“Why does that scare you so much?” Isobelle shot back. “If one of us dares to test the bars of our prison, you threaten her—kill her—as you planned for the women of Aberfarthing, and for Gwen. Why? Why are you so frightened when we go searching for the edges of the cage you put us in?”
The room was perfectly silent, filled with a tension as profound as the one that hushed the crowds when the guards ripped Gwen’s helmet away.
“I’ll tell you why you’re so afraid,” Isobelle said slowly, gathering her dignity about her like a queen. “Gwen was right. Gwen realized long before I did, this truth you’re all so frightened we’ll uncover.”
Isobelle’s heart was pounding, her blood singing in her veins as she drew one more breath.
“The truth is,there is no cage.”
She turned on her heel, vibrating with both fury and a strange, ferocious joy as she stalked toward the door, half certain she’d feel rough hands grab her at any moment.
But no one touched her.
I’m coming, Gwen.
Chapter Forty-Six
It came up from the mine
Gwen closed her eyes and let Achilles carry her through the forest toward the dragon’s lair. The thudding of her horse’s hooves was rhythmic to the point of being hypnotic, and after several rounds of trying to gather her thoughts and corral them, she finally let them go, to run alongside Achilles in his joyous sprint.
Her father had stripped off the armor pieces of his disguise and given them to her, allowing her to sneak out of the dungeons, with his assurance that he could make his own way out. After all, nobody had been told to guardhim.The armor had even allowed her to sneak into the ballroom as several dozen servants scrambled around, trying to reassemble a massive oak table. The diagram the castle staff were following was clearly a poor one, with half the servant battalion waving bits of metal and various pegs while the other half turned the pieces of the table round and round, arguing which way was up.
They never even looked up as Gwen slowly, silently took the ancient dragonslaying spear from its spot over the grand fireplace.
She had retrieved her horse from the stables and had beaten her father back to Ellsdale, galloping straight to the smithy and leaving Achilles stamping and pawing at the ground as she hurried inside.Olivia had brought Gwen’s armor to her father, and if there were any pieces the guards hadn’t ruined, they would be better than the guard’s armor she still wore.
She’d walked in expecting an empty smithy—only to find a broad-shouldered figure standing in the middle of the room, staring at her with wide eyes.
“Theo!” she gasped, trying to catch her breath from her headlong ride and her surprise.
His eyes lit as he saw her. “Gwen! Oh, Gwen, I saw part of your joust last time against Lorenzo, and it wasbrilliant—of course, I didn’t know it was you, but I would’ve just thought it was even more brilliant if I had, and obviously now I—”
“Theo,” Gwen had cut in, aware the boy would go on talking until someone stopped him, like a runaway horse with an infinite amount of road. “I can’t stay. Do you know where my dad put my armor?”
Theo’s face had glowed even more. “Oh, I have it! I fixed the leather straps—they’re a little stiff, definitely not as good as the ones you made, but they’ll work in a pinch, because I figured if they end up letting you finish the tournament and all that, you’d want—” He had turned, retrieving a pile of gleaming metal as he’d spoken.
Gwen’s breath seized in her lungs at the sight of her armor, and when she’d looked up to Theo’s shiny-cheeked face, every misgiving she’d ever had about the boy went flying out the window. “Theo, you’re amazing!” she cried, and leaned up to kiss him on the cheek.
She’d left Theo behind, staring at her red-faced as he watched her ride away. She’d paused only to ask a question of a womanwho’d emerged, yawning, from their neighbor’s cottage—Gwen had recognized her from the jail cell, the night they’d freed the villagers from Aberfarthing.
The gold mine, the woman had said in response to Gwen’s urgent question, her eyes wide as she gazed up at the woman in armor.It came up from the mine.
Achilles’s long, loping gait ate up the distance with ease, despite the added weight of Gwen’s armor and the dragonslaying spear lashed to his saddle.
The moon was gibbous, its light filtering through the thinner trees that arched over the road, casting monstrous shadows onto the silvered dirt. The air streaming past Gwen’s cheeks was cool, growing colder as the day’s warmth slipped away into the night. Before her rose mountains beyond the woods, looming higher every minute she rode, blocking out the stars.
Without warning, Achilles burst out of the trees and onto a village path. Gwen reined him back into a trot, catching her breath... and then he stopped as her grip on the reins went lax.
It wasn’t a village anymore.
Aberfarthing.
Not a single structure was still standing. Charred, blackened beams and pillars stretched up against the stars like the ribs of some long dead monster, piles of ash and partially burned thatch strewn about like decaying patches of flesh and scraps of hair. The stones of the well at the village center were black with soot, and sunken on one side where the fire had been hot enough to melt the stone and send it weeping down toward the water below.
Achilles’s skin twitched and rippled, trying to shake off the invisible weight of the destruction around them, and he walkedwith slow, nervous steps through the ruins. The air smelled of old, rank smoke and something else, something far more disturbing that made Gwen’s stomach roil with nausea. Not everyone had made it out of the village alive. If she lingered here long enough to sift through the rubble, how many charred bodies would she find buried beneath the layers of ash and ruin?
Fury rose within her, so quick and fierce Gwen’s eyes watered with the intensity of it. If Whimsitt had spared even one man to go check on the women’s claims that a dragon had attacked their home, the truth would have been undeniable. No one who witnessed this scene could have concluded that bandits were responsible, or some careless youngster mishandling a torch. Not even the lord of Darkhaven could dismiss this attack as simply imagined by a group of women, lying for attention and hysterical with superstition.
