She did not wake that night. She did not dream. It was as if he had driven the nightmares away.
The next day, they did venture into the forests to old lady Nilhin, who had stringy black hair and was missing several of her teeth. She hummed a lot, speaking with a thick, northern accent. She oohed over Aerhril’s blond curls.
She made up the poultice and chanted and threw smelly herbs into the fire in her house.
It was all nonsense, and Aerhril knew it was.
But the nightmares all but stopped, and when they did come, when Galadril would wake and grouse at her, Aerhril would get up and run down the hallway to the little room where Dathor slept.
Sometimes he would wake and climb onto the floor, but sometimes, he did not, and she climbed onto the floor and slept there until either the dawn woke her or his big thick fingers shook her awake and he said she’d best be getting back to her room now.
It wasn’t every night.
It wasn’t even often.
But he was always good to her, then.
In that strange, cold stone keep with its towers and turrets and the wind that howled around it when the storms came, he was the one thing that seemed to welcome her.
5
NOW, RACLAHAD RACEDto Aerhril when Dathor pushed her into the room at the bottom of the south tower where all the women were gathered. Her younger sister pressed her face into Aerhril’s body, shaking all over.
Aerhril wasn’t used to this sort of demonstrative closeness from her sister. They had not grown up together. She had never held her sister as a baby or cuddled her as a little girl. But now, she welcomed it, wrapping an arm tightly around her and crushing her close.
She murmured into the crown of Raclahad’s head, soothing noises, not even really words, just almost words, almost it’s-all-rights, but she mostly said the vowels, not all of the sounds.
Dathor shut the door, closing them all inside.
There must have been about twenty women, all of them guests from the wedding, all of them women from nearby areas, some of them warden’s wives, some of them ladies from the village.
A wedding in the south, in the city, would be attended by only people of equal and higher rank. One would invite one’s family and the other sorts of people one associated with at dances and the theater and things of that nature.
But here, everyone of equal and higher rank lived far away, so the social circle for a stewardess, as she would have been after she was married to Celedin, was made up of thosewho were below her rank.
Her mother wasn’t even there. She had sent a letter to the last place she had known her mother to be, the place from where her mother had sent Raclahad, but the letter had come back unopened, and there was no explanation.
She had no idea where her mother was.
Aerhril clutched her sister and surveyed the women gathered here. “Are all of the men dead?”
“Every single one, even old Warden Calidhan,” said one of the women.
Aerhril nodded, looking around at them. “And the children. We have no word?” Children were not brought to marriage ceremonies by tradition. Indeed, they did not enter the chapel until they came of age at thirteen. The children younger than that were all being watched by designated caregivers. They would have been playing somewhere, waiting for the wedding feast.
“None,” said another of the women.
“The boys?” she said, looking about. “They killed the boys, too?” There had been a few young men, adolescent boys, of age enough for a wedding ceremony but still not really grown men.
“Yes,” said another woman, her voice breaking.
Aerhril let out a breath, holding Raclahad tight to her. She wanted to cry again, but she was already getting to the point where every single spare thing that happened to her made her wish to cry, and she could not cry about everything, so she thought she must ration her tears, conserve her energy.
“We cannot cooperate with these beasts,” said one of the women, Wardenness nae Gilsin, whose expression was stony. “If they kill us, so much the better. It would be shameful to capitulate to these monsters.”
Monsters, yes, of course. Most of these women, they hated orcs. Everyone hated orcs in the Silvarenna.
Aerhril herself could not say she was pleased with being invaded, obviously, but she supposed she could understand why they would invade in the first place.
