Page 25 of Silverbow (The Godsung Saga #1)
She hated the king, his wielders, and his Master of Coin. She hated the men who chased her through Greenridge, the men who would hunt her family, and the men on the village green. She hated this whole gods damned continent.
A strained, half-mad laugh bubbled from her throat as she shoved open the door to her room.
She had been trying so desperately to reach Windcross Wells for them, but now…
now… You can still put this right. But the flame was devouring any voice of reason.
Somewhere between the front steps and the hall, the embers of a plan started to smolder.
Rash, Enya. She chided herself as she snatched three arrows from her quiver.
She didn’t care. There is a price on my head.
She laid them across the bed before hastily gathering her saddle bags.
Midday was upon her when she darted down the stairs, and the dull roar of a crowd was rising from the village green.
She paid the stablemaster his due and tossed a copper to a stable boy, ordering him to be quick about bringing Arawelo around.
Master Finn was wringing his hands when she returned to settle with him. “My lady,” he said nervously. “They’re going to start any minute now. You should be gone from Innesh. Nasty business, that is. Nasty business.”
“I forgot something in my room. I’ll be gone in just a moment.” He nodded, turning back to absently wiping a glass with a dingy towel.
She could accept her fate. She had accepted her fate when the rod left its mark on her hand. But if they were going to put a price on her head, she would earn it. She would earn every last copper of it if she had to burn a swath from Innesh to Misthol.
The window groaned in its frame as Enya shoved it open. Leaning out over the ledge, only a sliver of the pyre was visible between the rooftops, but it was enough. She was a Silverbow, after all. She might as well use her godsung gift if it was going to damn her to hell .
A matronly woman with long gray hair sat upright, facing the jeering crowd. She was tied to the stake, but irons still clasped her ankles and wrists and a ghastly iron gag kept her from cursing the men set to dole out her punishment, if she really was a witch.
Enya studied what she could see of the crowd; a rough farmer’s coat here, a blacksmith’s apron there.
They booed and jeered, shouting taunts at the woman who had likely delivered their children and tended their hurts.
Enya wished she had arrows for all of them, but the absent gods seemed to be running low on wishes to grant, and she had other plans for some of those arrows.
A ring of crimson clad men struggled to hold the press back, but they did nothing to stop the crowd from raining refuse down on the pyre - eggs and rotted vegetables splattered around the woman, but even as they struck, she sat with the stillness of stone; with the stillness of a woman resigned to her fate.
All around her, the village threatened to boil over like a kettle left too long on the fire.
When they seemed to reach a fever pitch, a crimson clad soldier climbed the edge of the platform.
Enya nocked an arrow as a hush fell over the green.
The man unrolled his parchment and read the king’s proclamation.
Words distantly drifted up to where Enya leaned over the window frame, but she didn’t hear them as she marked the man, squinting at him in the gap between the rooftops.
When the soldier rolled the parchment up again, the crowd surged.
“Witch! Witch! Burn the witch!”
Enya hated Innesh.
Another soldier came forward, carrying a flaming torch.
She marked him as her second as he dropped it into the kindling below the platform.
She’d have to be fast to get three off before someone whirled to look up, but she was fast. She was a Silverbow.
She took a steadying breath as the first curl of smoke rose above the rooftops.
She tipped her head in silent salute and didn’t bother sending up a prayer.
The crowd did not react when her first arrow ripped through the throat of the man who’d declared this the king’s justice.
He crumpled silently. Entranced as they were in by the flames, no one watched him die.
A few heads swiveled toward the garbled scream that erupted from the torch man, who took an arrow through the eye, but their shouts were indecipherable from the din.
Enya took a steadying breath as she sent her third.
The dam broke, spilling chaos loose across the village green when the arrow sprouted from the village healer’s forehead.
The woman sagged against her bonds. A scream never escaped her lips around the gag.
Enya felt a pang of regret, but it was a clean death.
Far better than what Pallas Davolier intended to offer her.
Far better than what she might receive herself.
As soon as the string snapped for the third time, Enya threw herself back from the window and was scrambling for the door. She leapt down the stairs three and four at a time, darted through the backdoor, and slid to a stop where Arawelo waited in the yard.
She did not have to see to know that Innesh was lost to the mob. The sound of breaking glass chased her as she turned south to follow the little track along the riverbank. A flicker of satisfaction drifted through her and was immediately swallowed up by the inferno that was her rage.
Ryerson House is gone.
The farms skirting Innesh lay abandoned, their people rioting now on the village green, and Enya let her cloak stream behind her as she galloped south.
Refreshed from a night under a roof, Arawelo’s hooves thundered over the half-tamed track, drumming a steady rhythm as they raced the current south.
When Enya reined in, she looked over her shoulder to see a plume of black smoke curling against the clouds.
She wondered faintly if it was the villagers or the soldiers doing the burning, but she didn’t much care.
The people in Innesh were all the same to her.
Farmer’s wives and shepherds pointed toward the plume in the distance, calling out to their neighbors for news as she wound through the outlying farms and fisheries. A lantern with a spare cask of oil, flint and steel.
Every child in the Westerlands, perhaps all of Elaria, knew that Trowbridge was the only place to cross the mighty Trydent.
She need only follow the river, but the bounty that undoubtedly papered every town posed a problem.
She could not rely on every innkeeper or serving woman being as blind or willfully ignorant as Master Finn or Hatti.
She still hadn’t puzzled out why they hadn’t handed her over to the crimson coats.
Any gold at all was likely to improve the eyesight of every washerwoman and gate guard from Valbelle to Analuz.
Ten thousand gold marks was enough to turn even a beggar to a lord, and still half that would buy an estate with a staff to run it.
To cross at Trowbridge would be a risk. She weighed it against the risk of swimming the Trydent.
A spare bowstring, a waterskin, a tin cup and a bowl .
As Enya sat on her blanket roll under the open sky, turning Liam’s horse head carving over in her hand, she lamented the loss of the bed at the Queen’s Dragon.
It was easier to lament that than what she had really lost in Innesh.
A blanket roll, three changes of clothes.
At least she was dry, and not hungry, but she lay awake listening to the night long after the wolves stopped howling.
When she finally drifted, the woman on the pyre and faceless men coming to claim the bounty joined her nightmares.