Chapter 14
Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 13
The space is a grassy square. To his right rises the wall with the huge window that Gregory was thrown through, several stories high. Across, there is a big gap, then more wall still standing at the corner. The latticed window section is to his left, now.
Torches burn on tall poles in the corners of the square. A lean-to has been built out of wood and tarps against the wall on the right.
And the rest of the space is filled with tables full of saws and tongs and knives, and piles of bones, and plants that twitch and shift and rustle in a way plants have no business doing, thorn-studded vines like the ones on the monster trailing across the ground. There’s glass jars with dark lumps in them, and not that Arthur can properly see them, but he’s pretty sure those are organs.
And there’s more monsters- his heart jumps painfully, but in the same moment, he sees that none of them are finished. They’re just nonsensical approximations of animals, plants and bones bound together.
Arthur takes all this in as his eyes dart around, searching for the source of the flapping sound, and Darcy. His gaze is drawn upward, to the high section of the opposite corner still standing, and there- a huge shape is moving… Wings, he realizes, huge wings of black… feathers? fabric? and pale bone, and a person suspended between them.
With a jolt, Arthur presses himself closer to the wall, but with the firelight and everything, he’s probably completely exposed… but the necromancer’s attention is on the wall next to him, Arthur can see the pale oval of his face.
Because there’s something moving on the wall, up the wall, and it takes a moment for Arthur’s mind to make sense of what his eyes are telling him- it’s Darcy, running up the wall like… like it was even ground, her feet just somehow sticking to it.
And she’s going up faster than the necromancer can gain height, as Arthur’s watching she draws even with him, only a few feet from the top and, without any sign of hesitation, jumps at him, claws outstretched.
The necromancer’s wings flap hard, move him sideways out of the way- so instead, Darcy hits the wing.
There’s a splintering sound, and then they’re tumbling down on to the ground in a whirl of black feathers and flapping dress and red hair gleaming in the firelight.
They miss a pile of bones by a yard, hit the grass with a thump and snapping crackle as the other wing gets trapped underneath them.
And before Arthur has even had time to pull his focus towards a fire spell, Darcy snarls and rams her claws into the necromancer’s mid-section, looks about to tear his throat out with her fangs, but instead hisses: “Nobody hurts my cat!”
Right. Arthur really wants to check on Gregory, but not with a necromancer loose at his back.
Who might recover from Darcy’s attack, who knows, so Arthur dashes over, dodges a wiggling vine on the way.
When he arrives, it looks to him like she’s got her entire fingers rammed into the man’s stomach, her knuckles pale against the dark wool of his jacket.
He’s making very pained noises, but Arthur’s not about to take any chances, looks around, sees some twine on a nearby table. Before he grabs it, he makes double sure it’s really just twine and nothing else, but it is, presents it to Darcy.
“Um… we can tie him up?”
Darcy huffs, but then gets up, pulls her fingers and claws free- doesn’t even seem to notice the gore staining them.
Arthur quickly turns his gaze away, ties the man up before he can recover.
Finished, he eyes his handiwork with scepticism- it’s a necromancer, a magic-user, he’s not at all sure whether that’s enough to keep them safe from him.
But for now, he really needs to check on Gregory- the necromancer still looks dazed and in pain, but Arthur doesn’t think he’s going to die in the next few minutes, and he doesn’t know if the same can be said for Gregory.
Darcy is already stalking off, towards the big window Gregory got thrown out of, above and next to the lean to. She looks like she isn’t going to let some tarps and stone walls stand in her way. And given what Arthur just saw her do…
Which he can’t do, so he jogs his way back to where he came in from, with a bit of a wider berth around the moving plants.
He can hear Darcy’s boots scraping on the stone wall when he runs around the corner of the castle. The grass is dark back here, moonlight shadowed by trees overhead, and it’s a corner, too, there’s a ramp of rubble under that big arch of the window where another wall used to be. Darcy is coming down it as Arthur calls Gregory’s name, squinting at the dark ground.
She clearly has no such troubles, because she jumps down the last foot and hurries to a spot in the grass, sits down in a flutter of skirts, and lifts a small, furry bundle into her arms, makes soothing noises at it.
Apparently, she really isn’t that upset with Gregory playing her cat? Arthur finds that confusing, but more importantly, he needs to know how Gregory is, so rushes over.
He knows, rationally, that their attack on the necromancer has only taken minutes- sneak, run, jump, scramble to tie him up, hurry back.
But still, what if… What if that’s all it took to be too late…?
But no, Gregory is stirring, is hurt but alive when Arthur hovers his hand just over his fur to heal him. He can feel the magic rushing out of himself and into Gregory, like it’s filling a well, and it doesn’t have to rush for very long before the well is full and there’s no room for any more.
“Did we get him?” Gregory asks. “Did we get the bad guy?”
“Darcy got the bad guy,” Arthur assures him, then blushes and looks at Darcy, not sure how she’s going to react, whether the reminder is going to upset her now that the excitement is over.
She isn’t, though, only scowls at the mention of the necromancer, while Arthur looks towards the inside of the castle where he is (not that he can see him through the stone wall), bites his lip, wonders out loud what they’ll do with him.
“He can bleed out!” is Darcy’s answer, and Arthur blinks at her, unsure.
Points out, “Um… I’m not sure that’d be legal? Without a trial and such?”
Darcy huffs, and Gregory says: “So we’ll arrest him!”
He’s back to sounding bright and like this is a great adventure. Apparently, getting seriously hurt doesn’t put any damper on his mood. Well… not like it ever has before. But they’ve never dealt with anything more dangerous than older street gang kids and angry shop owners and the threat of constables- terrifying, but not monsters and necromancers.
Arthur voices his concerns as to how they’re going to safely transport a necromancer back, and Darcy huffs again, rises to her feet, Gregory still in her arms, and marches back up the ramp. Arthur scrambles to follow- he has no supernatural wall-sticking abilities, but on this side, it’s easy to get up, and while it is a little high, the grass is soft enough to jump down into on the other side.
Darcy bends over the necromancer, who’s breathing heavy and lying still, pulls out a handkerchief and stuffs it into the man’s mouth without ceremony, pulls off his tie and tears a long strip of leather from the harness of the wings, uses those to finish off the gag and blindfold the man.
Then she marches off with her cat in her arms grumbling about whether they never read a story, that wasn’t so hard.
Arthur very much doesn’t know what to make of her mood- or whether the necromancer is safe like that, but he’s not about to cross her, so he heals the man, because he’s pretty sure you’re not supposed to have finger holes in your stomach, there’s important organs there and all.
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With the necromancer healed, Arthur undoes the wing harness and finds himself as the one to pull the man to his feet and push him to walk- he didn’t heal him all the way up, because he really doesn’t want to deal with a grown man in full possession of his strength. Some aches and bruises won’t kill him… he hopes. Magic healing is supposed to fix life-threatening things first, according to what reading he’s been able to do.
He leaves the wing harness behind, which is a bit of a shame because… well, that would be interesting to study. Though, it’s made of bones and such, so maybe kind of gross, too.
But there’s no way they can bring it, it’s going to be enough of a hassle to walk two men back to Newholm… Probably back to Whitby, at that.
They don’t have to go all the way to Newholm, though- it turns out, all the fire and noise and fighting has brought a big group of men out to the point where they killed the monster. Arthur recognizes some of them from Newholm, but not all of them.
Which, really, they should have expected- the villagers were on high alert for weird things happening, after all.
They look very much like they don’t know what to make of them- Darcy with a cat in her arms and blood staining her dress, Arthur pushing along a grown man, bound and blindfolded and gagged.
Torches and lanterns are illuminating the remains of the monster, and a group of men is standing with the apprentice, still tied up, Arthur sees in relief. He catches an earnest expression on the man’s face, like maybe he’s trying to talk the villagers into letting him go, just before he spots them. Seeing their prisoner, his expression turns enraged in a split second, he snarls and tries to lunge for them across the yards of churned forest floor and path, but two rangy young men grab his arms and shove him to the ground.
“You!!” he starts yelling. “They’ll catch you! We’ll get you!”
The necromancer Arthur is leading turns his blindfolded head in the direction of the shouts- like he’s giving his apprentice a look without being able to see, and the man falls quiet just like that.
Arthur has no doubt who “they” are, but he isn’t inclined to explain it to the curious villagers around, and neither is Darcy, clearly.
So Arthur distracts them by giving a very general account of what they found, and how the ruin will need cleaning up. Then the conversation turns to what to do next, and Arthur and the villagers agree that they want the criminals in the hands of the Constabulary as fast as possible- and Arthur really wants to get back behind the wards of the castle. Darcy has no objection, and so she declares that they’ll get back right away, despite the late hour.
The mayor from Newholm takes charge and sends a few men running for the village to get their horses and a cart for the prisoners ready. He takes Arthur to the remains of the monster to ask him about it- and all Arthur can tell him that it was a magical construct, but he seems satisfied with that.
In the better light, Arthur can see more of the construction of the thing than he really wanted to- like that its insides are a sludgy mess of various organs connected by pale little roots and fibres of some sort. Though, disassembled, it still looks gross but not as terrifying.
And Arthur fought that. There’s big burn marks on it, and he can’t really believe that he made those.
Which, really- he’ll deal with later. For now, he’s just as happy to have an escort of villagers with torches and rifles and pitchforks back to the village, to climb back on his fey horse and set out to Whitby with the rumble of cartwheels behind them.
Just to be safe, the apprentice has been gagged and blindfolded as well. Since he didn’t curse anyone or free himself when they were gone, probably he can’t do magic without his hands, but Arthur agrees with the villagers that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
The constables on duty in Whitby don’t look very thrilled to have a dangerous magical criminal handed over to them, but confirm they’ll hold them until someone from the Order of Galahad can come and pick them up.
The mayor of Newholm, who rode along with the prisoners, thanks them for coming so quickly, and then takes his leave, and finally, at something like one o’clock in the morning, they ride back onto the grounds of the castle and Arthur breathes a sigh of relief.