Page 123 of Disillusioned (A Lay of Ruinous Reign #2)
He swallowed, desperate to wet his parched throat. Lilac. Eleanor. She was so—so good. So warm. She was patient and full of vigor; everything he was not. He’d go to her, collapse into her arms, and nuzzle his face into her warm, nectared hair. He’d sink to his knees and?—
“They’ll drown your parents’ farmland in flame, just as they will your precious forest. Though, if I’d have known this was your home, I would have taken the honor upon myself years ago.”
Garin’s fist tightened around the lamp’s handle. “Then let me help you.”
There was a flash of realization in Lilac’s enlarged pupils, just before Garin whirled and flung the oil lamp straight at the torch above Artus’s head.
It shattered. Oil and flame rained down upon Artus’s face, engulfing his entire head.
The entryway burst into flames immediately after, fire rapidly spreading wherever else the oil had splashed—down Artus’s torso, the coatroom door, into the hallway.
There was a scream and sound of shattered glass; someone leapt through the slow-spreading flames in the hallway and had thrown the table vase out the window to the right of the door.
Garin started toward the man lowering himself out, but an arrow stuck in the escapee’s back before his feet hit the floor.
Although Yanna wasn’t in sight, Garin could hear her shouting around the back.
Lilac had taken her friend’s place; she’d picked up her bow and quiver again, her exquisite face wrought in a smoldering concentration.
He watched her chest rise, then fall, as she loosed the next arrow into a second escapee’s chest.
Everyone was either abandoning the shelter of the structure to evade the fire spreading throughout the halls, or trapping themselves further into the bowels of the house.
Garin could see his bedroom door up the stairs was wide open, probably filled with those who forgot smoke rose.
It would choke the breath from their lungs if the flames didn’t eat through the dry beams quick enough. It was an old house, after all.
Myrddin watched the blaze from the path as if in a trance, flames reflected in his somber eyes.
Lilac shook with fury, alternating between shouting at those climbing over each other to escape and cursing through gritted teeth, pulling hawthorn arrow after hawthorn arrow out of the quiver slipping off her shoulder.
She’d shot five in under a minute despite her fumbling fingers and awkward stance.
The door frame was a halo of holy fire, both warding and beckoning, bits of it breaking away in charred ash. Without another glance back, he strode up the porch steps and into his doorway.
The threshold was no longer.
The roar of the fire and the wails of the dying drowned out Lilac’s and Yanna’s shouts at the escapees; they remained amply distracted.
Artus was gone, or Garin at least didn’t recognize him in the immediate pile of dead near the entry.
He covered the lower half of his face with his hand out of habit and began to move.
As expected, the fire devoured the front of the structure first, climbing upward faster than it spread outward.
Black smoke filled the hallway; he winced and batted as the flames grazed him, the heat shockingly not searing so much as it was bothersome.
He’d never walked directly into fire, but the sensation at least momentarily distracted him from the throbbing in his limbs.
He held his apology as he stepped on bodies, over those begging for their end. Fire seemed a shitty way to go, but so was an arrow through your body or a creature with an iron grip sucking the life out of you. They’d dug their own grave.
Fangs dripping, eyes stinging, Garin walked with his arms out beside him, fingers trailing the wall until he emerged into the kitchen, the parlor to his right. A wide sweep of his hand and the hollow thump of aged wood it hit told him he’d reached the aumbry.
The smoke was a little thinner here; someone had broken the back window, but Yanna was out there, snarling threats and continuing to shoot arrows. He fumbled for the handle, throwing the door open and knocking several glasses over, shattering them before the book was in his grasp.
He swallowed, real tears beginning to fall as his hands grazed his mother’s handwriting. Garin flipped to the back and felt the small leather envelope—snarled and stuck his fingers inside. Empty .
The fact that the Adelaide’s family and Sable and Jeneare had kept the aumbry as it was shocked him, and filled him with a dangerous hope. Maybe it had fallen out. Just as he reached further into the aumbry, knocking his hand into the far corners, there was a sharp stab of pain at his back.
Garin roared and dropped the book, blinking into the smoke; he spun and swung, and his arm made contact with a body.
Artus grunted before him, his entire face charred, grasping blindly around Garin’s torso for the hawthorn stake that had impaled him.
The old man snarled and shoved Garin against the aumbry, trying to drive it further into him.
“No!” Fighting to keep conscious, Garin lost his footing and felt the stake inch into him as he slid down the front of the cabinet.
Just as his vision began to go and felt his mind slipping, there was a shriek and a thump ; someone else grabbed him—someone strong and full of vigor.
The painful pressure at his back and cloud of stupor that began to seep over him lifted, and Garin heard the stake clatter across the room.
“Come on,” shouted Lilac over the roar of flames. Coughing into her shoulder, she hauled him to his feet and threw his arm over her shoulder. She dragged him toward the now flame-covered hallway, retching and gasping for air.
He allowed her to pull him, but not before instinct had him tugging her back, sweeping his arm across the floor.
He didn’t find Aimee’s journal and there was no time to look—but his fingers did find purchase in something else soft and brittle.
Garin grabbed onto it, dragging it along over the piles of smoldering flesh.
The screams had become one with the creaking timber as the blaze spread throughout the east hall and second floor. A deafening groan shook the building. Lilac looked up at the ceiling, ducking and shielding her petrified face when embers began to rain down.
With all his might, Garin lunged for her, wrapping his free arm around her waist, pulling her down the hallway and out the door.
They stumbled together into the night and down the porch steps, collapsing onto the sodden earth. A crashing roar sounded behind them.
The Trevelyan farmhouse was gone.