By the next morning, when the Prince and Skerry set out to take a tour of inspection around one of the inner wards, the sky was mostly overcast and spitting snow.
Just like the other six courtyards, this one had become a squalid clutter of patched tents, ramshackle little sheds, shacks, byres, chicken coops, huts, hovels, and shelters more primitive stilclass="underline" hastily erected out of scavenged wood and fragments of stone; backed up against the bailey walls wherever possible; gathered together elsewhere in tipsy congregations that seemed to stand merely because every single one was relying for support on the others around it. A dark smoke, from hundreds of tiny cookfires, hovered over everything. Someone had dug a trench down the middle of the yard, and it was already half full of filthy ice and raw sewage. Piglets squealed, goats bleated, hens cackled; the cacophony was almost as bad as the stench, which was considerable. It was worse than the squalor of the most despicable slum; it was the way, maybe, that thousands of people displaced from their homes were forced to live now, throughout Skyrra.
It was war—just one more toll of the war, to be paid in the coin of human misery, Kivik reflected angrily, and it made no sense, not any of it, because the war itself made no sense. They had been attacked, savagely, mindlessly, relentlessly, and they did not know why.
To make matters worse, for all the hardships the refugees were prepared to endure, they had fled their homes pitifully ill-equipped to deal with this murderous cold—which no one could have expected in what ought to have been the middle of summer.
Yet from the first they might have found snugger quarters. Much of the fortress appeared inhabitable—the tall houses in the outer wards, the massive central keep, the lower floors of the soaring white towers—but no one had summoned the courage to venture inside. In truth, it took all the courage that most of them could muster just to pass through the gatehouses from one yard to the next, convinced as they were that the witch-lords, though dead, still lingered on as a malignant presence.
In one of the hovels, an old woman began to cough, a deep, racking, bone-shaking cough that went on and on and on—reminding Kivik that spectral sorcerers quite aside, these deplorable living conditions were, of all dangers, the most immediate. Already the smoke and damp were rattling in too many chests; more deaths would come of that if this freakish weather did not break.
A small figure made its way toward him across the crowded yard, bobbed an awkward curtsy, and shyly pressed something into his hand.
Gazing down at the child, Kivik experienced a pang of deep distress. A little maid of ten or eleven, she was dirty and emaciated, with fair hair ragged and snarled. He opened his fingers to see what she had given him.
It was exactly what he expected it to be, a wooden charm, crudely carved and brightly colored, strung on a leather cord. He owned dozens, probably hundreds, of these primitive talismans, presented to him by his father’s subjects. Yet he thanked her gravely, as was his custom, and slipped the braided cord over his head, so that the charm hung at chest level over his mail shirt. The little girl rewarded him with a tremulous smile, took two steps backward, then whirled and ran off.
In my charge, all of these people. A fierce protective instinct flared up inside him as he watched her go.
Under my protection.
He slid a sideways glance in his cousin’s direction, and Skerry’s words of the day before echoed in his mind: “It would be a great pity, would it not, if we defeated ourselves with our own superstitious fears…”
Then he thought of those ugly black storm clouds the giants were accumulating higher up the mountain.
He came to a sudden decision. “Summon all my captains together,” he told Skerry. “I’ve a plan to discuss with them.”
“I wish I’d held my wretched tongue, if anything I said gave you this mad idea!” Skerry protested a short while later.
They were seated inside the tattered silk pavilion along with a handful of Kivik’s surviving officers, gathered around a meager fire of sticks and straw. Though the other men muttered and shook their heads, they seemed content to let the Prince’s young kinsman voice their concerns.
“Granted that the danger may be—probably is purely imaginary. But what if it isn’t?” said Skerry. “You are far too important to us, and we dare not risk losing you when one of us could just as easily go in your place. I’m quite willing. I should be the one to go, since it was I who gave you the idea, at least indirectly.”
“I would never,” answered Kivik, flushing to the eyebrows, “order anyone to do anything I feared to do myself. No”—he threw up a hand, demanding silence, when Skerry looked like he might argue further—“my mind is made up, and I certainly don’t require anyone’s permission. Nor have I asked you all here to debate the matter; I simply wish to inform you of my decision. I am determined to spend the night alone inside the central pile of the fortress, and if—when I emerge in the morning alive and unscathed, it’s more than likely the people will take heart, follow my example, and move indoors out of the weather.”
The men were silent, no doubt considering the consequences should he not emerge unscathed, if some ancient evil still dwelling within those walls were to deal him a swift and appalling death.
And for all that he strove to put on a brave face before the others, Kivik could not quite shake off his own dread. As a lad, he had listened far too closely to far too many ghost stories told by his nursemaids and the servants at the Heldenhof. He could remember most of those tales, in every ghastly detail, far too well.
Yet whatever might happen, it had to be better than slowly freezing to death out in the courtyards, knowing that shelter behind stout stone walls was available all along, that only his own cowardice left him wretched and shivering in the cold outside.
“At least let me go with you,” said Skerry. “To share the adventure—if there is an adventure.”
“No. I suppose there must be other perils in old ruined buildings, besides supernatural ones. You are my second-in-command and will have to take charge if anything happens to me.” Nor was Kivik prepared to place his closest friend in unnecessary danger so soon after the last time.
Skerry made a wide gesture, indicating the other officers gathered in the tent, seasoned warriors alclass="underline" men with grey in their hair and beards, yes, grim and battle scarred, but still hardy, still battle ready. “Any one of these men could lead in my place: Regin, Deor, Haestan, Roric. Any one of them more experienced, more worthy than I.”
“More experienced than either of us,” sighed Kivik. “But the people might lose heart without a prince of our house to rally them—and they’ve suffered so much already.”
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the argument. Deor, Haestan, and some of the others were moved to state their opinions, and because he was accustomed to listening (if not to yielding), Kivik let them say whatever they would. Finally, he agreed to allow two guards from among the ordinary fighting men—volunteers, he insisted—to spend the night inside the building with him.
“Though whether I take two men or two hundred,” he grumbled, fingering the wooden charm, “I don’t see what difference it could possibly make if the spirits of any dead witch-lords turn up to challenge me.”
2
The doors of the central keep stood open at the top of a flight of dank stone steps, inviting the Prince and his two young guards, Berin and Nali, to step inside. Kivik paused on the last stair, trying to remember if these massive doors, riddled with wormholes and scarred by wind and rain, had been open or closed the first time he saw them—trying, with no more success, to convince himself that it did not mean anything either way.