hand and held it there. She did not dismount. Lord Golden looked tired and sickened, but he dismounted alongside me. Together we moved among the dead, inspecting them. They were all young men, just at the age to be caught up in such madness. Yesterday afternoon, they had leapt onto their horses and ridden off to kill some Piebalds. Yesterday evening, they had died. Lying there, they did not look cruel or vicious or even stupid. Only dead.
‘There were archers in those trees,’ I decided. ‘And they were waiting here. I think the Prince’s party rode through, relying on folk that already were in position here to protect them.’ I had found but one broken arrow, cast aside. The others had been frugally and coolly recovered from the bodies.
‘That is not the mark of an arrow.’ Lord Golden pointed out a body that lay apart from the others. There were deep puncture wounds in his throat. Powerful clawed hind legs had disembowelled him. His guts buzzed and clustering flies covered the look of horror in his eyes.
‘Look at the dogs. Cats attacked them as well. All the Piebalds rounded and stood together here, and killed those who followed.’
‘And then they rode on.’
‘Yes.’ Had the Prince’s cat killed this man? Had their minds been joined as the cat killed?
‘How many do you think we follow now?’
Laurel had ridden a little way ahead. I suspected she did so to be away from the bloating bodies as much as to study the trail. I didn’t blame her. Now she called back in a low voice, ‘I make it at least eight that we follow now.’
‘And follow we must,’ Lord Golden said. ‘Immediately.’
Laurel nodded. ‘There will be others from the village riding out by now, wondering why these men have not returned. When they find these bodies, their fury will drive them mad. The Prince must be extracted before these two groups clash.’
Her words made it sound so simple. I went back to Myblack, who annoyed me by sidling away twice before I could catch her reins. She wanted schooling but now was not the time for it. I reminded myself that blood will unnerve the calmest animal, and that patience with her now would pay great dividends later. ‘A different rider would give you a fist between the ears for that,’ I told her mildly after I was mounted.
Her shiver of apprehension surprised me. Evidently she was more aware of me than I supposed. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t do things like that,’ I reassured her. Horselike, she ignored my calming remark. Thunder rolled again in the distance and she laid her ears back flat.
I think it bothered all of us to ride away and leave those bodies swelling in the heat. Realistically, it was the wise thing to do. Their fellows would find them soon enough, and to them should fall the burying. The delay it would cause them would work to our good.
Wise or not, it felt wrong.
The tracks we followed now were the deep cuts of hard-ridden horses. The soil under the forest roof was moister and held the trail better. At first, they had ridden for distance and speed, and a child could have followed their marks. But after a time, the trail descended into a ravine and followed a twisting stream. I rode with my eyes on the trees overhead, trusting Myblack to follow Malta’s lead as I watched for possible ambush. An unspoken concern occupied my mind. The Piebalds the Prince rode with seemed very organized, almost to a military level. This was the second group of men who had waited for the Prince, and then ridden on with him. At least one member of the party had not hesitated to sacrifice his life for the others, nor had they scrupled at slaughtering all those who followed them. Their readiness and ruthlessness bespoke a great determination to keep the Prince and bear him on to whatever destination they had in mind. Retrieving him was very likely beyond our abilities, yet I could discover no alternatives save to follow them. Sending Laurel back to Buckkeep to fetch the guard was not feasible. By the time she returned, it would be too late. We would lose not only time, but the secrecy of our mission.
The ravine widened and became a narrow valley. Our quarry left the stream. Before we departed it, we paused briefly to refill waterskins and share out a bit of the Fool’s purloined bread and some apples. I bought a bit of Myblack’s favour with the apple core. Then we were up and off again. The long afternoon wore on. None of us had spoken much. There was little to say unless we worried out loud. Danger rode behind us as well. In either direction we were outnumbered, and I badly missed my wolf at my side.
The trail left the valley floor and wound up into the hills. The trees thinned and the terrain became rocky. The hard earth made tracking more difficult, and we went more slowly. We passed the stony foundations of a small village, long abandoned. We rode past odd hummocky formations that jutted from the boulder-strewn hillside. Lord Golden saw me looking at them and said quietly, ‘Graves.’
‘Too big,’ I protested.
‘Not for those folk. They built stone chambers to hold their dead, and often entire families were interred in them as they died.’
I looked curiously back at them. Tall dead grass waved on the mounds. If there was stone beneath that sod, it was well covered. ‘How do you know such things?’ I demanded of him.
He didn’t meet my eyes. ‘I just do, Badgerlock. Put it down to the advantages of an aristocratic education.’
‘I’ve heard tales of these sorts of places,’ Laurel put in, her voice hushed. ‘They say tall thin ghosts rise from those mounds sometimes, to capture straying children and…Oh, Eda save us. Look. The standing stone from the same tales.’
I lifted my eyes to follow her pointing finger. A shiver walked up my back.
Black and gleaming, the stone stood twice as tall as a man did. Silver veined it. No moss clung to it. The inland breezes had been kinder to it than the salt-heavy storm winds that had weathered the Witness Stones near Buckkeep. At this distance, I could not see what signs were carved into its sides, but I knew they would be there. This stone pillar was kin to the Witness Stone and to the black pillar that had once transported me to the Elderling City. I stared at it, and knew it had been cut from the same quarry that had birthed Verity’s dragon. Had magic or muscle borne it so far from that place to this?
‘Do the graves go with the stone?’ I asked Lord Golden.
‘Things that are next to each other are not always related to one another,’ he observed smoothly, and I knew he evaded my question. I turned slightly in the saddle to ask Laurel, ‘What does the legend say about the stone?’
She shrugged one shoulder and smiled, but I think the intensity of my question made her uneasy. ‘There are lots of tales, but most have the same spine.’ She drew a breath. ‘A straying child or an idle shepherd or lovers who have run away from forbidding parents come to the mounds. In most tales they sit down beside them to rest, or to find a bit of shade on a hot day. Then the ghosts rise from the mounds, and lead them to the standing stone. And they follow the ghost inside, to a different world. Some say they never come back. Some say they come back aged and old after being gone but a night, but others say the opposite: that a hundred years later, the lovers came back, hand in hand, as young as ever, to find their quarrelling parents long dead and that they are free to wed.’
I had my own opinion of such tales, but did not voice them. Once I had stepped through such a pillar, to find myself in a distant dead city. Once the black stone walls of that long-dead city had spoken to me, and the city had sprung to life around me. Monoliths and cities of black stone were the work of the Elderlings, long perished from the world. I had believed the Elderlings had been denizens of a far realm, deep in the mountains behind Kettricken’s
