The sundered seal

Chapter Six: The Curse Spreads Through the Villages

By midday, the road to Dawnhollow was full of the living.

They came in twos and threes at first, then in dozens, then in whole families with their possessions piled on carts or bundled on their backs. Farmers from the Fenwick holdings, weavers from the river hamlets, a travelling tinker with his pots clanking, and a gaggle of children from a village called Thornby who had walked all night without a single adult to guide them. They arrived at the northern gate with torn clothes and hollow eyes, and the watchmen, who had braced themselves for another assault, found themselves instead opening the gates to a procession of the exhausted.

"Let them through," Brenna Voss ordered hoarsely. "Every one of them. Check for wounds, and send anyone bitten or scratched to the Hall of Rank. Kaelen will see them there."

Kaelen was already seeing them. He had not slept, and he had barely eaten, and he had long since stopped trying to measure how much of his strength remained. He sat on an upturned crate in the great circular chamber where Dawnhollow's children had once been ranked, and one by one the wounded were brought before him.

Most of the injuries were ordinary: gashes from fleeing through brambles, burns from hastily lit torches, a broken wrist, a child's feverish cough. These he mended with a touch and a murmured word, the light flowing from his palms in a thin and tired thread. But every few minutes someone would be led forward whose wound was different, whose skin around the bite or the scratch had gone faintly grey, whose veins were beginning to show black beneath the surface.

Those were the ones he feared.

A farmer named Holt sat before him now, grinning with a terrible, brittle cheerfulness. His left hand was wrapped in a bloody cloth, and the dark lines had already crept past his elbow.

"It does not hurt," Holt said conversationally. "That is the odd thing. I thought it would hurt."

"Hold still," said Kaelen quietly.

He laid both hands on the arm, and the light went in, and the black lines pushed back. He could feel the sickness struggling against him, slippery and sour, like a living thing clinging to the inside of the man's flesh. This time it was harder than with Dorran. This time it had been given hours to take root.

Kaelen gritted his teeth and pressed on.

When it was done, Holt sagged against the wall with a long, shuddering breath, and the grin had gone from his face. In its place was something far more human, and far more frightened.

"I could hear it," he whispered. "While you were doing it. There was a voice, and it was telling me to hurt my wife."

"It is gone now."

"Is it?" Holt looked up at him with wet, hollow eyes. "Is it truly gone?"

Kaelen opened his mouth to say yes. Then he looked at the grey patch still lingering around the old wound, faint but undeniable, and found that he could not make himself lie.

"I have stopped it from spreading," he said instead. "I do not yet know if I can remove it entirely. I am sorry."

Holt nodded slowly, and said nothing more.

It was Lyra who found him an hour later, slumped against the wall of the Hall with his head in his hands.

"You have been healing for nine hours," she said gently, sitting beside him. "Father says you must rest."

"There are forty more people waiting."

"There will be forty more tomorrow. And you will be of no use to any of them if you collapse."

He did not argue. He simply leaned his head against the stone and let his eyes fall closed, and for a long minute neither of them spoke. Somewhere in the square beyond the doors, a baby was crying. Somewhere else, a man was shouting orders about water barrels and grain.

"The refugees brought news," Lyra said at last. "Thornby is gone."

Kaelen opened his eyes.

Three days earlier, if anyone had asked, Thornby would have been described as a sleepy little village of some two hundred people on the edge of the northern woods. It kept sheep and grew barley and brewed a mild and unremarkable beer. Its healer, a broad-shouldered woman named Ysolde Marne, was Dormant like nearly everyone else, and she had spent twenty years treating sprained ankles and teething infants and the occasional case of winter fever.

On the first night of the crimson sky, a boy had come to her door with a bite on his arm.

He was a farmhand named Tam, sixteen years old and sweating despite the cold. He said he had been walking home from the north field when something had sprung at him from the hedgerow. He had beaten it off with a rake and run. Ysolde cleaned the wound, bound it, and sent him home to rest.

She never saw him alive again.

By morning, Tam's mother lay dead in her kitchen. By noon, four of the neighbours were missing, and the dogs had begun howling in the streets. By dusk, the grey sickness was moving through Thornby like a fire through dry grass, passing from the bitten to the touched, from the touched to the sleeping, and from the sleeping to those who woke in the night to find something standing over their beds with black veins crawling across its face.

Ysolde survived because she had barricaded herself and eleven children in the village granary and held the door with a pitchfork for six hours. At dawn she led them out through a back window and walked them south without once looking behind her.

Behind them, the village was silent. Its streets were empty. And in the shadows between the houses, yellow eyes watched the departing children with a hunger that would not fade.

Thornby was not alone.

All along the northern marches, in the weeks before and the days after the seal broke, the curse had been spreading in the quiet. At the Fenwick farm, in the river hamlets, in the logging camps and the shepherds' huts and the lonely hunting lodges at the edge of the forest, the same terrible story was repeating itself in a hundred small variations. A bite. A scratch. A fever. A night of screaming. A morning of terrible silence.

The survivors who reached Dawnhollow said that it was in the mist, too. A grey, iron-scented fog that rolled out of the northern hills each dusk and clung to the low ground until sunrise, and anyone who breathed it too long woke the next morning with a ringing in their ears and a faint, creeping darkness beneath their fingernails.

None of this had been seen in living memory. None of it appeared in any of the old books. And in the silence of the council chamber, Dorran listened to every account in grim stillness, then lowered his head into his hands.

"It is faster than I feared," he said.

"Faster than any plague I have heard of," agreed the old scribe who kept the council's records. "At this rate, my lord, every village north of the Wren will be lost within the week."

"And after that?"

The scribe did not answer.

The hours crawled by. The sun slid slowly westward. In the square, the leaders of the refugee families gathered in anxious knots, murmuring about Vorthak's ultimatum, and about the dragon's promise to burn the valley by nightfall.

"We should go," said a tall man named Corwin, one of the oldest Dormant on the council. "The dragon gave us a choice. I say we take it. We load the carts, we take the children, we walk south before sunset."

"And where would we walk to?" asked Brenna Voss, who had joined them in the doorway with soot still streaking her face. "The road south passes through four villages. A rider came in an hour ago from Harrowmere. He says the curse has already reached the third of them."

Corwin faltered. "Then we go east."

"Through the Greywood? With a hundred children and a hundred old men?" She shook her head grimly. "We would be torn to pieces within a day."

"Then what do you suggest?" Corwin cried. "Stay here? Wait for the dragon to turn us into cinders?"

No one answered. Beyond the shuttered windows, the light had begun to take on the deep gold of late afternoon.

It was Kaelen, finally, who spoke. He had come in quietly, leaning on Lyra's arm, and he stood at the end of the long table with his face drawn and his eyes steady.

"The dragon did not want to do this," he said. "I felt it. The wyvern said the same. They are being driven by the sickness, the way Holt was driven, the way the shepherd was driven. If I can reach them, I may be able to break it."

"You would face a dragon," said Corwin flatly.

"I would try to."

"And if you fail?"

"Then I fail," said Kaelen simply. "But I would rather fail trying than run south through a thousand cursed villages and die for nothing."

For a long moment, the chamber was utterly silent. Dorran raised his head slowly, and the look in his eyes was something Kaelen had never seen there before. Not pride, not worry, but something closer to awe, and beneath it, deep and heavy, the first true fear.

"Son," he said quietly, "you are not ready."

"None of us are, Father."

The sun touched the western hills.

Dawnhollow gathered in the square, thousands strong, and waited. The elders held the children. The Awakened rose into the air above the walls, Lyra at their head. Kaelen stood alone at the northern gate with his hands open, and the light humming faintly in his palms, and the silence stretched thin as wire across the valley.

The sun dipped below the hills. The last gold bled from the sky.

Nothing came.

No roar, no shadow, no wall of flame. The dusk deepened into night, and the stars came out one by one, and the crimson that had stained the northern heavens for two days slowly faded to a dull and sullen violet. People began to murmur. Someone laughed, shakily, with relief.

Then, far off to the north, a single bell began to ring.

It was the bell of Harrowmere, tolling a frantic and desperate alarm. It rang for nearly a minute before stopping, abruptly, in the middle of a stroke. Then, to the east, the bell of Fenwick rang and stopped. Then another. Then another, nearer, until one by one, all across the dark marches, every bell in the north fell silent.

And in the stillness that followed, Kaelen understood that the dragon had never intended to burn Dawnhollow at all. It had only wished to give them time to realise what was already coming.