He turned to the window once more, ripping down the long, heavy drape in two swift pulls, working by feel alone as the room was completely black now. Iris coughed and choked in the darkness; Padraig’s own eyesran with tears.
He wrapped his hand in one end of the drapery and punched through the thick glazing. A breeze of hot air whooshed past his face as he swept at the sides of the frame, clearing away the jagged shards. He stuck his head out into the cold night and shouted with surprised relief—the narrow window was over the curtain wall, not three stories above the bailey as he’d feared, but perhaps only twelve feet above the stone wall walk. The fallen snow flickered against the reflected glow of the burning keep against the backdrop of night.
“Padraig?” Iris choked.
He ducked back inside, and where the room had before been black, a terrible heat now painted the absence of color, as if hell itself had bloomed around them. Padraig felt Iris grasping for him in their shared blindness. They had perhaps only moments left before the flames reached them.
“It’s the wall beneath you,” he rasped, his throat parched and raw as he looped the length of drapery around her back and beneath her arms. “Nae far. Bend your knees and roll when you drop.” Padraig turned her toward the window and lifted her to the sill, helped her to fit her legs through the opening. He held the ends of the drape in one of his hands and Iris’s wrist in the other while she slid through, the little sounds of scraping glass on stone beneath her causing him to wince. “Did you hear? Roll.”
“Yes,” she choked. “Don’t leave me, Padraig.”
“Get far out of the way. Far as you can,” he said as he let her slide out further, stretching his arms, his back to their limits to retain his hold on her for as long as he could. He took firm hold of the ends of the drapery and raised up onhis toes. “Go!”
Padraig thought he had never known such fear in his life as when he felt Iris’s sliding reverberate through the thick material, and then her short scream cut through the smoke boiling around him out the window. He thought he heard the soft, crumpling thud of her landing, but he couldn’t see the wall any more for the heavy billows climbing the keep from the lower levels. He let loose of the limp drapery and it was swallowed up by the black smoke.
“Stay back,” he choked as he gained the window ledge. He turned onto his stomach and slid over the edge, his sweaty, sooty fingers already slipping, the flesh of his palms scraping away as he fell freeof the window.
He’d tried to keep his legs loose as he fell, so whether he had turned in the billowing smoke or instinctively reached out with his feet to meet solid ground, the end result was a sharp pain in his lower left leg before he fell onto his side on the stones with a cry.
But there was no time to concern himself with so slight an injury. Iris was at his shoulder then, her hands brushing over him. Iris, alive and speaking to him, urging him to his feet.
“Are you all right?” she asked as he pulled her aright. Her legs were still weak, for she sagged against him.
“Fine,” he said, turning to her and gathering her against him, wrapping both arms so completely around her shoulders that she was truly enveloped by his embrace. He would never let her go, he thought. But they both flinched and ducked as a pair of flaming window frames plummeted from the uppermost floor with a terrible explosion of glass and smoke.
“Let’s get away from here,” Padraig said and, limping, half-carried her to the edge of the wall.
A large crowd of people were looking up at the façade of Darlyrede House, the bright light flickering over them, indicating to Padraig that the fire was so much thicker on the front of the hold. Their faces were solemn, round with horror as they watched—soldier, servant, nobility alike. Padraig waved an arm and shouted.
“Lucan!”
It was Rolf, though, who heard Padraig and turned his head to notice them standing on the high wall, Rolf who grabbed the arm of Ulric. They ran to a tall ladder lying in the trampled snow behind the crowd and trotted to the base of the wall where they leaned it against the stones.
Iris reached the ground in moments, Lucan arriving in time to receive her. It took Padraig a bit longer, for while he knew the shock had taken much of the pain of his injured leg, putting any weight at all upon it was akin to torture.
He and Iris, Lucan, Rolf, and Ulric joined the silent crowd watching Darlyrede House burn, while liberated animals roamed the lawn in confused freedom. Marta cried silent tears, wiping at her face occasionally with her apron. Peter and Rynn clungto each other.
Iris broke the solemn silence with a wary question. “Where isLord Hargrave?”
Padraig looked to Rolf, who only shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line within the dark frame of his beard.
* * * *
Searrach staggered through the blazing pillars of the great hall from the eastern corridor, the grand space so bright, so hot now with flames. The rippling, hungry sheets of fire crawled across the ceiling, turning the cavernous room into a chamber of hell, its roar that of a multitude of insatiable demons released from the very walls of Darlyrede House by the flames and now crying out fortheir victims.
Even so, she heard the weak yelp coming from the rear of the hall, from the floor before which the lord’s dais now crackled with wicked fire, resembling some hellish altar. She walked toward the sound and soon saw Vaughn Hargrave lying amid the wreckage of the flight of people, the broken table legs and planks of benches. His torso was twisted, his legs lying oddly thin and awkward on the stones, as if he’d dragged them behind him. He was bloodied and black with soot, his usually coiffed hair falling over the side of his face, revealing the bald spot Searrach had neverknown existed.
He looked old. But he was old, she supposed. He only looked his age, now—his skin sagged on his face, his eyes nestled in a pool of recently acquired wrinkles, deepened by soot.
He saw her, and his bloodshot eyes widened. “Searrach. Searrach, my dear girl,” he gasped. “Help me. My back—”
Searrach only stared at him andshook her head.
“Please,” he sobbed in his warbly, old man’s voice.
She was fascinated by what he had become, this man who had hurt her, tortured her so. He was just a man now. No demon, as she’d thought. He’d been able to hurt her because she had offered herself up to his depravity in vain hopes of a future. But the only future he had brought her to was a painful death in this strange land. She walked toward him, wanting to better see the agony on his face.
“Please,” he repeated as she drew near. “We can escape this together, you and I.”
