Page 137 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

It was a silence like none I’d ever heard before. A silence that pressed into my eardrums, screaming with its own lack of existence.

Only because there should have been sounds; there should have been laughter, whispers, shouts,anything. Anything at all. Even just footsteps or breathing. The houses stared with windows like empty eyes.

I now understood, with a vague sense of clarity below the dread and horror, that I had been intensely sheltered my entire life. No Veladari lived without fear of the Forians, but not until this very moment had I truly realized what it meant to grow up inside strong city walls.

I had seen corpses, but not like this. I had seen destruction, but not like this.

As Bane, Visca, and Miro left to join those vampires already collecting bodies, looking for warg-sign, searching for survivors, I slid from my horse on numb legs. Snow crunched underfoot, and for a long moment I just stood there and looked at it all.

It was like one of Edda’s paintings. Easier to think of it that way, the gray sky against white snow, the dark houses andred blood splattering a canvas. Easier to sever myself from the reality of the people strewn across the square in pieces, the people strung on wire and raised as a monument to death in the middle of the village.

My eyes went unwillingly to the front of the church, to the paintings defacing the wooden walls. The wide open wolf’s mouth, holding the rune of Wargyr.

So they’d had time to play. Time to not only rip and claw through everyone, but time to eat them, to take their blood and paint with it, to hang them up and offer them humiliation in death.

My gaze slid down, to a woman slumped against the wall. She reminded me of Antonetta, sitting there with her head tipped onto her shoulder, eyes already becoming milky, but Antonetta had been…cleancompared to this.

The clean strokes of a knife compared to the ragged bites taken from this woman’s thighs, her grayish-white skin scored with a thousand slashes. I found myself wondering, still numb, if she had already been dead when the wargs first began to eat.

Please, Lady, let her have been dead already.

My feet carried me forward without any thought. I stepped over an arm, the tendons dangling from the shoulder like ragged ribbons. Over a body, the head twisted around so the man’s face was pushed ignominiously into the ground. The snow was more red than white.

If not for the cold, the smell would have been unbearable. Even so, I had to swallow my gorge multiple times, my mouth watering as I walked. I clutched my cloak tighter, as though it could shield me from the sight of it all.

I should do something to help. Something useful… anything. But I stopped in front of a small body, arm still outstretched to a mother who wasn’t there.

Absurdly, all I could think of was the story the older maids in the Cathedral used to tell us when we were children, about the boy who didn’t cry wolf.

He went walking through the woods, and thought he saw pointy ears, but he said nothing. It was only the cones on the trees. He collected his berries, and thought he saw a bushy tail, but he said nothing. It was only a sleeping squirrel. He walked home with his basket, and thought he saw yellow eyes, but he said nothing. It was only the reflection of the moon in the water. When the boy got home, the guard asked, “Did you see any wolves?” The boy said no, he saw nothing. But the wolf followed him home in the shadows, and ate everyone in the village all up.

The stories we had thought were only stories, no more than fairy tales.

I looked at that little hand, pudgy with baby fat, dirt under the nails, and in my mind I heard the maid clapping her hands as she said, “Ate them all up!”

My stomach revolted. I ran past the church, feet slipping in the reddened snow, unseeing and unhearing. Past the iron horseshoes that had been torn down and bent out of shape. All the way to the edge of the trees, where I dropped to my knees and was violently sick.

It took some time. My stomach muscles ached, and my throat was raw as I spit sourness into the grass and snow that was still mercifully white and untouched by the carnage.

From a distance, I heard Bane roaring orders, Visca’s shouts to work faster, work harder. I closed my eyes, feeling dizzy and disconnected from everything.

I spat once more and scraped fresh snow over my mess, as though it would make a difference. Who cared about my vomit when the entire village behind me would never be scrubbed clean?

But it was something to do. My hands ached red from the cold as I scooped another mound to hide it.

Ate them all up. The maid’s sing-song voice played in my mind over and over, her big, toothy smile as she clapped her hands so vivid I could almost see it.

By the Light, I had been so sheltered. So terribly naïve.

All those stories had been true.

The next scoop of snow went in my mouth in a desperate effort to rinse the bitter taste away. I spat it out, staring at the clean, dark lines of the trees in front of me, wishing I could rinse away those images as easily.

All of them. Every single person in Tristone, eaten all up.

I scrubbed at my cheeks and got up slowly. I had to do something. Anything.

But I froze instead, listening intently. There it was again—I hadn’t heard it so clearly while I was heaving my guts out. A low groan, a sound of pain, caught on the wind and whispering through the trees.

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