AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They’re all dead, my whole family is gone, everyone I love.
It’s written on the walls…
The scream came again, this time with manic desperation. Her screams echoed and racketed shrilly through Winslowe Castle, her family’s house, where death now reigned high. She screamed and screamed some more. The sounds came from her swollen throat and reverberated like the bells of hell. She felt her screams more than heard them; she felt as the walls of her throat tore and bled against those screams.
Then she fell silent. She stared dumbly forward while her mind slipped into a state of unreality.
“Princess!”
Five minutes later? An hour? An entire fortnight? Blanchette had no way of knowing how much time had passed when she felt herself pulled off the floor and into a pair of muscular arms. She gazed up into a face she recognized well, one of her father’s most loyal knights.
Loyal, she thought with a shudder. What does that even mean?
Did he mean to kill her? To bring her to the Black Wolf?
I’d rather be dead.
She tried to speak, but the words dried on her tongue. She was as limp as a rag doll, her throat a raw wound. Absently, she watched as the dark walls slid by her, and he carried her down, down, down into the bowels of the castle. The knight spoke, his voice steady and comforting.
“Thank the Lord I heard your screams. Don’t know how I knew they were yours, but I knew. Thank God, I somehow knew.” Blanchette felt herself recovering. She squirmed and tried to break free of the knight’s hold, not trusting, needing to feel her own feet touch the floor… her home’s soil. She needed some form of grounding, no matter how trivial. “Nay, it’ll be fastest this way, Princess. Just keep still, and let me carry you out.”
“My family,” she asked, her voice a thin and painful whisper. “My mother and father… God, help them! My brother and-and my-my grandmother…” He gave no sign he’d heard her. Blanchette squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the tears return. He carried her through her home in this way—through that battleground of horror and death.
Torchlight flashed against the walls as two young soldiers raced down the winding stairwell.
“He has her—he has the princess!” one boy called to the other, his high voice echoing in the corridor. “Get her, damn you! Don’t let them escape!”
Blanchette felt her feet touch down and saw as Sir Lionel made quick work of the offending soldiers. They died at her heels, their stabbed bodies smashed against the wall. They slid to the ground in a puddle of blood and piss. Blanchette’s heart pinched at those young, sightless eyes staring at her. Unlike Elise’s, they did not live. They did not plead or speak. They had faded into darkness, where they would remain forever.
“The secret passageway—the hidden tunnel?—”
“Sealed off, Your Grace. The surest way out now is through and forward.”
Through and forward.
Through a graveyard and forward on to what?
Blanchette shivered. The hope she held in her heart faded with every breath.
“Those were naught but farm boys,” she whispered, the words grating against her sore throat. “I’ve seen them playing in the fields from the castle windows.”
Sir Lionel nodded, then took hold of Blanchette’s forearm. “It’s a sad song, for certain, Princess. Many more boys shall fall before this night ends,” he said. “Now, come with me while there’s still time.”
Blanchette reached for her cross but found it gone.
* * *
The inner bailey was a coliseum of death. The rhythmic crash of steel against steel, the guttural sobs of dying men, and the musky scents of blood, sweat, and rain all melded together.
Blanchette had never seen an actual battle before. More than half the fighters wore peasant garb and held flaming torches. Light glinted off the mail and plate armor of her father’s men, all slick from the rain and bloodshed. The ground had turned to slush and mud, and her house’s royal standards burned, wilting to ash.
Perhaps the most unsettling was the lack of disparity between friend and foe. Walking beside Sir Lionel, Blanchette watched soldiers and servants she’d known since she was a babe cut each other down.
Each step had to be measured, exact, without falter—or it would mean certain death. Disbelief overcame her. She became detached as if witnessing the scene through a third person’s eyes or wading through a nightmare.
Blanchette felt helpless and loathed herself for it. The soggy ground slushed beneath her feet, and she fought to keep her balance. Sir Lionel carved their way through the commotion, his longsword easily hacking down peasants and traitor soldiers and servants. Careful to circle her, he kept her well-guarded from the occasional straggler who recognized Norland’s princess.
What the rebel peasants lacked in formal training, they appeared to make up with in passionate bloodthirst. She kept the dagger at a point in front of her, ready to spill blood again if needed.
