The Lady Of The Castle

In the years before he turned seventeen, Domeric had grown up in the harder half of the country. Red marshes and thick groves of dirt and dead men that had wandered off an eye too far and foot too deep, like haunted marks that marred the flat plains of swamp, buried only a stone’s throw from the foot path unbeknownst to the passerby’s until their bodies came up with the summer rains.

It was hardly uncommon—both within the city walls and out to the surrounding towns—to hear stories of stableboy’s or farmhands who’d got swept up by an avalanche of mud and rain, drowned before the summer’s end and not found til the next summer season had salted the earth in a title wave of short held grief and pity. Only to be repeated again before the leaves turned and the rains contuined to drown the earth in a sorrowful muddy well.

The weather never an eve too bright, either. The air thick with the swells of black monsoons durning the wet summers and damp springs and little softer during the winters, only differentiated with an unbroken chill that seemed to beat to the bone under layers of furs and hearths and wet-boots. Domeric scarcely imaged anywhere on the continent might look so different than the cold eastern tip of Biwreye. Yet, the battlement was miles of country out, long past the acadiana and the marshlands and, as Ser Dane Hughes—a tall, stout man, who had been Domeric’s squire knight during his time in the battlement—had said, they were a three week’s ride south; with the sky a bleeting blue, like the speckled shell of an egg. And the summer, as it had been, was already deceptively warm. It was the most beautiful part of the country, yet, sorrowfully, Domeric thought, no less full of ghosts and dead men.

They'd been in the distance from a large southern castle for some time, a looming weave of white stones that sat atop a green hill. The tall peak of it stuck out from a sea of rolling grass that eemed to wrap for miles. Portly, in that it appeared so thick and deep one could feasibly assume they might just about stumble off the edge of the world if they walked into it. And no less humbly was the castle itself, stiff against the prodigal sky as the deep spur of the sun overhead hung like a yellow egg yolk, casting a wide shadow down from the keep that carved the grass below into a dark pit.

Domeric thought the thing might about swallow him whole, if he hadn't felt Favel beneath him kicking up bouts of rocks and earth with his unsteady gait. The image like a picturesque old world canvas, plastered against the wall of the abbey in his home city as a sharped edged reminder of what penitence had to offer. The sort of thing he was sure he'd seen in the pages of some fairytale. Nothing like the tall stone obelisks that stuck up from the wide landscape back in Biwreye, dutiful in their watch. This castle, born of beauty and ambition, was the kind fit for kings, and knights, and maidens fair and only really real in the intangible depths of dreams.

"Ever been to a castle like that?" Toke, one of the other noble boys in the cavalry, whispered beside him.

Toke was about a year or so Domeric's senior, with sorry eyes and a skittish horse named Dancer who had once ridden in tourneys before Toke had joined the Templar. When he'd first met Toke, Domeric had asked him how that'd come to be. A tourney horse to war. As Toke had said, quite listlessly, he'd once been the page to a tourney knight.

"Never much been to a real castle." Domeric said, Favel's foot sinking into a deep hole left in the dirt from the boat-carriages and wagons ahead. "Let alone a castle like that."

Though he'd imagined them plenty fold when he was much younger. Stories of knights in white armor and ladies in silk dresses gathered to court in castles that drowned the land around them like the mast of a black ship.

“Guess that’s what being a high lord gets you.” Toke said, tying a flask of watered-down wine to Dancer’s side as they trampled over the freshly kicked earth. “Think you’ll ever live in one, one day?”

Favel hit another dip in the worn wagon path cut between the thick walls of rolling grass, wrapping up to the castle’s frame like a warm bed.

No. Is what he wanted to say. Fantastical and grand that it was, like an untouchable monument from some long worn and lost moment in time. And quite stilly, as he stared across the open fields and hills that towered somewhere between the far plains of land west and the tawny coast, he found himself having a hard time imagining anyone having lived there at all.

“I’ve always wanted to live somewhere warmer.” Is what he said, instead. “I’d imagine this would be good a place as any to start.”

And it was, good as any. The walls of the castle drawn closer as they rode further up the hillside. And perhaps he might never live in a place such as this, but as he watched the sun dip down lower on the horizon, he understood plain as any why. Because people were not meant to live in dreams. And so horribly, the fair and framed face of the castle itself was as much a disincarnated dream as any place possibly could be, and too, inexplicably with the realization, Domeric felt a sense of dread looming underneath the wide, empty sky. Summer birds with white wings beating over in a one two time, loud as all terror.

The sky was a deep, angry orange by the time they'd arrived at the castle. The bleached bricks that toppled either side of the front gates tinged peach like the warm hearth of a fire as the sun burned its reflection to the lime-washed walls and bronze carvings that languished in tangled mass on the front gates' thick iron bars. The flushed noses of carefully patinated men and women drawn cold as the heavy doors brushed open and small lines of horses and wagons catered by in droves.

It was not quite evening, far enough from that there was little rest and much fanfare from the excitement the towered legs of castle spires inspired in boys who'd never been a wagon ride away from their homes. And among them, too, Domeric felt sickly awestruck by the unfathomable sight of the white stones and hickory trees dusted in shades of jeweled greens and golds. Not nearly done in justice by the small, lithe body of it that had been dotted in the distance of the horizon.

And though sick with exhaustion, he'd not much in the way of rest before taking to the tasks of unsaddling horses, alongside a few of the other boys, including Toke and an irritating boy named Bello.

Bello was the same age as Domeric, with a thin nose that had been broken crooked and a mad grin that probably pleased no one but Bello himself, since it only ever followed the spit of a flagged taunt. And at some point, Domeric figured Bello must have mistaken them as friends because he'd one evening, during their encampment at a town outside Longleat, come to Domeric's post with his teeth pressed wide to his ears and more tittering than Domeric took an interest in.

"Good news, m' on your post." Bello had said. Domeric hadn't seen how that was good news, but he'd also made no effort to protest, and had since been suffering through the whistle-toned blow of Bello's voice as he filled the empty air of the castle's stables with the chatter of how he'd spent the previous evening outside of Rhys with a homely woman named Jovena.

According to Bello, she was a well built brunette who frequented the local alehouse, though Domeric had his suspects that she didn’t spend her evenings waiting there for folks like Bello to sweep her off her feet in romantic tizzy.

Bello then had spent the rest of the evening attempting to convince both Domeric and Toke that it might be fun to go down again that same night after their dinners—a sorry little thing of creamed fish and pitiful wine that they'd pulled with them in their wagons—as Bello apparently had a friend who'd grown up nearby and knew his way in and out like a weasel. To which Domeric made a show of a stomach upset and an array of other excuses that might get himself out such a dreadful task, and Toke, avoidant as he was, had simply disappeared wordlessly at some inconspicuous point during their meal. So sly Domeric hadn't even noticed his absence until he'd turned to get Toke's opinion on the matter, only to find the seat beside him empty as the open sea.

It wasn't until later in the evening that he'd taken the opportunity to slip down to the castle's oratory. Domeric had never considered himself overly virtuous, nor ripe with piety. Moreso, he held with his visits a deep sense of duty best off carried by every man, knight or otherwise—though ostensibly the prospects of knighthood softened the labor of the task greatly. Being well what it was. A riotous awning of the prestigious and exemplary, rather than simply being born of petty honor and bedded flowers that wilted and died with rains, and droughts, and fair weather. And as he walked through the echoed halls of the carved chapel, he couldn't help but believe there ought to be the watchful eyes of God, here, too. Horribly observed by the empty room.

All tall pillars and saddled gold, lit by candles that cast large shadows against the tiled floors and paled beneath the slipped reds that drove down from the glass ceiling in an illuminating display of ornery moonlight. Only aided in the strange, empty nature by the bright stained oil paintings that sat stone in a leafed display around the edges of the room. Great big faces of men and women who were important enough that their likeness had been written down in a desperate attempt at remembrance against the race of time. Like fighting an invisible stranger who cared little at all for the fight, or even a winner for that matter. Though perhaps that was what made the defiance all so futile to begin.

He’d been to the abbey in Biwreye often. Smaller than the one in Somset, with less grandeur. The stones worn and the candles held by small iron scones, and the only painting being that of a black-varnished oil depicting a legie knight that hung staunchly on the back wall. He was an important knight. The kind talked of in books and the founder of the Knight’s Templar. And Domeric would look up at the painting often. The bone-bleached armor of the man as he sat atop the back of an obsidian horse, like a holy knight of myth. Domeric frequently imagined himself as the man in the painting, as any young boy might. God, gold, and glory pressed on the skin of an honorable man, as idyllic and untouched as the Gods themselves. Human, but surely not anything close to mortal; at least, that was what Domeric had thought as far as the man in the painting went.

And no less indefinite did the lords and ladies in the Somset oratory look. Fine men in red capes and preened expressions postured in an immortal sense of valor despite their existence as a temporary fixture of the castle in a long set of lineage.

Stuck out among them was a painting of a pale-faced woman. The tilt of her lips like the ruby flat leaves of a plum tree, though her features saddled the canvas like ruined stone, carved in a ladden expression that followed him morose through the chapel’s stalls as he stepped towards the perched altar sat center stage.

Might she have been either a lady or daughter at some point in the castle’s history? He did not know, but there was a grave sadness to the painting he had been unable to shake for the weeks following, and the stone halls of the castle, despite having been basking in the pleasant heat of the summer evening air, had been plagued by an autumnal chill not unlike a vague sickness that seemed to persist no matter the weather.

Too, by the wake of the morning, it was with little surprise he'd slept poorly as the weeks turned, on account of the deep humidity and a black pit of dreams. Like a stranger intent to drown him in a sea of steel. The image of a boy with an arrow through the helm of his eye and a neck bent into the dirt as a wash of horses and clotted boots sullied through red mud. Although he hadn't gotten much a good night of sleep since long before that evening too. The dreams of ghosts and a cold white eye pierced by copper steel hanging like an executioner's blade since the night he'd shot the arrow. And he wondered if Ser Dane suffered such bouts of sleeplessness and harrowing dreams as well, or perhaps the haunting feeling was something he'd long gotten used to as the price of a battle won and the grace of God to wake the next morning after. And he liked to imagine a far-off evening in a bed of fine linen and silks in a warm castle, in a warm city where such a thing might not bother him at all. The penance of noble endeavors steeped with deep rewards rather than merciless guilt.

Though, he was saved thankfully by the carrying voices of the infantry and cavalry outside bellowing in through the small stone-cut window of his room, lined with various colors of stained glass that danced peacefully onto the aching cracks of the stone floors. He hadn't recalled much of his southern history, and he had little clue who had owned the castle before the Knights of Templar had, but he'd imagined they must have been very wealthy.

It was still nearly dark by the time he'd made his way from his room to the stable where he and Toke had been intended to water the horses for the morning before breakfast.

Llewellyn, one of the younger squires, had been amongst them as well. Far more eager than either Domeric or Toke had been at such an early hour, and he'd spent most of the cool, silvery morning chirping in a brimmed dawning excitement, new to the prospects of travel at such an early age.

"I've never had a room so big." Llewellyn said as he tossed a cold wash over a horse named Bayard, running him down with a fine-toothed curry comb. "I've got a room my own of course, but never one so wide. Be hesitant to call anything a castle with one's like this."

"Decadent is what I call it," Toke said, "don't think anyone needs so much stuff, you ask me, castle's in better hands now."

Toke, though plenty wealthy, had grown up further north, where winters started by mid-autumn and didn't wane until the end of spring. Castle's often threadbare, likely more than even Domeric was used to by nature of bad weather, and built to withstand utility over all else. And it wasn't much hard for Domeric to believe that was where Toke got his general disposition, too. Though he imagined it might be an unpleasant way to live such as that, being so un-privy to all of life's thoughtful futilities.

"Who'd did own the place anyway," Domeric asked. Toke's brow raised to him as he razored a knot from the side of Dancer's mane. "Never much been good with my southern lords n' dukes."

"The Godfrey's," Toke said with a pause, "well, was the Godfrey's last I think. The portraits go as far back to Lord Norwitch, though, who'd had the place before."

"They teach much history where you're from?" Llewellyn asked, his own horse Morel rather skittish and easy to spook. A match made since Llewellyn himself was, well and things considered, a shy boy. His voice small and drowned like the scurry of a cellar mouse as he talked towards the tops of his feet. "Never much good at history in my lessons; I'm a better archer."

A hard image, the thought of Llewellyn killing anything besides strawmen with wooden swords and weaved targets. Though that was really all the fun of it, anyways.

"You'd seen the portraits?" Domeric asked, and he couldn't quite picture Toke stood at the foot of a chapel bench reciting words of prayer, though it might have been a funny image if he did.

"No." Toke said, grabbing a bridle off a woodcut saddle rack and hanging it over Dancer's tipped nose. "But I know of them. Probably more oils here than elsewhere, least from what I remember."

"And why so?"

"Rich family, big keep, big heads," Toke answered, barely a beat missed as he chewed through his stream of thought. "Lots of history in a place like this. Lot's a rumor, too." Toke adjusted the hang of the bridle with a rough pull, giving the tanned leather a loud smack as it sat straight on the dent of Dancer’s back. "That's what happens when people have the time to sit on their asses all day, I say. They come up with stuff to worry about."

Though the statement just made Toke sound like a rather big cynic.

“Well don’t just be sorry about it,” Domeric said, “what’s the rumor?”

“It’s a dumb rumor.” Toke pursed his lips to a line, “And I’m not sorry about it. It’s a ghost tale, mostly. They say the keep is haunted.”

“Doesn’t look like any haunted keep I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s because it’s not haunted.” Toke made a point of emphasis as he tossed his manner of tools back to their bucket. "People say it's haunted, doesn't mean it's haunted."

"And why not?" This time, it was Llewellyn, who spoke, eyes wide as a field deer as Toke squinted his eyes at him.

"You ever seen a ghost?" Toke gave a quick ring of his wet cloth before setting it off to dry over the stables side, gaze fixed down on Llewellyn, not waiting for him to answer his tall-taled rhetorical. "No, cause ghosts aren't real."

"My mother said our keep was haunted." Llewellyn offered. Which only caused Toke to laugh.

"My mother used to tell me there were Blemmyes cross the sea'," he gave a mild shrug, "not everything's the way people say it is."

Though people often say things for a reason. "What's the place haunted for, anyway?" Domeric interjected. It was a curious kind of place the be haunted, Magnolia tree’s and bright windows that carried that carried light like the soft break of dawn.

"One of the ladies," Toke pointed to a tower on the castles east side, a tall spire above the chapel and great hall’s end, "killed herself in that tower. After a battle, say her lover was killed. Some knight or other. Bad reason to kill yourself if you ask me."

Although Domeric thought it made for a rather lousy ghost story, seeing that it was mostly just sad. A terrible kind of tragedy. But he didn’t much forget Toke’s words either. And in the weeks following, he’d been curious enough to, at the very least, track down the woman’s name. Eilema Godfrey. Same as the painted woman in the Somset oratory. Coppery hair and sharp eyes over a thin, sloped nose that drew down to the flat of her lips. She was quite pretty, though not in such a standard way. And when she looked down at him with her tragically morose expression, he couldn’t help but wonder what her life must’ve been like.

For the most part, in the week to follow, Domeric had spent most of his time at the small wooden desk shoved in the far corner of his room. Several shelves worth of books piled around in small puddles as he made work of reading through the leafed pages. He'd found, quite unfortunately, there was very little to do outside a litany of chores and base responsibilities, besides perhaps drink and sew havoc on the small town of Ydolastre that was a half-hour ride away, which hadn't been allowed, but many of the boys did anyway.

Bello, on occasion, got out to do so as well, with a group of other men in the calvary and his mousy little gossip friend Wyket. And he had tried many times to convince Domeric that it might be fun outside of all the sorry excuses and flat rejections. Which mostly resulted in Wyket coming up with a number of increasingly absurd reasons why Domeric didn't want to come, likely ranging from the fact he simply had nothing better to do. Rather instead, Domeric had spent most of the evening in his room with a stack of books he had found in the castle's study, a large, tall, cavernous chamber that went on for rows and rows and seemed like it may never end in a senseless sort of gaudy collection. And he doubted most the books had been read at any point throught their existence in the castle walls based on the thin line of dust that had crept over the page tops and built stucco shelves that protruded from the library walls. He'd chalked his bitter curiosity up to the sheer boredom he'd been offered by the never-waning end of days and night's that he'd spent in Somset. Too, like a hanging ghost, the impressioned face of the woman in the painting compelling his interest around historical subject matters in a strange, unshakeable hum, that he seemed to worry around his thoughts endlessly. And despite being renowned for dying, the pale bound books had surprisingly little to offer in the way of the history of the woman. A stranger in her own life. He read down a list of names in a large bible book that documented family histories.

Mynde Godfrey—1216 - 1244

Married to Ysabel of Reweth

Meiler Godfrey— 1237 - 1260

Married to Lyana of Ashdow He flipped through several of the pages. The room a depressing cool as the night air swept through the cracks starting in the castle's walls.

Errc Godfrey— 1322 - 1358

Married to Ysoria of Apelles

Children, Errc Godfrey the younger, Aymeric Godfrey, Eilema Godfrey.

It wasn't until the fourth or fifth book that he'd found something more than the woman's year of birth and the name of her father and brothers. It was a small biography, of only a few words.

Eilema Godfrey— 1339 - 1357

Eilema was born to Ysoria of Apelles and Errc Godfrey in the city of Somset. She resided in Somset until her death in 1357, where she took her own life after the castle was captured by invading forces. She died with no children and was never married.

Despite the petty rumors of her ghost, it was as though the histories had eaten her alive. A sad sort of destiny to end up with.

He wondered what his own page might look like. Domeric Kane— 1402, born to Jane of Wakefield and Yorric Kane in Biwreye. He hoped there might be more than that. Thirteen words on a page. And most terribly, he thought again of the boy from his nightmares. The one he had killed. Might he have a page at all? Or even so much a name in a book somewhere? Likely not. And when Domeric finally went to sleep that evening, he saw a woman with red hair and a perfect arrow in his dreams.

The next of the weeks at the castle passed slow. A tirade wakefulness and restless sleep that he'd attributed to the development of his sudden break into madness, or what he assumed must be based on all accounts.

He'd start his mornings in the stables and spend his days a stone's throw from Ser Dane until the evenings, in which he mostly had to himself. Although he'd found the longer he stayed in the castle, the further the evenings stretched. Thoughts of the portrait and the woman hanging over him like a blank shadow.

Like Toke, he'd little believed in ghosts. Tall stories mothers tell their children or children tell each other to estrange and terrify. But as the days passed, he had started to notice that the image of the woman persisted like a blazing chill. And Domeric would often swear he'd seen her face or heard a woman's voice echo behind him down a long castle hall. A figure in a dovecote or buried in the faces of the great hall, only to find the castle empty and devoid of any woman to speak. It was maddening. And were Domeric any younger, he might have attributed to a divine sign or an omen, but now Domeric had simply begun to wonder if the boredom had caused him to lose his mind.

The worst instance had been the evening he'd finally agreed to go with Bello down to the small traveler's town of Ydolastre between Somset and Rys.

Bello had been beside himself giddy, with the effect that his persistence had finally worn down what little patience Domeric had, only to simply disappear the moment they'd gotten themselves seated in some partly derelict alehouse, leaving Domeric alone with Wyket, who'd already begun to drink himself a face closer to death, and another boy a bit older than all them, who was also from the east. The boy, Orvyn, had joined the calvary around the same time Domeric had, meaning he'd been at Ashdow, unlike many of the others who'd joined a few weeks later and had yet to see an eye of battle. And they'd had a not terribly unpleasant conversation about where in the east the boy was from, his family, and how he'd ended up with the Knights Templar.

"Most I saw it, just good for being away from home. Not terrible people, my family really, but I've got three elder brothers—not much else one can do but be a knight."

Domeric wanted to say that he couldn't have related less. Being the eldest of three, but instead, he attempted to offer what he'd hoped came across as an understanding look, though there was little guarantee that it had.

"What about you, why a knight?" Orvyn asked, a round wine cup pressed to his palm as he leaned back from the table, the orange glow from a nearby lantern casting a deep shadow that cut across the hollow curve of his cheek.

"I've just always wanted to be, I suppose." And when he said it, he realized just how foolish that sounded, a warm rush of blood washing over him as Orvyn laughed. Though with no intent ot malice, met by the embarrassment of it all the same. He'd reached to say something more when the room was cut by a loud crash of wood hitting dull against the floor, and Wyket's body way splayed against it, hisstinh the ground with a rather painful-sounding thud, the back back of his chair toppled over flat bedside him.

He'd drunk himself straight from the seat of his chair, and Domeric and Orvyn did nothing but stare at the sorry scene for a moment longer than they probably should have all sense of reasonable worry disappeared in the place of shock. "Someone should probably take him back." Orvyn said with a nod, broad-faced and nettled. "You remember the back way, in and out?" Oryvn asked, and Domeric nodded. "I'll go find Bello, probably off somewhere, damn fool he is. Go ahead and take him back will you."

Domeric hadn't much been looking forward to the task, and though Wkyet wasn't large for his age, neither was he reasonably light.

They'd been halfway up to the back end of the castle when Domeric caught the sound of voices carried in the distance.

Taking a moment's care to duck into the small set of birch trees that scattered in a light covering around the castle’s edges. Having little interest in taking whatever consequence came with being caught outside the castle walls unprompted. As the voices grew, the silhouette of several men on horses became apparent under the white cast of the moon. And he'd nearly dropped Wyket face down in the dirt. The face of the lady in the portrait floating by on the back of a black horse like an omen of death.

He'd made good to take Wyket back through the back end gates in a hurry and had simply dumped him in a bale of hay by the time they'd made it back to the castle walls. Scurrying off to his own room though guilty of some terrible crime, which in a sense he may have been. Though mostly, he couldn't shake the hallow of broken paranoia that had followed him. That perhaps the castle, or all of Somset, might be haunted—or simply, and even worse, he'd well and certainly lost it.

That evening, he dreamed he drowned in a sea of grass, and he'd awoken to the cold light of the morning sun as it barely ran thin over the crossed glass of his chamber's window.

He'd gone down to stables barely dressed, eyes still bleak and jaw still tense from the grip of his dreams and the evening before. Though when he'd made it to the rough-cut horse shed, Bello, chipper as all hell despite being out and gone for most the evening, was near shouting at poor Llewellyn, who stood sheepishly behind Morel as though it would stop the onslaught of Bello's voice.

"One of the ladies at the tavern told me." He could tell Morel was starting to spook from the commotion, ears tilted like a wind-sewn flag and back leg kicked hard into the dirt. "Saw em' riding this way last night."

"Saw who riding?"

He saw Bello jump in a quick turn, seeming almost embarrassed for a moment by the quick interruption before falling back to his typical, blustering, grin.

"Ser Godwin." His teeth almost split open on the words. "He's headed up to the castle." It was only then, that Domeric understood Bello's splitting excitement. "Heard too they had a prisoner with them."

"To the castle?" Domeric asked. The men from the previous night came to him in pieces. The cast of a black horse wide on the grassy landscape.

"Closest place between Certes and Apelles."

"Why Certes?"

"Well, I dunno know. That's what Orvyn said, he knows all about these sorts of things. Certes and Apelles. Must be someone important to go all the way to the queen's city."

Dinner was loud that evening. The hall, a buzz with excitement.

Word had gotten around of Ser Godwin's arrival. With Domeric having overheard some boys, Wyket and a fellow he didn't know quite as well, out near the Dovecoat saying they'd seen him ride through the gates that same morning. And Bello had been on again about some something or other— likely a listless tirade about the Jovena woman Bello always insisted upon—when his mouth bit closed like a vicious snapper. Whipped by some mysterious sense. At first, Domeric was grateful, thinking maybe he'd become suddenly aware of how irritating he was, until he realized the entire hall had fallen silent, eyes turned to the helm of the room where a man in white armor had seated himself firm at the head of a table, next to Ser Dane and the other ordained knights. And it was the first time Domeric had seen the man in person. Ser Godwin, founder of the knights Templar.

He was older than the painting Domeric had seen. His hair feathering white around the edges of his temples, and his face fuller with the skin of age and years well lived, though no less imposing, almost half a foot taller than Ser Dane, his amor white as bone and ivory.

“Well don’t silence yourself on my behalf.” Ser Godwin spoke, face raised in a brazen grin as he gave the room a dismissive wave. “Drink! It’s a night to celebrate,” he thrust his glass into the air, a red spill blossoming over the cup's lip. “The War’s just about over.”

And despite the great excitement, Domeric couldn't help but feel an air of ill ease, and the advent of Bello's yelps and shouts at people sitting three seats down the table did little to help. He’d slipped off with little less than a word before the dinners end.

It was in his early leave that he ended up wandering down a large hall in one of the castle's wings. Comprised of deft pillars and laid out like an expansive labyrinth from an old, worn-out myth, in which a beast waits somewhere in the belly below. Devil wings and a goat's head, or some other terrible amalgamation of beast and man to roam. And he'd somewhere along the way managed into an area of near darkness. The streams of moonlight suddenly cut, and Domeric, unsure of at what point they'd disappeared.

The stones of the room were less kept, too, like black coal lit by a few dim candles that had been placed on iron holds along the wall, casting large obtrusive shadows before mostly disappearing completely like something from a bad ghost story. Which Domeric was always sorely reminded of when alone in the castle at night.

He placed one hand along the wall, attempting to feel his way to an exit; when he turned around a corner, the pale face of a woman stuck out to him in the darkness.

It was in this moment of paranoid weakness that his heart nearly hit his throat, and he'd barely choked down his startled yell before he'd realized the figure wasn't spectral of any sort. Rather that of a girl.

A small girl, famished looking, like the black corvids that hummed overhead in Biwreye, with rusted hair that hung in loose, thin waves, weighed down by the weight of itself and splayed over the blushed pink of her dress, the fabric pale, like it had been bleached in the sun over the course of several days. And she had a fine purple bruise over the bust of her cheek.

She looked nearly surprised as Domeric himself had been, her eyes wide and lips slightly pulled apart before her brows knit together in a sort of recognition. Of what, he was unsure.

"I can't be that terrible to look at." The girl said, and suddenly, Domeric felt rather embarrassed.

"I thought you were a ghost," Domeric offered, not as willed with the declaration as he'd have liked to been. And the girl raised her brows with a burrowed frown.

"A ghost? And do you always believe in such nonsense?" The girl was stood less than a foot from the wall. A ring of fine chains drawn heavy around her wrists. And Domeric was met with the passive recognition that this might've been the girl on the horse, the one Bello had said Ser Godwin was taking to Certes. "Lots of people say their keeps are haunted."

"Lots of people are fools, then." The girl said plainly. "There's no such thing as ghosts."

Though she may have well been one. With her long, thin nose and perched lips. The cotton face of the dead woman that had been haunting his dreams.

"Says who?" Domeric said. "Can't be that everyone's a liar."

"May well that they can be." She sat down against the wall, the fabric of her dress pooling like a small pond by her feet. "And what're you, anyway?" She asked, not impolite but not terribly friendly either, and the question caught Domeric off guard.

"I'm knight," Domeric responded, a bit dithered. The girl contuining to worry faintly the hem of her dress.

"You look too young to be a knight, and that's not what I meant, anyway. What's it you're down here for?"

It was then that Domeric realized the perhaps bizarre nature of his appearance; just as off-guard as he might have been by the girl's sudden appearance, so too to her, strange did he probably seem. Wandering around the dark in imposing stature with seeming little reason as to why.

"I got lost." Domeric offered, and she seemed to accept his answer unquestionably.

"All southern castles are quite confusing, I think. No rhyme or reason, really; all the quarters built with separate visions in mind. The castle in Apelles isn't much different. Really, what need is there for so many different passageways?"

"Escapes, maybe," Domeric said, without putting much thought into it, though he quickly realized how crass it might seem on account of the girl's situation. "Or perhaps, confuse, I mean, any strangers that might find their way in."

"Perhaps so," the girl said, "though I've never seen strangers break their way into a castle. You're with Ser Godwin?"

"Ser Dane," Domeric corrected. On account of the fact he'd never much met Ser Godwin, not personally.

"If you're with the Templar," the girl enunciated, "you're with Ser Godwin."

"Then yes, I suppose that makes me with Ser Godwin."

"I don't understand why, he's not all very nice, you know." Domeric had never assumed he might be. In fact, he never assumed anything about Ser Godwin at all outside of the things he already knew. Which was that he founded the Templar and was an exemplary knight.

"He has a cause to support," Domeric said, and though he might've felt bad for the girl, grace in such circumstance was a luxury.

"I've not done anything, you know." The girl said this time from the blue, no longer looking down at her hands, but instead, her eye's wide to Domeric. "Really I haven't. The cause must be terrible so to cause all this. He killed my brother, too, down in Apelles. We hadn't done a thing."

"Your brother started a war."

"My uncle started a war." The girl corrected. "My brother died for nothing."

"Maybe so, but it's still war."

"And you'd die for this cause?"

"I think if I were to die," Domeric paused, "it would be best to die for something I believe in."

"And is this what you believe in?"

What Domeric believed in—

"Ser Godwin and the chruch have done good by my family. I'd be a fool not to believe in them."

"Be a fool, then.”

He'd spent most of the next two days in a sour mood. Toke had asked him at breakfast what happened, but Bello just made to dig and make his mood worse. Needless jabs as they huddled around the training yard like he was making some sport of the irritation.

"You're a shit archer," Bello said as Domeric notched another arrow, the last one dug into the fence post behind the archery stands mockingly.

"I'm a shit archer 'cause you keep talking," though truly, he hadn't shot a straight arrow in weeks. When with every time he tried, the face of the boy hung fatalisticly with an empty spot where his eye should be. He watched the arrow sail off and into a patch of dirt a row from the target's front.

"Nah," Bello said, giving him a pat on the shoulder, "looks like you're a shit archer 'cause you're a shit archer."

Though despite his talk, Bello himself wasn't a much better archer. Every arrow missed terribly to the dirt. The sight making Domeric smile just a tad.

After dinner that next evening, one of the boys had stopped him as he left the hall. Bello's friend Wyket. He'd nodded towards the long table where Ser Dane and some of the other knights often sat.

"Hugues wants to see you," Wyket said. And Domeric could feel the subtle itch of paranoia return. Worried that perhaps he had heard about their excursion to Ydolastre or some other of his wandering offenses. Wyket's drawn, dour expression doing little to edge his nerves.

"What for?" Domeric asked, and Wyket just shrugged solemnly.

"Dunno. Told me to go get you, though."

Domeric had wanted to argue, but instead, he stood, taking a quick turn to the foot of the long table.

"You wanted to see me?" he said, Ser Dane's head turning in a long arc to face Domeric. He seemed a tad drunk.

"Domeric!" Hugues said, girn wide as he waved Domeric forward. "You look glum? I don't suppose Wyket scared you. Has a way of delivering news like the dead, that one."

To that, Domeric might agree.

"Sit down, drink with me." Ser Dane raised his glass. "You're a good squire, you know, grown into a good man. You'd be an even better knight."

And despite the outward sense of cheer, he seemed morose, for a reason Domeric couldn't pinpoint.

"You ever met Cenric?" Ser Dane said suddenly. "He's a good knight, too. Maybe even the best of 'em." He took a drink from his glass. "He's lookin for a squire. Lost his on the field down in Apelles when they took the city."

He'd made his way to the room where Ser Dane had said to go not long after. It was a dim chamber in the upper east wing of the castle, with white walls that cast dark grey under the flickering light of the oil lamp set on the desk where Ser Godwin was sat hunched over a piece of white parchment, the metal tip of his ink pen scratching along the ridged paper.

"Domeric, come in." Ser Godwin said, his gaze not lifted from his parchment even though he'd been the one to request Domeric. "Ser Dane and I, we go quite back in the years. Good deal of it, it was. Met before the Templar even existed, down in Albury. He likes to act all humble, really, that one, but he's got more skill than spirit I like to think."

It was something Domeric hadn't known. Ser Dane being a mostly private man. With Domeric only ever hearing rare bits of it on occasion, about his time in Certe's or across the sea in Soveryen. And in the dim light, hunched over his desk, Domeric thought Ser Godwin looked little like the knight in the painting he'd seen hung the Biwreye abbey. Older and more estranged as he was illuminated by the candlelight. Abhorrently human.

"I'll get to the point of it." Ser Godwin said abruptly, tapping the stiff body of his pen around the glass interior of its inkbottle. "Ser Dane spoke quite highly of you. And I'm out a squire. I'd like for you to work under me until I take leave from the castle."

He lifted his head from the table, staring intently towards Domeric. And he knew appropriately he should be thanking the man profusely. Certainly, it was beyond the recognition he would have ever dreamed. Nor might anyone, dream. But he couldn't escape the hollow pit that had been sinking in his stomach. Pressing and drowning his excitement like a thick wall of peat moss hovered over an impounding log.

“I’m really not all that adept at it.”Domeric said, in the only response he could muster. And Ser Godwin laughed humorlessly

"See you get your humility from Dane, too. Look at ya." He waved dismissive, dipping his pen rapidly in its ink pot before pulling it out in a small wave. "It's just basic duties, mostly. Gaurd, stables."

"Gaurd?" Domeric asked.

"Mostly just standing nonsense, down in the cellars, though not much fun. But I trust you're plenty capable."

Domeric wondered if it was the same cellars from the other day, the dark, ugly walls still fresh in his mind. "You've got the rest of the night, but you start tomorrow. Enjoy it, you're almost a knight."

And in a deep irony, he’d slept dreamlessly that night.

In the day following, Wyket, gossip that he was, had told nearly anyone in the calvary that would hear about Ser Dane calling him the dinner before. And judged by the expression on Wyket's face when he caught glimpse of Domeric walking up on him and Bello in the training yard that afternoon, it was like he'd seen a ghost.

"Dom—" Wyket started before Bello cut him off.

"Didn't much expect to see you this fine day, thought Ser Hughues was set to cut your head up or something. That's what Wyket here said, least."

"For the crime of what?"

"Ydolastre? Being a shitty archer? Dunno, I don't ask those kinds of questions."

"Well, what was it then?" Wyket said, edged like a guilty accomplice and probably for a good reason.

"Ser Godwin needs a new squire," Domeric said plainly, and he was caught off guard by the echo of silence in the training yard as Bello just stared at him, mouth slightly agape.

"He wants you to squire for him?" Bello said hushed, his breath barely breaching the base of his lips.

"Suppose so."

"You suppose?" And as he spoke, Bello sounded rather winded.

The rest of the day had been full of accosting questions, from Bello and a few others. No better through dinner, either. And Domeric, though irritable, would have been irate by it if he weren’t so worried. The thought of the cellar looming over him like a black cloud through most of the day. No lessened in the evening before he was to be on his post.

"It's you, then. The not quite a knight from before—" the girl, who he'd learned from Toke was apparently the queen's cousin, Elisanna Seymour, began as soon as Domeric had stepped out around the corner into the muted cast of the room where she sat in plain view, her appearance little changed outside the fact her bruised cheek had faded somewhat over the past couple days.

"Knight would've been fine." Domeric said, and Elisanna smiled dimly into her cheek.

"Well, you aren't a knight." She said, pleased by it. "And I don't think you ever told me your name, or for that matter asked mine. Did you know that's common manner's?"

She was quite chatty, and Domeric wondered if she was bored, too.

"Domeric." Domeric said, though the answer didn't satisfy her.

"Domeric—?" She drew out.

"Domeric Kane."

"You're from up east then. Biwreye."

It was little often people not from the surrounding towns ever identified him by name.

"You know Biwreye? "Domeric asked, and Elisanna sat upright, back pressed against the greying stones of the castle cellar.

"Sure. I know lots of places." She said. "And you never still did ask my name."

Though Domeric didn't see much reason to.

"I already know your name." He said, and Elisanna seemed surprised, brows raised and eyes wide with a wild gleam.

"Really?" She asked, and Domeric cleared his throat.

"Elisanna Seymour, the queens cousin from Apelles."

Elisanna slouched back down, feet pointed inwards in a skewed triangle. "Seems you do know, then, though bad manner's not to ask me myself, still."

"And you care lots for these manners?" Domeric asked, and Elisanna smiled in reply.

"Course." She said. "We've got lots of manners down in Apelles, and plum trees, and clear rivers. I've never been to Biwreye, what's it like?"

"It's very wet," Domeric said, and Elisanna seemed disappointed to be met with such a pale description.

"Well that's not very exciting."

"It's not a very exciting place."

"Tell me about something else, then."

And they'd talked like that for some time til' late evening. Home cities and Saint's Day's. Surprisingly pleasant despite Domeric's reservations. And just about as bored as Elisanna seemed, Domeric had for many weeks, been dragged down by the pressing spires of Somset and the mid-summer weather, grown hot as kindling as the summer passed with little else to saddle the time in between. The white birds singing overhead as the summer reached its peak, loud as all terror.

The summer had burned down into its hot middle season. The kind that commonly spelled for rain and monsoons rather than an oppressive heat that drenched through loose layers of clothing and arid stone walls, the days of fairer weather past and the season at the worst of it.

Bello had gotten himself into trouble on several occasions for slacking off and his frequent visits to Ydolastre, which had been caught out the week before. Complaining of his reprimanding nearly daily. Either because he'd been bored to death with little elsewhere to go or brought to protest for being called on his bad behavior; either way, it had been everyone's problem since, and he doubted there was anyone in the castle who hadn't heard his list full of complaints. Domeric had even, on one occasion, so sick of hearing it, relayed as such to Elisanna, Bello's fry voice echoing.

"And too, ya know, it's not just me. Wyket as much as anybody, yet not one thing about him. You know what I think, it's some sort of damn conspiracy."

"Don't think idiocy is a conspiracy, Bello," Toke said as he threw a tall saddle with an archer's slot over Morel's back. "You knew it was coming."

"Wasn't coming. Like I said, it's a damn conspiracy." Although Bello didn't seem to much question why he'd be the target of such a plot. Likely because if he examined it further, he'd find far too many holes for it to be a sturdy scapegoat. And outside his restless complaints, Bello, along with most the other boys, hadn't left the castle since.

Mostly, too, he'd begun to look forward to his evenings. His guard duty less a dread and more a pass of the time. It was, in a way, exonerating to hear about what it might be like to live somewhere else in the country.

Elisanna had grown up in Apelles, with her uncle and brother, and she talked about it with the sweet initiation one might a bright evening or lovely dress of brass silk. Thin, wispy trees with white branches and tall grasses that bloomed under a soft summer sun, not unlike Somset. A beautiful paramount of the summer season. Much more romantic a childhood than Domerics own, with its deep mud and thick-rooted sandbox trees.

"And barnacle geese—" Elisanna had said one evening while describing her childhood in Apelles. Her hand stuck out through the rusted bars as she used a thin weave of straw to draw divots in the dirt dusting over the cellar tiles.

"There's no such thing." Domeric had said, and Elisanna protested.

"It's true. They grow on bushes like a berry. One in every lake. Swear it."

"Have you ever seen a Barnacle Goose?"

"I have."

"On the tree?"

"Well, not on the tree." Domeric looked at her incredulously, her lips pushed into a hard line. "Lot's of people say they've seen em."

"Lots of people say they've seen ghosts." Though she didn't much see the irony, and Domeric hadn't been sure whether or not he was being played for a fool.

By the midpoint of the summer swell, Domeric had gotten quite used to the normalcy of things. Even so much as to consider it fondly. One, in which they'd served a small tea cake with dinner, he'd taken one down to the cellars wrapped in a cheesecloth he'd taken from the kitchens earlier that morning.

"And what's this?" Elisanna had asked as she unfurrowed the small cloth in her lap, the tea pastry crumpled into the fabrics edge.

"A lemon cake, for your Saint's Day, is it not?" Domeric watched as she turned the pastry in her hands, eyeing the fine, thin lines of frosting on the cake's top.

"I hate lemons," she said, her lips pulled to a quaint smile as she split a bit of the cake off, pressing it under her tongue. "Thank you."

And as autumn pressed dubious at the edge of the summer days, Domeric had almost forgotten the temporary nature of the castle.

Most of the fighting had been taken east, a small rally of decenters near Lecchour who'd heard about the capture and had taken up arms at the behest of Elisanna's uncle. And when he'd gone to the cellar that evening, the cast of Elisanna's forlorn stare had hung heavily.

"Have you ever killed someone?" Elisanna said gravely, a sudden repose from Domeric's previous statement, though Domeric had already forgotten what that had been.

Once. He thought solemnly. A boy his age. The kind that, under different circumstances, may have been his friend. Instead, he'd laid face down in the dirt with an arrow through his eye. Sometimes, he found himself wondering where the boy's Mother was. Where he was from.

"I've killed many people," Domeric said in a lie. He thought of knights like Cenric, who certainly had. Thieves and criminals. The boy that Doemric had killed was neither.

"And did they deserve it?" Elisanna's eyes were wide and heavy, sunk by frantic thought as they ran over the skin of Domeric's face. There was no veil of sharp words or jokes, and it was uncomfortably raw.

No, that is what he wanted to say. Though he couldn't answer honestly either way. The boy hadn't deserve it. He was simply on the wrong side of Domeric's arrow.

"It's what had to be done."

The answer didn't seem to quell Elisanna any. Her hands worrying with the torn skin of her thumbs.

"My uncle took up arms, in the east." She stared intently at Domeric as her lips formed slow around the words. "They were going to let me live, you know, the queen was." She tore intently at a stray piece of skin on her thumbnail. "And now I'm going die in a city I don't know, for a war I didn't start, by men whose homes I didn't burn."

It was the quiet truth that Domeric often tried to avoid thinking about. Because he didn't want to believe it or by some affect felt guilted by it. It's what has to be done. And there was nothing he could do, either. Then, for the first time in weeks, he thought of the woman in the tower, what did she think as she saw the white rocks below. Domeric wondered.

And he didn't sleep at all that night, taunted by strawberry hair pinned neatly with a silver arrow.

He'd been called in for his leave later that evening. Ser Godwin was set to soon leave Somset, and though Domeric tried to carry on as he normally would, he found his mind often wandered back to the cellar listlessly.

There’d been a few evenings, in a minor trist of drunken reciprocity, he'd attempt to make his way down to the cellars, well unsuccessfully. And Domeric hadn't know either of the men Ser Godwin kept by his sides well enough to simply ask to be let through. The severity of the situation slowly weighing on him as the week poured by.

"Where's Ser Godwin?" he’s said to Bello, one afternoon at the training yard. Domeric hadn't seen him the evening prior, or that morning for breakfast, and he'd been worrying the thought endlessly.

"Godwin?" Bello said, face twisted in the flat confusion he normally held. "Rode off this morning with the captive lady and whatnot, Certes I think.”

The Queen's city, and he'd only needed a minute to reason why.

Bello had hung open his mouth to ask something, but Domeric had already made his way long down the path to the stables. Chest burning with a sudden sense of fear.

"Where are you going?" He heard Bello call out after him, taking off in a jog and a wild wave.

"To the city."

“Ydolastre?” Bello asked.

“Certes.”

"You out your mind?" Bello called. "I always knew you were a basket case, Dom, I mean really, but Certes?" He said. "Well what the hell is in Certes?"

"You said they're going to Certes." Bello had followed him all the way to the stables. "They're going to behead the Seymour girl."

"You're talking treason you know." Bello said, as Domeric threw a saddle over Favel’s back, the one Toke always left for Llewellyn’s horse Morel. Bello stepped right in front of Favel, who was uncharacteristically calm, despite the racket and commotion.

"What of it?"

"I mean think about it Dom, you even have a plan out the gate?"

"The back gate."

"It's plain as day out."

"If they ask, I'll tell them, Ser Dane sent me off, to catch up with Godwin."

"By gods Dom." Bello said, mouth hung in disbelief. "You really are an idiot."

Domeric heeled Favel's reins, kicking him into gear the way of the gate.

"A foolish, dead, idiot." Bello shouted, and for a moment, Domeric thought there were worse thing he could be.

The sun had risen to its high point along the skyline by the time Domeric had reached the caravan. A several hour long ride along the footpath, and Domeric had been driving them at a punishing pace, Favel, uniquely grave and deathly quiet as his hooves hit against the shallow grass fields and through a deep grove of birch trees beyond the hem of the castle walls, with ground roots that roamed upward from the dirt like slim fingers.

He was pretty certain none of the men in the caravan had seen him, their faces forward, faced north, and the open green fields that wrapped the hillside obscuring them to a small weave in the distance. Their figures still and stopped as they spoke in carried voices.

Domeric pulled an arrow from his back and notched it in his bow, feet pressed tightly to his saddle as he tried to hold himself upright.

There were two men along with Godwin in the caravan, and Domeric would never win a fair fight, unlikely against one, and certainly not three, he thought, as he loosed one of the arrows off towards the deep, flushed, sky, the steel whipping past and loaning itself into the dirt aimlessly.

The sudden shot caused a fuss up ahead as Favel inched closer on the gap, wide leaps covering distance faster than the men could mount their horses. Their broad hands pointing to Domerics' spot on the horizon.

He notched another arrow, this time trying to steady the pallid shake in his hands as they gripped around his bow. He aimed for one of the men who had been stopped on foot as he clamored to the back of his horse, a quick relay in Domeric's direction. And when he loosed the arrow, he watched the shot bury itself in the man's chest, soft in the spot between his breastplate where his shoulder met his body.

Domeric watched colourlessly as the hit knocked the man backward to the ground, landing in the dirt with a sickly sound, his body bent against the soft grass. He'd almost wished the man might get back up, in some horrible sense of alleviation, before he realized how terrible that would be. And that he'd made the choice before he'd ever shot the arrow.

And before he could give the dead man further thought, he loosed a second arrow, this time on the other man who'd pulled a long bow from his back, the first shot wedging itself in the man's draw arm, the second in his throat. The shouts of confusion rose as he closed the distance.

"Domeric?" He heard Elisanna ask, her voice ringing soundly like the echo of a canyon throught the rolling hills. "What the hell are you doing here? Oh damn you Domeric!" She yelled, her voice pitched high in a shrill of fear, though her eyes shone wide under the deep noon sky.

"Quite!" He heard Godwin shout as he dismounted his black war horse. Voice stone like a tempered cliff face. "What's this about? You damn fool."

And for a moment, Domeric hadn't known what he'd wanted to say.

"You can't go to Certes." Domeric said, finally. It was a terrible plea he knew. Fallen on the moment in deathly silence.

"You killed two of my knights,” Godwin said, sword still sheathed and eyes hung tightly, “to tell me I can't go to bloody Certes?" And Domeric could only nod to where Elisanna sat on the back of the black horse, A look of terrible understanding crass on Godwin’s face. "Is that how you want it to be?" Godwin asked, and Domeric felt his first tighten around the hilt of his sword.

"You'll never see us again, swear it." Domeric said. "We'll go across the sea, to Soveryen." But Ser Godwin just shook his head.

"Two men are dead, boy." He pulled off one of his white gloves, pressing it under his arm as he pulled for the other. "You don't just get to walk away from this." He could see the etched hardness ridgid in Ser Godwin's expression as he stood, cold and weathered but not disturbed or even filled with pity and grief from the deaths. But rather the weariness that comes simply with time. "Put down your arms, and I won't kill you dead."

Instead, Domeric drew his sword, point raised to Ser Godwin's chest.

"Are you an idiot?" Ser Godwin shouted this time. "I said put down your damn arms.” And Domeric shook his head flatly. “You know how to use that well, that weapon of yours?" His voice was hoarse like gravel. And Domeric raised his sword an inch higher, the weight burning through the tips of his fingers as Ser Godwin closed his eyes to the intrusive sun. “You're a child with a sword.”

"A knight." Domeric said, and Ser Godwin laughed.

"The idiot knight, maybe." And before Ser Godwin could speak further Domeric swung the heavy steel flat towards him, the hit narrowly parried as Godwin stepped back, unalarmed.

“You're not stupid. Throw the damn thing down.” Ser Godwin barked again, and the time, Domeric hit the hilt of his blade in the Templar knights chest, knocking him flat to the floor as he saw Elisanna lurch from her spot on horseback, hands bound at the wrist.

He felt Godwin's grip on his forearm as he fell, pulling him down to the dirt roughly and landing a clean punch against Domeric's face, he could feel blood begin to drip from his nose, but his instincts had kicked in, the sudden realization that he was outmatched weighing on him.

He hit Ser Godwin again, harder, causing the man to wheeze. Though the punch did little to ease the hand pressed on Domeric’s throat, like a dog that had been run loose on the pasture. The shallow sky waning in the distance, A thick clot of clouds cut by the bleached sum hanging sick overhead, full of sweet, soft rains set to break likely into a waring shower week, or even months down the line. He hit Godwin again, and twice more, the sharp end of his sword slicing thick against Ser Godwin's side in a terrible noise.

"To all the hells." Is all Godwin said, a spray of blood and cashmere rippled against Domeric's face as the sword sunk deeper in, the arm on his throat gone as it grabbed to pull the sword from his side. And before he'd been struck by the pain, the warm puddle blossoming down the length of his chest told him something was terribly wrong.

He heard a soft sound from the distance then, like a wail, the sky dimmer, the view of a pinhole. And then the heavy weight of Godwin slumped off him, and Elissaina stood dazed above him. Her hands were ripe and red as they dragged him from the dreamless ground. His back flat against a horse. Though he wasn't sure whose.

"Damn you." He heard her say again, and though the sky was clear, he felt the fall of rain as it wet the edge of his cheek. His heart pounding horribly and the sky racing above in a fine blur. Faintly, he could hear the sound of Elisanna's voice hung over him, but no words came out. A pair of egrets stamped to the clouds overhead, all long white wings as they flew above the summer hills. And awfully enough, Domeric thought, they were loud as all terror, like soft, terrible ghosts.