Royal Road

It was not hard to find my way back to the Grendlewald. A wide road had been carved up the hill from the river. The trees were broken and splayed outward like the pale rib cage of a monstrous snake.

On each broken stump, a man or woman was impaled. Some were roughly skewered, some were upside down, some were artfully posed as though in conversation. The stench was overwhelming, blood and piss and shit and the soft little touches of big black flies that hung in the foetid air.

Apart from the buzzing, the woods were silent. No birds sang. No little animals disturbed the undergrowth. As I followed the royal road up the hill, I recognised people from the village. There was the alehouse keeper. There were the two old women who talked behind their hands whenever I passed.

I wondered how the Sintarael had carried so many people? Had it killed them first, then carried the bodies in bundles? But no, many of them were gripping the splinters that impaled them, as though they had died while trying to pull themselves free.

"Help me." The voice was a tiny bubbling gurgle. I looked for it, but everyone was dead.

"Help me." There was a small flicker of movement, just the corner of a mouth working, an automatic response. It was Finn, the blonde boy with farmer's muscles who had pushed me on the green. It felt like a thousand years ago, but I supposed it had been less than a month. I instinctively recoiled, but then I remembered my new face. He had no idea who I was. I wasn't sure if he could even see me.

He had been pressed diagonally onto the sharp point of a splintered tree. His back was wide open, levered by the wedge. The point emerged from his chest, under his ribs. There was a brownish loop of entrail caught on it. His feet hung uselessly. The flies walked over him, drinking the fluid from his eyes.

How could I help him? I drew one of my good iron daggers, but his eyes, which had been glassy, became wild.

"Please, please, sir, I don't want to die. Please don't kill me, sir. I want to go home. I want to go..."

I didn't know what to do. I gathered him in my two arms and hoisted him up off the spike. He began screaming, an inhuman, wordless cry that wrapped around and around me. He grappled with me, clawed at my face and clothes with jagged fingernails. He wrapped his arms around my chest and squeezed, and he was stronger than me. He was wet and warm and sticky. Then he was shuddering. He was heavy, and I knelt, holding him close to me, trying not to gag at the smell that rose from the punctured hole in him.

"Please, please, Mister" It was an automatic sound, like a machine spinning its gears. "Please, Mister, I don't want to... I don't want to... Please, please, Mister."

Half of his insides were still caught up on the trunk, strung up like tent lines. Pink foam ran down his chin and onto my chest, then he was still. I didn't know what to do, so I laid him next to the tree and left him spread out there for the carrion.

I saw no more living people as I climbed the hill, though upon the bluff and down in the hollow where the still waters lay in stagnant pools, there were other horrors that I prefer not to speak of. Things I would not have thought could have been done to a person. They give me nightmares still.

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And then there, at the top of the next hill, was the grand old sweep of the wall, but where the gate had been, there was a great, heaving hole in the world. A thousand realities struggled within it, worlds like animals in a too-small cage, grappling. The faithful stones were scattered. They lay at odd angles. The careful little tunnel with the gate was blown apart. I crept closer, keeping to the shadows, but there was no use hiding, the whole place was unnatural. There was no way a crawling little human could pass unnoticed.

A dark shadow passed over me, and sailed up high, curving up and up, so the broken world seemed to turn with it. Then another, and another, ragged, midnight things that curled and fluttered. Tangled complications of yellow bone hung under them like bundles of broken fingers, dry and fragile in the wind.

And either side of the breach were the Sintarael. They were achingly beautiful. Their arms curved into slender fingers. Their legs swelled and narrowed into points. Their hips shivered in the soft summer breeze. One was forest green, the other was dim as a midnight rainstorm. They were taller than the trees that lay flattened all around, delicate as thistledown, arch as lilies.

They saw me, there was no doubt of it. To hide from them was to hide from the sun in the sky or the touch of the wind in my hair. Their heads tilted towards me. I was tiny before them, a fleck of mud on the boots of monarchs. The ragged dragons slid across the sky up and behind them, their tails spindrift in the wind.

Behind me, a thousand corpses dripped and quivered. There was no way to run, nowhere I could possibly conceive of running to. They were alien. They were everything. The world was filled up by them, and all the pieces of it were crowded into the margins around them.

Beyond them, the breach churned and writhed, and I glimpsed a tower with a single bright star burning in the topmost window. She was alive.

I stepped out into the open space, expecting at any moment to feel the wind cleave above me, one of those wiry tangles of claws to rip me open and shred me like paper, but they did not.

I kept my chin high. Something told me that to look away was to die. They were regal; pride was my one shield. Each held a sword as tall as a steeple, etched with runes that flowed along the length of the blade. I walked steadily towards them as I had once walked across the mayday green in the Telbridge Hearth, head high, shoulders back, expecting to die at any moment.

"I ain’t afraid of you!" I yelled. My voice was tiny in the grand arena of fallen trunks and bodies.

One of the figures lifted its sword and levelled it at me. The tip hovered six feet from my chest. Up close, the edges of it were fuzzy, as though it were made of compressed smoke. I could feel the air coiling around it.

"You will let me pass by!"

The other creature squatted, bringing its face closer to my level. It tilted its head to one side, a question? What was it waiting for? Was it waiting for me to run? I felt its breath on me, cool and sweet. Everything in me longed to flee away, but I kept my chin high.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something. A motley boy with a tattered cloak that flew about his narrow shoulders like a banner over a ruined battlefield, sitting on the wall, but he was not watching me. He was facing the other way, looking inward. I could see his lips working as though he were counting.

"Fat lot of good you are," I muttered.

I think, up until that moment, I had convinced myself that some manifest destiny was at work, that somehow, through some fairytale logic, I could just walk right up to the castle and claim my Princess, but it was not so. In a flash of clarity, I understood why I was still alive. I had walked a trail of slow, intricate violence. The Sintarael did not kill quickly. They liked to take their time.

The creature reached for me with slow arms. I backed away, stumbling, tumbling backwards into a mess of branches. It pounced, quick as a cat and hovered over me. I fumbled for my good iron dagger and dropped it down into the brush. The huge face was yards from my own, the blank eyes unblinking, I could almost reach out and touch it. The tips of the snip, snipping fingers were sharp as scissors.