Free For Camelot's Honor by Sarah Zettel Page A

Bracken rustled and broke. Urien’s sentries were beating the bushes for Madyn and Til and whoever else followed them. Elen barely thought of this. Instead, Elen began again to run. Yestin snatched at her arm, but she tore herself free and ran without looking back. She stumbled over the clods of torn earth but she kept going. She realized some marauders would still be prowling the edges of the village, that if they knew she was not among the dead they would be looking for her as well. They would surely kill Yestin as soon as they caught him. None of these thoughts slowed her down at all. Yestin swore and she heard the rasp as he drew his sword, not his gilded gift from the High King, but the keen and seasoned sword that had belonged to their father, and he ran behind her.
    Shouts, clashes. Names shouted to the wind. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered but getting home. Home. Home. Mother. Mother dead. Mother waiting for them to mutilate her body and enslave her soul. No. No. No.
    Fire had taken the village. It had clawed at walls and torn away roofs. Pens that had been filled with fat animals were broken and empty, and here and there among the ruin, her unwilling eye caught sight of the fallen. Familiar faces contorted by death, familiar hands covered in blood and dirt, reaching for help that never came. She did not let herself stop. She had to get to the house. She had to find her family.
    Finally, her headstrong blindness was too much. Her foot caught some unseen piece of wreckage. She sprawled full-length in the mud and ash. She picked herself up, shaking her head to clear it, and she saw yet another hand stretched out, as if to snatch at her, and she could not help but look for the man.
    Beven. Beven, their harper, lay curled over his instrument like a mother over a child. The harp too was broken and dead, its strings draped across the musician’s bloody hands as they lay together in the bright morning light.
    They’d killed the harper. They’d broken the harp. They did not care for even that. Even that. Bile rose in her throat and she stared up at her brother, mute in her fear of it. But Yestin was staring down the hill, toward the shouts and the clashes.
    Forgive me, forgive me.
Elen left Bevan as he lay, scrambled to her feet and ran again, only dimly aware that Yestin still followed.
    At last, the great house was before her, still whole despite the ruin around it. The hinges that had once held the great door hung loose and twisted from the lintel. The remains of the door lay on the floor so Elen had to step over them to enter her broken home.
    She could smell the blood here, and all the stench of death. The pitiless sun shone in through the doorway behind her, casting its bright beams into the ruined hall, lighting up the scattered ashes, the smashed and shattered benches, the torn cloth, and the bodies. There had been a last stand here, and she could count all the dead and give them their names.
    She found Carys just beyond the door. Her sister-to-be huddled on the stones, eyes open and staring. Her head had been all but torn from her neck. Her blood was smeared and trampled into the floor by the boots that had run past her to get to the treasury.
    The wealth of Elen’s family lay in a heap in the middle of their hall, the gold, the jewellery, the silver, and the fine pottery and plate. The bright sword brought by Arthur’s messengers for Yestin stuck out of the pile, flaring like a torch in the sunlight.
    Mother lay on her belly next to the plunder, her hair spreading out across her face and shoulders to trail in her own half-dried blood.
    Utterly spent, Elen dropped to the ground by her mother’s corpse. She reached out and took Adara’s bloody hand. It was cold. The flesh was soft and slack. The blood was sticky against her palm. She did not cry, she only held her mother’s hand and stared stupidly into her dead eyes, blinking now and again.
    â€œElen, we need to go.