Only the Valiant

by Morgan Rice

  It had seemed like such an obvious thing, to dive into the battle and cut loose the winds of fate. It had seemed like the only way to fit into what the fates wanted, when it was now so clear that the priests of his order had been trying to manipulate things in defiance of everything that was right, and holy, and sane.

  “And do you still think that you are any of those things?” the voice of Angarthim Ash demanded. The man was walking along beside him now, and Dust lashed out, but the other man parried the blow and moved, lashing out so that Dust had to dance back. A fire drake dove in toward him, and Dust ducked, lifting his arms in time to block a kick from his former mentor. He struck back, and Ash was gone, only to be replaced by an apelike thing that leapt at him.

  Even as he leapt and spun and struck, Dust knew how ridiculous it had to look from the outside. Anyone who couldn’t see everything that was affecting him would only see a man flailing blindly at the world, trying to strike out at things only he could see.

  “Are you all right?”

  Dust looked around and saw the shape of a young man, no more than a child, really, although by that age Dust had already been made to kill his first people, shown the utter futility of fighting against fate.

  “Are you real?” Dust asked. He walked up to the child, poking him with a finger. “Are you real, or another vision?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, as if it were the first time he’d contemplated such a thing. “I think I’m real. Do you need help? My family lives just over there.”

  Dust was about to say that he was fine, but the truth was that he was anything but that. The risk he’d taken, pushed by his confusion about what the fates truly wanted… that was harrying him now with the sight of things that made his brain scream just to see them.

  “I… need help…” he managed.

  The boy took his hand, leading him to a small farmstead, little more than a hovel really. There were animals in the yard—a goat and some chickens. Around them, vegetables grew, scratched into place in the dirt and questing for the sunlight. It was a quiet place, and distantly, Dust had memories of somewhere like it, where he had once been small, and helpless, and innocent.

  Perhaps those were more unreal things, because he couldn’t imagine ever truly having being like that.

  “Mother, Father, come quick!” the small boy called out.

  A man and a woman came out, and while Dust half expected them to attack him as something strange and different and evil, instead, he found himself ushered through to a spot by a fire, where a blanket was wrapped over him.

  “You sleep here,” the man said. “Nothing bad will happen to you.”

  Dust wanted to point out that it already had, but that seemed ungrateful, so he lay there while vision bursts of possibilities flowed around him, impossible to follow, impossible to make sense of.

  “No,” he told himself, “I will not let this stop me.”

  He lay there, shutting his eyes, and from the outside, it must have looked like sleep. It was anything but that, though. Sleep was an undisciplined thing, while this… Dust dove down into his heart, his skin, his feelings, sinking into each moment and drawing it out until it turned into a lifetime.

  He picked one of the visions floating around him, focusing on it and understanding it, then he reached out to grab it, stuffing it into his mouth the way another man might have devoured a pastry or a sandwich. Dust reached for another, then another, and with each he consumed, he felt as though he understood more.

  More importantly, there were fewer visions to distract him, and he started to feel more like himself. No, not himself. The man who sat there in the bed eating dream things was not the one who had come to this place on the orders of the priests. Dust knew more, had seen more. He knew what the priests had done, trying to use him to change fate to save themselves.

  He opened his mouth wide now, and the visions poured down into it like water through a hole. Dust consumed the whirlpool of them in seconds, dragging it down into the depths inside him, setting it to whirling there like a maelstrom. Was this what the priests felt when they prophesized and pronounced?

  He rose after what felt like an age, and now Dust was able to see the small dwelling as it truly was.

  “It’s beautiful,” he whispered, taking in the small, hand-carved ornaments, the spaces where wool had been spun and dyed to cover things. He could imagine the care that must have been taken in such things, eyes firmly on the outcome in the future.

  Dust looked around and saw the man and his wife staring at him, the boy somewhere behind, looking out from behind the woman’s skirts.

  “Thank you, my friend,” he said to the boy. “I think you might have saved my life.”

  It seemed like a strange thing to thank someone for. A life was something that ended when it was due to end, and to think in terms of joy or sorrow was madness. It didn’t feel like madness though, not then.

  “I’m Nathanial,” the boy said, sudden and sharp, the way small children seemed to. “What’s your name?”

  “I am called Dust,” he replied. “I am Angarthim, a bringer of death.”

  “Does that mean that you could kill us?” the boy asked.

  Dust thought for a moment about whether to reply, but there seemed to be no point in hiding the truth.

  “Yes,” he said. “Easily.”

  “Oh,” Nathanial said. His mother and father looked frightened.

  “Forgive me,” Dust said. “I have no wish to harm any of you. I wish only to recover, and consult the signs, and be on my way.”

  There seemed to be a hint of relief at that from the others, and Dust thought little more of it as he stood and went out into the yard of the hovel. He knelt there in the dust that was his namesake, watching its motes swirl and shift where the wind took it. There were signs in that, and now Dust found that he had the tools to truly read them. Fragments of visions rose up in him at the sight of each symbol that passed before his eyes. He saw a moment of someone falling in love in the flight of birds, and an instant in a battle somewhere as the sun glinted off glass.

  “Are you going?” Nathanial’s father asked. Dust could hear the hope there. This man didn’t want a stranger troubling his son or his family.

  Dust shrugged, and stayed in the dirt, scratching with the tip of a long knife. He sketched symbols and runes, fragments of things and possibilities stacked atop one another, forming patterns that made so much more sense to him now.

  “I said—”

  “For your goat,” he said, taking out a couple of large golden coins that were far more than the animal could ever be worth. He took out another. “For your silence.”

  Dust tossed them to the man and knelt at the heart of his creation, waiting. Eventually, as Dust had known that it would, the goat wandered over to see if this strange, gray-skinned man had anything that it could eat. Dust waited until it was less than an arm’s length away, and then struck out with a blade, so fast that for a moment the animal just stood there, unaware that it was dying even as the blood started to flow.

  It went into the furrows and lines Dust had created, channeling cleanly along some of them, hesitating as it spilled into others. Dust saw which ones the blood chose in its spilling, and whatever the priests’ dust had done to him rose in answer to it while he knelt there, spilling images into his mind as surely as the blood.

  He saw Royce, standing in battle, ruling over a kingdom. Dust saw him a dozen different ways: happy and sad, victorious and failing, with different backdrops and different settings. Dust saw the people with him shift, friends and courtiers, women and soldiers and more, so that now Dust started to see their roles in this. He suspected that this moment wouldn’t come again quite like this, not without much effort and danger, but that didn’t matter; this moment was enough.

  He saw things as the priests of his order had seen them, saw the choices they had made out of fear, and the ways that they had put themselves beyond what fate decreed to try to save themselves. They had
twisted Dust into something he didn’t want to be. He didn’t mind killing for them when that was what the fates decreed, because he hardly had a choice in that, but now… they had set him against the things that the signs and the portents laid out for him, made Dust into a thing that was wrong in the world.

  “What have you done to me?” he demanded.

  Around him, rain started to fall, muddying some of the symbols, changing the patterns there in ways that shifted the images flowing around in Dust’s head. He saw the possibilities there and the ways that the future could run. He was used to one clean line of fate telling him what to do, but now…

  …now it felt as though he was in a position to choose.

  That was a heretical thought, but that heresy was one that the priests had already embraced. Whatever happened now, the path of things was already off, so who better to choose than Dust? But could he do that? Did he dare?

  “What are you doing?”

  Dust looked up to see that Nathanial was there, although his father seemed to have disappeared back into the house.

  “You should go back in, boy,” he said.

  “I don’t want to,” the boy said. “I want to know what’s happening.”

  “You aren’t scared by all of this?” Dust asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  “I am looking at the future, trying to decide if I should change it.”

  “Is something bad going to happen?” Nathanial asked.

  Dust smiled at that, and it was a strange feeling. He so rarely smiled.

  “The future is more complex than that,” he said. “There are good things, and there are bad things, and sometimes bad things lead to good things, or good ones to bad. There are things that must happen, and things that could happen, and things that should never happen.”

  “And you decide which ones?” the boy asked, sounding in awe.

  Dust shook his head. “Yes, no… I don’t know. I used to think that fate was fixed. Now… I can see all of it, and I could change so much.”

  “Could you make things better?” Nathanial asked.

  “I suppose I could,” Dust said. “There is a man whose presence will bring much war, and many deaths. He is a man my priests sent me to kill, because they were cowards.”

  “You could stop people dying?” Nathanial asked.

  Dust nodded. All he would have to do was the one thing he had been taught never to do. All he would have to do would be choose.

  “Not everyone,” he said. “Some people would still need to die. I will have to kill some of them.”

  “But you’ll be doing it to save everyone else,” the boy said. “You’ll be… you’ll be a hero.”

  A hero? Could an Angarthim be a hero?

  A part of Dust admired Royce. He admired his bravery and his skill, but there was so much danger in all he could be. He could destroy so much. No, he had to be stopped, and, looking through the futures, Dust could see one thing that might do it. He could see the image of a ring on a finger, a beautiful thing of bronze leaves and silver thread. That small thing seemed to promise so much.

  Dust reached into himself for all the visions, all the magic, anything he could. He took all the choices and balled them up, scratching more runes into the dirt. These were dark, jagged things, that promised ill luck and ill feeling, breathing a curse into everything they touched. Dust took the image of that ring, and as carefully as if threading a needle, he connected it to the curse he had woven.

  “There,” he whispered as he collapsed in the dirt. “It is done.”

  It wasn’t done, he knew as he lay there, blackness creeping in around the edges of his eyes. There was still so much to do if he was going to make any of this turn out as it should; if he was going to bring down his order, and Royce, and be the hero that an Angarthim should never be.

  He would still be a bringer of death, of course; there were so many people who needed to die for this to work, but they would be the right people, and that thought gave Dust a sense of hope as he clung to life and warmth, forcing himself not to give in to the blackness as he lay there in the dirt.

  ***

  Dust didn’t know how long it was before he came back to himself fully. Long enough that the rain stopped. Long enough that his muscles felt cramped as he started to move, shooting agony through him as he forced his way back to his feet. He collapsed again the first time, but he didn’t let himself rest. Angarthim didn’t let pain, or tiredness, or anything else keep them from their duties.

  He forced his way back to his feet, stepping forward to the edge of the farmyard space and thinking about all the tasks he had to do. Then he turned back, half wondering why he wasn’t back in the spot where the farmer and his wife had bid him sit. What he saw there made him freeze in place.

  There had obviously been a house there once, but what lay there now was nothing more than a ruin, burnt out years ago. Weeds crawled across the roof, in a pattern that held a hundred signs ready to read, but Dust ignored them. There was the corpse of a goat, but it was clearly a wild thing, wandered in off the heathland. There was no sign of a family, or a bed, or any crumb of comfort.

  What had he seen? Had it been the past, the future, or something else? Had it been some lingering effect of the powder, or of everything that he’d had to do? Had his brain thrown all of this to him because it couldn’t deal with the priests’ powder any other way? Why that image, why there, and why did it feel faintly familiar?

  Dust didn’t know, and he didn’t care right then. He had too much to do, if he was to make the world turn out as it should. He stepped out of the abandoned farmyard, picking a direction in full knowledge that every choice had a thousand potential consequences now. He would choose, for everyone. He would choose who lived and who died, making the world that was best for everyone.

  Royce was just the first one who had to die.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  With Ember sitting on his shoulder, Royce followed Earl Undine into a hall where dozens of people sat eating around tables, feasting on the products of the latest hunt and on malted bread, small beer, and grains. Most of the figures there appeared to be knights similar to Sir Bolis and Sir Simeon, but there were many other men and women clustered around the tables.

  “You will sit with me at the high table,” Earl Undine said, gesturing to a table set above the others on a dais at the end of the hall. Earl Undine’s seat there was obvious, massive and carved, making his status clear. He gestured for Royce to take the seat on his right, while on his left…

  “Royce, this is my daughter, Olivia. Olivia, this is Royce. We believe he may be Philip’s son.”

  The girl who sat there was as beautiful as any Royce had seen. Her skin shone in the sunlight that came through the hall’s windows, while her golden hair was tied back in a long braid that fell down her back. She wore a dress of embroidered yellow, and jewels that looked as though they might have been her mother’s. She also wore a sword at her hip, the grip worn from long practice with it. Her eyes were a deep blue, and they seemed to gaze out at Royce with wonder. No, not with wonder, he realized, with something else.

  “It is… very nice to meet you, Royce,” she said, seeming to struggle for the words for a moment or two.

  Royce could only stare at her for those seconds. She was the most amazing girl he had seen, and Royce’s heart leapt just at the sight of her. It seemed to want him to turn to her and declare undying love for her, even though they had only just met, the sheer strength of that sensation taking him aback.

  “It’s nice to meet you too, Olivia,” he managed.

  Had he so easily forgotten just how much Genevieve had managed to hurt him? He’d given her his heart, had put himself and his brothers in danger to try to save her, had lost everything because of her, and she was now standing happily beside Altfor. Was he going to hand over his heart to a girl as soon as he met her, when that might happen again?

  When he still wasn’t truly over Genevieve?

  “You’re
truly the son of the old king, Philip?” Olivia asked him, and her voice was as beautiful as the rest of her. It was the kind of voice Royce could imagine hearing beside him for as long as he lived.

  “I don’t know,” Royce admitted. He held out his hand for her to examine, and she took it across the tabletop, apparently unconcerned by her father’s presence between them. That moment of contact felt like more than that: it felt like an instant connection, and a part of Royce didn’t want Olivia to let go as she examined his hand with delicate fingers.

  “It’s his mark,” Olivia said, tracing it in a way that made Royce’s heart leap again.

  “But anyone could be branded with a mark,” her father said, and the interruption was enough to remind them both of his presence and make them pull back. “Even if Royce is about the right age, and he has a look of Philip, seen like this.”

  “I’m not claiming to be his son,” Royce said, even though it made sense. A figure had come to him in dreams before the pit, and it was all too easy to imagine that figure as a king. “I’m just here to ask for help.”

  “With your rebellion,” Earl Undine said. “That’s what it is you’re doing. You’re rebelling.”

  “Royce doesn’t seem as though he would do something like that for the sake of it,” Olivia said, even though she had no way of knowing right then what kind of person Royce was. “Is it true that you’re rising up against your lord, Royce?”

  “Altfor is no lord of mine,” Royce said, “and his father was no better. After all they’ve done, is it any wonder that people rise up against them?”

  “The laws of the kingdom say that those who rise up against their rulers are traitors,” Earl Undine said. “King Carris is quite clear about that, whatever the rebels’ reasons.”

  “But Father,” Olivia said. “You have always taught me that a ruler must rule for their people. That they must not treat them as a resource to plunder, but as friends to protect. Tell us, Royce, what has this Altfor done?”

  Royce hesitated a moment. “Forgive me, my lady, I’m not sure that you would want to hear all of it.”