8
Lord Inguilar saw the Burnt Knight to the road with all honors. His cooks filled their saddlebags with hard cheeses, boiled eggs, and wax-sealed jars of honey; his quartermaster replenished their arrows and gave them oiled, hooded quivers to protect the shafts from foul weather as they rode. Lady Inguilar insisted on rewarding Bitharn with a purse of silver for her victory on the archery field, even though Bitharn tried to explain that as Celestia’s servants they were unable to accept such prizes.
“Take it,” Lady Isavela said, pressing the velvet bag into Bitharn’s hands, “or I shall be insulted. Buy yourself some jewelry. Every woman deserves one beautiful gem.”
Bitharn took the money, but she didn’t buy jewels. She bought a new whetstone: the quarries of northern Langmyr gave up good ones, rough white on one side and soft blue on the other, so that a blade could be quickly polished free of nicks and brought to a fine edge with a single stone. She also bought an oiled horn of extra bowstrings for herself and a warmer winter cloak for Kelland. Lastly, as her one indulgence, she bought a double-stringed ardvele from a tavern singer who had gambled himself penniless and needed the coin.
It was a beautiful instrument, fashioned from ivory-hued wood and inked with twining black vines. The ink was made from the burnt and crushed leaves of the ladyspear tree, said to grow only on heroes’ graves along the cold beaches of the Thousand Rivers. An ardvele painted with such inks, the northmen claimed, would always carry the voice of its homeland in its song. To Bitharn, who had no homeland of her own, the story was irresistably romantic.
“You don’t play the ardvele,” Kelland said when he saw it.
“I’ll learn,” she assured him airily.
They rode through drifts of falling leaves, their horses’ hooves striking broken music from the white stones of the River Kings’ Road. Bitharn never had time to try her ardvele, for they were scarcely a day’s ride from Thistlestone when she saw the first black birds circling in the distance. Carrion birds.
“Willowfield,” Bitharn said.
Kelland nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. He squared his shoulders and nudged his reluctant horse along the road. Bitharn followed him, full of trepidation.
He had trained for this, she reminded herself. Ten years he’d spent practicing swordplay and learning the prayers that called Celestia’s magic forth in battle. This was the purpose of his life, the end toward which he was Blessed: to confront the enemies that other men could not, and cleanse their evil from the world so that others might live safely.
She knew, too, that Kelland wanted—needed—to prove that he was worthy of the respect people gave him based on the white tabard he wore and the color of his skin. The mystique of the Burnt Knight was purely an illusion, and not one he wanted. Kelland hated that peasants treated him with awe and lords with fear because they attributed some imaginary magic to his blood. Nothing, he’d confided to her once, frightened him more than the possibility that he might be tested and fail before the eyes of a world that expected more from him than any mortal man could give.
Bitharn didn’t believe he could fail. Her faith in him, and in their goddess, was absolute. Nevertheless she felt a twinge of fear as they rode toward Willowfield.
Neither of them had ever faced a Thorn; she didn’t really know what to expect. The Spider was newly come to Ang’arta, her students newer still, and little was known of what they could do. Both Kelland and Bitharn had been in Calantyr when the Battle of Thelyand Ford was fought, and that was the only major conflict in which Thorns had taken the field alongside the ironlords. They’d heard the stories—everyone had heard the stories—but stories had a way of getting distorted between one teller and the next, and Bitharn had no idea how much truth was left in what they’d heard. She wasn’t especially eager to find out.
She said none of this to Kelland. He didn’t need her worry. The birds overhead were ominous enough. Black and stark against the autumn sky, the circling crows could be seen from leagues away. The size of their flocks told the number of the dead.
The wind turned as they came through the wood, and on it was a foulness worse than carrion, worse than the stink of putrefying wounds. It put Bitharn in mind of their first ride out from Cailan, right after Kelland won his spurs and swore his oaths to the sun. They’d gone to the tiny forest town of Silverpool, near Balnamoine, where a summer plague had stopped the flow of lumber across the high roads to the city. The lack of trade worried Cailan’s lords, so they’d sent for a Blessed to heal the sick.
Kelland and Bitharn had arrived to find the town already dead. Its people lay in the streets and their homes and the tiny chapel, where the last of them had gone to pray for salvation between vomited mouthfuls of blood. The plague had killed them too quickly to spread. A small mercy, perhaps, but to this day Bitharn thought there was nothing natural about it.
There had been crows in the sky then, too, and the same stench in the air when they piled up the bodies to burn. The work had gone on for days, and the stink with it, and when they finally left Silverpool Bitharn had burned her clothes and shorn her hair, because the smell would never come out.
She expected nothing better from Willowfield.
As they came up the road toward the village gate, the first of the crows startled away from their horses. More followed, and for a moment the sky was black and noisy with wings. They did not go far, though. This feast was too rich for them to be frightened from it that easily. The crows alighted on the empty houses’ rafters—the ones that were not too charred to bear their weight—and watched from there, eyeing the intruders warily.
Bloated bodies lay piled up at the gate, hacked by blades and quilled with broken arrows. She saw men and women, a solaros in a yellow robe stiff with dried blood and soft with putrefaction, a fly-specked gray horse with its front legs shattered and splintered wood plunged into its chest. Maggots crawled through the crow-torn flesh of the dead, fat as grains of boiled barley. Flies swarmed around them in buzzing clouds, so thick that some of the bodies looked as though they had been rolled in coarse black sand. There were no good arrows left in them, she noted; the killers had retrieved those.
Bitharn wrapped a scarf around her face to keep the flies away as they rode through the broken, corpse-crowded gate. Her jennet tossed its head back and whickered at the smell, tail flicking at the insects. Kelland’s seal-brown courser, bred for the battlefield, laid its ears back but kept walking.
She stole a glance at Kelland. His face was utterly expressionless. He sat his saddle as stiffly as a statue carved from dark vehrwood, and he did not look down at the dead, but every time his charger came near to stepping on one of their outflung hands or the hems of their clothes, the knight nudged the horse aside.
There were no flies in the center of the village. No crows, either. Carrion-eaters they might be, but flies and crows were creatures of the natural world, and there was nothing but poison for them here. Corpses aplenty, but no food.
The main dirt road was dark and gritty. It looked like a clay bed the week after a storm; once soaked through, it had dried in a hard crust that crunched as it broke beneath the horses’ hooves. It wasn’t water that had drenched the road, though. The sunbaked grit stank of blood.
The thatch on the half-burned roofs was stained red and had a shellacked stain under the afternoon sun. It, too, reeked of death. The whole village did.
More bodies lay between the houses. Children. Chickens. A mother cat, in the shadow of a scorched smithy, still gripping the wrinkled corpse of her kitten by the scruff of its neck, running for a safety they’d never reached. The bodies were shriveled and painted with a fine mist of blood that had been sucked from their veins and rained back down.
Kelland swung down from his saddle. He took a handful of dirt and crunched it in his fist, letting the bloodied grains trickle through his gloved fingers. “So it is true,” he said, and there was a hardness in his voice Bitharn had never heard before. “The Thorns have come west.”
She nodded. She didn’t dismount; she did not want to set foot on that tainted earth. “Should we burn them?”
He struggled with that answer for a while, but in the end Kelland shook his head. “I wish we could. It would be right. But we don’t have time to do honor to all the dead. Nor do I want to signal our pursuit to the Thorns. I expect they will learn we are coming, if they do not already know, but there’s no need to light signals for them every step of the way.”
Bitharn nodded again, silently relieved, but they did not leave at once. Kelland wanted to pray over the dead. While he did that, Bitharn wandered through the village to assess the rest of the damage.
The carnage in the chapel was even worse than that by the gate; but here the killing had been done by sword and axe, not the Thorns’ foul magic. The air was thick with flies and decay. Ordinary things. Things she could stomach.
Bitharn dismounted and went in.
A few minutes later she came back out, clambering over the corpses piled at the door. She took three long strides from the chapel and then she leaned forward with her hands on her knees and gulped air to clear the stench from her lungs. Her eyes watered from the reek and she knew that she would never be able to get it out of her boots, but that didn’t matter just now. She wiped the back of a hand over her lips—she hadn’t vomited, but wanted to—and got back into the saddle to look for Kelland.
He was praying on his knees beside a pair of small, withered bodies. A boy and a girl, she guessed by the clothes. The bodies were in no condition to offer further clues. Shiny, blood-lacquered grains circled the boy’s head like droplets that would never dry. Bitharn waited until Kelland finished his prayers, made a sun sign over the children, and stood; then she coughed discreetly to draw his attention.
“What is it?” he asked, shading his eyes against the low sun as he looked up at her.
“Who did Lord Eduin say died here? The murders we’re investigating, I mean.”
“They’re all the same in Celestia’s eyes. But Lord Inguilar worried about Sir Galefrid, his wife, and his son.”
“And the son’s an infant?”
“In swaddling.”
“I don’t think he died here.” Bitharn nodded toward the chapel. The crows had already returned to its doorway, squabbling over the best pickings. “I found Galefrid and his wife. A lot of liegemen, too. But there aren’t any children among the dead, much less a baby in blankets.”
“Where could he be?”
“Maybe the killers took him.” She shrugged, doubtful. “Do we look for the child or chase after the Thorn?”
“The Thorn,” Kelland said, without any hesitation this time. “Our charge is to find the killers, not recover a missing heir. I fear for the child, and pity him if he has fallen into enemy hands, but we have no business entangling ourselves with his succession. Our first duty is to deal with Ang’arta’s evil.”
“How do you plan to find him?” The stories said Thorns could walk through shadows and disguise themselves behind the faces of the dead. Finding one wasn’t likely to be as easy as asking villagers if any hideously scarred bloodmages had passed by recently.
Kelland bent to the ground and pried up three of the crimson-coated grains that had fallen by the dead boy’s head. He gazed at them in his gloved palm, then wrapped them in a scrap of cloth and tucked them into a pocket. “The Bright Lady will guide me. But we should go. It’s near dusk, and I have no wish to linger here after dark.”
“Neither do I,” Bitharn said fervently.
They made camp a league out of Willowfield, moving against the wind so that the smell of decay wouldn’t follow them into their sleep. While Kelland meditated in the last of the afternoon light, Bitharn saw to the horses, set up their tent, and laid a small, guarded fire. She didn’t think there would be much game this close to the dead village—or, if she was honest with herself, perhaps she simply didn’t want to wander off too far in the woods alone—so instead of hunting, she went into the stores of food that Lord Eduin’s people had packed for them.
They’d been generous. There were bags of dried beans and tough cured sausages and twice-baked bread flavored with garlic and small black seeds that Bitharn did not know. They even had small packets of salt and pepper, rare luxuries this far inland. She started a pot of yellow lentils boiling with onions and garlic, and cut up a sausage to add to her own meal once Kelland had taken his share.
Then, her immediate campsite chores done, she joined in Kelland’s prayer. There was music in his prayer, a sonorous solemnity that she could never match. The Sun Knight prayed with such devotion, such fervent love, that Bitharn imagined she could feel the warmth of Celestia’s presence touch them with the rays of fading light. He prayed until twilight came, and only when the last glimmer of sun was gone did he stop.
After the prayer they ate the soup with pieces of hard crunchy bread. Bitharn let Kelland eat in silence. She knew it took him a while to recover his thoughts after a seeking-prayer, and anyway she was content to watch him by the firelight. The white shells in his hair glowed with reflected warmth, and the fire burnished his skin to the color of deepest mahogany.
He was a beautiful man. Strange that no one else seemed to see it, blinded as they were by his exoticism and the insignia of his faith. Bitharn envied them, a little; maybe it would have been better not to notice at all, instead of longing for something she couldn’t have. But it was past helping, so she watched him by the fire and ached for what she couldn’t say.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her, smiling curiously.
Bitharn blinked. “I’m wondering what your visions showed,” she lied.
“We should go east.” Kelland’s smile faded. He picked up a piece of bark, turned it in his fingers, and tossed it into the flames. His eyes were dark and hooded in the fire’s glow. “The vision was … tangled, but that much was clear. They rode toward the rising sun. East, toward a castle where a green boy sits on an old gnarled chair, with white wolves defending him against his own dogs.”
“A green boy sitting an old throne could be any of half a hundred castles,” Bitharn said. “Heirs come young in this part of the world. What else did you see?”
“Little that makes sense to me,” Kelland said moodily. He took another chunk of bark from the dirt. “The boy dancing over a pool of blood that pulled away from his feet with each step but surged back to swallow him if he slowed. A bright blue crystal, colder than frost, that gleamed behind a mask made of dead skin. A black cat with an ebon unicorn’s horn and fierce green eyes, and a girl trying to ride it with two babies balanced in a scale, one to each side. Other things, dimmer, that I could barely see. And you, crying.” He held her gaze unblinking, his features stoic, but he broke the bark into tiny jagged pieces as he spoke. “You knelt in the snow, and you were holding my sword, and there were thorns in the hilt that drew blood from your hands. They rose up and made a chain around your wrists.”
His words chilled her, but Bitharn managed a nonchalant shrug. “Well, better my hands than my throat. Anyway, the visions don’t mean what they show you, you know that. The light of the Lady’s pure truth would blind us, isn’t that what the priests say? The goddess shows us what our minds can grasp, and sometimes we can’t follow her perfectly. I’m sure my hands will be fine.”
“I won’t lead you to harm.” A furrow appeared between Kelland’s brows. She longed to reach forward and smooth it away, and laced her fingers to keep them still.
“I’ll be fine. I was fine in Silverpool, and this is no worse.”
“This is different.”
“Why?” She raised an eyebrow. “This had better not be about protecting a delicate flower of womanhood. I’ll throw a rock at your head. You know better.”
“I still have the bruises from the last time to remind me.” A smile began in his eyes, but soon faltered and failed. “It’s the Thorns, Bitharn.” For once his gravity slipped and the knight sounded as young as he was. “I’m afraid for you. Not for myself. This is my duty. I knew what it meant when I swore my oaths. But you—”
“—swore the same ones,” Bitharn said firmly, cutting him off. “Or do my oaths not matter, because the goddess doesn’t speak through me?”
That was a low shot, and she felt a flicker of guilt for taking it, but her words struck the mark. Pain flickered on Kelland’s face before his mask of stoicism returned. “Very well. If you insist.”
“I do. You’re hopeless without me.”
“I am.” He tried the smile again, with even less success, and looked anywhere but at her. “That’s why I’m afraid. It isn’t about being Blessed, or not. I can’t lose you to the Thorns.”
“Oh,” Bitharn said. Brilliantly. “Well.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No.” She shook her head, her braid swinging across her back. All the words seemed to have evaporated from her mind. She stood, circled the fire to come to his side, and knelt so that she could press a finger to his lips. He flinched as if she’d burned him, then relaxed into her touch. “Please. Don’t ever be sorry about that.”
“I have to be. I’m bound by my oaths.”
Honesty, chivalry, chastity; Bitharn knew them well. The Knights of the Sun could take no lovers and no wives, for they were required to be as pure in body as they were in soul. Those who broke their oaths lost the goddess’ favor, tarnished the honor of their order, and were cast out from the ranks of the Blessed. Mortal love was impossible for those who enjoyed the favor of the divine.
“I know. I’m not asking you to break them,” she said. It was only half a lie. Wanting wasn’t asking.
“Thank you,” he said, and the words were almost a sigh.
She leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder, and wished that she might never have to move. An unseen wolf howled in the distance. Another answered its cry. Leaves rustled in the wind; one fell into their fire and curled bright-edged into ash. Kelland was warm beside her, and her hand stole down to find his. He stiffened slightly, but took her hand; their fingers circled together, a clasp that reassured where words could not.
“What do we know about the Thorns?” Bitharn asked softly. She didn’t want the moment to end, but if they were to succeed—and have more moments like this in the future—they needed to be prepared.
“Very little,” he admitted. She could feel the words reverberating in his chest. Without thinking, Bitharn nestled closer, resting her head against his shoulder. Again Kelland stiffened, but after a heartbeat he continued. “Only two of my teachers at the Dome of the Sun ever faced them: Khierien Solenar and Isleyn Silverlock. Both fought at Thelyand Ford, and Sir Isleyn was at Asen Falls too. Other than those two, and a handful of mentions in manuscripts that go back almost to Calantyr’s founding, we know nothing. Eltanir Teglessin has been working tirelessly to sort through the old lore and recover the arts we’ve forgotten, but these things take time, and in the meantime we’re hobbled. They’re so new.”
“Or so old,” Bitharn said. She’d pried the rest of their history from Kelland during their ride, and what she’d learned was not comforting.
Kliasta, the Pale Maiden who commanded pain, had once been worshipped in the west as well as the east. Her followers had never been numerous; there were not many who felt compelled to spend their lives seeking and cultivating agony. The truly mad went to Maol, while those who sought pure power and were willing to pay for it in blood gravitated toward Anvhad or Baoz, depending on their taste for subtlety. Kliasta drew very few worshippers, and still fewer Blessed, so her faith had been easily stamped out when the Celestians came to power in the west. They had been sadists and bloodmages, all of them, and no one mourned their passing.
The Kliastan faith had never died in the east, though. There, past the ruins of dwindling Ardashir and the blistering wastes of the Black Sands, the emperors of the Nightingale Court kept Kliastans in high honor as imperial inquisitors and torturers. The Pale Maiden’s temples stood openly there: palaces of carved ivory where coils of incense burned to complement, not hide, the stench of blood and hot iron from her dungeons.
Ten years ago, the man who was now Lord Commander of Ang’arta traveled to the distant east, seeking power at the edge of the world. Back then he was no one, just another Baozite soldier who had survived the breaking pits long enough to earn his brand and sword. He’d had nothing but his own savagery and vaulting ambition.
Eight years ago, he returned with one of those eastern witches. Avele diar Aurellyn, the Spider. His wife. Whether he had captured her, or she him, was wholly unclear; what was soon apparent, however, was that she made a formidable weapon. Within a few short seasons all his enemies were dead or broken, and Aedhras the Golden was Lord Commander of Ang’arta. Soon after that, the Spider took up residence in the Tower of Thorns and began gathering disciples in her bloody arts.
It was then that the Sunfallen Kingdoms began to realize the true danger on their borders. Ang’arta had been a menace for centuries; the Baozites took war for worship, and attacked any vulnerable target near their borders. But for a generation or more, they had not seriously marched beyond those borders.
That changed when Aedhras the Golden took the Whispering Throne. The man who had gone to Kai Amur to find a sorceress was not one to be content with holding the same land his predecessors had claimed centuries ago. He wanted more, and he had the strength and cunning to take it. The Baozites were a terrible force in themselves, but with Aedhras as their general and the Thorns adding their magic, they seemed unstoppable. They’d crushed King Merovas’ armies at Thelyand Ford, seized the territory up to the riverbanks, and would no doubt look for new victims as soon as they’d pacified the conquered lands.
“They must have some weakness,” Bitharn murmured.
“The Thorns? The same as any other Blessed,” Kelland said. “Their vows and their lives. If they have others, neither Sir Khierien nor Sir Isleyn saw them.”
“How did we stop them the first time?”
“We killed them.” His thumb traced along the inside of her wrist, idly, as if he wasn’t fully aware of what he was doing. Bitharn held her breath, afraid that if she moved he might stop. “They might have magic, but they are men, and they
can die.”
She nodded, unconvinced but willing to take the offered comfort. The Knights of the Sun were a different order in that age. As their enemies failed and died off, and the commonfolk’s needs grew more pressing, their training had shifted from the purely martial to adopt more and more of the Illuminers’ healing and divinatory arts. Centuries later, she didn’t know how well Celestia’s champions would match Kliasta’s. The Kliastans, Bitharn surmised, would have had little interest in diluting their own deadliness to help the commonfolk in their lands.
Still, Kelland thought he could prevail, and he knew his own gifts better than she did. Her skin tingled where he had touched her. “What can they do?”
“Bloodmist. You saw what it did to Willowfield. It kills anything living in its reach—man or beast, friend or foe. That’s only one of their spells. They can shatter victims’ bones in their bodies without shedding blood or needing a touch; they can inflict wracking pain from a distance. Sir Solenar said he saw one of them turn arrows aside on the battlefield, using shadows to deflect them instead of sunlight to burn them as we do. Sir Isleyn said they sent an inquisitor to Asen Falls, and that inquisitor could wrench the deepest fears and truths out of a man’s mind without saying a word.”
They can stop arrows? Bitharn felt a cold touch of doubt: what she couldn’t shoot, she couldn’t kill. She had little skill with anything but knife and bow. “What else?”
She felt Kelland hesitate before he spoke again. “Soulbinding,” he said at last.
“Soulbinding?”
“They trap the souls of men in corpses. Sometimes their own, sometimes others’. In Ardashir and Kai Amur, the Zhardians developed this to a high art. Many of them chose to kill and preserve their own mortal bodies, seeking immortality. The Kliastans … inflict it on others, partly as a form of torture and partly to create weapons of war. It is an ugly thing.”
“I can imagine,” Bitharn murmured. What would it be like to be trapped in one’s own rotting body? Could they feel the decay of their flesh? See the revulsion on the faces of those who had once loved them? She hoped not. She hoped she would never find out. “That’s what they’re doing?”
He nodded. “They took the dead at Thelyand Ford and turned them into slaves. Men fought their own dead brothers in the mud. Tireless, merciless, and never-ending … for there were always more corpses to be had. But those, at least, we never forgot how to destroy.”
Small reassurance, but it was something. Bitharn let her gaze drift away through the wind-brushed forest. The white stone of the River Kings’ Road glimmered softly in the dark. The night had grown cloudy, and neither moon nor stars could be seen, but the road shone with its own quiet light, a luminous ribbon in the shadowed wood. She could just make it out through the trees.
“It’s beautiful,” Bitharn said without thinking. There was nothing like it in Calantyr. They had magic there, some of it grand, but theirs was a young kingdom and it did not have the same weight of mournful history that she imagined for this road.
Kelland followed her look. “Athra lumenos,” he said, the High Rhaelic flowing as smoothly as if it were his native tongue. He had adopted the tone of a Dome lecturer, a habit he had when reciting history from his lessons. Sometimes it annoyed her, but tonight Bitharn found it soothing. “Stone of the light. The Knights of the Sun mined it, or made it, and the Wayfarers laid it down long ago, when all these little realms were part of Rhaelyand. We’ve forgotten the art since then, or perhaps our prayers have grown weaker, but the old stones hold their magic. They built the imperial roads of athra lumenos so that they would shine all through the night and travelers would never be lost in the dark. Rhaelyand is gone, but the road shines on. People still follow the empire’s old lines, building their towns and castles where the road leads, rather than bending the road to themselves. Through their holy gift, the gods still guide the shape of history.”
“It’s a wonder no one steals it.”
“It does no good removed from its purpose.” She could hear his smile, if not see it. “Break a piece from the road, and it loses its light. Athra lumenos was made for the common good; it will not avail the greedy.”
“Oh.” Bitharn wondered how many people had tried, and how badly they’d been disappointed when they chipped away a little of the gods’ light for themselves, only to find it flickering out between their fingers. Was it so selfish to want a fragment of beauty for oneself? Was that so grievous a sin?
She listened to Kelland breathing beside her. Steady, familiar, yet infinitely fragile. “Can you defeat a Thorn?” she asked.
“Yes.”
THEY WERE BACK ON THE ROAD the next morning. At every hamlet there were babies to bless and illnesses to cure, rumors to gather and gossip to share. While Kelland tended to the sick and injured, Bitharn talked to the patients and their kin, sifting through suspicion and half-truth to find whatever crumbs of real information she could.
They administered justice too. Among Kelland’s powers was the Light of Truth, within which all lies were revealed. Whenever a local liegeman or village reeve had suspicions that a criminal lurked among his commonfolk—or, more likely, knew of one and wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to his lord’s peace—he called upon Kelland to interrogate the suspect and confirm his guilt. Then the criminal was denounced and hanged, and Kelland and Bitharn rode on.
Their presence kept the peace along the border. Word of the Burnt Knight’s ride spread swiftly through town and village, and Bitharn knew that men who might otherwise have gone raiding across the river stayed at home for fear of attracting his condemnation. The hangings helped with that as much as his holiness did, but she still didn’t like them.
“They only give up those men to impress us,” she muttered once as they rode away from a newly decorated dule tree on a gray and drizzly afternoon. The hanged men were accused of burning down an Oakharne farm with its family inside. Kelland’s prayer proved their guilt, so they swung. “If you weren’t here, they’d be just as happy to cheer and join in.”
“They might,” Kelland acknowledged, “but their reasons are less important than their actions. So long as they keep their lord’s peace, half our work here is done.”
The other half, however, remained stubbornly unfinished. Only one girl had seen the Thorn, if that was what she’d seen, and all she could give them was a garbled story about a woman in black with moonlight for hair. A small company of Baozites had ridden through recently, leaving a trail of havoc in their wake, but no one had seen them for over a fortnight, either.
Finally, having exhausted what they could learn on the Langmyrne side of the Seivern, the Celestians turned toward the bridges of Tarne Crossing.
Two days from Oakharn, they saw the crows again.
There were fewer birds this time, for there were only two bodies to feed them, and both were badly burned. It looked like someone had laid one atop the other and made a half-successful attempt at building a pyre in the forest for both. There hadn’t been enough wood to finish the job, but neither was much left to interest the crows. Man or woman, young or old, Bitharn couldn’t tell through the charring and rain-bloat. She couldn’t even say what killed them.
One of the bodies, however, didn’t seem human at all. The crows avoided that one, preferring to squabble over the gobbets of flesh clinging to the other’s bones.
“Look at this,” Bitharn said, holding up the skull and wiping wet ash from its jaws with a gloved finger. The teeth protruded hideously from the jawbones, curving up on bony, gristle-wrapped prongs that stuck out like flayed fingers from a palm. The skull might have been a man’s, but there was nothing human about those teeth.
“Ghaole.” Kelland grimaced. “A Hound of the Night. Put that down.”
“Gladly.” Bitharn tossed it into the trees. “What is it?”
“It was a man. Until the Thorns took him. The ghaole—the Hounds of the Night—are among the soulbound. Legends say ghoul-hounds could smell better than dogs and run faster than deer. Their touch froze their victims’ blood, and they could not be killed, for they were already dead.”
“Well, somebody killed that one, if that’s what it was.” Bitharn shrugged, flinging her braid over a shoulder as she got back into the saddle. “And if somebody else could kill one, I daresay we could too.”