The Silver Tower

Part V

Saran pressed her hands over her eyes and staggered backwards. There was too much blood, too much noise and screaming in her head. Something was not right. Something was wrong.

She was on all fours, staring through the floorboards of the platform at the people below: they shook their fists and raved at her, but she heard none of their words. Her ears were buzzing with a deafening silence. She forced herself to look at Marcel’s headless body, and then back at Pieter who was curiously motionless. The boy stood still, gripping the rail behind him, staring at the scene of the decapitation in a sort of silent fascination.

Something was not right.

She reached out with her mind--

--and there it was.

Argus’ mind. She could sense Argus’ mind. Oh, merciful Father! She cried out aloud, then fumbled frantically to get a hold on it. But she couldn’t.

It was right there, brushing at the fingertips of her mind, but she couldn’t manage to seize it!

Something was not right.

An entire wall of the city square collapsed in a cloud of smoke and light and debris. The noise of the explosion rushed over the gathered crowds in a titanic wave.

A sulphur bomb. They only came from the far north. Renoult had leapt to his feet. “Bijaaern! He wouldn’t dare--”

“The northern war-lord,” breathed Aurelius.

Sure enough, the men that came flooding in through every available entrance were pale-bearded, stocky northerners. Their armour was strange: burnished bronze shoulder guards sat squarely over wide breastplates made of a blue-coloured hide and woven with exotic patterns. Instead of breeches they wore thick flaps of material around their waists, and covered their calves with more bronze. Domed metal hats of different degrees of elaborateness protected their heads. Their weapons were maces, teethed knives, spiked clubs--brutal melee implements designed to maim and destroy.

“But the peace treaty,” Saran heard King Gareth cry. “They were almost defeated. We had them under control!”

“Another foolish, last-ditch attempt,” grimaced Renoult, drawing his sword.

The citizens of Teulebaronis were fleeing, crushed by the falling stones and the heat of the explosion, and driven away by the oncoming wave of Bijaaern’s warriors. They brandished their maces and shouted, “Glory to the North!” in thickly accented voices, and they leapt in great bounds towards the platform, knocking soldiers and civilians out of their path.

Renoult was screaming orders. “Get the people out of the square! Engage those in the front line! Send someone to fetch the army!” He ran down the stairs. “Good Lord, where are the archers?”

The city square resounded with the clash of weapons. Aurelius had also leapt to his feet and was determinedly directing magic attacks at specific enemies. There was a frown of deep concentration on his face.

Saran could barely comprehend what was happening. Just as Marcel had been executed, just as she was about to die--Bijaaern had attacked the city. Oh, if only he had come a minute earlier!

The King stood from his throne and the four soldiers on the platform moved into formation around him, swords and shields raised at the ready. They looked awfully defenceless; a handful of men, a tiny safeguard in the midst of a battlefield.

They would come for him soon. It was easy to see that this was why they had chosen here and now to attack. They were going for the King.

Within minutes, Bijaaern’s warriors had broken through the ground defences and were climbing the stairs, their bronze-soled shoes making a huge clatter on the wooden steps. Renoult chased them, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop them, only to slice the neck of the hindmost warrior.

“Glory to the North!” the warriors hollered as they spilled onto the platform, a small tide of blue and bronze and pale faces. Four of them attacked the four soldiers forming King Gareth’s guard, advancing with sturdy, stomping steps and swiping in huge arcing blows. A mace sank heavily into one soldier: he screamed, a grating, warbling howl, and fell.

The platform was already spattered with blood. Saran glanced around wildly. She couldn’t see Argus nor his mighty blade. She was defenceless, and the last of the northern warriors, a snivelly man with not enough backbone to join the real fight, was circling her.

“Get away from me,“ she hissed, and dived behind the wooden block in one swift jump. The rough floor skinned her knees, and she bit her lower lip hard to counter the pain.

The snivelly warrior lifted his upper lip in a semblance of a smile. He lifted his jagged knife before him, and ran at her.

Saran put the soles of both feet against the side of the wooden block and kicked out with all her might. The heavy block slid itself over the smooth platform and barrelled into the man’s stocky legs. He came down with a crashing thud. She raced over and seized his knife, and examined him. He was spitting and gibbering something incomprehensible. She pushed the wooden block over him so that he was pinned down, and straightened up.

King Gareth’s defences were completely obliterated. Two of his soldiers were felled, bearing frightening wounds. The other two had been thrown off the platform. But they had taken a large number of Bijaaern’s warriors with them, too. There were only three of the northern men left, and Renoult had engaged them all in a very uneven fight. Renoult was clearly the most skilled, but the warriors managed to overpower him by brute force, and as the head of a spiked club came hurtling at him, he had no choice but to throw himself off the platform.

Just as he did so, there were slow, threatening footfalls on the staircase. Saran watched with a feeling of dread as a burnished bronze helmet ascended into view. The helmet was adorned with two enormous, curved horns of pure ivory that looked like they could gouge the eyes out of a dragon. The face that sat below the rim of the helmet was no less vicious in appearance. Bijaaern, the war-lord who had stirred up troops in the northernmost parts of the land, bore countless scars on his weather-worn face. Frostbite had taken most of his right ear: it was now little more than a blackened stump.

Bronze armour clattering, Bijaaern climbed onto the platform and flicked two thick fingers at his warriors. “Dispose of the magician.”

Aurelius’ blue eyes flared in defiance. He brought both hands together onto his staff, and raised it aloft, but before he could speak a single word, one of the warriors sent a blunted club thudding into the side of his head. He folded like a scrap of paper and slid over the edge of the platform.

The King didn’t take his eyes off the war-lord. “Bijaaern.” Gareth was now backed against the rails, vulnerable, defenceless. His face was a steady mask.

Bijaaern laughed heartily as he strode forward. Saran, unseen and unimportant in the eyes of the northerners, crouched at the side of the platform and watched him with disgust. He was a vile man, she thought. Vile from the top of his slab-jowled head to the soles of his humongous feet. And then she flinched: that was how the civilians saw her. Vile. They hated her with the same passionate fury. Could she really be like this man?

The northern war-lord fingered his belt languidly. After exaggerated contemplation he drew out a knife about ten inches long. It was not a jagged knife, nor was it embellished. It was designed simply to kill in a single strike.

Saran stared at the unmoving face of the King. No, she thought, rising to her feet. He was a man--a young man named Gareth who had not even reached forty, with a wife and children, and a dream to build a prosperous, peaceful land. She clenched her jaw and threw the dagger of her mind towards Bijaaern.

She was deflected. The bronze of the war-lord’s helmet was not as effective a shield as silver, but it still barred most of her power from entering his mind. What she could sense of the war-lord’s thoughts was a senseless, red-hot, angry buzzing that she had little power over.

“Gareth,” she breathed softly, unable to tear her eyes from her King’s face, and she knew that she did not want him to die; she yearned for him not to die. She wanted to weep at the unfairness of it all.

Bijaaern toyed with the knife for a few seconds. Then he spoke: “Let’s not waste time on theatrics, shall we?”

He drew his arm back to throw. In that moment, Gareth’s mask slipped for a second and pure terror erupted over his face.

And in that same moment, a dark, slim figure appeared at Saran‘s side. “I take it you’re not going to be saving the King, then.”

It was Marcel.

Marcel was alive.

Saran looked at him. And she staggered, overcome by shock, blinded by a sensation of unreality.

She looked at where his severed body had lain, but it was gone. There was no blood on the wooden block; there never had been.

Saran looked at Marcel.

“No,” she said faintly.

Bijaaern thrust his ugly arm forth, and released his grip on the knife, and then Marcel moved, faster than Saran had ever seen any man move. He was gone so quickly from her side it was as though he had never been there; running across the platform like lightning embodied, into a soaring leap, flinging himself between the war-lord and the King. The world slowed all around them as Marcel rose into the air.

It was desperate reflex that seized Saran’s mind and crushed every last drop of her power out of it, directing it all towards Bijaaern and his helmeted head. The intense blast of Coercion pierced through the shield of bronze and seared into the raging redness of the war-lord’s mind, and so in the final moments his resolve wavered and his throw faltered just the slightest fraction.

Saran saw a striking contrast between the sudden terror in Gareth’s eyes, and the steely calmness in Marcel’s as he dived in front of the King.

The knife whistled through the air, and found its mark.

Marcel hit the ground, blood pouring from a chest wound. Bijaaern screamed in outrage. Gareth, momentarily stunned, shook himself and rushed to his saviour’s side. Renoult, who had already stormed back up the stairs, launched himself at Bijaaern from behind and threw him to the ground. He plunged his sword deep into the war-lord’s body.

Saran dropped to her knees, unable to feel any part of her body, unable even to comprehend her own thoughts. Had she done anything, in those final moments? Had she penetrated Bijaaern’s mind and slowed his hand at all? Had she made any difference?

Blackness swam on the edges of her vision, threatening to engulf her. In the last few seconds of her consciousness, she glimpsed Marcel, supine, surrounded by the King and Renoult and other gathering soldiers. His eyes were closed, and Bijaaern’s knife was sunk to the hilt in his upper chest. He had saved the King’s life.

™˜

“I’ll take them both to the castle infirmary, if it please you, Sir.”

A deadened world swam in front of Saran’s eyes. Through blurred grey lenses she saw, teetering before her, a city square strewn with fallen bodies; the blood-spattered wood of the platform; the smoking debris of the collapsed wall; a storm of arrows sticking out of the ground like a multitude of surrender flags.

The person speaking was Pieter. They had put Marcel and Saran over the back of a stocky pack-horse and now the boy was leading them out of the city square. Saran swayed in her seat, struggling to support both her weight and Marcel’s. The knife had been pulled out of his chest and replaced with a makeshift bandage and dressing.

“It missed his heart by four inches,” said Pieter when he saw that Saran was dozy but awake.

Saran found it strangely difficult to get her head around his words. She asked vaguely, “Did we save the King’s life?”

Pieter‘s reply was even softer. “I think so.”

“What happens to us now?”

“I don’t know.” But Pieter’s tone of voice implied otherwise.

Saran smiled despite everything, and tightened her grip on Marcel’s limp form. “How did he do it? I saw his head clean cut off his body. How did he come back?”

“I don’t know,” said Pieter evasively, but again his tone told Saran that he knew just about everything, and he knew it better than anyone else.

They turned a corner onto a wide cobbled street, and Saran blinked uncertainly. “Pieter…are you sure this is the way to the castle?”

“No.” Pieter’s grip on the horse’s reins tightened until his knuckles turned bone-white.

Suddenly Saran was very awake. She stiffened in the saddle. “Where are you taking us? What about Marcel? He’s still bleeding profusely. We should get him to the infirmary--”

“If I take you to the infirmary,” said Pieter in a strained voice, “they will fix you both up till you’re good as new, and then they will take you back to the city square and they will decapitate you. If you want him to live more than a week, then we must leave Teulebaronis at once.”

Saran stared at him sharply, too surprised to speak. Was he truly going to help them escape? Suddenly paranoid, she glanced behind to see if any soldiers were trailing them, but they were all too preoccupied with the aftermath of Bijaaern’s surprise attack to notice a common boy leading two wounded persons on an unspectacular pack-horse.

Pieter set an urgent pace and they made it to the East Gate within a quarter of an hour. There was no damage to the massive dark-iron doors, so the northern warriors must have entered the city by trickery and not by force. Both doors were flung open, and a few soldiers were picking their way over the bodies of their fellows.

Trying to look nonchalant, Pieter walked straight towards the gates.

A burly soldier slid in his way. “Where are you off to, lad?” Saran hastily tried to make herself appear invalid and inconspicuous.

“Nowhere,” grunted Pieter, strengthening his commoner’s accent and removing any trace of nobility that he had picked up during his days in the castle. “Jus’ taking the wounded to a healer.”

“Best healers are in the city,” said the soldier. His beetled brows rose suspiciously. “Why’d you want to go outside for? There’s only slums out there.”

“The castle infirmary’s bound to be overflowing,” shrugged Pieter. “I know of a doctor-lady what lives in a little shack just outside the walls. Thought my friends would have more chance of getting aid this way.”

“Well, I think you should turn your little pack-horse right round and go back the way you came, laddy,” sneered the soldier. “Right smart-alec you think you are; too good for the castle healers are you? Well, why don’t you--” He cut himself off sharply and stared at Marcel with bulging eyes.

Pieter backed away a step. The horse almost tripped over its own legs.

“That’s--” The soldier gaped, looking from Marcel and Saran, to Pieter, and back at the two innocent wounded who were perhaps not so innocent after all. “Is that…Are they--”

“--with me,” finished a deep voice. Renoult stepped around the pack-horse, into view. He put a hand on the horse’s bridle and nodded sternly at Pieter. There was no telling what the commander was thinking.

“Oh,” said the soldier, dazzled.

“They’re with me,” repeated Renoult, a little slower this time. “I advise you to do exactly as the boy says.”

“Oh! Of course, your honour--I mean, good sir…ah, yes, Renoult--King’s man.” Bowing profusely, the soldier retreated to the side of the gates and beckoned them through.

Pieter turned a wary eye towards Renoult, but said nothing. He took up the reins again and, stiffening his back, strode out of Teulebaronis, leading Saran and Marcel on the pack-horse. Renoult didn’t follow.

Saran looked back over her shoulder, at the tall, broad-shouldered commander who had stood faithfully by the King’s side his entire life. She knew that she respected him immensely, even throughout all those years of her treachery. And she thought now that perhaps they could have been friends, under different circumstances. Good friends.

But he was letting them go, and that was a wonder in itself. I advise you to do exactly as the boy says, he’d told the guard.

Renoult watched them until they were far off, winding down the road between the slums, until the corrugated, rusty buildings snatched him from their view. Saran turned back to face Marcel again, holding his wounded body to her chest, wondering where exactly Pieter was leading them and what possible future there could be in fleeing.

Ah, well. Anything had to be better than going back to face Argus’ blade.

™˜

They walked for the most part of the morning, until they were sure that they had left the city of Teulebaronis far behind. Only then did Pieter let them stop under the wide branches of an oak tree and redress Marcel’s wound. They laid him down on the soft, shady grass and took out fresh bandages that Pieter had resourcefully stolen from the army healer’s belt-pack.

Marcel flinched and cursed as Saran peeled off the old dressing and gently pressed a new pad over the wound. It was healing well already: the blood was thickening and stoppering the hole.

“I heard the army healer say that the blade pierced only flesh and sinew, and none of the vitals,” Pieter told them.

Marcel groaned and squeezed his eyes shut in pain. “I consider my shoulder quite vital, thank you.”

“Four inches from his heart,” murmured Saran. “Four inches from a heart that should not even have been beating in the first place.” She looped the last bandage around his shoulder and tightened it just so that it would hold, but not too painfully. She sat back on her heels and regarded Marcel. “What happened, Marcel? I felt something when I saw you die--I felt that something wasn’t right, that there was a strange weight lifting off me; and then I could sense Argus’ mind--I could feel it, right there, but I couldn’t touch it or Coerce him…”

Marcel and Pieter looked at each other.

“You were part of it,” she said to Pieter, half-accusingly. “I know you know something.”

Marcel put a hand over his wounded shoulder and, wincing, pushed himself upright into a sitting position. The effort made beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. He pressed the back of his hand to his brow to blot them away. “I cast an Illusion,” he said bluntly. “Over you, over the King, over every last person standing in that square. I made you see that Argus had cut off my head when in fact I had slipped out from under him and knocked him out with the handle of his own blade. That was why you could sense his mind but couldn‘t control it--Argus was unconscious.”

Saran became still in thought. The blade that she had seen slicing into Marcel‘s neck--that had not been real. It had never happened. Marcel had never died. It was all an elaborate, large-scale Illusion. “But how could such an Illusion work? Pieter was less than ten metres away.”

“The weight you felt lifting off you was Pieter withdrawing his powers,” said Marcel, meeting Pieter’s eyes with a small smile. “What even Aurelius doesn’t know is that in those months of Pieter’s disappearance, he taught himself a very useful skill.”

“I can shut off my abilities when I don’t want them,” the young boy explained. “Aurelius never imagined that such a thing could be possible. He saw me as simply a human vacuum and nothing more. That’s how I managed to elude him for so long. I cut my hair off, I got an artist to apply a prosthetic nose to my face, and I hid my Trueseeing powers so that even when his magicians started testing every second boy in the city for abilities, to them I was just an ordinary street rat.”

Saran tried to make sense of this. “Wait--Pieter, you withdrew your powers so that Marcel could cast an Illusion? But why would you want to help Marcel?”

Pieter shot her a frighteningly intense stare. “Why am I helping you now?”

Saran returned his gaze. “I don’t know,” she challenged him. “Why are you?”

Pieter seemed to lose his nerve suddenly, and fumbled for the used bandages. He began packing their things away. “Because I don’t think you two deserve to die. Not anymore. Not as the people you are today. Perhaps the Saran and Marcel of the past deserved to have their heads cut off, but not the Saran and Marcel I see sitting in front of me now. Saran--what you said was right. At least, I think so, if no one else does. You lost your old self when you lost your memory. And Marcel, being on the run for six months and fighting a death that lives inside your head, a death more frightening than anything else--a man cannot survive such an experience unchanged. I saw that change in you even before you saved King Gareth’s life, but your act of heroism today proves that.”

A tiny spark of hope ignited within Saran. “Do you think that there are others who share your views?”

Pieter looked uncomfortable. “If you want me to be honest with you--no.”

“If we go back to the city, they will kill us still,” said Marcel. “Even Renoult and the King will not hesitate to put our heads back on the chopping block. The people will cheer for it. They cannot forget what we have done. We killed people, Saran.” His voice dropped into a black whisper, like the voice of the Reaper. “We sent innocent men and women to their deaths. We tricked the King. We slaughtered dozens of the citizens. No matter what you said in your marvellous speech, we were evil. And people don’t easily forget the ways they were wronged.”

His words were like hundreds of needles prickling over Saran’s skin. Her mind felt numbed by the gravity of what he was saying. “What can we do, then?” she asked blankly. “We can do nothing to redeem ourselves.”

“You must flee,” said Pieter, standing up and tying the bag of bandages onto the horse’s saddle. He spoke as casually as if they were chatting about eating lunch. “I will take you to the very eastern edge of the land, and you will leave the kingdom of Gareth, and you will never return.”

Even Marcel was utterly silent at these words.

At long last, Saran replied. Her voice was fainter than the rustle of leaves. “You want us to go…beyond.”

“Don’t you see? I don’t want you to do anything. You don’t have any other choice! Do you want to go back there and die?”

Marcel stared blankly ahead. “No.”

“Good. Then we keep moving as fast as your injury lets us. There is a village not far from here, called Luxem, where we can get food and supplies to last us all the way. It will be at least a two-week journey, perhaps three, for you two, and a five-week journey for me to return to the city.”

Saran nodded mutely. She hadn’t expected Pieter to come with them anyway. It would be insane for him to give up his life in Teulebaronis. Only the most desperate of fugitives disappeared beyond the edge of the kingdom. It was Unknown, and it is what they do not know that frightens men most of all.

™˜

Renoult watched until they disappeared behind the rows of corrugated iron hovels: a small, skinny lad leading the very two people that he had pursued tirelessly for so long. He could scarcely comprehend what he had done. It hadn’t felt like right thing. He had simply done it.

Suddenly his armour felt impossibly burdensome. He heaved himself around, nodded at the madly grinning soldier by the gate, and plodded back through the endless city streets towards the Castle. It was a brilliant morning, and the warmth and sunshine seemed to mock the devastation that lay at his feet.

He went first to the infirmary and visited Aurelius, who was still unconscious from the violent blow to his head. The magician’s breathing was steady, but his skin had a pale sheen to it. When Renoult questioned an on-duty nurse, she could only tell him that she was unsure whether he would wake up.

They burned the bodies of Bijaaern and his warriors in the afternoon, right in the city square next to the platform where the execution of Saran and Marcel had almost been held at daybreak. The stench was horrific and the few handfuls of civilians that had gathered to watch the ceremony quickly dispersed to escape the gaseous, odorous black smoke that streamed from the corpses.

The fallen soldiers of the kingdom would be given a formal burial ceremony the following day in the Garden of Heroes not far from the Castle. At the moment, workers were slaving away to recover all the bodies of the King’s men and carry them in wagons up to the top of the city.

In the evening the King sent for Renoult. The servants admitted him not into the King’s usual chamber but granted him access into his private sitting-room: a moderate-sized, well-furnished room with a fireplace, bookshelves, curved couches for lounging, a chess board and several low oak tables. At the King’s request, a servant drew the curtains tightly shut and lit candles before leaving Gareth alone with his most trusted confidante.

The two men sank heavily onto separate couches and sighed. The King put his face into his hands.

“I hope you are not too shaken by today’s ordeal, my lord,” said Renoult.

Gareth rubbed his palms coarsely over his cheekbones and straightened up. “No, no. I must be glad--Bijaaern and the threat from the north has been removed.” He took a flask of liqueur from the table beside his couch and poured a little into two sturdy round glasses.

Renoult took a measured swig. “Yes. The attack was well-controlled by our soldiers. The archers managed to turn the advantage to our side.”

“Good, yes.” Gareth stared at the dancing flames, silent for a very long time. And Renoult did the same; there was not much to be said.

Eventually, the King spoke. “Concerning the matter of Marcel and Saran, and their impending execution--it is necessary and crucial that search parties be sent out at once with the order to kill.”

“Yes,” agreed Renoult vaguely. Could the King possibly know of how he had let them go? “It is critical that we do not waste any time in this matter. Your kingdom lies once again in danger--”

Gareth held up a weary hand. “Yes, yes, I know. My apologies, dear friend, but I simply tire of being warned again and again of the perils into which I am constantly plunging this land.”

Renoult remained silent.

“Oh, Renoult, do not take offence. I did not mean to slight you.” For the first time in days, the King smiled. “Listen, friend, I will put you in charge of the search. I want you to send out soldiers and command them as they scour the land for any sign of Marcel and Saran. I will suspend all your other duties for the time being--at least until those two murderers and traitors are caught.”

Renoult cleared his throat. “With all due respect, my good King, I would like to ask this time that you exempt me from this responsibility. I would pray call on your good favour and request that I have a few weeks away from service, simply to--to rest. I have an excellent second-in-command who would gladly take up control of the search parties and work loyally under you. I would dearly like to exclude myself from this task--but only if it pleases you.”

Gareth met the other man’s eyes. “Renoult--you have served faithfully by my side for countless years. You have never once failed me, not as a friend nor as a military leader. How could you even imagine that I would deny you this one small thing? You may have your rest. Take no part in the search for Saran and Marcel. Return to your home and to your wife for as long as you need.”

Renoult consciously felt the muscles in his neck loosen and relax. “Thank you, Gareth,” he said meaningfully.

The King nodded, his eyes sharp and intelligent. He ran a hand through his dark-gold hair, then rubbed his short beard, and then laughed. “Get on home, then. Why stick around here?”

Renoult smiled, but it felt partially forced. He downed the last of his drink, and set the glass firmly on the table. He heaved himself to his feet. “Until next time, Gareth.”

“Until next time.” The King lifted his glass in a salute, settled and snug in his couch like an old grandfather, his royal robes crumpled around his body like blankets.

Renoult left the private chambers and strode quickly through the castle, and as he walked he felt the weight of responsibility gradually floating off his shoulders, bit by tiny bit, as though he had carried it around as an enormous sack of feathers and now a wind had come and was blowing the feathers away, a handful at a time. When he reached the stables he seemed to be physically lighter, and there was a determination in him that he had never experienced before, not even when he was commanding his men in battle. He cast all thoughts of Saran and Marcel out of his mind, and he did not feel guilty.

His horse was waiting for him, dragging its hooves eagerly across the hay-strewn floor as if to say, “We should be home already.”

“You’re right,” Renoult murmured, and swung himself into the saddle. He thundered home, not breaking speed the whole way.

There were lights on in his manor--he could see from quite a distance away--but when he slipped inside the front door it was quiet. Christa the maid met him in the foyer with a solemn expression.

She whispered, “Your wife’s in her room and she won’t let me come in. She keeps telling me to go away. I’m frightened for her. A man was here before--I heard noises, and I think she’s weeping.”

Renoult shrugged off his cloak and hat and handed it to her. “Thank you, Christa. I’ll go upstairs at once.”

He felt the maid’s eyes on his back as he climbed the stairs, smoothing back his curly locks with nervous fingers. What on earth was he going to say to Clementine? Would she even let him come near her? And the man--Christa had said that there’d been a man here, earlier in the day. The man who had given Clementine the music-box, undoubtedly.

He rapped on her door. “Clementine. It’s me.”

There was no sound from within.

“Clementine. I’m going to come in.”

There was a small noise--was it a stifled sob? Or just furniture bumping? Renoult put his hand on the knob and eased the door open, slowly, tentatively.

He saw his wife sitting despondently on her bed, her hands over her face, sobs making her shoulders shake. She was the single beautiful thing in a room full of broken furniture, smashed glassware, torn curtains. Her hair had been pulled out if its pins. The collar of her dress was yanked down and a large blackening bruise branded her shoulder. She looked like she didn’t know whether anything was real.

“Clementine.” He was at his wife’s side in a second, gathering her up in his arms, smoothing her hair back from her tearstained face. “Oh, heavens, Clementine. I should have been here to protect you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m going to be here from now on, I promise; I’m not going to go anywhere, Clementine. I’m coming home. I’m coming home for good.”

™˜

They passed in and out of the village of Luxem in one night. Marcel knew the loneliest ways through the plains and then through the forest. A week after they had set out from the city, they arrived at Brukham, but didn’t dare stop over at Linde and Kurk’s inn for fear of being recognised. They picked up their pace now that Marcel’s wound was steadily healing. He was stronger than ever before, now; stronger than Saran had ever seen him.

Not long after Brukham they came to the Silver Tower, nestled in a valley between two mountain ranges: the western, lower one was called The Scrying Hills, Marcel told them, and the eastern, higher one was called The Devil’s Arm. They detoured along the valley creek to refill their waterskins, but didn’t wander too close to the Tower. Saran didn’t want to remember the place where she had been imprisoned. She didn’t want to remember anything that had happened to her, come to think of it.

“The silver’s rusting, now,” remarked Pieter, glancing at the Tower as they topped off their waterskins.

The other two didn’t reply, and they went on their way.

It took them almost three days to fight a path over The Devil’s Arm, so overgrown it was with brambles and carnivorous vegetation. The trees formed a canopy so thick and black over their heads that for most of the daytime they hardly saw the sun. When they finally reached gentler forest on the other side, Marcel scrutinised Pieter. “You sure you can make the return journey on your own?”

“I’m sure,” said Pieter. “I’ll simply retrace our path. I’m not incapable, you know.”

Marcel smiled. “I wasn’t implying anything.”

The small party of three carved a path through the Scarbough Forest, the great eastern woodland that had not been crossed by anyone in the kingdom for decades, and then waded over Drakan’s River, and climbed in and out of the rocky hollows of the Sleeping Gully. And exactly nineteen days after they had fled from Teulebaronis, they reached the peaks of the mighty Apocalypse Ranges, the very eastern border of King Gareth’s land.

They stood for a moment on the wind-lashed summits, Marcel and Saran and Pieter and the faithful pack-horse, with the clouds breaking overhead. Rain began to fling itself down in icy buckets, seeping through clothes and drenching them to the skin. It was a unique feeling, to be standing on the border between two lands, one known and one unknown, teetering on the edge of a mountain range and feeling as though one slip could send them tumbling over the brink.

They looked out over the foreign country. Below them, the eastern slopes of the Apocalypse Ranges swept into a wide, dark valley cupping a wide, dark lake. And beyond the great lake there stretched a road within a ravine, and beyond that there were grasslands of a beautiful, otherworldly, purplish hue, and finally, beyond the plains there stood a silhouette of a spire, tiny on the distant horizon, that might have been a watch house or an army lookout or a messenger post, or perhaps a lonely tower for prisoners.

The rain lashed into Saran’s eyes, and before long her vision was flooded with water and she had to blink madly. It felt like they were being drowned by the downpour.

“This is where I turn back, I suppose,” said Pieter, spitting water out of his face.

“Don’t sound so forlorn,” said Marcel, folding his arms. “You get to travel all the way back, climb through that murderous gully, fight your way through Scarbough Forest, over The Devil’s Arm--”

Pieter silenced him with a glare.

Saran managed to laugh. “And what about you, Marcel?” she demanded, cocking her head at him. “Do you feel excited?”

His eyes sparkled at her, as deep and impossibly grey as their surroundings. “How could I not? We are free, you and I. This land that lies at our feet--it is our new life. Who knows what we could end up doing? Settle down in a nice, three-room bungalow, plant lettuces in our front lawn, maybe even start a family. Wouldn’t you like to raise a couple of young’uns?” He grinned wickedly, and Saran simply gaped at him, unsure whether to laugh at him or hit him.

She looked at Marcel, tracing with her eyes the path of a raindrop over his soaked, ebony hair, as it slid down the straight slope of his nose and fell. He hugged a cloak around his body in a vain attempt to keep himself warm and dry, but there was cold rain on his neck, under the collar of his shirt, in his shirt and all the way down to the soles of his shoes. He loomed tall and dark and lean in her gaze. Could she live with this man? Could she follow him and him alone into a strange land?

And Marcel was looking at Saran, at the way her cacao-coloured hair, now black in the rain, whipped at the side of her face, and her coal-black eyes stared ever-accusingly at him, and how there was the faintest curve of an amused smile at the corner of her lips. And she had her arms curled around herself, shivering in her thin shirt and woollen coat, and there was a flush of colour in her cheeks. Marcel remembered vividly what the two of them had had before her memory was wiped from her, and something blossomed inside him. He would wait, and he would stay with her, until maybe one day they could have that back.

Pieter started unloading his own supplies from the pack-horse in readiness for his trip back, but Marcel stopped him. “Take the poor beast with you--we won’t need him.”

Saran laughed breathlessly. “Are you so sure?”

Marcel met her dancing eyes. “No.” He seized their bags, and tossed one to her, and without waiting for any sort of emotional farewell he leapt over the edge of the summit, and Saran followed, and together they climbed down the unknown slopes on the wrong side of the Apocalypse Ranges, and disappeared into the far east.

THE END!

I hope you enjoyed reading! This is probably my favourite work to date. It's short, neat, sort-of-pretty, challenging, vivacious, and yes I'm going off on an unashamed ego trip here. I'll stop complimenting myself and say thanks for plodding through five exhaustive chapters of my writing! THANK YOU! Leave a review if you would (:

Hot apple crumble and ice cream all round,
charliedon'tdie