The Skeleth

Chapter 26

Edmund raced up behind Ellí and grabbed her by the sleeve. "An army?" He spun her around to face him. "An army?"

"The army's not important—they're not even meant for Elverain." Ellí shrugged him off and kept her pace down the broad slope of the vale. "They're camped in the ruins of an old fortress town. I should have understood before that this was once King Childeric's stronghold, his tower and tomb. We must get in, we must get past them, and—"

"What do you mean they're not meant for Elverain?" Edmund jabbed a finger westward. "This road leads right to Moorvale, right over the bridge to my village!"

Ellí shot a glance at him sidelong. "They're not going to Elverain, they're going through it. That's why Lord Wolland's at Northend. He's parleying with your lord Aelfric."

Edmund drew up all he knew of the world in his mind. "Quentara." He followed the path of the army, down through Elverain and beyond into the settled lands west of the Tamber. "Rushmeet, Umberslade, the Hundredthorn. They're going south."

"A strike by surprise, from a direction no one suspects, and at the very edge of winter." Ellí nodded her head. "By the time anyone can muster a force to react, it will be too late. Lord Wolland will be king of all the north."

Edmund looked out across a bleak bowl of land that seemed like an inverted curve of starless sky. The glow rose from a ring of fires spread across the hollow. Within the rough circle they bounded moved a swarm of shadows, men and horses in restless camp. A pair of smiths beat their hammers out of time. A laugh sounded, loud and harsh, while someone else played a tune upon a flute.

"Do you see it?" Ellí pointed. "On the hill, there, right in the middle of the fires."

Edmund peered ahead. The flat expanse of the vale confused his senses, making him think at first that the shape on the hill ringed by the fires was just another hump of rock, but it was too regular in form to be a work of nature.

"It looks like the big tower of the old keep back on Wishing Hill, the one where I found the tomb." Edmund followed the stonework upward to the jagged line where it gave way to starry black. "But it's broken off halfway up, and all tumbled over."

"Three brothers, three kinsmen, three kings of the Pael—just like the book said." Ellí threw back her cloak and quickened her pace. "If only I'd understood the first time I was here."

Edmund followed at a horrified stumble over treeless heath, toward the ring of fires around the broken tower. "But if Lord Wolland's got an army already, why does he also need the Skeleth?"

Ellí walked a few paces onward, deep in thought. "King Childeric believed that the Skeleth could make his army invincible." She turned to Edmund. "Lord Wolland believes the very same thing. He's made a deal, a bargain with a wizard who told him that the Skeleth could bring him certain victory."

"Which wizard?" said Edmund. "Vithric?"

"No, my teacher." Ellí trembled. "Her name is Warbur Drake."

Edmund watched her in silence, trying not to simply fall back into mushy-headed sympathy. He started to wonder whether Katherine might have seen something in her that he could not.

"Come closer." Ellí reached into her belt. "We'll need to get past the sentries without being noticed."

She threw the dust, spoke the words of her spell, and the night warped around Edmund. He fell with Ellí under the Sign of Obscurity, and it seemed to him that the moon hung above him without giving light.

"There." Ellí beckoned Edmund onward. The spell left trails of her smile in the night air. "Come with me."

Men and boys crossed the road in front of Edmund, and behind, trampling down the heavy grass around the sentry fires. Many wore livery, the crests of ram, rook or boar upon their chests, and in the dizzying churn of the spell it looked as though they had sprung to life on the chests of their wearers. Someone barked an order, and a rough circle of torches drew in like a swarm around an oddly shaped structure by the verge. The swelling light revealed it for a tent spread out over the ancient stone foundations of a house—around the tower such dwellings grew more dense, making it look like an odd, half-ruined village. Dozens of horses raised their heads as Edmund passed their makeshift paddocks, and a chorus of whinnies resounded through the camp.

Edmund did his best to focus his mind past the confusion of Ellí's spell. He shot glances left and right along the road, and marked a horse for every man, many of them fine stallion chargers worth more than most peasants made in a year. The fires burning in the hollow around him bounded a circle wide enough for hundreds, but not thousands. He could only guess that he stood amidst an army of knights, second sons of noble birth who owned no land, and so hoped to make their ways in the world by conquest.

He nudged Ellí's side. "Do they have any archers?"

"Forget the army. They don't matter." Ellí turned off the road toward the ruined tower, which stood on a hill just to the north, surrounded by more tents and paddocks.

Edmund could not quite bring himself to forget a camp full of hundreds of armed and hungry-looking men not ten miles from his home, but he followed all the same. He let his hearing widen out, trying to grasp the meaning of all that reached his ears. Men led horses to and fro along the road, while squires—many of them boys his own age—carried hauberks of chain armor big enough to weigh them double. An old man sharpened swords in another ancient, ruined house on the apron slope around the tower. A warhorse reared and thundered, but a squire got him down again with the offer of a turnip. Harness jingled in the hands of men brushing past on either side, the metal polished to a gleam that caught the moon.

"Richard!" A man in rough river furs stepped out from behind the tented ruin, surrounded by the torches—a guard of men dressed in like fashion to their leader. "Richard Redhands, say that we must wait no longer! Say that soon we ride!"

One of the men passing next to Edmund turned around. "We await the word of our lord and commander, Hunwald, just as we have these past days."

Edmund froze in fear. Sir Richard Redhands strode onward, passing Edmund by without paying him the slightest notice, so near that some of the slowly falling dust from Ellí's spell landed on his sleeve.

"You ask me, sir knight, we've no need of waiting." The furred man spoke with a guttural drawl that forced Edmund to listen very closely to make out the words. "Once we're across the bridge, there's nothing Aelfric can do to stop us. We could be in Quentara by tomorrow night!"

"We do not ask your counsel, Hunwald of the Uxingham Hundreds." The spell made the scowl on Richard's face look all the worse. "You have been promised a great deal for your aid—do not presume that the banner of command was part of the bargain. Await your summons to battle, just as we do."

Hunwald turned away, grumbling with his men. "We're going to starve to death out here," said one. "Where's that accursed grain they promised?"

Richard Redhands strode off in the opposite direction. "It sickens me to bring such men along." He muttered it under his breath to the young knight at his side. "I can hardly stand the smell of them."

Ellí tugged Edmund's arm. "Hurry, now. My spell won't last much longer, and if we get caught out here, we're both in deep trouble."

Edmund stepped over the wind-shot bones of what must once have been a castle wall. The foundations of the tower ahead stood intact to just beyond twice his own height, in front of a standing stone that looked just like the Wishing Stone back home. The double doors lay smashed inward, leaving a gap just wide enough for a man to crawl between them.

Edmund looked at Ellí. "You passed right by this place, and you didn't go in?"

"I was just trying to stay out of trouble." Ellí would not meet his gaze.

Edmund approached the tower. "There's something scratched into the walls here." He traced his fingers on letters that seemed chiseled into the stone with little care and even less craft, scrawling larger and then smaller across the door. "It's Old Paelic. Stranger beware, it says. Open not this door."

The letters crawled and twisted under the false light of the spell. Edmund thought he heard his own voice screaming again, just as he had the first time Ellí had cast the spell on him. This time, though, he thought he could almost make out words.

"Can you fit through?" Ellí stood a few paces back of him. "We should go through."

Edmund gave the broken doors a tentative push—they did not move, but there was more than enough space to squeeze between them and into the dusty blankness beyond.

"If someone sees us up here, we'll be caught." Ellí hovered over him, her voice hushed and urgent. "We should go inside before my spell fails."

More chiseled letters drew Edmund's eye. "Look—there it is again: Open not this door." He felt along the cracks of the letters, pulling dust and blown weeds aside to trace their shapes. "This place is defiled. It is poison. Open not this door. And that: Ahibanas dhuguni . . . Mek dhiti ghav. That's Dhanic, again—another warning."

"Hurry," said Ellí. "Please."

"And these here—Gatherer symbols." Edmund touched them. "They're done wrong, but I think I can read them: Death-Below-Crawling, Away-Flee-Always."

Edmund stood and looked back, around him at the ring of fires and the shadowed army. "A warning, in three languages."

Ellí came up to his shoulder. "I can light the lantern once we're inside." She took his hand again—she quaked, but when he held her firm, she stopped. "I'm not so scared when you're with me." She ran her thumb up his palm.

Everything tumbled in Edmund. He started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the way he had always felt about Katherine was a childish thing, something that would wear off as he grew up. He opened his mouth to speak, though he did not know what he was going to say.

Ellí did not let him speak. She pressed her lips to his.

Amidst the rapture of it came a thought. His first kiss was not Katherine. His dreams had not come true.

"All right, then." He turned to the door. "In we go."

She squeezed his arm. "I knew I could count on you."

Edmund turned back to the staved-in doors. He climbed up their splintered faces and felt out into the gap with one booted foot. He thought he touched solid ground beyond, but when he set his weight, his footing gave way with a snap, and with nothing to brace against he tumbled inside, into the darkness of the chamber beyond.

"Edmund?" Ellí hopped into the chamber after him. "Did you hurt yourself?"

"No, no. I'm fine." Edmund flailed out a hand and grabbed what he had broken, an old wooden stool that had survived the centuries intact, only to be splintered by his misplaced foot. "If this place is anything like the one in Moorvale—"

"Yes, it should be down from here." Ellí was already across the round chamber. She scuffled in shadow. "Stairs, yes, down. I'm letting go of my spell now, so don't raise your voice too loud."

Edmund picked himself up from the floor. "Should we light the lantern?" His skin began to crawl, but he could not tell why.

Ellí shook her head. "Let's wait until we're well out of sight."

"I don't think anyone down the hill will see a light from here." The feeling came to Edmund that something about Ellí was different—the way she spoke, and something about the way she looked—but it was too dark to see her clearly.

"Very well." Ellí knelt down in shadow—from the sounds of it, just by the top of the stairs. She set down her woven bag and riffled through it.

Edmund felt his way over to her side. "I liked what we did, outside."

"So did I." She drew out an iron lantern.

He set down his own sack on the floor. "I've never done that, before. Kissed someone." He knelt to help her, feeling through her woven bag for the tinder and flint. "Was I . . . um . . . was I any good at it?"

"What?" Her voice sounded breathless. "Oh, yes, wonderful. Give me space to light this."

Edmund looked around him. "It's just like the southeast tower back in Moorvale." His eyes grew accustomed to the deeper dark within the tower. "Lilies, the serpent, even the double spirals."

Ellí turned her back to him. "Just a moment." She sparked the tinder—yellow light flickered under her. "Will you please go down first? I'm scared."

"Of course." Edmund stepped onto the first stair, the Paelandabok under one arm and his other hand on the hilt of his brother's dagger. "I've done this sort of thing before. It's all right to be scared."

She raised the lit lantern behind him. He turned his head and looked up at her with an encouraging smile.

His smile died. All at once, he knew what was wrong—too late, too late.

"I am sorry about this." Both of her eyes were blue. "At least, I think I am."

She kicked him hard. He tumbled down into the dark.