“What happened?” I query when I finally have the ability to speak.
“There was something outside, something which wasn’t you,” Hazel says, pulling back and studying my face. “Then I met the owners of this place.” She nods towards the trap door where I see, and unfortunately growl at, a witch and warlock who are staring at me.
“My name is John,” the warlock says. “This is my wife, Joan.” The witch does a small curtsey. “We are privileged to have you in our home.”
“I doubt it,” I growl. “Not if I bring a Dunnie to your door.”
The warlock blanches. “A Dunnie?”
“What’s a Dunnie?” Hazel queries.
“The risen dead,” the witch whispers, looking at her husband, who pulls her close.
Hazel searches my face.
“The Dunnie were once Brag, but they made a pact with the Beneath to gain power and glory. They did not fulfil their side of the bargain, and they were twisted, turned into the living dead,” I explain. “I thought they were all destroyed during the wars for the Night Lands.”
“They are attracted by untimely death.” John speaks up as he helps Joan up and closes the trap door behind him. “I don’t know what it is doing here. There have been no recent deaths of any sort.”
“They can also be set up on a path of destruction,” I reply. “You were lucky.”
“I fought in the Night Lands,” John says.
I pull Hazel away from him.
“The Faerie didn’t just take monsters to do their dirty work,” John says, moving over to the fire as Joan picks up Hazel’s dress and shakes it out, water streaming from it. “They used us too.”
“I saw no warlocks.”
“You wouldn’t. We were sent, wave after wave, to be slaughtered,” John says, swinging a black kettle over the fire and stoking it up. “That’s how I know what a Dunnie is. I saw plenty on the battlefield.”
He turns to face me, and I tuck Hazel behind my back.
“I know what they did to you and the others. You were never meant to see what they did to us,” John says.
I growl deep in my throat. First the Dunnie. Now this.
There is a hand on my arm. It grips at me. It grounds me.
“John and Joan saved me,” Hazel says quietly. “They saved me from having to use the sword.”
I am caught in the beauty of her eyes. They draw me to a good place. A place I once inhabited before all the war.
“Ah, yes,” Joan says as she hangs Hazel’s dress over a rack, which she pulls up to the ceiling. “The sword.”
“Joan also fought,” Hazel says quietly. “She was a weapons maker too.”
“Come,” Joan says. “Sit your mate by the fire before she catches cold.”
She pulls a couple of chairs away from the table and places them on either side of the fire. Hazel sinks into one, and Joanputs a brightly coloured blanket around her. I want to growl again as I have blankets in my saddle bags, but also I want Hazel to be warm.
She looks warm.
“Sit, sit,” John says.
I sit, eyeing the witch and warlock warily.
“It is a formidable weapon,” Joan says as she watches John make a pot of tea. “The sword you carry. How did you come by it?”
