Days Of Light And Shadow (25 page)

“Mistress Sophelia?” Rial was still worried, though she had no reason to be. Sophelia understood everything that was happening as she saw the guards removing a shining steel cuirass and green cloak from a trunk on the back of the pack horse. She knew why they had stopped. Sophelia hushed the girl quietly.

The Lord of Drake had finally returned home. The people had to know. But did Iros know? She looked in to his eyes, and saw a frightening deadness in them. The reaper had claimed a part of his soul early.

And yet she knew he would do his duty. He looked at the city, his dead eyes filled with nothing, and she saw duty. In the hard line of his jaw, the purposeful set of his shoulders, the rigid posture, she saw duty. A part of Iros the man might be dead. Murdered by her foul cousin. But the Lord of Drake still lived.

It did not bode well for a marriage, but maybe it did for a peace. Yet even that was a lie. Iros had told her on that first day, before the healers had dragged him away, of what he had heard in the Royal Chamber. She hadn’t believed him, even though she’d told her father. She hadn’t wanted to. But after weeks in the lumbering wagons, travelling through the lands that her cousin’s soldiers had destroyed, she knew the truth. Her cousin was evil. He was never of House Vora. And he had sold her in to an unworthy marriage only to save his neck. Not for peace. He’d never had any intention of honouring the peace. To him she was even less than a bartering chip. She was simply something he could throw away when he needed to.

And still there was nothing she could do.

Sophelia dried her eyes, there was no point in tears when everything she could fear had already happened. She straightened her clothes, took a deep breath, and prepared to be driven into her new home.

The Lady Sophelia of Drake was home.

Chapter Thirty Nine.

Sophelia entered the castle nervously, not knowing what to expect.

Nothing about this land had been as she’d imagined it. And everything about the town and especially Castle Drake had surprised her thus far.

Mostly it was for its scale. Everything was too big. Far too big. This was supposed to be a town or at best a small city and yet in sheer size she thought, it could rival Leafshade as it spread itself out over the gently sloping hill. It sprawled at least a league in all directions, and the buildings were larger and closer together. There weren’t vast swathes of grass and gardens separating them.

The shops and smithies and other buildings were all oversized. All were two and three stories in height, sprawled out for surprising lengths along the streets, and made of huge stone blocks that the masons must have spent years chipping to shape. The houses behind them, those few that she could see, were the same as well. Why so big? Why did everything have to be so massive? Or so crude?

The streets were actual streets, wide and straight, but never cared for. These were not the elegant stone paths of Leafshade running through gentle green lawns, they were broad tracks of hard baked earth that ran all the way up and across the long hill, the shops lining them on both sides. And they were impossibly straight, set out by men with rocks in their hearts, not artists.

The whole town was like that. Too many straight lines and right angles, too many dark stone walls, and too much dust. It seemed that every horse and wagon that walked down the clay streets kicked a little more of it up into the air, and the breeze then carried it away to settle on a house or building. There was a layer of fine dust over everything. Even over the scorch marks that adorned far too many of these ugly buildings.

The scorch marks of course were another surprise. A bad one. As just like the blackened fields and burnt out towns they’d passed through on their journey, they proved the lies of her cousin and his black blooded advisor. The watchmen had struck deep into the southern lands of Irothia. This was never the work of watchmen defending Elaris.

Worse though had been the large piles of black armour that she had seen thrown against walls along the streets as they’d ridden in. The armour of the Royal Watch. Her people. Silver chain, blackened with pitch. They had come here at the direction of the high lord. They had fought their way into the city and they had died. And too many parents would still be sitting in their homes, impatiently awaiting the return of their sons and daughters, worrying that they might never step through their front door.

She wondered what had become of the wearers. Had they been buried or burned? Or had they just been left somewhere for the birds to feed on? Like all the farmers and their families that they had killed. Had the proper blessings been said?

Each time they had passed another pile of elven armour she’d turned her eyes away, not wanting to see. But there were so many.

And when they’d passed by the cemetery, her heart had almost stopped beating. So many graves. So many fresh graves, the earth newly dug, the headstones clean and flowers planted. How could there be so many? But there were. And there were still more coming. Even as they’d ridden past, a dozen funerals at least had been underway, the priests of the various faiths standing there, intoning from their sacred ritual books, families gathered around, their faces filled with grief.

So much death.

This place was bad enough already. A town as large as a city, but built for giants not civilised people. Built for big dwarves that lived above ground rather than buried in it. It didn’t need war and death as well.

Then they had come across the castle.

Castle Drake, sitting in the centre of the town, cresting the hill like a sleeping dragon of grey stone and overlooking all. If the other buildings were big and solid, it was surely a thousand times more so. The castle was massive, and nothing at all as the images of castles had been in the storybooks her mother had read to her as a child. They were white with huge towers stretching for the skies, and pennants flying from all the turrets and rooftops. This was something else.

It was a fortress maybe. Circled by a moat, an actual moat large enough that a boat could have rowed on it, the huge stone walls standing at least twenty feet tall had intimidated them as they’d approached, as they were meant to. The crenulations atop them from which guards stood watching them as they’d approached, told her that they were intended to be defensive. The snouts of cannon peeking out from between many of the crenulations had suggested that they could be truly deadly.

Sophelia had wondered briefly how many of her people had died trying to attack the castle, and shuddered a little at the thought. Finell might be wrong about a great many things, but he was right in at least one. The humans were a warrior people. Their armies had never stood a chance.

They’d passed over the drawbridge and through the iron portcullis to reach the castle, guards standing at attention as they did, and it was only then that she’d finally seen the fortress itself. It had taken her breath away with its sheer scale.

The castle was nowhere near as tall as she’d imagined, standing only four stories high and having no towers. But it sprawled hundreds of paces to both sides of them. Hundreds of paces of imposing stone walls, iron grated squared off windows, and of course, more battlements. Endless battlements lining the roof and the balconies. Anyone making it in through the outer wall she knew, would be trapped in the staggeringly large courtyard, and arrows fired down upon them from above would soon have found their throats. If the cannon didn’t get them first.

To an elf this place was a nightmare, but to the soldiers who had brought them here and to Iros himself, this was home. She had seen the smiles on their faces. Even on his. She had tried to find one for herself for the end of the journey, it was only politic, but as the soldiers had escorted them in through the massive iron and oak doors leading to the great hall, it hadn’t come.

Instead as she stood there facing the staff she had to settle instead for trying to look calm and composed, even though she was anything but.

The staff and by the looks of things many of the nobles of the realm, had gathered in the great hall to welcome their lord home, and when Sophelia walked in through the huge doors a few steps behind her husband, she was surprised by how many there were. But more than that she was surprised by the apprehension she could see in their eyes. Maybe they were even a little fearful.

But they had reason to be. From what she had been told Iros had been away for many years, and after the deaths of his entire family, they surely didn’t know what to expect from him. He had after all been a boy when he had left, and now in the wake of a brutal war, they needed a man. They needed someone to tell them that things were going to come right. She prayed to the Mother that he could be that man. That he could be their lord of Drake in truth.

Then they started clapping, applauding him simply for returning home, for standing in front of them, and the thunder of their welcome gave her a chance to catch her breath. To look around.

Sophelia stood there and stared for a heartbeat or two, taking in the people, and the hall itself, staggered by its sheer scale. The great hall was an impossibly large open area that could rival the Royal Chamber for size if not beauty, and it impressed Sophelia for that at least.

She had heard the word castle from long before she had even seen Iros, and wondered at it. But she had also heard the phrase farmer lord bandied around among the high born, and she had always imagined that his home would be little more than a run down fort, ruled over by farmers with grand ideas. This wasn’t that. It was something far more impressive. And at the very least it spoke of wealth. Wealth perhaps even to rival that of the seven great houses. He had no house but still Iros was not from such humble origins as he’d intimated. Perhaps that had just been the envoy speaking.

Sophelia still couldn’t quite believe that she was standing in a building so vast. That there could be such a structure. But she was. The stone block walls had towered above her head, almost like small mountains as she’d approached, and now being inside the hall it felt like being inside a mine. As though there was a mountain above her head. And the huge beams above them, entire trees, massive trees had been shaped into beams just to support the unimaginable weight of stone hanging overhead.

The castle was a titan of stone and oak. It was vast and crude, roughly built and seemingly unfinished. And yet there were also touches of an artist’s thought in it. In the great hall at least, which was all that she’d seen of the castle thus far.

The front of the great hall extended forwards of the castle, with a balcony on top of it. But until she’d entered the hall she would never have imagined that the balcony’s floor was made of glass. Poor glass, thick glass that people could stand on, but still glass to let the light in from above her head and fill the room. More light came from the oil lamps above their heads. Wagon wheels hanging on chains set into the ceiling had dozens of oil lamps on them, imparting a soft yellow glow to the room. And the huge fireplaces, half a dozen of them, all of them burning furiously, added to the effect and took away the chill of the stone. Without them she guessed, it would be very cold inside, even on a warm summer’s day.

Still the thing that stayed most with her of the room as she stood there staring, waiting for the applause to die down, was its size. The great hall could hold hundreds, and it seemed that it was. The hall was full.

When the applause began to quieten she knew that the time had come to stand with her husband before the people who called this monolith home. It seemed an impossible task. So many people, so many eyes, all staring first at their lord in his finery, glad to have him home, but then one by one turning to her. They saw an elf. They saw her blue hair and pointed ears. They saw a member of House Vora. And she was sure that they saw an enemy.

Her feet were suddenly frozen to the floor.

Iros held up his hand for quiet, and soon he had it. The staff stopped applauding and waited for their lord to address them. They seemed restless as they waited for Iros to speak, unsure of themselves and unsure of her. Sophelia was nervous too as she faced them, wondering what to expect, and desperately trying to find the strength to walk those last few steps to stand beside her husband as she needed to.

These were people who had just been at war with hers. Their town had been attacked, their people killed, hundreds if not thousands of their loved ones were never to return home again, and none of them she knew, had done anything to deserve it. Greenlands was a farming town, a rural province. Its people cared nothing for politics, and they weren’t brigands. They were farmers. They had reason to be angry. She was angry.

Riding through the town, seeing all those people, all those faces staring at her, had been beyond hard. It had been soul destroying. And all of the faces they’d ridden past had seemed to accuse her of causing their loss. Blackened and broken buildings, fire could destroy so much, even stone. Dark stains in the dirt streets. Women crying, children crying, even men in tears. At least the bodies were gone, but the memories lingered and the pain endured. And it had shone in the faces of the towns people. And the faces of the staff in front of her, they were the same faces.

Riding through Greenlands, trying so desperately to maintain her composure, that had surely been the toughest journey she had ever made. Yet suddenly she had to make a worse one. To walk the few steps to stand in respectful silence beside her husband as he introduced her. And she couldn’t do it. Her feet refused to move. Yet somehow she did it. She did it because Iros helped her. He turned around when he realised that she wasn’t beside him, held out an arm for her, and smiled politely, and somehow she took it.

Then, her hand in his, all she had to do was stand beside him, facing all those angry eyes and pray to the Mother that he knew what to say.

It took everything she had to stand tall and dignified in the hall beside Iros. Her two attendants were luckier as they remained outside in the wagon, where she too would far rather have been. But Sophelia knew she had only one ally in this terrible place, her husband. And Iros would protect her. She knew that too. His hand in hers told her that truth.

Not for love. Not for the rule of law. Not even out of respect for her feelings or to give her comfort. But purely out of a sense of what was right and wrong. What had to be done. He was a lord, he had responsibilities, and though many others would have been crushed by what had happened to him, he stood tall. He stood somehow like a giant in that room.