The Fiery Arrow by Bo Burnette

Author:Bo Burnette
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780985061265
Publisher: Tabbystone Press
Published: 2016-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

None, that is, in either of the two armies. But the queen, an innately skilled archer, could make the shot. There, poised on top of the tower, she readied her arrow. The arrow for this shot was no ordinary arrow.

It was a fiery arrow.

The queen had dipped it in flame from the tower’s torch, and it now blazed bright as she knocked it in the string and aimed. With the dancing flames reflecting in her eyes, she drew back the string. She released the arrow.

Heavy footsteps smacked the stone floor in the hall.

Arliss slammed the book shut and stuffed it back into the tattered pocket of her underdress. She barely had time to right the slit skirt of the blue woolen dress before the door creaked open. Damian stood in the doorway sneering at her, a squashed fragment of bread in his hand.

“Here, have breakfast.” He threw the deformed piece of loaf at her.

She wolfed it down and instantly wished there was more. She’d eaten nothing since the morning before, and her stomach was complaining riotously.

“It is time.” His accented voice was sharp and rounded in the way he pronounced vowels. “You shall come to the Master. He demands to see you, now, yes?”

“What if I don’t want to see him?

He drew a long, ugly dagger. “Then you shall not see your companion again, either.”

Her heart beginning to beat its drum, she rose and followed him out into the hallway. Who was this Master? Why did they not address him by name?

Áedán’s final words burned in her memory: “Thane! Thane has come!”

Thane. The name stirred something deep within her memory, something which had long been forgotten and unused by her mind. Damian grabbed her arms and pushed her along as images flashed and flickered in her head before fading into darkness: the Isle of Light, the volcano erupting, her father leading, fighting…

Fighting a man with a bloody gash on his jaw and a treasure chest beneath his arm.

Somehow, this memory had remained neglected—no one had spoken of this moment in all her life. It seemed like a dream which was real and vivid in sleep, yet faded away the moment she wakened.

The dark hallway spilled out into a huge clearing—an open cavern of stone. It was like being inside a hollow mountain with the peak cut off. Walls of stone, ground of hard dirt dotted with boulders. And all around there were soldiers and guards, clomping about in silence.

She was in a defensible structure—a castle of sorts. A turreted wall spanned the width of the stony clearing behind her, and guards patrolled its crenelated heights. In the middle of the wall’s base hung a large door beneath which flowed a small, slow river. It trickled straight across the entire clearing, disappearing beneath a tall stone platform which overlooked the entire fortress.

Short stone embankments had been erected to help contain the water’s flow. But there must’ve been some other dam concealed beyond the guarding wall. The river flowing through the forest was much too vast and raucous to be limited to this thin, trickling stream.

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