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

white cow and two spotted sheep inside and cleared a place to bed down. The musk from the animals and the dusty scent of dried grain and hay was a relief after the wet mush of ash and cloying soot I had been breathing for the last few hours. The animals shifted and lowed as Azyrin and Makha brought the dead farmer into the barn, but Azyrin was right, we couldn’t leave him outside.
    We ate a cold supper of hard bread and dried meat and Alew introduced his siblings in the same numb tone. Iera was ten, a plump girl who might have been cheery in more normal times. Her younger sisters were Neth, eight, and tiny Perl, the baby of the family who still refused to let go of Drake once he’d picked her up. She had fallen asleep, wrapped in his cloak, still tucked into his lap. To Drake’s credit, he held her gently, not protesting the damage this must be doing to his gods-may-care attitude.
    Alew, at fifteen was the oldest. Cher, at thirteen, had apparently taken over the duties of mother to her siblings when their own died after Perl was born and carried a maturity in her brown eyes beyond what even the grave events of the afternoon had wrought. The final child was Enil, a sour-faced boy of twelve, who reacted to sorrow with anger instead of grief. He had more than once tried to berate Makha and I for not saving their father, but Alew’s hissed warnings and Makha’s hard gaze had finally shut him up. Even now he glared from his spot near the sheep, refusing to stay near the group.
    “What sort of a name is Killer?” Alew asked, looking at me with weak curiosity.
    “That’s what the beastie calls her, so we do, too,” Makha said with a shrug.
    “Will she kill us?” whispered one of the littler girls, Neth, I think.
    “No. She’s an adventurer, like us. Killer only kills evil things.” Drake’s voice was soothing and once again I found myself surprised by his kinder side.
    I rose from my spot and took my bow and cloak. I need less sleep than humans and still felt strange and edgy from the quake and the subsequent events. Wanting to be alone with my thoughts, I slipped out of the barn’s half-open door into the night.
    I found an old portion of stone wall a handful of paces from the barn and settled on it, pulling my cloak around me even though the summer night was mild. What had I promised the dying man? I was not one to break an oath, but did this count as a true one? The children had an aunt in Fallbarrow and my companions had promised to take them with us after we buried the farmer. I hoped that seeing them safely to the village and into the arms of their mother’s family would be enough to fulfill the promise I’d unwittingly made.
    That line of thinking satisfied, I turned my thoughts to the quake. There were many places where such things were normal. The Barrows was not such a place, to my knowledge. This land was half swamp, half sod-covered rocky hills, and buried deep beneath all of it were the remains of the dead of an empire terrifying and vast, the Saliidruin.
    Centuries of watching the mortal lands in the Hall of Windows, and another decade adventuring through them as I sought to fulfill my one thousand heroic deeds and break my curse, had taught me that nothing good came of strange events like this quake. Not when the land was already riddled with monsters and undead and even worse lurked somewhere beneath.
    The sky at least was clear. I stared upward at the myriad of stars, the name of each flickering through my mind as sleep weighed on me heavier than my worries.
    Again it was the silence that warned me. Fade appeared in the grass to my left, his head turned toward the dark curve of the hills around us. The crickets and buzzerwings ceased their night songs. My green cat-slit eyes, as sharp at night as Fade’s, picked up movement in the long grass. Something big and quiet slunk toward us.
    The wind shifted and the night scents changed from soot and churned earth to the thick smell of old rot and decay,