The road to the castle wound around the hillside. It was an old bumpy road, cratered by weather and use. The horse would stumble now and then when it hit a rough patch and it would jerk on the brank, causing the spurs to rip viciously at Baolyn’s inner cheeks and tongue. She would scream out in torment only to get barked at by her captors. The sun was slowly beginning to sink in the distance, for which Baolyn was thankful. Were it overhead, it would only make her journey that much worse.
Her feet ached, and each step felt as if her thin leather slippers were filled with hot broken glass. Her mouth was no longer in pain, it was swollen and numb, until it was jarred. She could barely keep her eyes open anymore and she stumbled around in the deep grooves cut out by constant wagon use, and her eyes would snap open as the spurs dug into her. She knew that under any other circumstance she would have no trouble walking this distance, after all it was not so far away, but from her blood loss and beating from earlier, she was no doubt in a weakened state.
Baolyn was fully awake when she was drug through the castle gates and into the crowded bailey, where the market was coming to an end. Everyone stopped and a hush fell over the growing crowd. They watched silently as she was led to the center, where the unusually empty stockade waited for her.
Sergeant Graethos dismounted, chain in hand. He yanked her forward with him as he strolled to the stockade. He turned towards the crowd, and with a haughty tome said: “Lyres Baolyn of Ganvale Tosh has been arrested for witchery and will serve in the stockade until her case may be viewed by his majesty, the King.”
The guard, whom she had earlier kicked, was opening the stockade as she was hauled towards it by the giant of the guards. She tried shoving herself off of him but his grip was strong and steady. He was simply too strong, three times her size and possibly more in weight, she was no match. She kicked her legs up and pushed off the wooden platform as he hauled her up and for a second he fumbled with her weight, but he dragged her back and tossed her upon it. She was forced down onto her knees, in front of the vertical stockade, her head pushed down as the younger guard unshackled her wrists. The spikes on the collar of the brank dug into her chest pushing the depressor deeper into her mouth. She couldn’t hold in the half moan, half sob as it’s jagged spurs burrowed into the roof of her mouth. The louder she became the harder the guard pressed down onto the back of the brank. Blood dripped from the face of the Brank as it trickled from her open mouth.
Her arms were lifted above her head and clasped into the arm holes of the overhead stockade. When they were tightly locked in her head was released. They lifted her up to a crouching position until her head and the brank were clear of the wooden boards of the stockade’s frame. The stockade bar was clamped around her neck, just below the brank. The way this stockade was set up, the captured couldn’t sit or stand or even rest on their knees, and with the brank on and the spurred depressor in her mouth she couldn’t even lower herself a little to rest her weight on her calves. She sat in her precarious position, trying not to move at all, looking out over the crowd, and wondered how anyone could do this to another person.
A man walked up to the platform. Wilakan Mordow, a man she had known since she was a small child. He had been her neighbor growing up, and a friend of her father. He had always been so jovial and jolly and his face always with a smile upon it. He was now elderly, his small face full of wrinkles. His once friendly, bright blue eyes, now faded. She looked to him for any form of relief, kinship from a long time family friend… but she found none. She found a angry little man, his smile deformed into hatred and disgust and he screamed out in a nasally high pitched voice, “Abomination!” He finished it by spitting in her face.
Baolyn wanted to scream. She wanted to rip the fist cuffs off and crush the little man’s bones with her bare hands… She just wanted to wipe her face off! A single tear drop trickled down her face and was quickly absorbed by the dried blood. She just wanted the pain to end. She would rather them just kill her now. She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to not be in so much pain. Her mind just could not conceive it at the moment.
