The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [241]
At last Grace understood. She started to reach her hand toward the floor, then halted.
Durge was looking at her. He sprawled with limbs twisted, his cheek pressed against the floor, the arrows jutting from his body. His brown eyes were fixed on her. One was dead and lifeless, but the other shone with a familiar light, gentle and true. She had not felt the pain of the knife wound, but she felt this pain, and it was unbearable.
“Do it, my lady.” Durge's voice was a croak, but it was not flat, not dead. It was he. It was really he. “Awaken the defenses of the keep. Slay the servants of the Pale King.”
Tears trailed down her cheeks, bitter as they touched her lips. “It will kill you, too, Durge.”
“I am already dead, my lady. I died over a year ago, on Midwinter's Eve. That I was granted so much time after that to serve you was a reward I did not deserve, though it was one I cherished beyond measure. But now all I deserve is death. I have betrayed you. And I . . . I have slain Lady Aryn.”
“No,” said a soft voice, “you haven't.”
Aryn knelt beside Durge. Her face was ghostly and tight with pain, but her blue eyes were as brilliant as sapphires. She lifted his head, cradling it on her lap.
Durge wept, though from only one eye. “No, my lady. I beg you, do not do this. Do not show me such tenderness, not after what I have done.”
She smoothed his hair from his brow. “You should have told me, Durge. You should have told me you loved me.”
“I did not wish to bother you, my lady.”
Despite her tears, Aryn laughed. “And how could it possibly have been a bother, to be loved by a man as noble and good as you, Durge of Embarr?”
“I am not so noble, my lady. And you could never have returned such a love.”
Her eyes went distant. “I might have,” she said quietly. “I might have.”
His body jerked. “You must go, my lady. I can feel it, digging deeper. In a moment I will be lost again.”
“No, Durge,” Aryn said, gazing into his eyes. “You will never be lost to us. Never.” She hesitated, then bent down and pressed her lips to his.
Aryn lifted her head. A sigh escaped Durge, and a stillness came over his body. The lines that had always rendered his face so grim were smoothed away. His eyes stared without seeing.
“I am a lucky man,” he said, his voice soft with amazement. “I am such . . . a lucky man.”
Aryn wept silently. Durge groped with a blind hand toward Grace.
“Tell me, my fairy queen, what is your command?”
Grace kissed his brow. “Sleep, my sweet knight,” she murmured. “Sleep.”
Then she pressed her bloody hand to the floor.
54.
Grace straddled a gap in the line of sharp-toothed peaks. Her arms braced against the cliffs to either side, so that her broad shoulders guarded the pass. And her head reached up toward the sky, so that she could gaze for leagues around.
She could see—could sense—the small sparks of life that moved within her. Hundreds of men stood atop the high wall that skirted her, and a thousand more gathered behind, ready to take the place of those who fell. More men moved in the yard between her encircling arms, fletching arrows, sharpening swords. She was pleased; not in seven hundred years had she hosted a force so proud as this.
Thunder shook the air like the sound of drums. Dark clouds churned in the sky. Grace turned her gaze out over the vale of Shadowsdeep. Three leagues away, outlined by a livid glow, were the sharp spires of the Ironfang Mountains: the walls of the prison in which the Pale King had been trapped for a thousand years.
Trapped no longer. There was a shadowy hole in the Fal Threndur. The Rune Gate—forged by the same wizards who had bound Grace's stones with magic—had opened. The army of the Pale King streamed forth. Gouts of fire shot up to the black sky. The army marched toward the keep.
Let them come. She was ready.
But what was this? Servants of evil already prowled within her. Dozens of them were in the main hall at