In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“Sorrow! Sit!”

Sorrow sat on the man’s left arm, pinning him, and panted, drooling a little, as Alain stepped forward to look the man in the face.

“I know you. You’re called Heric. You were a man-at-arms in Lavas Holding seven or eight years back.”

The pungent smell of urine flooded as the man wet himself.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I pray you, forgive me!”

“For trying to kill me just now?”

Heric kept babbling. “It was my sin! Mine!”

Although it made his head ache a little, Alain remembered. “You were the one who put me in the cage.”

“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”

“What of the reward you received for bringing me in to Geoffrey? Surely he gave you something? How after all that do you come to be hiding in the woods wearing such rags?”

“Don’t let them chop off my hand! I didn’t steal anything!”

“Only my freedom!”

Heric screamed and jerked his leg, but Rage was only licking at the swollen toe. “I had to! You were an outlaw! You were a thief, the worst of all! You took what wasn’t yours to have. So they all said!”

aused, waiting.

“What do you want?” he asked her. “You did no wrong to me, and I none to you, I think.”

“I just wanted to see you in the dusk,” she said, “to see if the shadows made you look like they say that prince did. To see if you might be his by-blow, as some whispered. Shadow-born. Demon’s get.”

“Do you think I am?” She puzzled him. She was cleaner and prettier than she had been before, better cared for in both dress and manner, and while she did not seem precisely friendly, neither did she seem spiteful.

“You’re not what you seem,” she said, turning away. She took three steps before turning back to look at him. “There was nothing in those ruins, not even shadows, because there was no moon to make shades. But if you want to hear the weeping of ghosts, go to Ravnholt Manor.”

Because of the cool weather and the clouds, the abandoned path leading to Ravnholt Manor was not at all overgrown or difficult to pass except for some fallen branches and a thick cushion of leaf litter. He came into the clearing at midday two days after his departure from Lavas. He discovered eight graves dug beside a chapel that was just big enough to seat a half dozen worshipers beside its miniature Hearth. From a distance, the mounded graves still looked fresh, but that was only because so few weeds had grown in the dirt. It wasn’t until he came up close that he saw how the earth had settled and compacted. A deer’s track, its sides crumbling, marked the corner of one mound. A rat sprinted away through the ruined main house, whip tail vanishing into a hole in the rubble. Otherwise it was silent.

No. There. He heard a faint honking and, looking up, saw a straggling “v” of geese headed north, not more than a dozen. He put a hand to his face, feeling tears of joy welling there, and he smiled. Rage and Sorrow snuffled around the fallen outbuildings. There was a weaving shed, a privy, two low storage huts, and a trio of cottages. The byre hadn’t burned, but its thatched roof had fallen in. Alain poked through the rubble of the longhouse with his staff, but he found nothing except broken pots, a pair of half eaten baskets, and the remains of two straw beds dissolving into the ash-covered ground.

A twig snapped.

“What do you want?” asked a voice from the woods, a man hidden among the trees. The voice seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“Just looking for the four women who were taken from this place by bandits.”

He felt a breath, an intake of air, and threw himself flat. An arrow passed over his head and thunked into a charred post behind him. Barking wildly, the hounds charged into the trees. By the time Alain scrambled to his feet, he heard a man shrieking in terror.

“Nay! Nay! Call them off! I beg you! Anything! Anything!”

Alain pushed through the brush to find Sorrow standing on top of a man. His right wrist bled where Rage had bitten him. A bow carved of oak lay on the ground atop a fallen arrow. The man writhed, moaning and whimpering, as Sorrow nosed his throat.

A ragged wool tunic covered his torso. It had been patched with the overlarge stitches that betray an inexperienced hand. His hands were red from cold. He was also barefoot; his feet were chapped, heavily and recently callused, and the big toe of his right foot was swollen, cracked, and oozing pus and blood.

Alain picked up the arrow and broke it over his knee, then unstrung the bow and tied it onto his pack.

“Mercy! Mercy! It was my sin! I am the guilty one!”

“Sorrow! Sit!”