8. CROSS-ON-GREEN

Once she was set once more to travel, Martimeos carried Elyse across the creek. It was shallow here, and choked with the branches of fallen trees, such that he was able to nimbly step and jump from stone and branch to make his way across and keep himself dry. Once back on the road, however, the witch insisted on walking once more. It did seem a bit easier for her now that she was out of the fae-wood, and not walking over the gnarled roots of the forest but rather the smooth flagstones of the road. Still, she leaned heavily on his shoulder, and Martimeos hoped that the village ahead might have an inn with room. She said that just a day or two more of working on her ankle with the Art and otherwise staying off it might do it a world of good.

But as they made their way forward and the forest thinned, giving way to fields, Martimeos knew something was wrong. If these were farmlands, they were overgrown and wild, and likely hadn’t felt the touch of a plow in years. They were farms halfway back to the wilds, overgrown with tall grass and meadowflowers. When Flit flew ahead and then came back and sang what he had seen, Martimeos’ face darkened.

It was not long before they came upon the first farmhouse, except it was not a farmhouse any longer. Nothing was left but a burnt-out stone shell, soot-stained and crumbling, and a large pile of blackened ruin where perhaps a barn had once stood. “Do you think, perhaps, that Lob lied to us?” Elyse whispered to him, as she looked upon this. “Did the demons do this?” Martimeos shook his head. Already shrubs and some thin young saplings grew among the ashes and rubble of the barn. This had been done some time ago. And he thought he knew by whom.

They passed by more fields, more farms, and every farmhouse had been subjected to the same fate. All burnt, down to the very stone, and the fields overgrown. Dirt paths, themselves nearly hidden by brush that had not been cleared from them for years, led away from the main stone-paved road and towards other farms, but Flit flew up and told them that it was the same as far as could be seen. Every single farmhouse had been put to the torch years since.

Martimeos began to feel a pressure building behind his eyes, and he traveled in grim silence. Elyse was quiet, as well, perhaps catching his mood. He knew the worst would be when they reached the village itself. Nobody had come out to rebuild these farmhouses or put these fields to work once more. How many would even still be living there?

But his imagination could not have prepared him. There was simply nothing left.

Cross-on-Green had not been a village, it had been a town, once grown happy and prosperous - perhaps on the trade from the travelers along the large roads that stretched through it and off into distant lands. There was no way of knowing what had once been the craft and lifeblood of this place, however, because it had been razed and ruined so thoroughly that no trace of the life of its people now remained. Even its name they had only known because Martimeos had found a collapsed, half-burnt sign in the tall grass that still bore an old welcome in fading green paint.

They walked among empty streets, and the charred skeletons of ruined buildings loomed on either side of them. Where a building had been wood, nothing remained any longer except piles of broken char, and even where stone had been used in construction, it often lay toppled or cracked by the heat. If anything useful had been left in the remains, it must have been picked over long ago. Plants had begun to grow in the ruins here too, though not nearly so much as they did out in the surrounding farmlands. This place still smelled of woodsmoke and death, even now.

“I…this place is enormous,” Elyse, still hushed. Perhaps she still thought it was the demons that had done this. “I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed that I’d see so many buildings in one place. What could have done this?”

It is not that large a town, Martimeos thought to himself. Perhaps he lingered on this thought to deny the weight of what had happened. The reality of what he knew, in his bones, must have transpired here. “The White Queen,” he said hoarsely, and then cleared his throat, blinking. “This was her doing, for certain.”

“The White Queen?” she asked, and frowned when Martimeos glanced sharply at her.

“Do…have you never heard of her?” What a blessing, that would be. To live where her cursed name had never crossed folk’s lips.

“I’ve heard the name, I think,” Elyse replied, and Martimeos was suddenly aware that the witch was peering at him very intently. “Though never to hear of her deeds or know who she was.”

“She was…” Martimeos paused, looking out across the burnt, the wrack and ruin, and his heart twisted so much that he had to close his eyes for a moment. “They called her the White Queen,” he went on, finally, his voice a croak. “Or the White Rose. I knew her as The Witch in the West. She…” He took a breath, and bit back on his bitterness, so that he might give a simple telling. “She was a sorceress, and a conqueror, and a butcher. She wrought blizzards upon her enemies, and her servants left death like this wherever they went. And in the end, so it’s told, she went truly mad, and brought ruin even on those faithful to her. And now, she is dead.” Not soon enough. Better for her to have been strangled in the cradle.

“Martim,” Elyse said softly, and something about her tone brought Martimeos out of the storm of dark thoughts in his head. The witch was looking at him oddly, though not unkindly, and he realized his arms shook and his eyes were wet.

He roughly scrubbed away the beginnings of tears, a hot spike of shame shooting through him. “Let’s try to find some place to rest here,” he said gruffly, though he’d only wager a tin penny that any of the buildings had been left standing. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen what was left of those who suffered the White Queen’s wrath. These were, or had been, her lands while she had yet lived, and yet there was no doubt in his mind that it was her armies that had done this.

They walked to the center of the town, to what had given Cross-on-Green its name; the two paved highways that met in a large plaza at the town’s center, one running north to south that they had just walked in on from the One-Road Wood, and one running east to west. Perhaps merchants still used these roads, on occasion. Where once had been a bustling square where the two roads met, however, was now the broken heart of Cross-on-Green, black and ruined, with everything burnt. A sickly looking oak grew out of the center of the plaza, shorn of leaves and choked with thorns, a grim witness to what had happened.

All except one building. A tower of pale stone, rising slender from ashes and rubble piled up on both sides of it, conspicuously untouched by the fire. It rose high, likely over ten stories tall, and had probably once dominated the town center. Though it certainly had a practical purpose - it was ringed with arrow slits, and turrets protruded from it, crumbling crenellations along their battlements - the top of the tower flared out into a buttressed spire, tall and thin and tapering, as if its builders had strained to make it touch the sky.

It was of Aurelic build, Martimeos knew, the moment he had seen it, and as they drew close to it, both he and Elyse could feel the touch of the Art upon it. The Aurelics had ruled these lands long ago, from their sacred heartlands of Mannus Aurum. Many kingdoms had sworn their allegiance to the Aurelic Crown, and occasionally the Aurelics had seen fit to build fortifications like these among the lands of their subjects, perhaps simply to remind their vassals of their power. They had known much of the Art and the working of it, and the Art they wove into stone kept their buildings standing through the centuries. Much of what was known of the Art these days came from what the Aurelics had learned, or so it was said.

But that was all long, long ago. The Aurelics were faded and forgotten now, leaving behind monuments and stonework for folk to puzzle over. That, and the stories they left behind, was all that was left of the Aurelics these days. Martimeos knew some of the history, or at least some of the stories that were told. There had been a rebellion led by someone only remembered as the Gully Man, and this had broken the Aurelic Crown. There were those who had said the Gully Man was a servant of the Dark Stranger himself, and blamed him entirely for all the misfortunes that had followed after the crown had been shattered. There had been plague, and civil wars over succession, a breaking of allegiances. Some stories even told of an invasion of monsters. Many had tried to cling to pretensions of Aurelic glory through any excuse, even long after it had tarnished, but eventually that, too, was forgotten. The oldest man alive today would not have been able to remember seeing their banners raised, even by pretenders. Most of the kingdoms that had once sworn to them were dead by now, as well.

Elyse was quite excited by the tower, and delighted by the thought of making camp inside it. She had heard of the Aurelics in stories, of course, but never seen aught that they had built. Martimeos, personally, was not so sure that it was the best place to rest. He thought that perhaps it would be best to camp in the field, and preferably out of sight of this entire accursed, desolated town. Too much death had been dealt here, and in places such as this, sometimes the world could grow thin. But the witch had been made to hobble far enough, and the sun was beginning to dip low in the sky.

The doorway to the tower was ringed by many faces carved into the stone, some laughing, some weeping, some sneering and some contorted in rage. He knew these were not meant to be faces, but rather masks. The Aurelics had put a strange stock in masks, and often used them as decoration. While the Art may have done well to protect the stonework of the tower itself from the flame, it could not do anything to save the furnishings inside. It seemed like anything that might have been within had long since been looted or taken away, and they were not the first to have used the tower as a campsite either - a small ring of stones sat on the bare stone floor of the tower around a small pile of white asn.

Circular stone steps rose in a spiral along the inner wall of the tower, leading up to the darkened spire. Flit darted up, a bolt of red, to see if any hid within, and Martimeos followed him to see what was on the floors above, finding only bare stone wherever they looked - it had truly been picked clean. Nothing but the skeletons of rats, and piles of dirty feathers molted from birds who nested in the spire. All gone, all gone so long ago, and one day even the Art in these stones would fade away, and then eventually the tower would crumble and it would be gone too.

He rejoined Elyse on the ground floor, and sparked a small fire for them to share. They shared what was left of their meat - they still had some rabbit left - and Cecil went out to prowl, but came back from his hunting unsuccessful. Between the two of them, they puzzled over the Aurelic enchantments on the stone. They could feel what was done with the Art, but it was beyond anything that they knew; like a complex knot that they could neither see how to untie or replicate. Perhaps it was beyond the ability of any one practitioner of the Art to make.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

By the time Elyse had re-made her bandages for her ankle, and worked more of her healing upon it, gloom had settled upon the skeletal remains of Cross-on-Green. Those leering ruins were unsettling in the twilight, long shadows stretching towards them across the plaza, and so they both made their beddings away from the doorway, such that the devastation outside could not be seen. But nothing could stop the sound of the wind from reaching them, and the sound of its long moans down those empty streets was what they closed their eyes to.

===***===

Elyse lay slumbering in one corner of the tower, her arms wrapped around Cecil, and her wounded foot propped up on a block of stone, and with nothing but her dress for bedding. She had a remarkable ability to sleep anywhere, Martimeos thought; he at least had his cloak and old clothing to lay down on, but he wished this place had some leaves or grass to pile up and soften the stone.

Truth be told, even if he had been lying in a real bed, soft and warm, he would not have been able to sleep. He stood now in the doorway of the tower, looking out across the plaza, across the ruins. Sorrow wrenched his heart to look at those, the detritus of sickness and madness. How many had lost their lives here, all for nothing, nothing, nothing at all? It gripped him, like poison in his veins, and seeped into his head, filling it with dark thoughts.

He stepped out of the doorway and into the plaza, into the black night. A thin and pale moon cast a ghostly light for him to see by. Something called to him, out there. It is where I belong, he thought to himself, and he didn’t know where the thought came from. A strange desolation settled upon him, muddling his thoughts; he could only think of those poor souls, all those who had died here so senselessly, and despair that something so wrong might have happened. It was not the first time he had seen ruins such as these. Not the dozenth time. He thought he might harden to the sight of them, and sometimes it seemed that he had. All too often, though, it felt as if every reminder of the war simply poisoned him further. What enraging, appalling lunacy it was. It seized his heart so that he felt as if his body was not his own. He wondered if he dreamed.

He crossed the plaza in this haze, and found himself standing before the tree that stood in the center of it. A towering oak, though perhaps a dead one - it was entirely bare of leaves long before autumn had denuded any other tree that he had seen. Its twisting, interlocking branches cast tangled shadows upon the stone. And growing all around its base, up its trunk, into its branches, were vines of cruel black thorns, dotted with small red flowers that reminded him of nothing more than blisters.

He had never seen such a thornbush before, and had no name to give it. He had first noticed it in the abandoned farm-fields on the way into Cross-on-Green, choking the land, but had thought little of it. Now, though, seeing it crawl over the plaza’s oak, it seemed strange to him. It wove itself in patterns that seemed to have designs, the knotted gnarls of it seemed so beautiful, so true, so…

“Martim.”

Martimeos froze. A cold wind blew through the plaza. The voice had come from just a few paces behind him. His veins filled with ice, and his legs felt like lead. He knew that voice. There was no way that voice could be here.

“Turn and face me, Martim.”

He closed his eyes. He knew what he would see, if he turned around. That ruined face, half-pale, half stained red with blood. That staring, pleading eye. “No,” he whispered, his throat dry as dust.

Silence. And then his heart leapt into his throat when the voice spoke again. It was closer, now. Close enough for its owner to touch him. “Do you want to see? What happened here.”

Martimeos didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

And then, he was surrounded by flame.

Roaring flames, howling flames, consumed the buildings that ringed the plaza, devouring wood, cracking and blackening stone, and smoke billowed out of them so thick, so much that it hung in the sky like a cloud, its underside flickering orange from the fires that birthed it.

The air was thick with screams, though there was so much death he could not imagine who was still alive to voice them. Piles of bodies stacked like cordwood lined the plaza, and even as he watched, footmen in chain hauberks and kettle-helms threw yet more, fortune bite their eyes, more and more bodies upon the piles. The soldiers were all tall and slender, hard-faced, black-haired and gray eyes that seemed like glass, flat and staring, as if they could not see what they were doing, and their tabards bore a white rose on a blue field. They seemed only half-real, moving as if in a dream, blurring and fading away.

The oak that stood before him was no longer dead, but its branches were heavy with horror, heavy with dangling corpses hanging from them by nooses, and its leaves wilted with the heat of the flames. No, not corpses, not all of them. These folk had not been hung properly, so that their necks would snap, giving them a quick death. No, some of them drummed their feet, and their hands scrabbled at their necks, faces purple and bloated, trying in vain to free themselves, to draw in ragged, gurgling breaths. Some of those who hung were very small. Their faces were so swollen, so contorted, it seemed impossible that they had been human once.

And before the tree was a horseman, his steed a black warhorse, his armor burnished until it shone. A knight, with a snowy white cloak stained now with blood and ash. His tabard showed three stars rising above the rose, and his winged helmet had the visor up, revealing a haggard, gaunt face, with gray eyes that seemed unfocused.

Before the knight, pressed down into the pavement by the boots of two footmen, was a stout, short man with graying chestnut hair, plastered now to his skull by sweat. Blood stained his mustache, and his teeth, and his eyes were red with weeping, but by now he had no more tears in him. He had nothing in him anymore. He stared, dully, at the horseman, but it seemed as if his eyes saw nothing at all.

The knight stared at the corpses hanging from the tree. He looked around the plaza, at the piles of dead, at the roaring flames, and for a moment, he appeared confused, as if he was uncertain how this all had happened. Then he shook his head and leaned down in his saddle. “This is the price of treason, Beovar,” he said to the man held helpless before him. His voice sounded tired, and there was no real malice in it. He nodded towards the oak. “You should not have tried to help them escape. They could have gotten a quicker, cleaner death than this.”

“Is that why you dragged me here?” Beovar asked, dragging his eyes from the ground. “To watch my family hang?” Something shattered within him, and a hoarse laugh, almost a scream, shook his chest so much that it seemed nearly as if his heart were trying to tear its way out.

“As mayor, it was your duty to bind these people in their oaths to the Queen. As mayor…” The knight trailed off, and there was no conviction in him. It seemed almost as if he was simply too tired to go on. The men pinning Beovar looked up at their officer curiously.

“She’s dead,” the mayor said, in a flat voice that made it clear he had said it many times before. Then he laughed again, the laugh of one broken, who knew he would never be whole. “She’s dead, and you know it, don’t you?”

The footmen standing on him flinched, but they did not release the man. They looked askance at their commander. “Captain, is this true?” one of them asked, but the knight gave them no reply. “Captain Rodin! Is this true?”

Far from reprimanding the man for his tone, the knight slumped in his saddle. He waved one gauntleted hand idly, dismissively, but it barely seemed as if he could summon the energy to do that. “A rumor,” he said, and his trembling voice gave away the lie.

“She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead,” Beovar’s voice rose to a shout, bloody spittle flying from his lips, a feverish light giving life to his eyes once more. “She is, she really is, oh you fools, why did you do it?” Half-laughter, half-frantic tears shook the old man. The footmen stepped off him, unsteadily, as he howled so loud and so long it seemed certain that his throat would burst. “You’re damned,” he said in a growling whisper, pulling himself to a crouch, pointing a shaking finger at the knight and his attendants. “You’re damned to the Hells. Old Scratch will drag you there in black chains and flay your soul for all eternity, and you did it all for a dead woman.”

The fires rose higher, higher, and the black smoke billowed forth endlessly to stain the sky, and ash rained down like snow. It was unclean to see this; the knowledge seared the soul. Martimeos had seen the aftermath of war and ruin, but to know that so many deaths had been ordered for a war already lost, by a man who did not even seem certain about his actions, who killed so many with so little purpose, it was too much to bear. Killing so many knowing it was all for naught. These soldiers were not men, they were parasites, they were worms. He hated, he hated so much that he fell to his knees, his heart turning to slag of hot iron, dark, poisonous thoughts eating a hole into his brain. He reached out towards the knight, wanting only to see him burn, to call up that terrible hunger in his very flesh and watch him wither like a leaf. Dimly, very dimly, some part of him whispered that this was strange.

All at once, the flames were gone, their awful, searing heat was gone. The bodies, the screams, all of it was gone. He was hunched over on the stones of the plaza in the chill night air, before the thorn-choked oak, and the sorrow burned so fiercely within him that he wanted to scream.

“No undoing what’s been done,” the voice said, and it felt nearly as if it were whispering in his ear.

“How are you here?” Martimeos asked, but he received no answer. When he finally had the courage to look around, he found the night about him empty. There was no one there.

His thoughts were muddled, and he lay down there on the flagstones, wondering if he dreamed, wondering if he would wake up. The only way that any of this made sense was through a dream. And still he felt drawn to the oak. Something was there, in its roots, deep within the earth, in the black of the earth, and that was where he belonged. Deep in the well of darkness that the oak dipped its roots into. That was his home.

He did not know how long he lay there, and the strange thoughts did not leave him all at once. The wind seemed to help. They seemed to fade away before the biting chill it brought with it, enough to reach him even through his cloak, and something about it choked off the black fog in his mind, bringing clarity back to him.

Eventually, he sat up, to look warily at the oak. It was just an oak now, and no voice haunted him. A deep fear settled in the pit of his stomach. The only explanation he could think of was that he had been dream-walking. Whatever else, it was the only way to explain how he had heard that voice here. Why, though? Had the terror of the journey here really toyed with his mind so badly? He had faced danger before and not had this happen. It was not right. Something was not right.

Soon, he would stumble back to the tower, giving thanks to Fortune that the darkness still held, and he had not woken anyone with his dream-walking. Dream-walking, yes. That must have been what it was.

Not knowing that Elyse had woken when first he had gone to the doorway. That she had moved herself so she could watch as he walked out to the plaza, to stand before the black oak, and then froze and fell to his knees. And though she had seen no one else in that plaza but him, she had seen the leaves that littered the stones lift into the sky, as if billowed upwards by a great heat.