The Skeleth

Chapter 32

Edmund braced himself against the wall of the tomb. He blinked in the light. "How did you find me?"

Katherine had never looked so perfectly lovely. "When I saw you lying there, you had your eyes closed, and I thought . . ." She could not finish.

Geoffrey held the torch on the stairs behind her. He glared at Edmund, his freckles bunched in a frown. "You really are stupid sometimes, you know that?"

"Geoffrey, don't say such a thing." Katherine propped Edmund up. "He's suffered."

"Suffered how?" Geoffrey ducked into the tomb. "By getting stuck here in the dark?"

"Can't you feel it?"

Geoffrey came near. His look of reproach faded away. He stared down at the fissure in the floor.

Edmund found himself unharmed in body, save for the scratches on his hands. "Geoffrey's right—I have been stupid. We have much to do."

"We caught that wizard girl sneaking back through the village." Geoffrey drew away from the fissure. "She told us where you were and what she did to you—after a bit of prodding, of course."

Edmund blinked in surprise. "You found her?"

"We did, but she got away again, right up into the clouds," said Geoffrey. "I don't want to be the one to tell old Robert Windlee that all his chickens are dead."

"The sentries were too busy packing for the march to spot us sneaking in." Katherine pulled back her hair and jammed it under her collar. She drew up her hood over her head. "There—do I look like a boy?"

Edmund smiled. "No." He took in the tomb around him, seeing it in the light for the very first time. It had the same shape as the tomb under the old keep on Wishing Hill, but blank and unfinished, as though the work of preparation for the royal burials had never been completed.

"Let's go," said Katherine. "We've got to get back to the village and warn everyone that there's an army on the way."

Edmund stepped over to the corner of the tomb. "Just a moment." He knelt beside a pile of stony slabs. "There might be something to learn here."

"I can't believe it," said Geoffrey. "He's been trapped in here all this time, and now he wants to learn about the place."

"I couldn't tell what these were in the dark." Edmund blew the dust from the slabs. "Tablets, made of clay." They were covered in close, angular writing, the letters looking odd because of the surface on which they had been written, but they were still ones he knew.

Katherine slipped over to the open door. "Edmund, there's an army outside, and they're getting ready to march."

"I'll be quick." Edmund beckoned to his brother. "Bring the light over here."

Geoffrey came in again, though with an air of great reluctance. He held the torch above the tablet.

"This is written in Dhanic." Edmund traced a finger on the words. "It reads: Sisters, O my sisters, forgive me. My heart is broken, for I have broken faith with you. My king, my love, my husband is gone, taken, one of them. Sisters, O my sisters, forgive me, for I loved him. He rode with his army to join the Skeleth, and the Skeleth consumed them all."

The trumpet call, far away upstairs, seemed somehow mournful to Edmund's ears, almost as though it sounded in answer to the words he read.

"I think that's a call to arms," said Katherine. "Edmund, hurry."

Edmund shoved the first tablet aside and glanced at the one beneath. "The Skeleth are man and monster both." He squinted; Geoffrey had moved the light away. "To kill it by sword kills only the man, leaving the monster free to enslave the victor instead. O my sisters, to defeat these creatures, you must not fight them. To kill them is to die. To fight them is to fail."

"Come on, Edmund!" Geoffrey hissed from the doorway. "I hear voices up there!"

Edmund moved the tablet. The one beneath was blank.

"Edmund!"

Edmund stooped to pick up his sack and packed the Paelandabok inside. He took one look back at the fissure in the floor, then followed his brother up the stairs.

Katherine stood by the fallen tower doors, peering out and down the hill. "We'll need to get home well before the army if we're going to give a swift-enough warning. Let's steal some horses and slip out in the muddle. Follow my lead—Geoffrey, douse that torch."

Edmund slipped up beside her and looked out. The stars had spun. The cold had come down almost to a frost, colder still with the wind. "At least it's still night."

"You mean it's night again," said Katherine. "You were missing for a whole day."

They waited, knelt in the shadow of the doorway, for some clear break in the swarming mass of the army. In the hanging gloom, though, they found no way to tell whether anyone in the camps that ringed the tower hill happened to be looking their way. All they could be sure about was that none of the men around them were sleeping. Edmund had nearly come to the point of suggesting that they wait for the army to march away when a light and a shout drew everyone's attention to the place where the camp joined the road.

"Now." Katherine ducked out, stepping with balanced grace over the remains of the door. Edmund followed with Geoffrey at his heels, and before he even had time to fear an alarm, he found himself amongst a milling crowd of eager men who paid him no mind at all, for they all craned their necks to watch the small clump of riders on the road. They crowded up from the dark, trampling down the moorspike around the sentry fires. Someone barked an order, and a rough ring of torches formed to light a council of war.

"My lords, say that we wait no longer!" Hunwald of the Hundreds stepped into the light. "Say that soon we ride!"

Sir Wulfric of Olingham raised a hand for silence. "Men of Wolland, men of Tand and Overstoke, men of the Uxingham Hundreds. I ask you do not shout, do not clash your shields, but bid your squires set out tack and saddle and put oiled edges to your swords. Look you all to horse and armor, and to the days to come as the days that will bring you glory to last you lifelong." It would have been too much to ask for the army not to raise a shout at this, but they held it as low as they could.

"Prepare to march." Lord Wolland rode in amongst the crowd. "By the solstice we will be masters of the north."

As soon as Edmund saw the horse Sir Wulfric rode, he looked at Katherine. All she did was hide her face.

Indigo snorted and stamped under Wulfric's saddle. His ears shot up, and he looked about him as though straining to find something he could not see or hear. Katherine mouthed his name in silence and turned away.

"Knights." Geoffrey's eyes went wide in fear. "Knights in armor. Look at them all! No one can stop an army of charging knights! What are we going to do?"

Edmund found himself the least stunned and frightened of the three. "Let's start fretting once we're out of here." He listened for where the sounds of neighs and whinnies were loudest, and started off across the road, through the very heart of the enemy camp.

"Cold one, hey?" Someone slapped his shoulder in passing. "Don't worry, lad, we're on our way soon."

"Mm." Edmund quickened his pace, leading Katherine and Geoffrey on a wide circle through the tents, avoiding torch and firelight. They passed in between stacked bundles of supplies and a pair of grooms doing their best to get all the tack straightened out in the dark. The sentry fires stank of peat—smoke loomed everywhere.

A young knight in chain armor shouldered Edmund aside without seeming to see him, deep in argument with a horse-groom more than twice his age. "It doesn't seem a proper war to me." The knight reached for the reins of the very horse Edmund was about to steal. Edmund ducked back around the tent, his heart in his mouth.

"It never does, once you're in 'em, sir knight, saving your pardon." The groom heaved up a saddle onto the back of the horse. "War's all tricks, don't let no one tell you different. Nothing in this world worse than a stand-up fight. You could die that way!"

The young knight stood waiting, hand to the hilt of his sword. "But what glory is there in what we are about to do? What honor?"

The groom buckled the girth beneath the saddle. "Your pardon, sir knight, but is that why you came on this little trip? Glory and honor?"

The dark swallowed the long pause that followed. "I'm a third son. I want land."

"And you'll get it." The groom led the horse out of the paddock and handed the reins to the knight. "So will I, in my more humble way. Now, there's a bit of trouble there, which I hope you'll see. You seek to have a manor, sir knight, but all the manors on the west side of the Tamber already have knights to hold them. Your common servant might look for a good plot of land for his reward, but of course all the good farmland's already under another man's plow. Me, I've always wanted to be a baker, but I reckon all the villages over there already have bakers. You understand?"

Edmund felt the blood rush inward from his skin, chilling him sick. He took a wild guess at another place where he might find ready horses, and led Katherine and Geoffrey away from the two men. He felt thankful that Katherine had not brought her sword. From the look on her face, she might have been tempted to use it.

"We have to stop them." Geoffrey's skin had gone pallid white between his freckles. "We have to stop them! They're going to—"

Katherine silenced him with a hard grip on the shoulder. She mouthed two words: "We will."

A ring of tents lay struck next to the post-and-rope corral, far to the eastern edge of the camp. Edmund took a careful look around him as he approached and found much less activity on that side. The men had started bunching toward the west, eager for the signal to march, but leaving the trailing eastern side poorly guarded.

Katherine drew her hood down over her face, then crept to the edge of one of the two rope corrals. She leaned against a post and looked about her. Edmund did the same—no one seemed to be paying them any notice. They leapt the rope together.

"Here, girl." Katherine got a cart horse in hand without trouble, then found another for Edmund and Geoffrey to share. She slipped the rope on the far side of the corral and led them east, aiming for a gap in the sentry fires. Prickles ran up Edmund's neck, one after the next.

"Once we're free of the camp, we'll loop around cross-country and head for the bridge." Katherine held the leads of both horses. "It will be a dangerous run, but if we can get ahead of the army, we'll have time to prepare."

"You there—you three!" A voice shouted. "Get over here. We want some help with these tents!"

Katherine glanced at Edmund, who nearly panicked before he found a reply: "Er . . . got to help with grooming. Lord Overstoke wants us."

The man peered at them—Edmund felt Katherine tensing up at his side—but then he pointed. "Lord Overstoke's tent's over that way."

"Is it? Thanks. Lost my bearings in all the excitement." Edmund swung around, leading Katherine and Geoffrey off in the direction the man had shown, but then ducked behind a half-struck tent and resumed his original course. The hollow rose and roughened ahead; the shadowed horses thinned out around them as they walked, and so did the voices of men making their preparations. They held their breaths as they passed the remains of a sentry fire, but nothing happened. They walked on into the utter dark of the moors without a challenge.

"You must wake the village, when we reach it." Katherine helped Edmund onto one of the horses, and then raised Geoffrey up to sit behind him. "Wake everyone, get them armed and ready, but whatever you do, don't let anyone ring the village bell."

"What are we going to do?" Geoffrey looked ready to cry. "They're an army, hundreds of knights—what are we going to do?"

Katherine grabbed her horse's mane and leapt astride. "We are going to war."