Chapter Two
Rise and Fall
He is upstairs in Highgarden House's impressive library, seeking an escape from the polite conversation and bad music, when it starts. The screaming and smashing of glass and thundering of feet. Willas throws down the book he has been reading and gets to his feet, his bad knee spiderwebbing a sharp spasm of protest up his thigh and at the same time down to his feet. He stifles a groan. Shouldn't have got up so quickly.
There are footsteps on the stairs, going down rather than up. Voices – high; panicked; urgent – demand to know what's going on. For a few moments, he stands still and tries to think. Now that he's paying attention, he can feel it; the thick, viscous presence of the Red Priestess' magic in the air. Her sendings, whatever they are, tear through his home, but he can hardly go charging out there to strike them down; he couldn't even if he wanted to. He needs another course of action.
From the pocket of his jeans he draws the little woven band his sister made for him four summers ago after he injured his leg in a fight with one of the renegades. The band is simple, plaited leather, and ties about his wrist. But there are minuscule protection sigils cut into the brown leather that make it impossible for anyone or anything to come within a few inches of him when he's wearing it. Though he always carries it about his person – to keep Margaery from nagging, if nothing else – this will be only the second time he has actually used it. He remembers the humourless smile he had given Margaery when she had handed him the homemade charm. "So, Garlan and Loras protect you, but you protect me? Is that how it works now?" Her eyes had widened slightly and then narrowed, at the bitterness in his tone, and he had amended hastily, "But thanks. Thanks for – for thinking of me."
He hates it – even now, after years of schooling himself diligently against any trace of resentment – he hates that he cannot fight the way his brothers and even Margaery can; the way the Sighted must. He doesn't crave glory the way Loras does; nor does he feel the burning need to protect people which motivates Garlan, but his lack of martial prowess makes him a liability; makes him helpless. He's seen what bitterness can do to the Sighted; how it can twist them, so he tries his hardest not to let it get to him. But that's much easier said than done, he reflects grimly, wrapping the leather strap about his wrist and securing it in place with a knot. Immediately, the prickle of magic, like a low, slow electric current, starts through his body, making the little hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
Grabbing for his crutch, he moves across the room and then out onto the upstairs landing.
The first thing that hits him is the chill in the air. It's much colder out here than in the library. Freezing, in fact; way too cold for May. It's an effort to keep himself from shivering.
The second thing is the noise. The library's on the top floor, far enough away from the party on the ground floor that he could hardly even hear the music from in there. But, distant as they are, there's no missing the screams and hideous tearing noises that emanate from the bottom two floors of the house. It gives him the strangest feeling, standing here, removed from all the panic and yet so close to it. It's like being in a dream, only somehow different. He can't quite explain it, even to himself.
The stairs are thickly carpeted, so he descends with a quietness that adds to the bizarre feeling of being there and not there at the same time. The fifth and fourth floors of the manor house are deserted, doors flung open, someone's overturned drink – coke and something, it looks like – staining the cream carpet on the fourth floor landing. The quiet pervading the atmosphere here stands in eerie contrast to the ruckus downstairs. There is a dead feeling in the air, he realises, with a swooping dread in the pit of his stomach.
On the third floor, he finds the first bodies. They are the only people left here.
One, he almost stumbles over on the stairs. She lies sprawled on her back, one arm flung to the side, where the stairs meet the landing. Her face, neck and shoulders are a bloody pulp – it's only from the pale turquoise dress she's wearing that he recognises her as his cousin, Elinor. Bile rises in his throat and his breath catches quick and sharp, so that he has to stand where he is for a moment, eyes pressed shut whilst he fights to compose himself. Keeping his gaze averted, he steps carefully over her and moves on.
The second corpse lies at the top of the next set of stairs, and all the breath rushes out of Willas' body at the sight of it.
It's Sansa's eldest brother, Robb.
His face, though glassy eyed and pallid, is still perfectly recognisable, unscathed apart from the horrible fact that it is no longer attached to his body. His head stares unblinkingly up at the ceiling from the third stair down, whilst the rest of him slumps against a wall; a wall now spattered with dark brownish-red. There is still a knife in the slack grip of his right hand.
Willas does not know how much time elapses before he forces himself to move. When he does, he feels even more as though he is sleepwalking. What is he going to tell Sansa? Sansa.
Sansa.
Where is she?
It is as though someone has jolted him with an electric shot from a runemaker. His eyes pull wide and his heart drums a violent tattoo against his ribs. He takes the stairs as quickly as he can, with only one thought in mind: find her.
He turns out of the stairwell and onto the second landing – into bedlam.
There are more dead. Some he recognises – Myrcella Baratheon; a young renegade boy whose name he thinks might be either Tobias or Trystane, something like that – others he doesn't. And there are – things; some leaning over the fallen, others advancing on the living. Things with scabbed, mottled grey skin and gaping voids for eyes; things whose wetly glistening skin radiates a fierce cold. One is pinning a blue-haired boy back against a wall; lowering its ugly, misshapen head to tear at his terrified face, and Willas is about to throw his knife at the thing when something else catches his attention. The something else is a girl, her usually smiling face a mask of fear; her brown hair a wild tangle; blood dripping down her face from a cut above her left eye. One of the grey creatures has her backed against a closed door, its hands tightening at her throat as she struggles futilely.
He forgets all about the blue-haired boy, because the girl is Margaery.
Desperately, he hurls his knife at the creature. It lodges in its lower back, and it jerks, sputtering wetly, but its hands stay clamped firmly around Margaery's neck. If anything, it grips tighter, lifting her off her feet. Her legs kick wildly, drumming against the shut door, and Willas feels a horror wash over him that's colder than anything these creatures could inflict. She's going to be killed, right there in front of him; mauled to death like Elinor and Robb, and there's nothing he can do about it. He yells frantically, trying to get the thing to turn and redirect its attentions his way, but it pays him no heed. Perhaps it cannot even hear him. He starts towards the thing and his sister, painfully aware of how slow he is –
And something whizzes past him and buries itself in the base of the creature's neck. It releases Margaery and staggers, wheeling in a hopeless circle for a moment before crashing to the floor, a yellow-orange ribbon where there had been none before, fluttering innocuously at its neck.
Behind him, a voice shouts his name.
Sansa's voice.
Almost reflexively, he turns. Sansa stands at the top of the stairs leading up from the ground floor, a fair-haired renegade girl beside her. He hesitates for a moment, caught between his sister and the girl he loves, and then starts towards Sansa, whose pale blue jacket is stained with something that looks horribly like blood.
"Sansa," he starts, and her name has power on his lips; a sort of wavering, thrumming power, like the last echoes of a sung note after the sound has been cut short. "Are you –"
"She's fine," the renegade girl interjects coolly. "Help your sister up, if you want her to live. We need to go."
He complies, his mind too full of whirling thoughts and images to bridle at the girl's tone. Margaery, who had fallen when the shadow-creature let her go, is struggling to right herself, the effort made more difficult by the convulsive tremors wracking her slight frame. Willas and Sansa go to her at the same time while the renegade girl looks on impassively, guarding them should more of the creatures move in their direction, but making little effort to do away with the others wreaking havoc around them.
Willas is used to seeing his sister composed and poised, making arch observations or laughing lightly at something one of her friends has said. Now, Margaery's golden-brown eyes are very wide and she draws in laboured little gasps of breath that seem to exacerbate her panic. The skin at her throat, where the creature touched her, is greyish in colour; like a bruise, only darker. Sansa and Willas help her to her feet and, moving carefully around the fallen shadow-dead, begin to follow the renegade girl down the stairs.
-OoOoOoOoOoOoO-
"It's not just that you want a normal life," Sansa's sister Arya had flung at her once, in the midst of an argument, "It's that you're scared. That's why you won't train and fight with the rest of us. Because you know you can't hack it." Sansa had stuck her nose in the air and replied sniffily that she refused to be drawn into Arya's silliness, at the time, but now, surrounded by pressing bodies, some of them icy cold, she is beginning to recognise the truth in Arya's accusation. She is scared, and what sane person wouldn't be? All around her, people are dying.
Her right hand is still clasped around Margaery's left, and her friend's grip is cold and clammy, like that of someone with a fever. In her other hand, she holds a knife that Robb gave her once; a knife she has never used. Willas is at Margaery's other side, and Tyene walks in front of them, her poison-tipped darts felling more of the shadow-dead as they go. They pass through the downstairs hallway; through the living-room, where the people are pushed closest together – a pressing, frantic mass. Keeping as close as they can to the wall, they inch along, and Sansa's eyes seek out Robb in the midst of the crowd, but do not find him.
"Once we get out," Tyene calls out over her shoulder, "We have to torch the place. It's the only way to get rid of all the shadow-dead."
Sansa, unpractised though she is in Sensing, feels a sharp spike of astounded fury from Willas, such as she hasn't felt before.
"It'll also kill all the living people in here," he points out tightly, and Margaery, who so far hasn't said a word, stiffens suddenly and blurts out –
"Loras. He's here somewhere. You can't –"
Tyene's gaze softens slightly, but all she says is: "If he hasn't managed to get himself out by now, he's as good as dead anyway."
It is now that Margaery – still shaken from the shadow-creature's attack, Sansa supposes distractedly, because she has never seen her like this – begins to sob in earnest. Sansa thinks of Robb and feels her own throat tighten, but it's all she can do to help Willas half-drag Margaery in the direction of the back door. She can't cry now. She can't show Willas that she's really as pathetic as Arya thinks she is.
In the kitchen, a shadow-creature grabs at the back of her jacket and she lashes out blindly with the knife, bending her arm back as far as she can while a pounding litany of this is it this is it this is it screams inside her head. But to her surprise, the creature lets out a hiss and releases her, and they move on.
They reach the back door, which is hanging from its hinges now, and pile out of it into the cool evening, fear and exertion quickening their breath. Tyene flicks open a compartment in the end of her oddly-shaped dart-gun and, from the small pack strapped to the belt of her skirt, she retrieves another round of darts, these ones with bright red ribbons tied about their ends. Before any of them can ask what she's doing, she takes aim and fires through the shattered kitchen window.
Whatever is inside the tiny dart must be incredibly powerful, because the entire left side of the house explodes with a sound that leaves Sansa's ears ringing. She and the others are flung back, rolling, skidding on knees and elbows across the churned-up lawn. Willas, staring up at what was once his own, makes a small, wordless noise that no one but Sansa notices. Margaery is still weeping. Tyene, though, is on her feet in seconds, stalking towards the side of the huge, once grand manor which remains standing; as close as she can get.
Her second dart is fired through the games room window, and Sansa's stomach twists as the entire place goes up. She knows it's coming, this time, and can do nothing about it, which is worse – far worse, than not knowing had been.
By the time Tyene has picked herself up and returned to the others, Sansa is standing. She faces the other girl with an anger she didn't know she had in her seething and scorching through her veins, leaving a bitter taste at the back of her throat.
"That's their home!" she cries, her voice wobbling on the edge of tears, "That's their home, and you just – you just destroyed it without even thinking twice! All those people – you killed them –"
"I had to," Tyene interrupts quietly; evenly. "All those shadow-dead had our scent. They'd have tracked us after we left, and we couldn't have held them off. Fire's the only way to destroy them properly – better do it while they're all contained." Her dark blue eyes meet Sansa's lighter ones, staring her down, but Sansa, to her own surprise, isn't cowed.
"Don't you have a family?" she rails, "D'you think you'd like it if someone went and murdered them all without a second thought? Don't you understand –"
"Sansa –" Willas starts, but she ignores him, folding her arms across her chest and meeting Tyene's gaze, absurdly glad that she is the taller and so can look down at her.
"The Red Priestess – the woman who sent those things – you're as bad as her. You killed –"
"Sansa."
This time, Willas' voice is so insistent that she turns to look at him.
"Look," he says, pointing towards the wooded area that backs what used to be Highgarden House. Three figures, having emerged from the trees, are making their way slowly towards Sansa, Willas, Margaery and Tyene. At first, from the peculiar, halting way they move, Sansa thinks they might be more shadow-dead, and her heart jolts sickeningly. But as they draw closer, she realises with a rush of heady relief that she was wrong.
Margaery, sitting on the ground beside Willas, stops crying abruptly, at exactly the same moment that Sansa realises who the three people are.
Leonette. Renly. And Loras.