Chapter 4: The Stronghold

Raina's pov

The keep was smaller than I expected, but that might have been because so much of it was burning.

The outer walls were still standing—thick stone, ancient but relatively unblemished by the Scourge's direct attention. But the buildings inside the walls, the structures that would have housed the garrison and stored the supplies necessary to survive a siege, were engulfed in flames. The smoke rolled across the mountainside in thick, dark waves, carrying with it the smell of burning wood and something else, something that made my stomach turn over.

"We can still use this," Corvin said, though she didn't sound like she entirely believed it. "The walls are intact. We can clear out the rubble, set up camp in the courtyard. The fires are already burning out—see how the smoke is lessening?"

She was right about the smoke. But the reason it was lessening was because there wasn't much left to burn. As we approached the main gate, I could see bodies scattered throughout the courtyard. Not many—maybe a dozen or so. Soldiers, by the look of their uniforms, or what was left of them.

"They fought," someone said quietly. "They actually tried to fight back."

We found out later, from the handful of soldiers who'd managed to hide during the initial assault, that the Scourge had come during the night, that they'd overwhelmed the gates before the garrison could mount a proper defense. Most of the soldiers had died in the initial assault. The rest had barricaded themselves in one of the lower towers and waited for rescue that never came.

There were three of them left alive. Two women and a man, all bearing the marks of the attack—burn scars, wounds that had been hastily treated and were starting to show signs of infection. Their eyes were hollow in a way that suggested they'd witnessed things that human minds weren't supposed to see.

The older woman's name was Captain Solace. She had close-cropped gray hair and a bearing that suggested she'd spent her entire life trying to hold things together. Even now, even in this catastrophe, she was trying.

"There are supplies in the lower stores," she told Corvin, gesturing toward a section of the keep that had been less damaged than the rest. "Food, water, basic medical supplies. The fires haven't reached there yet, but they're close. We need to get organized, get everything salvageable moved to the courtyard. And we need to post guards. The creatures might come back."

"How long did they stay here?" Corvin asked.

"Maybe an hour, maybe more. Time gets strange when you're trying not to die." Solace's mouth twisted into something that might have been a smile. "They seemed more interested in the buildings than in us specifically. Like they were looking for something. When they couldn't find it, they moved on."

"Which direction?"

"Northwest. Toward the higher passes, it looked like."

That should have been good news—the Scourge was moving away from us, not toward us. But somehow it wasn't. Because if they were moving deeper into the mountains, that meant they weren't confined to any particular area. They were spreading out, pushing deeper into what we'd thought of as the safe parts of the world.

The next few days were a strange mixture of activity and despair. We worked frantically to salvage what we could from the keep, clearing out the supplies and setting up a rough camp in the courtyard. The walls did provide some protection, and there was fresh water from a spring near the base of the keep. It wasn't home, but it was better than sleeping in the open.

The soldiers, despite their injuries, helped where they could. Captain Solace in particular seemed to take some kind of purpose from organizing us, from giving us tasks and structures. I found myself working with her, helping to inventory supplies and figure out how long they might last us if we rationed carefully.

"You've got a mind for logistics," she said one afternoon as we were counting bags of grain. "Ever thought about doing this professionally?"

"I've never thought about much of anything," I said. "Everything I was is gone."

"Then you get to choose what you become next," Solace said simply. "That's not a loss. That's an opportunity."

I didn't feel like I was being offered an opportunity. I felt like I'd been robbed of all the futures I'd never bothered to imagine, replaced with some terrible present that I didn't know how to survive in.

But I kept working anyway.

It was about a week after we'd arrived at the keep that Dovette found me sitting on one of the walls, looking out over the mountains toward the northwest where the Scourge had gone.

"You're thinking too much," she said, settling beside me carefully. Her own injuries had largely healed, thanks to Mira's careful attention, though she still moved slowly on her right side where she'd been burned.

"Someone has to," I said.

"Corvin's already doing that. She's trying to figure out how to survive the winter, how to maintain this keep, how to gather information about the Scourge. You're allowed to just exist for a while."

I laughed, but it came out bitter. "Existing is what got my family killed. I should have been doing something, preparing something, instead of just existing in my life like it was guaranteed."

"Your mother was preparing," Dovette said quietly. "That bag of supplies you filled up—that was her work. She was trying to keep all of you alive. And your stepfather, whatever his faults, he was trying to gather supplies when the attack happened. It wasn't about existing, Raina. It was about the fact that there was no way to prepare for something like this. There just wasn't."

I wanted to argue, but something in her voice suggested she understood this from personal experience. We sat in silence for a while, watching the mountains, until Dovette spoke again.

"I've been thinking about what comes next," she said. "Not the immediate next—not the survival through the winter or defending the keep if the Scourge comes back. But the bigger next. The future, if we can get one."

"And what's that?"

"I think we need to know more about the creatures. About where they're coming from, what they want. About whether there's any way to fight back, or if we're just going to be running and hiding forever."

"That's a recipe for getting killed," I said.

"Yes," Dovette agreed. "But we're going to get killed anyway, eventually. The Scourge will either find us here, or it will spread across the world until there's nowhere left to hide. So we might as well try to do something about it."

"You're talking about leaving the keep. About going after them."

"Not immediately," Dovette said. "But yes. Eventually. When you've healed more, when we've gathered more information. When we're strong enough to have a chance." She looked at me. "I think you should come with me when I go. I think you need to stop existing and start doing."

I didn't say yes. But I didn't say no either.