Once Upon an Autumn Eve

12

It was well after the mark of midnight when Liaze awakened trembling, not from the cold but from a feeling of dread. She looked at Luc lying asleep, but the darkness obscured his face, and so she slipped from the bed and went to a nearby window and drew aside the drapes. She lowered the sash and opened the shutters, and once again she shivered in the chill autumn air. This night was the dark of the moon, and only starlight shone in.

What did awaken me, and why this sense of anxiety, as if something quite ghastly is creeping upon us?

Liaze looked out upon the lawn, and she saw a small dark form scuttling across the sward and pointing up at her open window. Yet that wasn’t what affrighted her so; instead it was a huge dark shadow following, the shadow slithering back and forth, like a giant serpent, or perhaps more as if it were a questing hound, seeking, seeking, flowing upon the grass like some dreadful Of a sudden Liaze saw what it resembled: A shadow of a great hand, creeping this way, with clawed fingers and Liaze spun and cried out, “Luc! Luc, waken!” And even as Luc started up from the bed, Liaze shouted to the unseen ward below, “A foe comes!”

Luc bolted up and into his chamber, and by the starlight shining in through his open-shuttered, open-draped windows, he snatched his sword from its scabbard lying upon a bedside table. And he grabbed his silver horn and chain shirt and silks and leathers and boots from their rack-stand.

Back into Liaze’s chamber he ran and to the window, and he said to Liaze, “Step away, they might fly arrows.”

He sounded his horn, and it was answered from below by the houseguard.

Luc looked out and down. “What-?”

He flung on his silks and then his leathers, saying, “I know not what that black thing is, but you need to stay back and safe.”

As he slipped into his chain shirt, ignoring the warning Liaze stepped again to the window. “Oh, Luc, it’s creeping up the side of the house.” She hauled up the sash and slammed the window shut.

“My bow, I need to get my bow.” Liaze ran through an archway to an adjoining room.

A darkness blotted out the starlight, and the house creaked and groaned, as if its timbers were shifting, as if someone or something were trying to crush it.

Luc stomped his last boot onto his foot, and grabbed up his sword and stepped to the window.

Just as Liaze came running back in, her strung bow in hand and a quiver at her side, Luc lowered “Luc, don’t!”

— the sash.

Her cry came too late, for the huge shadow rushed in and snatched Luc up and jerked him out the window, his sword spinning down toward the ground to land on the flagstones with a clang!

Even as she ran toward the gape, Liaze nocked an arrow to bowstring.

The shaft was already half drawn as Liaze reached the window. She stared into the night, and saw something small and dark shoot up from the distant trees, dragging the great shadow after, with Luc caught in its grasp. Up and across the sky they flew, and Liaze drew to the full and took aim at the blot resembling an arm and loosed her missile, the arrow to sail through the umbrous wrist and beyond to no effect whatsoever. And there came through the moonless dark a distant laughter of sinister glee as the shadow and Luc and something flying ahead of them disappeared into the night.