Wild Watchtower: Shield & Claw Book One

Chapter Twenty-Five: Treachery at Calafort Scoite

Side by side, we wound through the muddy streets of the hamlet with the carriage trundling behind us, but at the door of the watchtower, I shook my head at Gobhainn and the driver. They weren't trained fighters and they were both only human; there was no point in them risking their lives. This was my duty but it wasn't theirs.

In truth, I wished I possessed a brave enough soul to go in alone, without risking the princeling's life as well. This was my obligation, not his, and there were probably rules about endangering a future king's life... but my new found confidence didn't extend that far. Anyway, eight clawed paws and two fanged maws were better than what I brought to the table on my own. Or so I told myself as I looked up at the third tower.

It had a similar aesthetic to the second, with its yellow stone walls and square footprint. It had carvings too, only rather than decorating the lintels and corner stones, instead the carved stones formed bands around the tower; documenting past battles of both the elves and the wolves of the Tírgardaí. Strangely, though, in some of the friezes it seemed almost as though the wolves of the Tírgardaí faced off against the elves rather than standing with them.

Perhaps the artist had meant the regiments of wolves and elves to stand side by side, but when carved in profile, facing each other, it looked more like opposition than collaboration. Stranger still, one of the carvings had been defaced in much the save was as the design at Cuan Caoineadh. That single wolf was crowned by a series of deep, uneven grooves, as though someone had removed something from over his head. I wanted to study that carving. Or maybe I just wanted to avoid the discovery I knew we had to make. The Cosantóirí pack deserved to have their story known, however.

Pressing my head against the heavy oak of the door, I pushed it fully open, and my eyes watered at the smell of death that already tainted the air. If I could have stopped breathing, I would have done so. I feared I'd never get that smell out of my nose or the flavour of it off my tongue. The iron tang of old blood was heavy, along with the putrid odour of rancid meat and the almost cloying sweetness of rotting fruit; the combination something truly awful. It grew worse when we passed the door to the kitchen, where a human cook sprawled in the doorway, her throat torn open by a razor-sharp blade and her blood drying on the stone floor.

Other staff lay scattered around the kitchen behind her, slain as they peeled vegetables or kneaded bread dough. The bowl of sliced carrots and parsnips had already started to rot, and that only added to the smell. As did the fermenting mass of over-proven dough, the yeast having continued to do its work long after the kitchen staff's fingers fell still. That soured dough remained sat on the table, above the fallen corpse of a flour-covered cook. The eyes the Cosantóirí pack's employees stared up at the ceiling or across at the walls, as blind as their mouths were silent; all life ripped from them in a brutal act of slaughter that confounded me.

Why would anyone do this?

Considering what I witnessed happening to Mis, I should have accepted the harsh cruelty of the world. I felt like I should understand it somehow. But I didn't. I knew the callous and murderous took without reason, yet my mind still struggled to comprehend the atrocity before me.

Swallowing to keep from vomiting, I turned away from the kitchen and headed along the hallway to the third tower's great hall, then stepped into the massacre beyond.

And it was a massacre. No other word could describe it.

The majority of the pack lay where they had fallen, so many of them that I couldn't grasp the loss. Their number had done nothing to save them and their bodies littered the room; draped over benches they'd stumbled against as they fell, or contorted on the floor in unnatural poses. Their attackers had hacked them apart; broken their bodies under such a ferocious onslaught that it seemed inconceivable. Some were in their fur, others in their skin, and all bore mortal wounds many times over. The perpetrators had shown no mercy and given no quarter.