Chapter 36: Volume 1- [ - 37 ]
The wall was modest, the guards few, but the house within was substantial: two stories of timber and stone, with a slate roof and shuttered windows and the kind of sturdy, unpretentious architecture that spoke of money earned through labor rather than inherited through blood. Smoke rose from the chimney.
Lanterns burned in the windows. The place looked, from the outside, like the home of a man who had done well for himself and expected to continue doing so.
I did not enter through the front gate. I had the carriage stop two hundred meters from the wall, in a copse of trees where the vehicle would not be visible from the house.
The knights who had accompanied me — Pell and his companion, silent and obedient since the morning’s events — looked at me with questions they did not dare ask.
"Wait here," I told them. "If I am not back by morning, return to the manor and tell Martha I said to prepare the study for two guests."
’Two guests? What guests? What is the lord planning? What is happening?’ Pell’s internal voice was a question mark shaped like a man. But he nodded. He had learned, over the course of the day, that nodding was the safest response to instructions from a lord who killed merchants with unknown weapons.
I checked the Serpent’s Fang. Reloaded. Tucked it into my waistband. Then I walked, alone, through the darkening fields toward the Harwick estate.
The sun fell below the horizon. Night came.
Inside the Harwick estate, in the main hall on the ground floor, two young women sat at a long table covered in ledgers, account books, and the neat, precise paperwork of a merchant household that ran on numbers rather than titles.
The elder daughter — Sera Harwick — sat at the head of the table, her dark brown hair pulled back in a braid that fell to the middle of her back. She was tall for a woman, with the kind of lean, angular frame that came from years of helping with the harvest rather than sitting in parlors. Her face was sharp — her mother’s cheekbones, her father’s jaw — and her eyes were a clear, pale green that caught the lamplight and held it. She wore a simple dress of dark wool, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her fingers ink-stained from the ledger work.
The younger daughter — Lira Harwick — sat to her left, a mirror image in structure and a contrast in detail. Where Sera was angular, Lira was soft — rounder face, fuller lips, a body that curved where her sister’s angled. Her hair was lighter — a warm chestnut rather than dark brown — and she wore it loose around her shoulders, the kind of casual beauty that she did not seem aware of and would not have known how to use if she had. Her dress was lighter — cream cotton, modest, the neckline high, the skirt long. She held a quill in one hand and a counting board in the other, her lips moving silently as she tallied figures.
They were eighteen. Both of them. Born within four months of each other — Sera in late winter, Lira in early summer — and raised with the practical education of merchant daughters who would one day manage their own households. They could read, write, calculate, negotiate, and evaluate grain quality by touch. They were, by any measure of this world, accomplished young women.
They were also, at this moment, alone. Their father had left that morning for the Veyne manor, summoned by the lord’s maid. Their mother had died six years ago — a fever that the village doctor could not treat. The household guards — four men hired by Harwick — were stationed at the gates and the perimeter, but inside the house, the sisters had the evening to themselves.
"Father should have returned by now," Sera said, her quill pausing over a column of figures. Her voice was low, measured, the voice of a woman who managed her concerns the way she managed her accounts — carefully, precisely, without waste.
"He probably stayed for dinner," Lira said, not looking up from her counting board. "You know how father is. He cannot resist a lord’s table, even a poor one."
Sera smiled — a small, brief thing, there and gone. "The Veyne lord is supposed to be useless. I heard he cannot even manage his own household."
"Which is why father is so eager," Lira said. "He thinks he can buy the land cheaply and sell it at—"
She stopped. Her quill froze.
Both women looked up.
A sound — from outside. Not from the gate, not from the road. From the east. From the darkened fields where the corruption seeped and the monsters bred.
A howl. Low, guttural, inhuman.
Then another. And another. And then — closer, much closer — the sound of shouting, the clash of metal, the wet impact of something heavy striking something soft.
The guards. Something was attacking the guards.
Sera was on her feet first. "Lira — upstairs. Now."
Lira did not move. Her eyes were fixed on the window, where a flickering torchlight had just been extinguished — not doused, but knocked from someone’s hand. The darkness beyond the glass seemed to press inward, and in the press, shapes moved. Small shapes. Hunched. Wrong.
The front gate splintered.
Not from a ram — from claws. From dozens of small, clawed hands that found the wood and pulled and tore and shredded until the beams gave way and the gate collapsed inward, revealing the dark, starlit field beyond and the things that had crossed it.
Goblins.
They poured through the broken gate like water through a breached dam — a dozen, then twenty, then more. Small — no taller than a child — with green-grey skin, pointed ears, mouths full of sharp teeth, and eyes that glowed yellow in the darkness. They wore no armor, carried crude weapons — clubs, sharpened sticks, rusted knives — and they moved with the jerky, chaotic energy of predators that had caught a scent.
The household guards fought. They were hired men, paid to protect the estate, and they did their duty — swords drawn, shields raised, cutting down the first wave of goblins with the mechanical efficiency of trained soldiers. Three goblins fell. Five. The bodies piled at the gate.
But more came. Always more. Pouring through the breach, scrambling over the bodies of their dead, swarming the guards from every side.
Sera grabbed Lira’s arm. Pulled her from the chair. The ledgers scattered, ink spilling across the table, the careful columns of numbers becoming meaningless as the sisters ran for the back of the house.
A goblin appeared in the corridor ahead. Small, fast, its yellow eyes locking onto them with the predatory focus of a creature that had found prey. It hissed — a wet, guttural sound — and lunged.
Sera shoved Lira behind her. "Run! Get to the back door! I will hold it—"
"No!" Lira screamed, grabbing her sister’s arm. "I will not leave you!"
The goblin leaped.
It was on Sera before she could react — its small, clawed hands finding her dress, its weight hitting her chest, knocking her backward. She fell, her back hitting the floor, her breath driven from her lungs.
The goblin was on top of her — its face inches from hers, its breath hot and foul, its yellow eyes wide with animal hunger.
Its claws found her neckline. The dress — dark wool, sturdy, made for work — tore like paper under the goblin’s grip.
The fabric split from collar to waist, and Sera’s chest was exposed — her plain cotton chemise, the upper curves of her breasts, the pink ribbon of the chemise’s neckline.