Dead of Knight (The Gryphonpike Chronicles Book 4) by Annie Bellet Page A

running toward the sounds, as much out of concern as out of desire to do something, anything, after the frozen weakness I’d just displayed during the quake.
    My companions were on my heels as we crested the second hill. The plumes of dark smoke warned us before we saw the farmhouse. It was the same low wood and stone and earthen structure as those we had passed earlier. Or it would have been, if the quake hadn’t warped and twisted and broken it. The central beam jutted out of the collapsed roof like a snapped bone and flames licked what would burn around the wreckage.
    A young human girl, no more than a hand of years old, stood screaming outside the broken home. Two girls barely older than the little one were trying to beat down the rising flames threatening to catch the grasses outside the home. Three older children, none over fifteen, were trying to free something, or someone from under the broken door.
    I ran to them. A boy, his dark brown hair matted with soot and sweat to his forehead, turned and yelled something at me as I dropped my bow and leapt over broken stones to help. If he was surprised to see an armored elf springing into the wreckage of his home, the child gave no sign.
    “Our da is trapped,” he yelled over the crackling flames.
    The door was thick oak and iron. The quake had twisted it inward, the hinges bending and cracking under the strain. I imagined the father had tried to get his children out of the home and found himself trapped as he went through the door last. All I could see of him in the stinging haze and debris was a thick tanned arm and part of what might have been a thigh.
    Makha came up beside me as I climbed around the door, looking for a good angle to lift it from.
    “Get back, childrens,” she barked at them.
    Startled, desperate, they listened, backing off with hope on their tear and soot-stained faces.
    Makha and I bent, gripping the door as best we could. I raised my eyes to meet hers, blinking in the smoky air. The heat of the fire ran sweat down under my armor. The blaze would soon find us. Time was running out for the farmer.
    “One, two, lift!” yelled Makha.
    Muscles straining, we heaved the door off the broken man beneath and threw it away from us, into the burning remains of the farmhouse. I bent, trying not to see the closed eyes and bent limbs of the big man we’d uncovered, and lifted his shoulders as Makha grabbed his legs. Between us we carried him free of the house and out into the cleared area between house and barn.
    The farmer’s eyes snapped open and he reached up with his unmangled arm to grab my wrist in a surprisingly strong hold.
    “Please,” his bloody and cracked lips whispered, “keep. . . them safe. Promise… me.”
    Though it caused my head to spin and nausea to rise like smoke in my belly, I nodded, risking the wrath of my curse to ease the mind of a dying man.
    The breath that sighed from his bleeding body was hot on my face. He did not draw another.
     
    * * *
     
    We got the fire under control by hauling water from the well behind the house. The well was choked with silt and debris where its cover had cracked and fallen in, but we were able to pull buckets of water from it with Rahiel’s help. Azyrin’s healing magic took care of the six children’s minor burns and scrapes, but could do nothing about the stunned grief that reduced the littler ones to shivering, inconsolable sobs and the older three to blank-eyed numbness.
    “We need to bury Da,” said the oldest, a boy of fifteen, who had given his name as Alew.
    “We will lay him out in the barn tonight, keep him safe from animals,” Azyrin said gently. “Is dark and we are all tired.”
    “We best stay in the barn tonight, Alew,” Drake, who had Perl, the youngest girl, in his arms, agreed with Azy. “No telling what the quake might have stirred or if it might happen again.”
    The barn was a solid stone and sod pyramid that hadn’t shifted during the quake. We penned off the