Chapter 19: Thaw Morning

The hex-riders came out of the mist at dawn, a grey wave on grey horses, with their black banners hanging wet.

Yui could not see them from the yard.

She saw them in the faces of the thirty men beside her, standing among their litters with kettles steaming, looking up at the wall.

She heard Brunhild's voice, calm and carrying, from the gate.

"Shield, hold. Archers, on my word."

Then the first curses came over.

They were not arrows.

They were thin black threads that fell out of the sky and settled on men, and wherever they touched, the skin turned dark.

The cry that went up from the wall was the cry Yui had heard in the west.

Within a minute the first soldiers were coming down the steps with blackened hands, black necks, black lines running up under their sleeves.

"Litters!" the grey-haired sergeant roared. "Line up and take them in order!"

The thirty went to work.

They carried the men to the straw, laid them down, stripped the cursed cloth away, and bathed the marks with warm water, as Yui had shown them.

It was slow.

The black crept as they washed, an inch, two inches, and the men moaned.

"Keep going," Yui said, moving down the line. "Keep washing. It stops when it stops. Hold their hands."

By the sixth cursed man she had counted twenty more arriving at the door of the yard.

By the tenth it was forty.

The thirty were too few.

She knew it, and so did the sergeant, and so did the dying boy she was holding by the wrist.

"Saint!"

The roar came from across the yard.

Stahl was striding through the straw with six black-and-gold guards behind him and his red face wet with sweat.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.