Chapter 127. Not an Army but a Caravan: How Redhorn Hold Fell to a Gift Wrapped in Gold

Chapter 127: 127. Not an Army but a Caravan: How Redhorn Hold Fell to a Gift Wrapped in Gold

A sound went through the room.

Nobody had moved.

"They did not come with swords," the minotaurkin said.

Her voice was a thread. "They did not come with fire...!"

"They came with gold." She swallowed.

A line of blood ran down her chin. "They stood outside the gates, and they sang to our horns!"

Her eyes rolled back in her head.

She collapsed.

She fell forward onto the marble, and the horn rolled from her fingers and clanged across the floor, and its song went on, high and thin and terrible, long after she had gone still.

On the table, the Veil Bell began to ring.

It had been quiet all morning.

Now it shrieked, a high, frantic, silver peal, over and over, so loud that it made my teeth ache. It jumped against its tray.

It didn’t stop, and it didn’t slow either. It rang, and rang, and rang, and every head in the room turned toward the end of the table.

Magnara moved.

She crossed the floor in two strides and clapped her enormous palm over the bell, silencing it with a muffled clink. She held it there, pressed flat against the wood, with her eyes squeezed shut and her whole body shaking.

When she opened them, she was looking at me.

I didn’t say a word.

I walked around the table. I knelt on the cold marble beside the fallen axe.

It was very heavy, and my hands were still sore, and I picked it up with both of them.

I held it out to her, half first.

For a long moment, she looked at it. Then, with a hand that trembled so badly that I could hear her fingers rattle against the wood, she reached out and took it.

Neither of us spoke.

Behind us, the silver horn had finally fallen silent.

...

Marrow does not believe in dying in her hall, and she told the minotaurkin on the cot so, repeatedly, in language that would have made a sailor blush.

They had carried the wounded guard to a bed in the corner of the dining hall, and the old healer had descended on her like a small, furious storm.

She had cut away the strips of ruined armor with a pair of shears. She had washed out the wound in the woman’s side with something that smelled like turpentine and regret.

All the while, she grumbled without pause, in a dry, cracked, steady stream.

"Do not die on my floor, girl... I have just had it scrubbed, and I did not scrub it for you to bleed on it."

"Hold still now... Stop breathing like that, you will tear the stitches. Hold still."

The woman held still. She had no choice.

She lay on her back with one eye swollen shut and the other rolling blindly across the ceiling, and her broken horn stump was pressed into the pillow. Her name, someone said, was Dorrah.

She had kept the outer gate of Redhorn Hold for twenty years.

The silver horn lay on the table beside her, where somebody had set it down. It hadn’t stopped humming.

Every few seconds it gave off a faint, quavering note, and every time it did, the Veil Bell on Sylvara’s belt answered with a thin, silvery ring.

Magnara stood at the foot of the cot with her axe in her hand, and I could see the sound travel through her. It shivered in her horns.

It ran down the cords of her neck, and her knuckles whitened on the haft.

She noticed. I know she did...

She glanced down at the bell, and then at the horn, and then, very briefly, at me. Then she looked away.

Dorrah woke up twice.

The first time, she screamed.

The second time, with Marrow’s hand clamped over her forehead and a cup of something bitter at her lips, she told us everything, in a cracked, halting whisper, between swallows.

...

They had come three nights ago, she said, with carts full of gold.

Not soldiers... Not an army...

A caravan, with a dozen painted wagons and a troupe of singers in gilded robes, rolling up the long road to the outer gate of the Labyrinth like a traveling fair.

They’d brought gifts. Cloth, wine, and pretty things for the children.

They’d said they’d come to trade... They’d said they meant no harm.

"Some of our young ones took the gifts," Dorrah whispered. "A bracelet... A ribbon... and a pair of earrings."

"They were so happy."

I felt my stomach go cold.

The earrings, she said, had been made of gold glass. When the minotaurkin girls put them on, nothing happened.

They laughed, thanked the singers, and went home. But on the second night, when the singers began to sing in the courtyard, a low, wordless song that rose and fell like waves, the girls who’d taken the gifts began to dance.

"They danced backward," Dorrah said.

Her voice broke. "In a circle... All of them."

"They were smiling... They did not stop for three hours."

Then the horns began to hum.

It was a new thing, a new kind of crystal, Dorrah said. The Chain had called it Horn-Glass.

It was a shard of pale gold, no bigger than a thumbnail, and it had been set into the tip of each girl’s horn. The singers’ song worked on it like a hand on a harp.

The crystals vibrated... The vibration ran down the horn and into the skull and into the mind, and by dawn the girls were no longer girls at all.

"They are Dancers now," she said. "They obey the choir."

The outer ring of the Labyrinth had fallen in two nights. Matriarch Torga Redhorn, Magnara’s mother, had withdrawn to the inner rings with what warriors she had left and sealed the gates. The mothers and the children had retreated to the heart of the maze.

Torga was holding the third wall, and the fourth, and the fifth, and she wouldn’t surrender.

"And there was a man," said Dorrah. "A priest... a rather gentle man."

"He wore a robe the color of old coins."

"Lucan," Elysandra said, softly, from the doorway.

"He stood outside the gate, and he spoke to us... So kindly. "Dorrah’s good eye had gone glassy. " He said, When the moon falls, the rabbit will be ours, and the Gate-Breaker will open the way."

Magnara went still.

"They said your name," Dorrah whispered, looking up at her. "All night... They kept saying it."

"Magnara... Magnara... Like a song."

Her eye rolled back, and she slumped against the pillow, and Marrow clucked and went on cleaning the wound.

Nobody spoke.

The horn gave a long, low, trembling note, and the Veil Bell rang.

"They want her," Elysandra said quietly. She had closed her eyes. "They do not merely want Redhorn..."

"They want the gate breaker to walk home."

...

Magnara turned and walked out of the hall.

She did it without a word. She just turned on her heel, with her axe in her hand and her back like a plank, and strode toward the great doors at the far end of the room.

Her boots rang on the marble. And the sound echoed.

Nobody moved to stop her.

"Magnara," Velora said.

"I go now."

"You will not go alone."

"I go now!" She did not turn her head. "Nobody will stop me!"

She was right. I knew it as I watched her.

There wasn’t a soul in that room who could have laid a hand on her. She’d caught the claw of a monster the size of a barn with her bare arms.

She’d held the line at the gate of Hearthfang with blood running down both forearms. If she’d decided to walk through a wall, the wall would have had to make other plans.

I stood up.

I don’t know why I did it... It wasn’t a plan.

I’d run out of plans a long time ago. I only knew that there was a woman walking toward a door, with her shoulders shaking, and that I couldn’t let her go through it alone.

I crossed the room at a half-run. I got between her and the door, a couple of paces from it, and stopped. I didn’t spread my arms.

I didn’t plant my feet. And I couldn’t have stopped her with a battering ram.

I held out my hand.

I held it out in front of my chest, with the palm turned up and the fingers open, shaking a little. It was the only thing I had.

Magnara stopped.

She stopped so abruptly that her boots scraped on the marble. She stood there, a few feet away, towering over me, with her axe hanging from her fist and her face gone white and set.

She looked down at my hand. She stared at it for a long, long time.

"It is small," she said, in a low, rough voice.

"It’s what I’ve got."