrounded by a stone wall some four yards high, encompassing its inner dirt courtyard; the entrance was framed by two pillars rising barely higher than the wall. As Chane reined in the team of geldings, he looked through the gates’ iron lattice and straight to the keep’s double doors—which were up a rise of six broad stone steps. At a guess, the keep’s rear wall faced the cliff over the ocean shore. Likely it had been built here due to the solid stone of the knoll and cliff for a sound foundation.