The courtyard was right where he left it.
Eighty feet across, open to the cracked purple sky, ringed with tall carved pillars. Ten trees stood in a circle in the middle of it, with a third lamp hanging over the center. And from the trees, from every thick, twisted branch, the dead knights hung.
The first time he'd come through here, the bodies had made his stomach turn. Armor torn open. Missing arms. Wounds big enough to put a fist through. They'd been hanging from the branches by their necks or their ankles or wrapped in rope, like decorations someone had put up to warn him off.
They were still there. But the trees had grown.
