The boy came to his senses
At first he felt dizzy, as if he’d been spinning in circles for fun like a small child. Rapidly the dizziness cleared, and was replaced with a dullish ill feeling deep in his gut. He thought he remembered snatches of a voice, grim and old and tough, saying words that would not stay in his memory, words that could not be repeated, nor written down. The voice echoed inside him, just out of grasp.
Silence.
In that silence he could hear his own breath, rasping. Nothing else.
He looked around. Cold and trembling, he tried to understand what he saw. Caewen and Fleat were slumped. They looked unconscious. Dapplegrim was snoring gently under what seemed to be a net of some silvery material that was woven with ghostly white flowers.
He took a step, and heard an awful sticky sound. When he looked down, he found that the floorboards were covered with drying blood. There were scorch marks around his feet too. It almost looked as if someone had set the floor boards on fire, then put them out again.
The more he looked around the space, the more uneasy he felt.
Something very strange had happened, and he had no memory of what it was.
There was tacky, congealing blood on the floor in a great spreading puddle. The boy then realised–with a shuddering start–that someone had drawn symbols in the blood, marking out three circles around the point where he stood. He thought perhaps he might be able to read them, if they were writing, but they were something else. Not only were they meaningless to his increasingly worried mind, but the symbols made him sick just to look at them. He felt an immediate compulsion to rub his foot over them until they were smeared away to nothing. He did this without even thinking, in a frantic mad urge to destroy the weird, cruel shapes. Seconds afterwards he couldn’t even remember quite how they had looked. One had a hooked shape–but not quite–and one of them had been a whorl with points–but not exactly–he couldn’t have redrawn any of them, even if he’d wanted to. It was as if they existed outside of the boundaries of human thought.
He took a more certain step away from the smeared blood and the charred floorboards. Then another.
He noticed a leather lump, some moderate distance away. Recognising it, he picked it up and looked inside. It was indeed the eyes of the wizard’s shackle. So… someone had taken the eyes of the unmagic beast from him, spilled blood, drawn sorcerous shapes in the blood.
To what end?
None of this made any sense.
He took a few more gingerly trod steps.
There were bodies of strangers lying around the stable floor. They were crumbled up into uncomfortable angles, and pushed off to the walls of the place. Most were dressed in armour. Looking at them, the boy knew–somehow–that these were witch-soldiers sent by Athairdrost. But how did he know this?
He noticed also some wide streaks of blood too. He guessed that other bodies had been dragged out of the room, and then carried off. The whole scene gave the impression of a vicious fight where the winners had taken away their dead.
“Megsty me,” said the boy. He reflected that he needed to learn some stronger curses. It was obvious that before he did anything else, he needed to wake the others. A palpable, awful fear and urgency started to slither its way up into his throat.
The boy stepped around the bloody patterns as best he could, and avoided going near the most hacked-up of the corpses.
Caewen’s sword and scabbard had been left simply leaning next to her against the wall. For all the world, it looking like it had been gently placed there waiting for her to wake. He crouched down and shook her shoulder. Some cut ropes were coiled nearby too. Had someone been trying to tie them up? Or, had they been tied, and were now untied? What had happened?
“Caewen. Caewen.”
She stirred a little.
“Caewen!”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Child? What? Why was I asleep?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that Athairdrost’s soldiers know where we are. We’re in danger.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t understand. But there are dead men all over the place, and they are Athairdrost’s men. Something has happened, and I don’t know what.” He reflected a moment. “We have to go.”
She looked around for the first time. All she said was, “How?” in a puzzled voice.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’m frightened, Caewen. I don’t know what’s happened.”
She put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s alright. We’ll wake the others and go.” Caewen then pushed herself to her feet, wincing. “We’ll plan our next move next.”
While Caewen was waking up Fleat, the boy happened to sink his hands into his pockets. The fingertips of his right hand brushed something, and he drew it out. It was a little piece of paper, neatly folded. On it was a small sprawl of awkwardly written letters. Whoever had written it was not skilled, but had left legible words, nonetheless.
Leave Baght. Go north and east. Seek a stream. South from Murksallow Woods. Find pool of carved rocks. In woods. There is Athairdrost. He is alone.
Fleat woke in a quiet, muddled confusion. He looked around, blinking his big owlish eyes. Caewen did her best to explain, but eventually just trailed off with an apologetic shrug.
Together, they pulled the silvery net off Dapplegrim.
He jumped up at once. “I’ll murder all of you! I will… um, I will…” He snorted. His ears twitched. “What’s going on?”
“None of us seem to know. Do you remember anything?”
A few soft blinks. A snuffle of air through flared nostrils. The skin of his strange skullish horse’s face wrinkled. “Well… I remember armed soldiers bursting in–” He scraped the tip of a hoof against one nearby patch of spilled blood. “Why does it stink of death magic in here? And who killed all these men?”
Caewen could only shrug. She picked up the weird glass bottle, full of churning shadow. “Fetch?” she asked.
Dapplegrim snorted. “Might be better to leave that one in a cage.”
Caewen raised the bottle over her head and threw it against a wall. It shattered into a thousand shards of sparkling glass and fetch fell out. The shadow-creature tumbled, snarling and hissing like a cat that had been tied up in a bag. Caewen opened her mouth to ask the same question, but fetch spat angrily, took three leaping bounds across the floor and burrowed its way into the satchel at Caewen’s belt. An inky splotch of darkness poked its head a fraction above the lip of the bag. “Tsssch. Not coming out.” Then it vanished.
No amount of coaxing or begging brought fetch out of its hiding place. In the end, Csaewen just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess whatever happened to us, happened to him too. Maybe we should take a look around? Search the nearby streets and laneways for clues?”
The boy had re-read the piece of paper several times, before stuffing it away. He then raised his voice. “I don’t think we have time. We have to go. There’s a stream that comes out of a place called Murksallows. The stream will lead to a pool with carvings. That’s where Athairdrost is. We can find him there.”
Caewen’s eyes lit on him with a mingling of suspicion and concern. “And how do you know this?”
“It’s fleeting and vague.” He shook his head. “I… um… I’m not sure how I know it… but I do have some memories. There was a person–many I think–there was a fight. I’m certain we’ll find Athairdrost at the pool of the carven stone.” He paused a moment, saying nothing, and he thought about why he was so certain. Other, dim memories struggled at the back of his mind, like wet flailing bits of fabric in a black wind. “And… and, if not there, then he will be holding court at the Blade Henge. In three days.” He had to catch his breath then. Memories and dim recollections were heaping up into squalid little unclear heaps in his brain. The note had provoked some of it. Some of it was there already, waiting. He proceeded more carefully, measuring out his words. “Athairdrost will be at the pool first. And he will be alone. He might be there now even.”
Caewen and Dapplegrim exchanged questioning looks.
“I know Murksallows Woods,” said Dapplegrim. “I wandered those woods in my youth for a short time. It’s a lonely, eldritch place. No one lives in the forest, and not many live nearby. Only a handful of dusk-woodsmen. I suppose it is the sort of place a sorcerous prince might go to get some alone time.”
“Well,” said Caewen. “Alright. In any instance, we absolutely must leave Baght Town. That much is clear. And it’s clear that whoever has done all this–” she waved a hand at the blood, the huddled corpses, the death. “Well, they could easily have slit our throats. It makes no sense to save us from a trap, only to send us off into a trap. Or at least, no sense that I can see.” She cast a glance around. “We’ve all been through something. And… if there is magic at play–well–then, it does make some sense that the child would remember a little more of events than the rest of us.”
The others were quiet for a moment. At length, Dapplegrim gave out another little snort and said, “Good enough for me.”