Summary:
Durwin is a unicorn knight and brother of the Abbey of the Golden Hill. He and the unicorn Sibbe ride in honor and glory against the forces of the Fey Queen Arvariss until the outcome of a battle threatens him with the loss of everything.
Notes:
Still a work in progress!
Ch 1: Abalone
Durwin sank into the soft sand at the base of the cliff, damp with sweat from the descent down the crumbling slope as much as the droplets of silvery fog that obscured the world nearby into flat, pale silhouettes and beyond into white. He kept his bearing by following the muffled hush of waves against the beach at his front and by keeping the disc of the sun to his back, weak enough in the morning, even in late spring that he shivered for want of it. Though he wasn’t warm, Durwin was plenty tired, thighs burning with the effort of walking over sand so soft that he sank in it to his ankles with every step. He took a swig from the jug that dangled from the sling across his chest and grimaced at the taste of the bitter ceremonial concoction of herbs that laced the water. The sound of the sea called him still and had in every dream since the prayer and fasting of his preparation had been answered. It had been a long, lonely journey for the boy who was nearly but not yet a man, and he groaned with the effort to getting to his feet and hoisting his pack once more. Iceplant crunched underfoot as he trudged, miserable and sore. Then, all at once, the blanket of cloud that hid the world shredded into ribbons and lifted in the sunlight. He could see the blue of the sky and, at last, of the great and foaming sea.
His weariness was forgotten in an instant and he scrambled down the rest of the way and was soon standing with rolled pants and bare feet as the water pulsed up the beach, breaking over the rocks that jutted out into the water to his left and right. The water was icy cold, deep, and thick with long ropes of kelp, the tops dark where they reached the surface and strands with a circumference the same size his wrist were heaped in stinking piles across the sand, flickering with gnats and stinking of iodine. He relished the numbing of his travel-worn feet and didn’t even mind terribly when a stronger wave caught him unaware and soaked his rolled hem. Long minutes passed and Durwin scanned his surroundings, absently at first and then with anxious attention when the reason he had traveled the long way from the abbey was not forthcoming. The foam curled as another wave receeded and he felt the relief of being at his journey’s end run away with it.
*Where is she?* he wondered.
It was the flight of a pelican that drew his attention to where he was required, gliding low over the water and then swooping up to perch atop a pillar of rock jutting out of the water five times times as far away as he could throw a stone. Something atop it glinted at he tracked the bird with his eyes, brighter even than the white of the salt spray as waves broke around it. There was the treasure he had come all this way to win and he would rather die than fail now in seeking it. The cold, roiling water seemed dreadful now and as he stripped down to his skin he prayed to the eye of heaven that the strength he had built climbing and on the training field would be enough to carry him there and back. He stashed his belongings in a dry alcove, took one last fortifying breath, and then plunged in.
His chest squeezed tight with the shock of it and the current was stronger than he had imagined from shore. He paddled, trying to keep his head above the water and the rock in sight, but kept getting dragged away and down until he could only try to stay near enough to the surface to snatch a breath, all hope of reaching the distant rock gone. He opened his eyes in the dark, searching for the light of the surface that he was not sure he could reach. Just as he began to sink slowly down from where he had been suspended in the water column, too tired to struggle any longer, a glittering mass surged up and around him; a million fish with bodies like bits of silver foil carrying him up up up until he found the air again. There were the rocks and he clung to them, panting, as the surf surged back and up again in another wave. He let it carry him up to where he could climb out of the water and onto the sun warmed surface, on which he lay, regaining his strength. Beside his hand, an empty abalone shell lay, with nacre the dark blue and green of the sea. Water had collected in it from the spray of the waves. He looked into the water inside until a wave crashed against the rock, showering him with foaming spray and water so that he blinked. He opened his eyes again and saw her, flanks of pearlescent green and blue and mane the white of the foam. His unicorn.
He stared up at her and could find no words until she bowed her head and touched his lip with her horn, knobby grey brown like the outside of the shell that birthed her. He felt his lip pierced, though she touched him only lightly. A drop of blood trickled down the corner of his mouth to match the ruby drop at the tip of her horn. He could speak again, and was grateful in a way he thought he could never be for Brother Robero’s incessant demands for recitation. It was hard enough to keep from squeaking as his heart raced with joy and anticipation.
“I thank Heaven that you have called me, creature of light. I offer you my devotion and my chastity, if you will deign take the name I offer and suffer to bear me forth.”
“Courageous youth, unblemished by lustful touch of another or the worship of evil spirits, I will gratefully receive the name you give me,” she replied in a voice like the wind.
He remembered too, the name which had ended every dream. “I, Durwin of the Golden Hill, name you Sibbe.”
“Sibbe,” she murmured. “I am pleased. Let us go, Durwin of the Golden Hill, before the tide returns.” She bent down and he, gathering all that remained of his strength clambered onto her back, feeling small as she stood again. He held the silken curls of her mane and reveled in the joy and fear of their first ride as she leapt down the rock, cloven hooves bounding over the waves as if they were stone, until they came again to the shore.
Ch 2: The Valley Bandits
Sibbe’s shoulder twitched under Durwin’s thigh, sending the fly only buzzing off a short distance before it returned again, lazy and fat, to settle elsewhere on her body. Her leonine tail whisked in annoyance, both at the insect and at the endless standing and waiting that their company was doing in the muggy, smokey heat of the valley. The Abbey of the Golden Hill was not, strictly speaking, responsible for protecting the rough town of ranchers and farmers beyond the bridge over the river that they held. But the mayor had come in person to ask for assistance against a band of raiders who had been harassing ranchers and traders along the road north to the capitol and east. Abbot Mortimer, being a shrewd man as well as a faithful one, had seen the opportunity to secure alfalfa at a good price as well as put a little seasoning on the untried brothers in the order. And so Durwin and Sibbe sweated and sneezed and squinted in the summer glare, standing scout for an enemy that Durwin was half convinced was entirely fictional.
There was movement. Durwin wasn’t sure at first if he had imagined it but he could just make out, partially hidden in the yellow scrub, two men crouched low and creeping down the draw below. At Durwin’s breath, Sibbe’s long and tufted ears snapped forward, alert and ready to move from where they were hidden in the dappled shade of a gnarled oak. They waited long moments in perfect stillness, though the beads of sweat and the hum of insects were temptation aplenty. Finally, a breeze quivered through the sage and buckbrush chaparral and they doubled back behind the slope from which they watched to bring back their report.
Captain Baltasar rode up to meet them at the bridge and after a quick recounting of what he had seen, had Durwin and Sibbe rejoin the main company. Before he knew it, Durwin was in a line close beside an older boy who had seen combat once before, his friend Vidal. They were both armed with five iron banded javelins apiece, tips loosely wrapped in a heathered green cloth of the same color that made up their cloaks and banners, along with sabers of bronze, a metal far less odious to their mounts. Gem, Vidal’s unicorn with a rather flashy splashed red and yellow coat, was touching noses with Sibbe, whispering their language too soft for either rider to understand something that had the jittery Sibbe still somewhat. Durwin, too, was anxious, and prayed silently that he remember the years that he and Sibbe had spent training for just such a day.
At a distant signal, the riders set off along the draw, aiming to flush out the men Durwin had spotted and any more besides. The mayor had spoken of a dozen or so bandits, even going as far as to to claim that some of their number were fabel creatures, though they were supposed to live only in the mountains on the eastern range and the gloamy cliff forests that ran along the coast southward, both of which lay many miles of empty hill country away. Durwin rode in the middle of the right wing, Vidal to his left and a bit down slope. The leftmost wing spotted the bandits lair first, sending five men running down toward the center of the formation with a whoop and a volley that left three behind, dead. The nerves that had simmered down somewhat in the act of navigating the slope resurfaced and with a mix of excitement and dread, Durwin gripped his ready javelin all the tighter. A shout from Captain Balthasar jerked him out of his head - he had begun to veer left and ahead, nearly in front of Vidal so that his place in the line was bare and Vidal hampered in his throwing. Sheepishly, he trotted back and let the line catch up with him again. It was perhaps providential that he had just then turned to go back to his place, for on the other side of the gulch, other figures bolted up and made for the break in the line. They were obsured from the brother riding to Durwin’s right by tight mounds of greasewood and manzanita and Vidal was too focused on the bandits headed his way to spot them. With a shout to his companions, Durwin threw the first of his javelins, which missed narrowly the hulking figure as with surprising agility it tracked the motion and ducked for cover again.
Then came the howling cry and the claws. What had been the shape of a giant man twisted and popped into the shape off the biggest bear Durwin had ever seen. It thundered toward him, jangling copper plates in a kind of bib like armor from its massive chest and head. Durwin had time to launch another javelin, this time striking true in the shoulder, but it was only a surface wound, which did nothing to impede the beast, and merely fell away as the creature closed with Sibbe. She reared, frightened, and struck out with her cloven hooves before Durwin managed to turn her. The bearman raked her pearlescent flank with claws the size of Durwin’s palm, but thanks to a vicious kick by Sibbe and Durwin’s javelin thrust, held spearwise, into its eye, they managed to get away. Vidal and the rest of the right wing had already begun to close on the fablebeast and at the urging of Captain Baltasar, Sibbe limped out of reach of the half blind beast, haunch well bloodied. It was disoriented but rage filled, and once it had its bearings again, the copper bib slapped against its broad chest as it barreled toward them, gaining ground. Durwin leaped from his saddle to ease his mount’s burden, not quite sticking the landing on the uneven ground, but rolling up again to move obliquely out of the path of the charging bearman. He hurled the last two javelins in quick succession before drawing the bronze sabre at his side. Lightened without her rider, Sibbe darted up a rock face out of reach just as the bearman fell in a heap, javelin protruding from the base of its skull. Durwin was collecting theones that had missed their mark when Vidal and the others reached him. His hands were trembling and scraped and good sense had not yet overcome the rush of the fight. Vidal looked at the bearman, dead, and said, “Well done. Post up there with Sibbe if you can get to her and see to her wound. Captain says we have work to do still.”
Sibbe, when he finally managed the sheer climb, was frothy with pain and nerves, the wound reaching muscle but not bone and oozing with a yellowy saplike discharge that Durwin had never before seen on horse, human, or unicorn. He cleaned it as best he could without catching a kick to the gut, noting well how the blood
on the tip of her sharp hoof was not the silvery pale of unicorn’s blood like was seeping from her haunch, but rather the dark and sticky stuff that leaked from the corpse of the bearman. It was not long then, until the company returned to him, Brother Asher injured in the thigh, but not fatally. Getting Sibbe down from the cliff took some coaxing, but eventually they made their slow and limping way home to the Abbey of the Golden Hill in glory.
The water in the baths was steaming hot and strewn with steeping herbs already by the time Durwin had settled Sibbe down to fresh bedding, good food, and pleasant company. She nudged his forehead with her nose in dismissal when he lingered, having already brought her an entire sheaf of goldenrod flowers to mix with the dried wild rose blossoms and hay that she munched on, the gashes in her leg itchy but already healing well. “By the God of the Green, you have fretted over me enough. Now,*go,*” she groused. ”I won’t have you sleeping near me smelling like that.” Durwin did as he was told, bone weary and unable to feel the jubilation that he had expected now that he was finally a battle tested member of the order. But the distant voices of the other men were a comfort and, when he joined them in the baths to purify his body once more from the blood spilled in service to the God, their presence was as much a comfort as their retelling of his own deeds. His fight with the bearman, vile and misshapen thing, seemed a great feat even, through the eyes of those who had not nearly lost the precious bond of their souls to do it. He blushed furiously into the water until the conversation moved on to other things, and let the heat of the water ease the tension he had not even realized he was carrying.
Durwin had thought himself the last of the company to enter the baths and so was surprised, halfway through rubbing the scented oil through his unbound hair, to hear Captain Baltasar enter, the door loud behind him. His prayers were perfunctory and he spent little time messing about with preliminary washing, merely dumping a bucket of tepid water over his head and shaking himself like a dog before plunging in with the rest of them. “Don’t get too comfortable, boys,” he said irritably. “The king sent a whole contingent from the capital to see the abbot. We're going to war.”
That night, as the sage smoldered in the little clay bowl on the table by his bed, Durwin offered personal thanks to his God while the little trail of sliver smoke twisted and dissipated in the draft. Sibbe slept peacefully below his loft, flopped over on her uninjured side in a banked pile of new straw. Durwin lay awake a long time, remembering her scream, and the feeling of the bearman’s eye as he gouge it out, and the thud of the body in the earth, and the trembling of his hands, and the triumph. The embers were all faded by the time he found sleep.
Ch 3: The Rout and the Fall
Sibbe’s belly was flecked with mud from the long, hard climb up the mountainside, wet with the spring snowmelt that incessantly dripped from the upper branches of the ancient trees to soak the soft duff below. The canopy was thick so that even at midday the forest floor never brightened past a twilight gloam, but they and the rest of Captain Durwin’s company were traversing the side of the range in a wide swinging switchback in the early hours morning, too near daybreak for the Queen’s creatures to be at their best, but before they would expect human men to be up and fighting fit.
Durwin, like Sibbe, was also sodden, having dismounted for the more treacherous parts of the climb. The unicorns managed, barely, a path that was completely impassable for mortal horseflesh, but there was no need to make it more difficult for them by balancing a rider when hands and feet could climb the sheer rockfaces just as well. He was cold all the time, and had not felt well and truly warm since the earliest days of autumn, but even though the spring brought an abundance of mud, it also promised warmer days ahead.
This was not one of those warm days. The stream they were to cross was narrow this far up the mountain, with steep banks on either side. Far downstream was an easier crossing, but well guarded and both attempts at taking the bridge had been met with disaster. Instead, Durwin had been sent with his company here to chance a half rotten footbridge in the dark. The cold air and misting spray from below billowed up into the pocket of body heat his heavy marled green and brown cloak had been protecting thus far. He looked at the bridge, slimy with moss but mercifully short, and watched as the men of his company tucked silently among the trees as they regrouped before crossing. Vidal was the last up the trail, and walked with Gem to where Durwin waited.
“Think the bridge will hold?” he murmured low.
“The timber is still good from what i can see. It’s slick and we’ll have to cross singly, but I’m more worried about when we are on the other side. We won’t be able to get back quickly, if it comes to that,” said Durwin. Not for the first time that morning did he wish Captain Balthasar alive and making the decisions for him again. He unrolled the map and squinted at the crude cartography. “I didn’t see anywhere else to cross without getting wet, but if we have to fall back, we’ll do it here,” he pointed with a chewed on bit of stick to the part of the map corresponding to a place that had looked fordable, though cold and rocky and too far downslope to reach their intended destination without being accosted. “Let the boys know the plan and to be ready to move in half an hour.”
Durwin kept moving, knowing that as soon as he stopped moving the perpetual chill would reach back into his bones, making him stiff as well as nervy and tired. He brushed the drying mud from Sibbe’s forelegs and neck and she nibbled affectionately at his ear, breath warm and sweet as grass on his cheek. Any misery was lessened when they touched, and any hardship made bearable. They had both won many scars in the three years since that first fight, and each of them he kissed in thanks and reverence.
The crossing itself was easy enough, slick but solid, though clearly meant for creatures human sized and shaped, if not human specifically. Sibbe delicately balanced, catlike, over the simple stretches of rough timber balanced atop worn pillars of stone. The drop wasn’t far, but the water was fast and cold and without an obvious way to climb back out again. Halfway through the company’s crossing, a flock of bats swarmed overhead, then swooped low among and below the unicorn on the bridge, following the water in a jumble of wings and squeaks. The unicorn, silken little gray Whisper, had frozen in place as the bats surrounded her, every muscle tense and eyes wide with the near overwhelming desire to bolt across the bridge and away. Her rider, the shy young Bertolo watched from just across the bridge knuckles white around the hilt of the bronze saber at his side. Sibbe’s murmur in his ear was all that kept him from racing toward her to beat them away.
“The creatures are only hunting for insects, see? Whisper is unharmed and is doing well to stay very still. If you go now, she will startle or the bridge will break and she will be hurt.” Bertolo nodded, but it was not until the cloud of creatures had swooped up again into their thundercloud of bodies and into the dawn tinged sky that he could finally relax. Whisper shakily walked toward him, body twitching all over where little claws had clung and scrambled and pulled out little tufts of hair. He ran his hand soothlingly down the length of her, his forehead pressed into her neck until the rest of the company was across and they had to move again.
The alpine meadow crawled thick with the misshapen creatures of the Queen’s army: beetle winged women with carapaces of green instead of armor and long spears tipped with unbreaking obsidian, packs of coydogs squabbling among lichen splotched trolls, bare except for the crisply curling hair that grew in patches on knobbled, ashen skin, sure footed satyrs with the curling horns of their ram forefathers. A distant horn echoed up and the Queen’s forces moved to meet. Durwin’s company waited above, unseen in the underbrush, until the mob they watched below was committed to their march.
Then, at a low whistle, they surged out of the brush, felling many with the first volley of javelins even before the mob realized that they were there. Each man threw with practiced aim as his mount galloped down the treacherous slope, light as dandelion tufts until the javelins were spent. Then, they were surely not the etherial things of dreams but rather terrifying dealers of death as they plunged their horns into yielding flesh, their clinging riders slashing down any who dared fight back. The foe broke, those in the rear scattering in all directions to escape Durwin and his men while the forward half of the column wheeling about in confusion until their officers could command their attention once more. By then, Durwin felt the alpine air billowing from Sibbe’s nostrils as she heaved great breaths, oil slick blood dripping down her horn to stain her short mane and Durwin’s hands. He cut down a howling victim of her goring, a troll who they ran down from behind, exhilarated.
He looked around and, seeing that the company had scattered in the chase, called out the command to regroup for another charge. His voice range out through the trees but was cut short when a great blow struck Sibbe from the side and below, sending him flying down a loose slope and scrabbling to gain purchase only to fail and fall, cracking his head against the root of a tree along the way. His vision blurred and he could only vaguely make out the shapes of two hulking figures standing over him before he was roughly carried away.
Ch 4: Warprize
The Dread Queen Alvariss saw the commotion before she heard it, the plume of cackling jays diving and swooping above the branches of the thinner pines with far too much excitement for the eating of the king’s carrion and too disorderly to be carrying out the orders of her underlings. Her train of guards and attendants followed as she tromped over the muddy ground of the encampment. The noise, which had melded indistinctly with the ruckus of the camp, was distinguishable now as jeering, swearing, and beneath it all, a muffled man’s tortured sobbing.
One of the attendants rushed forward, iridescent green elytra flashing in the evening light as she pulled the flap to one of the sleeping tents wide to make way for her mistress. Inside, bedrolls, bags, and all the other detritus of camp life were piled up in the corners of the dim space, while in the center a throng of creatures were huddled around a figure hastily bound, spread eagle, to some stakes that had been pounded into the ground just for that purpose. Some of the party recognized the entrance of the queen at once and hastily slunk away, but the majority were single mindedly focused on the bound and gagged figure in the center of the room. Captain Aretta, a hulking stooped woman of wolfish lineage, was slicing his clothes off in ribbons, taking plenty of flesh and blood with it. His torso was already exposed and sticky with his own blood, and she had moved on to cutting up both his inner thighs. Another drag of the knife across his belly and his genitals were bare to the room. He sagged after the cut until Aretta began fondling him, small and delicate in the bulk of her massive hand. He thrashed and pulled and her amber eyes gleamed with cruel satisfaction as she drug a claw along the member, tip to balls and then to taint as he cried out. Queen Alvariss was mesmerized by the sight, but then happened to catch a glimpse of the strip of cloak torn into a strip to use as a gag, clearly the marled green of the riders.
"You gonna use the pony boy or what?" laughed a voice.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm getting to that," said Aretta. "Why, you want to watch that bad?" She was straddling him now, shimmying out of her blousy trousers before she licked a long stripe up his cock. Durwin shivered and strained against the bonds, dark eyes rolling wildly until he caught the gaze of the Queen. A gesture, and less than a second later, Aretta was half naked on the floor and bleeding from both eyes, the Queen terrible and mighty with all the shadows of the tent colleted to herself. Captain Aretta wheezed like a dying fish but the crowd was frozen in place, too terrified to help her.
"I accept this man as tribute," boomed the Queen. Aretta could not have argued, for the Queen was entitled to first choice of all pillage. That Durwin was there at all without the Queen's knowledge had been a grave presumption. She nodded, unable to speak but bowing low. The crowd moved as one and bowed too, remembering themselves only belatedly in their fear. "Good," said the Queen and released them from the spell. "Release his bonds but do not touch him." This was done with great haste before Queen Alvariss bore the man away, half dead, to her tent.
Durwin was shivvering hard by the time she laid him in her bed, filthy and small and naked and utterly out of place even in the somewhat more practical splendor of the Queen's field accommodations. He struggled to get away from her as soon as she released her hold on him, smearing blood mud all over the quilted coverlet only to be dragged back by his ankle into the center of the bed. He yelped at her touch in the middle of the frenzy of incoherent babbling and after the Queen pinned him in place with one delicate hand on his breastbone, she was able to see that the ankle she had grabbed was badly swollen under the cuts left by the ties that had held him for Aretta's ministrations.
"The captain was not careful with her gift, was she?" mused Alvariss. "Well, it is no matter, I am versed in the healing arts as well as harming ones, though my gifts might not well agree with the workings of your order. Stay, or I will make you stay and you will not like how." She released him for a moment and he lay there panting, able to think better of disobeying even with his addled mind. She rummaged around inside the drawer of a little folding desk on the other side of the tent, returning with a vial of stoppered terracotta, painted with a twining vine of geometric black. She got onto the bed beside him and pulled him to rest his head on her lap, uncorked the bottle, and held it to his lips. The scent alone was vile - a sulfurous oily anise that burned the inside of his nose. He could not suppress the gagging cough, though it pulled at the lacerations across his body and the shooting pain in his ribs suggested they were cracked at best. He tried to turn his head away, burying it in her lap, but Alvariss caught him by the chin, pried open his jaw with inhuman strength, and dumped the concoction down his throat like a dog.
He was awake just long enough to feel the rising burn as the liquid spread through him, writhing against the unbearable internal heat heedless of his injuries, simultaneous with the feeling of being detached from his own body, as if he were feeling someone else's agony, until he felt so distant that he lost consciousness entirely. When he woke again, the burning had abated to a nearly pleasant warmth. Taking careful stock of his body, he was relieved to find himself clean, his injuries stinking of herbal antiseptic, stitched and bandaged, and significantly healed, and his ankle stiff where it was set. He was also worryingly naked under the impossible softness of the bedding and could not recall clearly what had happened between his fall and waking beyond a series of disconnected nightmares. After a bit of awkward and painful shuffling, he managed to wriggle himself up so that the pillows propped him up enough to look around. At the other side of the dim space, he saw a woman, at a desk, arranged so that she could both attend to the papers there and see the bed where Durwin lay. Her posture was perfect despite the heaviness of the robe and the glint of the shirt of fishmaille beneath it. The light outside was tending toward dusk and offered little to light her face through the walls of what he realized with a silent groan was a tent, the royal tent of the Dread Queen Alvariss.
Durwin's heart thudded in his chest as he realized who exactly it was who sat there keeping watch over him, but the effect of the vile concoction that still burned in the inside of his nose had not done so much so quickly as to give him any hope of escape. He tried anyway, doing his best to roll up onto his hands and knees, biting out a cry at the shooting pain in his side and the swimming sensation in his head. He breathed in through his nose as the bile rose in his throat, willing back the sudden irrepressible urge to throw up. He was grateful, then, that he had neither touched food nor drink since the earliest hours of that morning, less that the sensation of his stomach trying to empty itself anyway exacerbated every pain. The Queen watched as he struggled to master himself, her face unreadable, then set aside her papers and went to where he retched on the bed. He flinched hard at the proprietary touch of her hand along his spine and shuddered as she wiped away the dribble at the corner of his mouth with her thumb.
"What are you going to do to me?" he wheezed.
"That depends," she said, stroking down his back absently.
"The order...you won't get as much for me in ransom if you ruin me."
He could feel her breath on his skin as she murmured. "That is no matter. You are mine."
Hot tears welled up unbidden, but the potion has taken his strength as well as his pain and he could not resist as the Queen eased him to his back again, covered him with the thin sheet, and kissed his brow tenderly before returning to her work. He dozed to the sounds of her monstrous staff coming and going with the business of war and to the sounds of the camp outside for interminable hours. He healed quickly and was kept biddable with the frequent application of the Queen's concoction. Time went on and he found himself waking without her keeping watch over him. He distantly thought of escaping, knew he had an obligation to try, but found a flat braided collar had been clasped around his neck while he had slept particularly deeply and that this was affixed by a cord of the same material no thicker than the stem of a mountain aster, to the center pole of the tent. He tugged at it experimentally and found that the cord and collar were stronger than steel, though they were soft as silk and that, when he moved, a tiny bell at the hollow of his throat, just below the loop of the cord, chimed out. He pulled harder, trying to keep the bell silenced with one palm, but whatever spell had been worked over it did could not be silenced by his hand. His bonds did not budge. Mere moments later, he squinted as the entrance of the tent was pushed aside and his guard looked in on him, stern and well armed.
"The Queen wants you back in bed, Toy" said the figure. Durwin glared, then obeyed after giving the cord another tug for good measure.