As she swung the lamp around, a brilliance flared on Karigan’s table. Strangely attracted, Mara stepped over the threshold and into the room. The crystal fragments of Karigan’s moonstone dazzled, reflecting and refracting the lamplight. They sparkled more than the dim lamplight warranted.
A hiss.
Mara whirled around.
A shadow detached itself from the wall, clutching Karigan’s greatcoat in one bone white hand, and a bit of blue hair ribbon in the other. The chain of a manacle dangled from its wrist.
Mara’s feeble lamplight gleamed on a lead crown.
Her mouth went dry. The summer evening had become bleak winter, a steely cold. Down in the city, the bell rang out the late hour in heavy, sonorous tones as though echoing the dread of this moment.
“We seek,” the shadow said, its voice a frosty almost-whisper, “the Galadheon.”
So stricken was Mara that she could not have spoken even if she willed it. Her hand fluttered at her hip where her saber would have hung had she been anywhere but on the castle grounds. She possessed no weapon, and she was certain it would have had little effect anyway.
The shadow creature stepped closer to her light. She made out flinty, impassive eyes; skin the shade of a corpse’s.
“We seek,” it repeated, “the Galadheon. You will tell us.”
The lamp slipped from Mara’s fingers and smashed to the floor, spreading oil across the old, wooden boards. Fire whooshed up between them, and the wraith brought up its arms to protect its face.
Laren gazed up at the clear sky. The Hunter’s Belt was migrating into the eastern horizon, and as the nights grew longer and the days shorter, it would reign dominant over the summer stars. The moon was brilliant, but did not diminish the brightness of the stars.
“Gods please help me through this,” she prayed, as she did every night.
Only after the castle grounds settled for the night did Laren dare step outside her quarters. She had learned that in the quiescence of night, her ability assailed her less, as though all the mental activity of others during the day somehow contributed to her problem.
By day she lay in bed, a pillow wrapped around her head to stifle the voice of her ability. It did not work of course. Only sleep brought her some measure of peace, though sometimes she could hear her ability intrude even on her dreams.
It commented on anything and everything, including her own thoughts and emotions. Slowly, she knew, it would push her to the brink when she just couldn’t stand the assault anymore. What she would do when that happened, she wasn’t sure.
Overlying everything was the guilt, the guilt that she had abandoned her Riders, leaving the entire operation in Mara’s hands.
True.
Whenever her feelings of guilt welled up, her ability unswervingly told her “true” like a finger of condemnation.
False.
A quiet cry of hopelessness escaped her lips and she continued prowling the grounds, trying to blank her mind.
The grounds near Rider barracks were quiet and the darkness held the weight of a cloak. A few tiny lights twinkled about the castle, but the grounds were soaked in shadow, only the moon outlining rooflines and walls.
The bell down in the city clanged out the hour, and she broke out in a sudden cold sweat. A sensation of terror overrode all other feelings of guilt and hopelessness. The source of the terror emanated from Rider barracks.
She ran toward barracks, though she desperately wanted to run in the opposite direction. The building was a shadow within shadow.
She ran toward what could be her very grave, and what compelled her forward in the face of such fear, she never knew. Did her fear for her Riders overcome her own sense of safety? Was it some inner strength? Or had she already been driven into madness?
A figure emerged from the shadow of the building. Loathing washed over her.
The figure crept toward her, paused, and crept closer.
Laren wanted to run, but she was held in place, as if ice had formed over her skin and solidified.
“We seek,” the wraith said, “the Galadheon.”
Lady Estora Coutre walked dim corridors, the lamps at low burn for the night. Her cousin would not be pleased if he ever learned she wandered the corridors unescorted at so late an hour, but she could not sleep, her heart filled with unease. Unease about the ultimatum her cousin planned to present to the king, from her father. She sensed she was but a game piece on an Intrigue board that others moved in some desired direction for their own benefit; powerless to move in her own direction. Her future was not her own.
She supposed her relationship with F’ryan Coblebay had been a secret retaliation against those who used her in their plots. A secret retaliation, yes, but one in which she held power—not over F’ryan certainly, for he had been as unpredictable as the winds, and not over her own emotions—but in the secret itself.
The castle corridors went for miles if one followed them through all their various wings, and up and down the various floors. She passed servants’ quarters, her shawl pulled up to cover her hair and shadow her face so none would take special note of her. The quarters were subdued, though some folk were about: a cook with flour smudged on his cheek retiring for the night, a laundress who set down her burden of dirty linens and rubbed her sore back.
She avoided the administrative wing, its corridors dark, cold, and cheerless. Even during the day, those older corridors did not invite her in. They stirred within her a sense of age and ghostly presence, and things best left undisturbed.
She walked past guards and old suits of armor and tapestries telling stories few remembered. She mounted the curving stairs to an upper level and bypassed the rooms of sleeping courtiers and officials from other lands. More guards, more tapestries, more armor.