“If your people think you cursed Padric, there is a reason. A reason for which the Fae are to blame, mark me. You should discover why you have been so ill-named. And who better to ask than an immortal? One who was around the day you were born and thousands of years before. This Rosheen knows, Padric, but she has left you to suffer in ignorance. Such are the games played by the Fae.”

E LEVEN

ELEVEN

Deglan chewed willow bark to ease the pain and swelling in his mouth. His tongue kept wandering his aching gums, probing at the salty gaps where four of his teeth used to sit. Three were completely gone and he had been forced to yank the jagged remnants of the last out by hand. Thankfully, he still had his satchel and the prepared willow, but the slow working herb had not yet reached his head. A dull pain, fed by a sizable knot, still pulsed through his skull. It would fade given time.

There was no balm for the pain he felt when he finally reached the Wallow. Even from a distance, the destruction was absolute; a greasy black stain on the landscape. Deglan walked the ruins, struggling to see some semblance of the place that had been his home for over eight centuries, but everything was utterly laid low by Fire. Only a skeleton of the windmill remained standing, two tumbled stone walls barely managing to lean against the other. Deglan plodded numbly into the shell and poked around the morass of wet ash, fearful in the certainty of what he would uncover. Most of the bones were reduced to little more than charred fragments, but the skulls were unmistakable. He had known these men, treated their hurts as boys and delivered them as babes. Now their empty sockets stared back at him from a charnel pile of soot. Some of the skulls were clearly goblin, but Deglan could find no joy in the sight. There was no more honorable pyre for a Red Cap than the flames of destruction they lived to create.

In the mud outside were the prints of many horses. He had lost Acwellen and his band of brigands in the forest, but he was on foot and they must have reached the village well ahead of him. Come to see the spoils of their treacherous act and gone away, leaving Deglan to stand, a living corpse, in the vestiges of Hog’s Wallow and try to make sense of it all.

He had never trusted Kederic Winetongue, not from the first day he arrived with promises of protection and friendship, but he never thought the man capable of this much evil. Consorting with Red Caps and sorcerers! Deglan let out a choked grunt and kicked savagely at one of the goblin skulls, sending it bouncing through the muddy ash. It rolled to a stop still facing him, grinning at his despair.