Page 32 of Nightingale (The Broken Kingdoms #1)

H e surveyed the surrounding damage of the Blackleg Caverns with a sceptical eye, brought after many years of fighting in countless battles, of finding targets from miles away and hunting down his enemies.

Roaming over the dozens of spider carcasses that arrows protruded out of, with nothing but black blood as far as the eye could see.

An ambush of sorts, with the Niroulians if the blue-tipped arrows were any indication. Niroulian warriors liked to use obsidian to carve their arrowheads as well as mark them with one of their house colours. As he yanked one free of a particularly large beast, he examined the glass-like tip to find his assumption correct. Pointed to a deadly precision, chipped edges that shattered upon impact for a painful removal, and a tiny badger carved into the wooden shaft.

Niroula.

He tossed it aside, the wind rustling his white-blond hair, down like it always was. He didn’t like the way it looked when it was up, didn’t like the pressure at the nape of his neck. It felt too much like a collar and he was already clasped in one of those. Instead, he let it fall free, curving and whipping around his shoulder like a flag in the middle of a hurricane.

It was wild, untamed.

Sometimes he thought back to his mother and what a great beauty she must have been. Even he saw the allure in his reflection from time to time. There were no features of his father within him, which meant that they must have all come from the woman that sired him. There were no descriptions, no drawings to aid his memory of a Carylimian he did not recall. It sorrowed Castil in a certain way that he couldn’t remember anything about his mother but there was nothing to do about it. His father refused to speak of her, even in kind memoriam.

His hair wasn’t the only thing the breeze stirred up. The smell in the valley was rank, one of the worst things he’d even smelt in his entire life. It was death with a tang, a wafting odour of salty blood mixed with shadows and an oily texture by the touch of it. He didn’t dare use his bare hands, tugging on a pair of gloves as the chill set in.

Castil ran a finger over it, smudging it in the same way that fire oil smeared.

The spiders were flammable.

He rummaged through his saddle bags, searching for the flint and stone he always carried whenever he travelled, locating them at the bottom of the pack. They must have fallen over the miles of rocky terrain.

Castil worked quickly, tearing up one of his filthy shirts from days on the road into thin strips of cotton, wrapping one at a time around bundles of branches that he covered with the black blood. He continued until he had twenty bundles of kindle, the exact number of tunnels that surrounded him. Spider webs were tossed carelessly everywhere, which would only help his cause.

With a strike of the flint against the stone, and a couple sparks later, he held a flame. The male lowered it to the first bundle, waiting as it sputtered, danced and came to life. It hissed in wriggling delight as it came in contact with the blood, flaring up violently enough that he shielded his eyes. When the light wasn’t intolerable, when he could blink away the brightness, Castil brought his line of sight back and rose from the ground, taking another bundle of sticks and tucking it into the pit of his arm.

He rested them on Atlas’s saddle, balancing and stacking them in a way that wouldn’t send them toppling with a hoofed step. His horse didn’t seem to mind as he continued until there were none left on the ground and he brought the one under his arm back out, lowering it to the flame.

It took a second, but then the fire jumped.

Castil eyed the distance, wrapping his reins across his knuckles as he brought his arm back. Then he threw the first bit of kindling into the very first cavern. For a moment, he stood still as the fire passed down, down, down. And as it spiralled into the depths of darkness and shade, a shiver ran through him at the thousands of reflective eyes that tracked the fire.

A crack sounded, a rumble of legs, and then a loud ignition as the flames burned.

Castil didn’t waste anymore time as a screech filled the air, heat blasted out of the tunnel and the smell of decay increased. He lit another, tossing it to the cave on his right. Then another, into the one on his left.

On and on he went, quickly grabbing the bound pile of wood from Atlas’s back and setting the flame with the smeared, oily blood, throwing them with all his might in order to make sure that they reached the very bottom. Making sure that they took out as many Blackleg spiders as possible. Small ones ran for their lives, scurrying out of the tunnels as they avoided the inferno, whilst the larger ones that had woven themselves into complex nests of spider-silk struggled to get free before they were roasted alive.

The smell had been bad before, but it was positively wretched now.

Castil lit the third to last as he ran, aiming for the largest tunnel of them all and hit gold. It must have bounced off a Blackleg as it fell, a horrified shriek rattling the passageway as stones trembled in its wake. They tumbled down the sides of the mountains, skipping and sliding and spilling into his path as he narrowly avoided tripping over them.

The fire spilled out of the entrances, a mesmerising garnet that licked the rim of the caves, casting a heated hue that burned forever bright. It wouldn’t last forever, fading away as soon as it ran out of spiders to fuel its flames.

Atlas held steady, standing with him as he continued to light each stick as quickly as he possibly could, without burning the end of his long fingers. The proximity had to be just right, had to be close enough to ignite with how the Blackleg blood took a second to take to the fire.

He’d felt the scorch a couple times now.

The male was down to two handfuls of kindling, rotating the second as he hurled it into the second to last cavern, watching it consume every inch of the spun-silk that coated the insides. It went up within an instant as the embers sparked, turning the white-web into charcoal ash and soot.

A medium-sized arachnid made for him, its tendril legs scraping the air as if it would climb him like a tree for protection, away from the smoke and heat. Castil stomped down on it, pressing his heel in deep before it even had the chance to brush against his pant leg. He didn’t mind the creatures too terribly like his brother did, but there was no amicable favour for them either.

With a dash of its blood against the last pile of sticks, he dropped it in the very last cavern, a slight rush of thrill overtaking him as he viewed his quick thinking. There was no way that any of the massive Blacklegs could have survived any of it, not when none of them crawled out to escape the blasting warmth.

Which meant that Castil had just taken down all, if not most, of the Blackleg Spiders.