Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,71

the mountains were all the colder without her.

“What happened next no one can say for certain. Raiders came. Some say from the north, some from the east; some say they were demons of the frozen wind. I say they came from the south, but I’m the only one who remembers it so. Wherever they came from, whatever they were, their weapons were sharp enough. When villagers came to the castle days later they found only frozen corpses. The lord lay dead in his hall, stabbed through the heart and his sword in his hand. The servants had been rounded up and slaughtered like sheep. Of the lady there was no sign, but her library and workrooms were destroyed. The villagers searched the woods and riverbanks for her but found no trace, though some claimed to have seen blood on the rocks below the castle ramparts.

“We buried the lord and his people, but the castle became home to ghosts and hungry spirits, more than the village witchwives could dispel. Demon birds circled the towers, and many thought them the lady’s pets driven mad by her death. The Sarken king sent no new lord to hold it, and the Selafaïns staked no claim, so villagers circled it with salt and wards and left it to molder in its grief.”

She fell silent, mopping her chin and frowning lopsidedly. Her chair creaked and clacked as she rocked, and wood fell in the hearth with a flurry of sparks. Dust motes danced and settled in the slanting light. After a long moment she spoke again, the words even more muffled now by the handkerchief.

“The forgetting came not long after, like a fog over the mountains. The castle stands, and everyone remembers the lord, but no one remembers the name of his wife.”

Her gaze, distant with memory, sharpened again as she squinted at Iancu. He nodded to her question, then glanced at Savedra. “She asks if we mean to go there. I assume we do.”

Visiting a haunted ruin at twilight didn’t seem the best idea, but Savedra nodded anyway. She reached for her purse, but the woman made another dismissive gesture.

“She says that she’s done us no favors,” Iancu said. “But her granddaughter will show us the trail. And that we should hurry.”

“Thank you,” Savedra said, scrambling to her feet. The woman only shook her head.

The sun hovered a finger’s width over the serrated teeth of the Varagas, already peach-red and swollen. The young witch pointed them toward the road that led to the castle and turned away when their feet were on it, vanishing back into the village.

Valcov lay on a small plateau; past the edge of town the road dropped away and valleys and ridges fell like wrinkled cloth, the tangled skirts of the mountains soaring sharp and cold to their right. Somewhere north and west the Varagas gave way to gentle hills and fields which in turn rolled toward the sea, but from this vantage there was only stone and trees and snow high on the peaks, and the wide crush of sky.

The castle Carnavas brooded on the edge of a cliff, overlooking Valcov from one side and the icy rush of the Ardos¸ from the other. It would have been a forbidding place in any light, but as dusk crawled from the roots of the mountains, it was all too easy to imagine the specters stirring in empty halls. Dark shapes wheeled against the sky, vanishing into the towers; birds home to roost for the night.

“This is as close as we go tonight,” Iancu said. Not even Ashlin argued. But they stood and stared, shivering as the evening chill chewed through layers of cloth, caught in the ruin’s spell. The last of the daylight lined the western sky with apricot.

“Tomorrow,” Savedra said. The steadiness of her voice surprised her. But they’d come this far, and they certainly weren’t about to ride back to Evharis in the dark.

With a glance between them they turned away, hurrying back to the warmth and walls of the inn.

That night Savedra and Ashlin lay back to back in their shared bed. It was a small inn, and they could forsake luxuries for a night. Iancu and Cahal shared the room across the hall.

“What do you think?” Savedra asked, the words muffled by the pillow. The bedding smelled of down must, and the pungent straw beneath the featherbed.

“It’s an interesting puzzle. Your whole family is interesting.” The last she said so dryly that Savedra elbowed her in the