Harwell woke him up after a while and took him up to the battlement. This was a strange development—normally after dinner the lord of Sedge would disappear into his chambers and not come out again until breakfast. The two of them walked the circumference of the castle until Pack could hear the river running below, swollen and angry with rain. The storm had paused for the evening, leaving behind a low sky made of iron and ink, and the torches were blurry with drizzle. The forest of soldier pine that surrounded them was only just visible in the night, a faint wall of green.
“Look there,” Harwell’s raspy, reedy voice said. The man held up his torch and leaned over the crenelated parapet. “Do you see? It’s a miracle of life and death. Their god is a great god. He brings the dead back to us. Do you see?”
Pack peered hard into the trees on the bluff across the river. It was at least two hundred yards, far beyond the reach of their torches. But wait—yes, there! A pair of glowing red-orange eyes observed them from the undergrowth, distant, unblinking.
“How can you tell?”
“Watch this,” said Harwell. He had an antique crossbow, and the load’s head was knotted with a rag that smelled of bourbon. He dipped the point in his torchflame and it caught instantly. Aiming it over the river, he fired the quarrel over the gap in a blazing arc. To Pack, it looked like a comet.
As the quarrel sailed into the wet foliage, it passed and briefly revealed a black-cloaked figure in a dirty white jackal mask. The Wilder’s eyes burned like coals.
— The Fiddle and the Fire vol. 2, “The Cape and the Castle”
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