Only the Valiant

by Morgan Rice

  “You think I did this?” Royce asked. Did this woman—he still had trouble thinking of her as Lori—think that he was some kind of sorcerer?

  “No, stupid boy,” Lori said. “I did this, with a body that won’t let me die. Your touch, one of the Blood, was just enough to catalyze it. I should have known that something like this would happen from the moment you washed up close to the village as a baby. I should have walked away then, instead of staying to watch.”

  “You saw me arrive at the village?” Royce said. “Do you know who my father is?”

  He thought back to the white-armored figure he had seen in dreams, and to the time the master of the Red Isle had said that the unknown man who had sired him had saved his life. Royce knew nothing about him, save that the symbol burned into his palm was supposedly his.

  “I know enough,” Lori said. “Your father was a great man, in the way that men call themselves great. He fought a lot, he won a lot. I suppose he was great in some of the other ways too: he tried to help people where he could, and he made sure those under his protection were safe. This pyre of yours… it’s the kind of thing he would have done, brave and righteous and so utterly foolish.”

  “It’s not foolish to want to keep our friends from the crows,” Royce insisted, giving Lori a hard look.

  “Friends?” She thought for a moment or two. “I suppose, after enough years, a few of them might have been. It’s hard for me to truly be friends with anyone though, knowing how easily death comes to most. It will come to you too, if you insist on lighting a beacon so that everyone from here to the coast can see that the duke’s men haven’t finished their job.”

  Royce hadn’t thought of that, only of what needed to be done for the people of his village, and what he owed them, after bringing this down on their heads.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Let them come.”

  “Yes, definitely your father’s son,” Lori said.

  “You know who my father was?” Royce said. “Tell me. Please, tell me.”

  Lori shook her head. “You think I’ll willingly hasten everything that’s to come? From what I’ve seen, there will be death enough without that. I will tell you this: look to the symbol you bear. Now, will you give an old woman a head start before you do anything stupid like lighting that fire?”

  Anger flickered in Royce, roiling up from within his grief. “Don’t you care about any of the people here? You’re just going to walk away before this is done?”

  “It is done,” Lori countered. “Dead is done. And don’t you dare accuse me of not caring. I have seen things that… arrgh, what’s the point!”

  She flung a hand toward the pyre Royce had built, muttering words in a tongue that hurt his ears just to hear. Smoke started to billow up from it, and then the first small flickers of flame.

  “There, does that make you feel better?” she demanded. “I managed to keep myself from resorting to that while a man stabbed me, I was going to let myself die, not that I had the power to do much else, being so old. Now you have me doing it in five minutes, damn you!”

  Royce had to admit that her anger was quite impressive. There was something almost elemental about it. Even so, there was something he had to ask.

  “Did you… did you have the power to save people here, Lori?”

  “You’re going to try to make this my fault?” she demanded. She nodded over to the spot where the fire was just starting to catch. “Magic isn’t just wishing for sheets of fire or calling lightning from the sky, Royce. With a ritual long enough, maybe I can do some things that might impress you, but a spark like that is about the limit of what I can do as I am. Now, I’m going, and don’t you try to stop me, boy. You’re going to cause enough trouble for me as it is.”

  She turned, and for a moment, Royce thought about catching hold of her arm, but something made him hold back, simply staring out as the fire grew in the dark instead. There ahead of him he could see the flickers and sparks of the conflagration as it grew, building up into something that looked as though it was consuming the entire sky with its heat.

  Royce stood as still as he could, thinking of all the people committed to that fire, wanting to honor them by watching the last moments that their bodies had there. The blaze burned and burned, rising and falling with the wind and with the fuel beneath it, so that it seemed to Royce almost like a kind of symphony born out of the fire.

  Something else came through the fire, dark against the flames, flitting through them as easily as if it didn’t feel them. Royce made out the shape of a great fishing hawk, of the kind that plunged into the lakes nearby, but this was no normal bird. Its feathers seemed tinged by the red of the fire where they weren’t a deep, sooty black, and there was something far too intelligent about the look it gave Royce as it circled him, glowing with embers in the dark.

  On instinct, Royce held out an arm the way he’d seen falconers do, and the bird settled heavily on his forearm, working its way up to his shoulder and preening itself. It spoke, and Lori’s voice came out.

  “This bird is a gift, although the gods alone know why I’m doing it. I will see what she sees, and tell you what I can. May she be your eyes, and stop some of what’s to come from being worse.”

  “What?” Royce said. “What do you mean?”

  There was no answer, beyond the shrill shriek of the hawk’s call as she took to the air. For a moment, Royce had an image of the fire below him, the circle of flames it formed seeming puny from so high above…

  He came back to himself with a start and held out his arm for the bird. She landed as casually as if nothing had happened, but he found himself staring at her. There was a flicker of flame in her eye that made it clear that this was anything but a normal hawk.

  “Ember,” Royce said. “I shall call you Ember.”

  ***

  Royce stood with Ember through the night, ignoring the way his legs ached, and his body fought with him in the desire to move. They stood vigil over the fire while it burned, with the hawk flitting from time to time above the flames, soaring in the thermals they created.

  He didn’t move; he felt as though he owed the dead that.

  Eventually, the sun came over the horizon, and as it did, Royce saw the men and women on the edges of the trees near the village. He turned toward them, and he felt himself stumble, his legs unwilling to obey after so long standing in one place. If these were the duke’s people, then he was as dead as Lori had predicted he would be.

  Strong hands caught him up as they came forward, and now, Royce recognized some of them. There were friends from the village, and others from villages further off, deeper in the dukedom. They were all about his age, some dressed as foresters, others just dressed in whatever they had on hand. All of them carried weapons.

  Royce recognized one of the boys who held him up, a large young man called… it was Hendrik, wasn’t it?

  “What are you doing here?” Royce asked them. He looked at some of the ones who had come from his village. “I thought…”

  “Some of them got away,” Hendrik said. He was taller than Royce by a head, and there were those who joked that he must have the blood of some troll kin out of stories to be so large. “We heard what happened here, and when we saw the fire burning, we came.”

  “What you did, building the fire, standing there,” a girl with short red hair said; Royce thought her name was Matilde. “It was right somehow, you know?”

  Royce nodded, because he understood. He managed to stand now without help, looking round at all of the others.

  “But what are you all doing here?” he asked.

  “We’re here to help you,” Hendrik said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Help me?” Royce said. “Help me with what?”

  “Help you overthrow the duke,” Matilde said. “We heard what you did back in the pit, and there’s a whole rebellion in the dukedom. We want to be part of it. We want to help.”

  Royce started to shake his head,
wanting to tell them that he didn’t intend to start a rebellion, wasn’t planning to kill whoever the new duke was. Then he thought about all the people who had died in his village, and who must have sent the men to kill them, and he knew that wasn’t true. He wanted the new duke dead, just as he wanted to kill the man who had slain his parents and then passed him by like it was nothing.

  “It will be dangerous,” Royce said. “Most of you… you aren’t fighters.”

  “More dangerous than sitting at home waiting for some nobleman to decide he has taken a fancy to me?” Matilde demanded.

  “More dangerous than just being less than them, when they come raiding?” Hendrik added. “We’ll learn to fight. You can teach us. And then…”

  And then, they would not just be a rabble, Royce knew. They would be exactly what he needed them to be if he was truly going to beat Altfor and his men. They would be an army.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dust tracked his prey through the night, seeing well enough in the dark that he needed only the starlight, following the signs that the world presented to him with equanimity. A spider’s web spun the wrong way had him split from the path. A tree whose knots looked like the ancient Gaath sign for travel told him that he was on the right route.

  “Everything is right, because it cannot be other than as fate decrees,” Dust reminded himself as he walked. Such were the words that the priests in his home had taught him, until no part of him could deny the truth of them. “Against the power of fate, all are small. Who would swim against an ocean?”

  The truth of it seemed like an absolute to Dust; was an absolute, since those who questioned the will of fate’s signs usually found themselves given up as sacrifices in his homeland, or provided as subjects on which to teach the Thousand Torments, or the many ways of death. Even so, he knew what the question was: if fate would happen as it must, why were the angarthim necessary? The answer was as well-worn as it was obvious.

  “We are the tool through which fate corrects itself,” Dust said. “We are the balancing hand on the scale, the correcting push against chaos.”

  He murmured these things like the prayers they were, along with other, older phrases as he walked. When the signs around him showed a place to rest, he sat cross-legged with his back against a tree and rested in a way that wasn’t quite sleep until the fatigue drained from his body. Ready to continue, he started to walk again, down toward a place where a large pit sat, surrounded by a kind of stand. Dust had seen fighting pits before, although he doubted that this one saw anything so elegant as the duels through which he had been trained.

  Nevertheless, it was where the signs pointed, and so he went there.

  There was fighting in the streets beyond the pit, out on the edges of the town, where guards vied against men and women who looked to be no more than ordinary townsfolk to Dust. It said something about the chaos around the place that hardly anyone looked at Dust at first, even though his hood was down. He stopped beside the road, casting knuckle bones into the dirt to try to find out the cause of it. Reading them told him that there had been death, and the death of someone important.

  The signs among what was happening told him more. The duke’s men were there, and Dust could see their nerves, hear the flickers of their conversation. He pulled his hood up over his head so they would not see him as anything more than a beggar, a mad prophet, a person to overlook. It let him move closer to them and listen.

  “…right through his chest! Just threw it!”

  “Try not to sound so admiring,” another guard said, “or Lord Alistair will have your head for it.”

  “Are we obeying him now, or the old duke’s son?”

  “Who do you think?” the guard demanded. “A boy or a respected commander? Rumor is that Altfor bowed down to him anyway. Saw which way the wind was blowing.”

  Dust had long read signs in the wind, but this was one set of signs that he hadn’t read until now. Slowly, he was starting to piece things together.

  He was still doing it when the two guards looked over at him. Apparently, he’d moved too close.

  “You, what do you think you’re doing?” one of them demanded. “What are you doing out despite Lord Alistair’s curfew?”

  “I was listening to your conversation,” Dust said. “I take it that there has been a death here?”

  “Are you stupid?” the other one demanded. “Of course there has been a death. What do you think the fighting is all about? That boy they sent to the pit, Royce, managed to kill the old duke! Have you been sitting under a rock while half the dukedom has been hunting for him and there has been rioting in the streets?”

  “I have not been in this land,” Dust said, pulling back his hood so that the men could see his skin, and his tattoos. “But it seems that we have something in common. I too am hunting this boy, Royce.”

  The first guard laughed. “You think you can just come here and declare you’re going to take the boy from us?”

  “Yes,” Dust said, because it was no more than the truth. He would be the one to find Royce, and he would be the one to kill him. “Tell me where he is and the fates may let you live.”

  “Tell you…” The first of the guards looked to the other, as if barely able to believe what he was hearing. “You want to question us like we’re some peasant scum? I have a better idea: how about we take you in for questioning? I’m sure the duke’s inquisitors will get some answers out of you.”

  “No,” Dust said, shaking his head. Did these men really think that things would happen that way? “No, I am sorry, but it will not happen. I would have seen it if it were to be allowed.”

  “What is going on here?” a third man demanded, and this one was dressed in the clothes of a noble, silk and velvet, with a light courtier’s sword on his hip. “There’s no time for harassing beggars when there are still knots of traitors on the street.”

  “This madman says that he’s hunting Royce,” one of the guards said. “He demanded to know where he was so that he could kill him.”

  The noble turned toward Dust. “You aren’t armed.”

  Dust shrugged. The things that most people thought of as weapons were too… coarse. He could use them, of course, but why should he, when the needles and garrotes and slim knives in his sleeves were more than enough?

  “An angarthim is never unarmed,” he said. On the noble’s breath, he was sure he smelled the scent of alcohol. Such things could be exploited, but they could also be dangerous. They made men less predictable, although nothing was truly so to a man who understood fate.

  “This man is clearly some kind of madman,” the noble said, waving a hand dismissively. “Make him go away, and then get back to the fight. Lord Alistair was most insistent that we control the situation!”

  As he waved that hand, Dust saw the rings there, the swirls and decoration blending together with the light to form symbols that he thought he knew. Now he understood. He had been put here in this moment for a reason. He smiled at that.

  “What are you smiling about?” the noble demanded. He raised his hand as if to slap Dust.

  Dust struck him in the chest with the palm of his hand, sending the noble staggering back into the dirt.

  “Right, that’s enough!”

  The first guard lifted an axe, and now Dust saw how the waves and shine of the metal formed something that could, in the right light, be taken for a skull. This was another place where fate had sent him, to kill those who needed to die.

  “Ah, I see,” he said. “Forgive me.”

  “Too late for that,” the guard said, and swung his axe in Dust’s direction.

  Dust stepped inside the swing, as close as a lover might have been in an embrace, then spun, throwing the first guard at the second, who was just starting to raise his sword. Dust timed the throw perfectly, and he heard the guard’s gasp as the sword point appeared through his chest.

  The one with the sword dropped it, scrabbling for a dagger, but Dust didn’t let him get close to it. He grab
bed the reaching hand, holding it in place, while his elbow swung round with bone-breaking force once, then again. As the guard fell, Dust brought the heel of one foot down sharply on the man’s throat, hearing the crunch of cartilage.

  By this point, the noble was back on his feet, slender sword held in the tentative grip of a man who had clearly only used it for show before now. Casually, Dust slipped a throwing needle from his sleeve, end glistening.

  “On the way here,” he said, “I was contemplating why fate sends me where it does. Now I know. Thank you for showing me that I have more than one role to play.”

  “Stay back!” the nobleman said.

  “Certainly,” Dust replied with a bow. As he straightened, he flung the needle, seeing it embed itself in the noble’s flesh. The toxin was one taken from frogs kept for the purpose in the temple’s vaults, and Dust was already turning away as the man fell, gasping.

  He continued toward the pit, moving at a measured walking pace and lifting the sword that one of the fallen guards had used. As more men came at him, Dust cut left and right, constantly moving, never staying in one spot, even though the men’s movements were obvious enough that a fool could have seen the places they intended to attack. Enemy after enemy fell before him, with sufficient ease that Dust started to feel a little bored. He chided himself mildly for that; this was not about his entertainment, but about the requirements of the signs around him. Death continued to shine in everything he saw, and Dust moved onward through a trail of blood.

  Eventually, there were no more foes to kill, either because he had slain them all, or because they had learned enough to keep out of his way. It made it possible for him to come out into a box overlooking the fighting pit, and there he saw half a dozen noblemen and women sitting around drinking, obviously holding back when they should have been engaged in the search for his prey.

  Dust looked around, half expecting to see another death sign proclaiming their fate, but instead, he saw two discarded flowers forming the sign of peace in the language of one of the lesser islands. Dust set his stolen blade down and ignored the nobles for now as he moved around the place.