Chapter 59. Two Days North Through Land Someone Else Already Owns

Chapter 59: 59. Two Days North Through Land Someone Else Already Owns

Bryn dropped back from the front of the column a few minutes later and fell in beside Elsbeth.

She had a map tucked into her belt and a worried crease between her brows, and she spoke low enough that only the nearest riders could hear.

"Damn it! There is a problem with the tunnels," she said.

"I assumed there would be," Elsbeth replied. "There’s never an easy way out for us."

"The entrance behind the frozen waterfall is only a side branch... It collapsed years ago, during a bad winter."

"What an idiot I am! I should have remembered that single detail!" She grimaced. "The real mouth of the Wolfsbane Tunnels is the great gate, two days’ ride north, at the bottom of the plateau, near the frozen river."

"To reach it we must go through territory the Chain already holds."

Velora, riding at the head of the column, didn’t turn her head. "How much territory are we talking about here?"

"A great amount of deal."

"Wonderful," Velora said, in a voice like a closing door.

She spent the next hour reorganizing the formation. The riders closed up into a tight double file, with Sylvara and Millie in the center, and the scouts fanned out ahead and behind.

We would avoid the main roads and keep to the folds of the hills, riding in silence.

When she was satisfied, she turned in her saddle, found me with her golden eyes, and said, "Debtor... Keep your horse quiet."

"She’s not mine... She just lives near me."

"Keep her quiet anyway."

I did my best. I really do.

But about an hour later, when the mare tried to take a bite out of a passing branch and nearly dumped me into a thornbush, I heard a very faint noise from the rider behind me that sounded suspiciously like a stifled laugh.

The forest we passed through that afternoon had been burned.

I don’t mean it had been hit by a wildfire. But from what I looked at it... the trunks were scorched black from the ground up to about head height and no higher, in neat, regular lines, like someone had gone from tree to tree with a torch and a ruler.

The snow around them was gray with ash.

Nothing moved. And nothing sang.

The only sound was the creak of saddle leather and the soft crunch of hooves on the frozen ash.

And then we came to the village.

It sat in a hollow between two ridges, a cluster of timber houses with steep roofs that must have been very pretty once.

Now half of them had collapsed. A fence lay flat in the snow.

A cart stood tipped on its side in the middle of the road with one wheel still slowly turning in the wind.

I walked my horse past an open door and saw a table inside with bowls still set out for supper, and the food long since frozen into gray lumps.

There were no bodies. And that was the thing that got to me.

I’d braced for corpses, for blood and smoke and the kind of horror I’d seen in movies.

But there was only silence, and a set of long, deep furrows in the snow where something heavy had been dragged, and in the frozen mud beside the gate, the faint, regular marks of chains.

"They did not... kill them," Eira said quietly.

She had ridden up beside me without my noticing, her brown braid hanging over one shoulder, and she was staring at the empty houses with her hands tight on the reins. "They took them."

"That’s even worse," I said.

"Yes."

"Because it means they’re still alive."

"Yes." She swallowed. "And they are somewhere... waiting."

Sigrun, a few paces behind her, swore under her breath in a long, ugly string of Wolfkin curses, and I didn’t need a translator to know that she meant every word.

Bryn dismounted at the broken gatepost and stood there for a moment with her hand on the charred wood. Then she bowed her head, just slightly, the way you’d nod to a friend you’d never see again, and climbed back into her saddle.

But then... There was one survivor.

We found her by accident when one of the Nightclaw scouts noticed a thread of smoke curling from a cellar door at the back of a half-collapsed farmhouse.

An old woman climbed out when Bryn called her name, blinking in the light, wrapped in three moth-eaten blankets and carrying a kitchen knife that was too big for her hand.

She had gray fur on her ears and a face like a folded paper map.

Her name was Marta. She told us, in a dry, cracked voice, that the Chain had come at night, when the village was asleep.

They had taken the young and the strong, loading them into barred wagons, and left the old and the weak behind.

She had hidden in the cellar and listened to the screaming for three hours.

Then she looked up at Bryn, and her cloudy eyes sharpened.

"They say there is a human," she said. "A human who reaches into the dark and brings our own back..."

"Is it true?"

Bryn didn’t answer. Her eyes moved, very slightly, in my direction.

Oh no... I know what that old lady’s talking about. It’s fucking me, isn’t it...?

I wanted to disappear into my saddle. But then it’s too late because Marta turned her head and looked at me for a long, steady moment, and I felt every one of my scrapes and bruises, and every dumb joke I had ever made.

"Hm," she said at last. "I do not trust lowly humans."

And here we go again with the racism.

"Eh. That’s fair," I said.

"But I will trust whoever saves my grandchildren..." She pulled her blankets tighter. "A human like you... surrounded by the Nightclaws will do... I suppose."

I just sighed and felt that I need get used to this hate from beastwomen. Who am I even to blame to from the causes of humanity.

After that... She refused to come with us. She said she’d lived in that house for sixty years, and she would die in it if she had to, but she wasn’t going to be dragged out of it by a bunch of children with swords.

Even though I said lots of things that could move her heart and even open her mind... I still couldn’t change her mind.

And so... I emptied my pack and left her half my food, and she took it without a word of thanks, and I thought that was the highest compliment she could have given me.

For a racist towards human, that is.

I didn’t make a single joke that whole afternoon. When I glanced up, I caught Velora watching me from her black stallion, with an expression I couldn’t read, and I looked away first.

I don’t know why, but... my body shivered just by looking at her watching me like that. Maybe it’s already in her to have that fierce looking eyes that could partake my body parts at any time.

That night we camped in an abandoned hunter’s lodge at the edge of a pine wood, a low, sagging cabin with a hole in the roof and a stone hearth that mostly worked.

Sylvara spent an hour renewing the veil around Millie, her violet threads shimmering in the dark.

Bonette kept watch at the door with a pair of silver knives on her knees. Elsbeth sat alone by the window with Bryn, the two of them talking in low voices.

And I’m here... enjoying myself. Not masturbating, but thinking of the upcoming plan.

And after dinner... that shivering feeling came at me again just because Velora came and found me.

"Come," she said. "You will not die of poor technique on my watch."

"Another training we go, I guess."