The Skeleth (23 page)

H
ow long has she been up here?”

The voice came from above, lonely in the dead night sky. Katherine looked up to see a guardsman ascending to take his place atop the small turret that projected from the castle's keep.

“She was there when I took my watch at sunset.” The guard on duty in the turret yawned, then bent to collect his things.

The first guard, a young, rangy sort, leaned out to look down at Katherine, who sat huddled in a corner behind the battlements. “That's the marshal's daughter, isn't it? Doesn't she know she can sleep in the hall?”

“I don't care where she sleeps.” The other guard slung his crossbow on his back. “What news of Harry?”

“No news.” The young guard poured oil into the basin of the watchlight. “If he dies, do you think there will be war?”

“I doubt it,” said the other guard. “Wolland's twice our
size, at least, to say nothing of Tand and Overstoke. We'd be crushed.”

“What about the king, though? Surely, for the death of a lord's only son and heir—”

“Pfah. The king. Weak as a kitten.”

“The way I hear it, the Earl of Quentara doesn't like Wolland much,” said the young guard. “They've been enemies since who knows when. This could be his chance.”

“Let's hope for our own sakes he doesn't take it.” The other guard turned to climb down. “Good night.”

“Good night.” The young guard unbuckled his sword and set it down. He lifted a drinking horn and took a gulp while waving to the distant figures of the guards who walked the tops of the outer walls.

Katherine shut her eyes for a while, then opened them, staring up. The stars wheeled overhead—silent, their patterns suggestive of everything, and then nothing.

The watches of the evening passed. Every so often, the young guardsman would poke his head over the side of the tower and glance down at Katherine. The moonlight caught his face from time to time and seemed to show him watching her more than anything else he had been charged with protecting.

“Are you hungry?” His voice came after such long silence that it made Katherine jump. She looked up at him.

“You must be hungry,” he said. “Or thirsty. You've been up here all night.”

“I'm not hungry.”

The guard rummaged through something on the turret and
spoke with his mouth full. “Well, let me know if you change your mind, and I'll toss something down to you.”

Constellations rose; others set. The young guard's helmeted head appeared again. “What are you asking the sky?”

Katherine ran a hand down her cheek, though she had done with crying long before. “I'm asking it please, please no. Please not him, please not now.”

The guard glanced up, then down again. “Worth asking, I suppose.”

He left her to her silence, watching around into the dark distance and signaling his fellow guards with an all-clear from time to time. His yawns came louder after a while—closer and closer together—then Katherine heard the sound of the trapdoor being raised on the roof of the keep below.

“About time, Ulf.” The young guard bent to pick up his things. “I nearly fell asleep. Any news?”

A narrow, balding head stuck up from below. “Is the old marshal's daughter up here?” A third guard climbed up onto the roof of the keep, wrapped in a heavy cloak.

The young guard pointed. “She's over in the corner. Why? What's the trouble?”

Katherine stood up, slow and stiff and in a clutch of fear.

Ulf reached for the ladder to the turret. “Harry's awake—he's past the worst. They say that he'll live, more than likely.”

Katherine let out a cry. She put her hands to her face, then hugged herself.

Ulf turned to look from halfway up the ladder. “Oh, I see her now.” He took the young guard's offered hand. “Anyway, I
was down in the barracks when the news came in—Harry's awake, and he's calling out for Katherine—Katherine Marshal, over and over again.”

Katherine leapt up and raced for the trapdoor down into the keep.

“I wouldn't bother.” Ulf shook his head at her. “Not a chance my lady Isabeau will let you in there.”

Katherine threw back the door. She cast a last glance up at the silent sky and at the guards changing places on the turret above. Ulf looked down at her, shaking his head, while the young guard stared at the stars with a more thoughtful look on his face than any she might have guessed he could wear.

“I'll tell you this.” Ulf's voice faded from Katherine's hearing as she hurried down the stairs. “Whatever happens, I feel sorry for that girl.”

T
his place.” Edmund looked about him, shivering. “Horrible.”

They had marched three rises out, across the old stone bridge over the Tamber and up onto the moors. Behind them stood the posts of the bridge, the span across the water and the thatched roofs of home. Before them stretched a land both wild and dead, a heartless claim on the horizon, gray beneath a pall of black.

“It doesn't get any prettier, I'm afraid.” Ellí stopped at the crest of the rise. She knelt to search through the moorspike grass, and pulled out what looked to be a beaded, woven bag concealed amongst the bladed leaves.

Edmund glanced behind him, gazing down at the mill and the hall, the homes and gardens huddled beneath the distant Girth. Against foreground of moor and backdrop of mountain, his village looked terribly lonely and small. “Why did you bring me out here, and why did we have to wait for night?”

“Think about it, Edmund,” said Ellí. “Why does the land look this way?”

The words of the book came back to Edmund.
The land where the Skeleth walk is now waste. It is ruin, a land given up to death, a land under the sway of That Which Waits Within the Mountain.

He felt the hairs stand up on the backs of his arms. “It's here. This was Childeric's kingdom.”

“The fairest of the lands between water and wood,” said Ellí. “And now look at it.”

Edmund set his sack on the road. “How far are we going?”

“It's ten miles, give or take.” Ellí dumped out a loaf of hard old bread from her bag, then packed in a bundle of her clothes, along with an iron lantern and a flask of oil. “The sooner we start, the sooner we'll be there.” She hauled up her bag and turned east.

“Wait.” Edmund took Ellí by the sleeve. “If someone did something bad, but did it in a moment of weakness and now regrets it, how should that person be judged?”

Ellí turned to look at him. “There is no reason to hide it, Edmund.” The moonlight at her back left her face a shadowed blank, a blank on which his fears drew a dozen awful visions. “I know what you did.”

Edmund's hands trembled, so badly that he had trouble getting a grip on the drawstring of his sack. “If he was really, truly sorry, does that make what he did less wrong?”

“You are asking where good and evil truly dwell,” said Ellí. “Are they in what you mean to do, or only in your actions?”

“I didn't want to hurt him.” Edmund hugged himself. “I just didn't want him to win.”

“It's a harder question for us wizards than it is for other folk.” Ellí started eastward down the road. “What we wish for and what actually happens are often much closer together.”

Not a tree broke the horizon, nor a cloud to dim the stars. A hard wind rippled the heath, working its way under Edmund's shirt no matter how he turned himself. He paused at a ridgetop, then set down his sack to adjust its contents, hoping to find some way for them to lie that would stop their points and edges jabbing at his back.

Ellí waited for him. “Have you had a chance to study the spell?”

“Yes.” Edmund did not want to add that he barely understood what he had read. “I'm sure there's something missing from it, though. That riddle I found still bothers me. When I look away from it and think about something else, an answer almost comes.”

“I hope you figure it out soon,” said Ellí.

“Me?” said Edmund. “But you're my teacher.”

Ellí shook her head—the twining locks of her hair bounced outward and back. “Edmund, I don't know how to do spells like that.”

Edmund stared at her.

“I could not possibly hope to break a spell cast by Vithric and the Nethergrim itself, the way you did up in the mountains,” said Ellí. “I told you that I would try to teach you everything I know, but you must understand that if anyone can defeat the Skeleth, it's you.”

The tingle that ran up Edmund's arms came from many sources at once—cold and fear, excitement and pride, and
something else, something that happened when Ellí's forearm brushed against his.

A half smile turned Ellí's lips. “I won't be your teacher for long.”

They ascended the shoulder of a hill that had somehow passed down as legend in the village, though no one Edmund knew had ever seen it. Beyond it, so said everyone, the land forgave no trespass. Humps of rock stuck out on the ridges ahead, bare and formless, raised wounds on battered earth.

“I don't know how scared I'm supposed to feel out here.” Edmund shifted his belt, so that the fighting dagger he had stolen from his brother rode close to hand. “I can't see anything dangerous, but I know I'm in danger. It's like when I was up in the Girth—I know I don't belong here, somehow.”

“You're right,” said Ellí. “You don't. Come on, we're more than halfway there.”

“Halfway to where?” Edmund hurried after her. “You came with Lord Wolland over these moors, on a stretch of road that no one has walked in the memory of the oldest folk alive. You took this way when you could easily have crossed the river down in Rushmeet and come up the Kingsway, like everyone always does. Why?”

Ellí heaved a long breath. “I am not like you, Edmund. All I ever wanted was a comfortable room at court and enough coin to pay for food and parchment. I came with Wolland because that was what I was told to do, and I never had the courage to ask him about his plans.”

The West Road ran on and on, straight as a lance into
nothing. Save for the stars, there was no telling land from sky at the horizon.

Edmund waited on Ellí, and waited. “Will you tell me where we're going, or at least what we're hoping to find when we get there?”

Ellí spent a long time thinking over her reply. “Yes. I'm sorry, I've gotten too well used to keeping secrets. I think I've figured out where the Skeleth were first brought into the world. I must have walked right past it on the way here without understanding what it was. If we go there, we might learn more about how they were summoned up, and that might give us the key to how to put them down again.”

Edmund was nearly sure he saw something move, something flitting between the bald humps of rock ahead. He tensed, watching for movement left and right as he ascended the rise.

Ellí gripped his hand in hers, then let go. “I'm sorry. I'm getting scared.”

Edmund shrugged and turned to lead them onward—but then Ellí took his hand again and held it firm.

“I don't quite know how to say this, but I feel much braver when I'm with you.” Ellí matched Edmund's pace, walking close at his side.

Edmund looked around him, at the moorspike crowding up beside the road, at the flat old horizon and the gibbous moon. He did not feel brave at all, just then, though somehow he could not stop trying to pretend, if only for Ellí's sake.

The land around them seemed to widen ever more as they walked on, stretching back to the horizons all around as
though it would fold itself away into an endless void. Edmund found himself clinging as tightly to Ellí as she did to him, holding on to her hand as though letting go would mean wandering forever, lost in the dark.

When he noticed it, the first thing he thought was that he must have lost track of time. “Do you see that glow up ahead?” He looked around to get his bearings and make sure he was still going eastward. “That can't be sunrise yet.”

Ellí seemed to rouse herself from some inward sorrow. “You are not the only one who has done things he regrets.”

“Those are voices!” Edmund strained to listen to the murmur, then the distant laughter, then the metallic clatter and bang. “Ellí, wait, don't you hear that?”

“There are some things I should have told you before we left.” Ellí kept a few feet ahead of him. “I feared that you would take them wrong, though, and I had to make sure you would come with me.”

Edmund hurried after her, following her up between the humps of rock to a broken ridge. “What things?”

They crested the rise together.

“Edmund, I am sorry.” Ellí tried to take his hand again. “I want to make amends. I do.”

A sick, hot feeling took Edmund, pricking up from his fingertips. “No. Oh, no.”