Give him rest, I ask thee
May the god of men watch over your journey.”
When he was done, he looked up at the stars and in a soft voice said, “It’s dark.”
Chapter 13: Artisitc Vision
Arista did not want to breathe. It caused her stomach to tighten and bile to rise in her throat. Above her stretched the star-filled sky, but below—the pile. Like a nest, the Gilarabrywn built its mound from collected trophies, gruesome souvenirs of attacks and kills. The top of a head with dark matted hair, a broken chair, a foot still in its shoe, a partially chewed torso, a blood soaked dress, an arm reaching up out of the heap as if waving, so pale it was blue.
The pile rested on what looked to be an open balcony on the side of a high stone tower, but there was no way off. Instead of a door leading inside, there was only an archway, an outline of a door. Such false hope teased Arista as she longed for it to be a real door.
She sat with her hands on her lap not wanting to touch anything. There was something underneath her, long and thin like a tree branch. It was uncomfortable, but she did not dare move. She did not want to know what it really was. She tried not to look down. She forced herself to watch the stars and look out at the horizon. To the north, the princess could see the forest divided by the silvery line of the river. To the south laid large expanses of water that faded into darkness. Something out of the corner of her eye would catch her attention and she looked down. She always regretted it.
Arista realized with a shiver that she had slept on the pile, but she had not fallen asleep. It had felt like drowning—terror so absolute that it overwhelmed her. She could not recall the flight she must have taken, or most of the day, but she did remember seeing it. The beast had lain inches away basking in the afternoon sun. She stared at it for hours, not able to look at anything else—her own death sleeping before her had a way of demanding her complete attention. She sat, afraid to move or speak. She was expecting it to wake and kill her—to add her to the pile. Muscles tense, heart racing, her eyes locked on the thick scaly skin that rippled with each breath, sliding over what looked like ribs. She felt as if she were treading water. She could feel the blood pounding in her head. She was exhausted from not moving. Then the drowning came over her once more and everything went mercifully black.
Now her eyes were open again, but the great beast was missing. She looked around. There was no sign of the monster.
“It’s gone,” Thrace told her. It was the first either of them spoke since the attack. The girl was still dressed in her nightgown, the bruise forming a dark line across her face. She was on her hands and knees moving through the pile, digging like a child in a sandbox.
“Where is it?” Arista asked.
“Flew away.”
The princess looked up scanning the stars, no movement at all.
Somewhere nearby, somewhere below she heard a roar. It was not the beast. The sound was constant, a rumbling hum.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“On top of Avempartha,” Thrace answered without looking up from her macabre excavation. She dug down beneath a layer of broken stone and turned over an iron kettle revealing a torn tapestry that she began tugging.
“What is Avempartha?”
“It’s a tower”
“Oh. What are you doing?”
“I thought there might be a weapon, something to fight with.”
Arista blinked. “Did you say to fight with?”
“Yes, maybe a dagger, or a piece of glass.”
Arista would not have believed it possible if it had not happened to her, but at that moment as she sat helplessly trapped on a pile of dismembered bodies waiting to be eaten—she laughed.
“A piece of glass? A piece of glass?” Arista howled, her voice becoming shrill. “You’re going to use a dagger or a piece of glass to fight—that thing?”
Thrace nodded, shoving the antlered head of a buck aside.
Arista continued to stare open mouthed.
“What have we got to lose?” Thrace asked.
That was it. That summed the situation up perfectly. The one thing they had going for them was that it could not get worse. In all her days, even when Percy Braga was building the pyre to burn her alive, even when the dwarf closed the door on her and Royce as they dangled from a rope in a collapsing tower, it was not worse than this. Few fates could compare to the inevitability of being eaten alive.
Arista fully shared Thrace’s belief, but something in her did not want to accept it. She wanted to believe there was still a chance.
“You don’t think it will keep its promise?” she asked.
“Promise?”
“What it told the deacon.”
“You—you could understand it?” the girl asked, pausing for the first time to look at her.
Arista nodded. “It spoke the old imperial language.”
“What did it say?”
“Something about trading us for a sword, but I might have gotten it wrong. I learned Old Speech as part of my religious studies at Sheridan and I was never very good at it not to mention I was scared. I’m still scared.”
Arista saw Thrace thinking and envied her.
“No,” the girl said at last, “it won’t let us live. It kills people. That’s what it does. It killed my mother and brother, my sister-in-law, and my nephew. It killed my best friend Jessie Caswell. It killed Daniel Hall. I never told anyone this before, but I thought I might marry him one day. I found him near the river trail one beautiful fall morning, mostly chewed, but his face was still fine. That’s what bothered me the most. His face was perfect, not a scratch on it. He just looked like he was sleeping under the pines, only most of his body was gone. It will kill us.”
Thrace shivered with the passing wind.
Arista slipped off her cloak, “Here,” she said. “You need this more than I do.”
Thrace looked at her with a puzzled smile.
“Just take it!” she snapped. Her emotions breached the surface, threatening to spill. “I want to do something, damn it!”
She held out the cloak with a wavering arm. Thrace crawled over and took it. She held it up, looking at it as if she were in the comfort of a dressing room. “It’s very beautiful, so heavy.”
Again Arista laughed, thinking how strange it was to fly from despair to laughter in a single breath. One of them was surely insane—maybe they both were. Arista wrapped it around the young girl as she clasped it on. “And here I was ready to kill Bernice—”
Arista thought of Hilfred and the maid left—no, ordered—to stay in the room. Had she killed them?
“Do you think anyone survived?”
The girl rolled aside a statue’s head and what looked like a broken marble tabletop. “My father is alive,” Thrace said simply, digging deeper.