The Witch's Plot

Outside the castle walls there was an encampment with a dozen banners raised. From her vantage point at the top of Ugelor's central tower, Lady Rachel of Losk could recognize a good number of the signs emblazoned there: Osteler, Golding. Salle and Hewes. The dueling stag and crows on gold that heralded the famed knight Odo of Treserre. All come to rescue her from the grip of Cador the Thrake, Red Prince of Ugelor, most infamous blackguard, who farmwives and baronesses alike whispered had the Devil for a sire. Sir Cador stood now on the ramparts, addressing his foes with a booming voice. Both he and the sieging **** were too far away now for Rachel to hear their negotiations, and so she was **** to stare at his back, at the mane of red running down it, and the armor of black and silver that disguised his unholy form. His arm was outstretched beside him. The palm of his hand rested atop the sword whose hilt was said to be braided with hair from his own body: _Goscled, _the blood-sword.

He would return soon, thought Rachel. She allowed herself to turn away from the negotiations to look back into the shadowy room that had been her resting place for the last ten months. There was a window facing east, and the sea. On the sill there lay a knife with a serpentine blade. She had found it on one of her rides outside the castle, clutched within a skeleton's grip in a hastily made grave. Its first owner, she suspected, had been a foe of one of Cador's antecedents. Though Cador was the first castellan of Ugelor who had fully conquered its dark energies, he was not the first to try. Other men had called themselves princes of this desecrated place and for a time had thought themselves immortal.

Rachel wondered what the knights below would think of the fact that she had found the knife a month before and had not planted it in Cador's chest at her earliest opportunity. She remembered the night after that ride when he had come to her room in his robe of green and gold, looking like a forest god stepped out of myth. But he and the worship of him did not belong in a temple or a green. His were dark places, beneath the ground, where he could be closest to the gods that were his patrons. Knowing this, she had not plunged the knife into his hairy chest, but showed it to him, and suggested that it might be suitable for sacrifices. He had agreed to quiet her. His coming there was not to talk of gods or piety. He disrobed, and she joined him, and they were joined together.

It had been so nearly every night of the last ten months. The knights now camped outside Ugelor had been sent by her lord father, Baron of Losk, who believed that Cador had invaded his castle in mist-shrouded evening to steal her away. He did not know that the Thrake had never come to Losk or its Castle Codny. There was much that he did not know. Lord Fulke of Losk had never guessed that his daughter had learned witchcraft from the ladies of the Gabras Marsh, or that she had overcome them in power and cunning. That she worked rituals in the heart of his castle, binding together the anima of his people into a trap that would send them hurtling into the Land Below at the moment of their deaths, no matter their piety. That the spirits with whom she communed bade her go to Ugelor herself, to meet its Red Prince and to be his consort, that they might serve deep gods together.

Were those knights to reach the room where she had slept these last ten months they might be surprised to see the serpent blade on her windowsill. They might wonder whether it waiting for the moment when she would take her own life, no longer able to bear the fact of her own defilement, for they did not know that she had defiled herself long ago. Rachel imagined the look of terror that would cross their faces when she lifted that knife against them. The shadows of the room would grow long and take the blade from her. In one moment the shadows would use it to sever their souls from their bodies.

It was only a fantasy. They would never reach Ugelor's central spire, for Cador would rebuff them. No sword or lance held in hallowed hands could pierce his walls, much less his armor or his hide. He would lay waste to them, and their graves would be the foundation of his new kingdom.