Aaron frowned, rubbing his chilled hands together, “No, better that we all die together? Better that we leave all of Eladen’s people to their fate, is that it? With no one to stop him, Belgarin will be king, and I guess that’ll be the end of it, huh, princess? Hundreds, maybe thousands die in the quelling all because you felt left out?”
“P-princess?” The youth asked, but neither of them paid him any attention.
“You bastard,” Adina said furiously. “Fine, get yourself killed. Do what you want. What do I care?”
He shrugged, “You’ll have to do better than that, princess. Bastard’s what my friends call me.” He turned to the youth, “Now go as fast as you can but be safe. Now’s not the time to break one of the mules’ legs by leading them into a hole.”
Without a word, the boy barked a command to the mules, and the cart lurched into motion. Aarno watched them go, Adina staring at him with a strange look on her face, Gryle still gawking at the blade like it was going to bite him.
He kept watching until they disappeared over another hill. Then he sighed, and glanced back in the direction they’d come. In the wake of the receding cart, the night was eerily silent and still. It was as if the whole world waited on him. It was also cold, bone-chilling, goose-bump raising cold. On a night like this, a man would be more worried about staying warm than anyone coming up on him in the dark. Or so he hoped. He wrapped his cloak tightly around him—the tattered cloth provided meager shelter against the stinging wind, but it was better than nothing—and started down the road.
It wasn’t long before he could make out the orange glow of a fire in the distance. Grunting in satisfaction, he headed toward it. This is a very stupid idea, Co said in his mind.
“You’re as bad as the princess,” he muttered.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
He sniffed and brushed an arm across a nose that felt like a chunk of ice, “Take it how you want to. It doesn’t matter to me. But let me ask you a question, firefly. You think a hunter ever wonders what the deer is thinking?”
There was a pause, then, reluctantly, No.
“Neither do I,” he said, struggling to keep his teeth from chattering, “because he’s the hunter. His job’s killing, and the deer’s job is dying, right?”
That is a rather crude way of putting it, but I suppose. Is there a point to this?
“My point, lightning bug, is that, to these men, we’re the deer. Men don’t have a lot of expectations of their prey. They expect them to be scared, to run, to hide, and, eventually, to die. What they don’t expect is for them to sneak up on them while they sleep and slit their fucking throats.”
And what if there are more than you expect?
He shrugged as he continued forward into the howling wind, “Then we’ll be at it all night. What the Pit else do we have to do?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
He walked for what felt like an eternity. The fire was little more than a dull orange glow on the horizon, and his fingers and toes felt frozen, but he bared his teeth and pushed on, the wind and the cold cutting through his clothes like blades made of ice.
After a time, he was close enough to see the shape of the flickering fire. The flame whipped back and forth in the wind, as if performing some ritualistic dance reminiscent of the days when the world was still young, back in a time when fire was man’s only ward against the darkness, against the things that waited in the shadows.
He didn’t’ know how long he stood, watching it, a frozen revenant who’d forgotten what it was to be warm. Then, he caught himself and shook his head as if to clear it. Damned cold must be getting to me. Jerking his attention away from the mesmerizing flame, he stalked closer, wincing at the crunch of the frost-laden grass beneath his feet. As he drew nearer, he could just make out the shadowy forms of two men lying in the darkness. Two horses had been staked to the ground nearby. Their ears perked up at his approach, but they appeared exhausted, and they made no noise.
Two, he thought, two at the least. Some men would have moved in then, satisfied that there were only the two, but not him. There were plenty of fools living in the world, but there were a lot more dead ones. Instead of giving in to the temptation to get it over, to get it done, he waited. In the cold, in the darkness, he waited.
He might have stood there for minutes or hours, in the darkness and the cold, he’d lost all track of time. He waited, the darkness wrapped around him like a cloak, schooling his breathing and listening to the steady pop and snap of the fire, scanning the fields to see if some other hunter shared the night with him. When he was finally satisfied that there were only the two and decided to move forward, his knees protested painfully and small shivers ran through his body.
He crept around the shadow of the camp, forcing his numb legs to move, until he stood above one of the men. This close, he could see that the cloak the man had wrapped himself in before he went to sleep was a deep crimson, and despite the accumulated dust on it, the golden slashes on the cloth were still visible. He sighed silently to himself. They were colors that brought out shouts of pride and cheers of joy from some men, while sending others scurrying into their homes like rats trying to outrun a flood. They were Belgarin’s colors, Belgarin’s men. He glanced back at the other, ensuring himself the man still slept. He wondered idly how the prince had found out that they had traveled north but pushed the thought aside for later. There were things that he needed to be about just now.
Silently, he knelt down, drawing his remaining blade. As he did, the soldier rolled over in his sleep, so that he was facing toward the sky, toward Aaron. The flickering firelight revealed the face of a youth that was certainly no more than a year or two older than the boy, Peter, if that. It was probably the boy’s first outing, the first time he was trusted with anything more than cleaning the latrines and mopping up after the real soldiers.
Scouting duty—if that was what this was—and judging by the fact that there were only two of them, Aaron was confident in that assumption, was one of the most hated tasks of enlisted men. Nine out of ten times, it was a complete waste, and more often than not, you returned with nothing to show for the trip except for a saddle-sore ass and a desperate need of a bath. The veterans had probably done everything they could to avoid it. But not this one. No, this one would have volunteered readily, excited to become more than just the errand boy around camp, excited to prove to himself—as well as the others—that he was a soldier in his own right.
Yeah, nine out of ten times the boy would have made it back to camp empty-handed. Empty-handed but safe. No doubt, even now, there were men scouting in all directions from the town of Krase, finding nothing and grumbling themselves to sleep. But not this one. No, not this unlucky bastard, who was still young enough, still stupid enough, to think life was a fairytale, and that he, unlike everyone else, was immune to the Keeper’s Call. Aaron raised the blade above the boy’s throat and positioned his other hand so that he could keep the sleeping man’s mouth shut as he bled out. It was a damned messy job—he knew this from experience—but he couldn’t risk waking the other—not yet.
He was just about to open the young soldier’s throat, when something about the youth’s features struck him as familiar, and he hesitated. For a moment, he couldn’t think of what it could have been that had triggered the feeling, but then he knew. The boy’s nose was thin, and canted to the side where it had obviously been broken. It looked exactly the same as Owen’s had, so many years ago. Owen had got his broken nose from his abusive, drunken father, and ever since then it had held the same crook. That was, before the old man decided to take on a bottle of poison in a game of chicken—the poison won. Death always did. Aaron couldn’t help wondering where this boy had gotten his.
What in the name of the gods is wrong with me? He thought angrily. Sooner started sooner done. He leaned forward and brought the blade within an inch of the youth’s throat. There was a rustle at his side, and he whipped his head around, sure that th
e other soldier was bearing down on him. Instead, he saw that the man had only rolled over in his sleep. Satisfied, he turned back and saw that the boy was staring at him with wide, terrified green eyes. A green he knew well. “Owen?” He whispered, dumbfounded. “It can’t be.”
“P-please,” the soldier pleaded in a whiny, child’s voice, “don’t.”
Aaron felt his arms break out in gooseflesh. He blinked once, then twice, and stared back at the soldier. “Owen, you know I’d never—“ Wait, he thought, just wait a damned minute. Owen would be older than this. With that thought, suddenly his vision seemed to clear. This man wasn’t Owen. His ears were small—Owen’s ears had been massive, much too big for his face—and this man’s hair was black, where his childhood friend’s had been a brown so light it was almost blonde. It had been nothing but his mind playing tricks. He must have been more tired than he’d realized.
Still, the look of terror in the boy’s face filled him with a nagging sense of shame. Why the fuck should I feel guilty? I wasn’t the one chasing him. “You were chasing me,” Aaron whispered.
“I-I was ordered to,” the boy whimpered, his bottom lip quivering, “I didn’t—I wouldn’t have hurt you. Please don’t kill me.”
Irritated at himself, Aaron realized something. Despite the fact that he knew it was foolishness, he couldn’t kill the boy, not now, not with those stupid green eyes pleading, begging him to stay his hand. He was a sellsword, after all, not a monster. “I’m not going to kill you, kid,” he whispered, cursing himself in his head as he did, “Not this time, but don’t you let me see you again. The next time, you’ll suffer before I bleed you out, you understand?”
The boy’s head jerked in a tight nod, “Y-yes sir, of course.”
Aaron grunted quietly as he rose, his breath pluming out into the cold night air and vanishing like a dream. He sheathed his blade and pulled the hood of his cloak back over his head. “Go to sleep, boy. Go to sleep and this’ll all be gone when you wake up, nothing but a nightmare on a night made for them.”
“Yes sir, thank you, sir,” the boy stammered. Aaron only stared at him until the youth swallowed hard and closed his eyes.
You’re making me soft, firefly, he thought wearily as he turned, too damned soft. He’d taken no more than two steps when he heard the tell-tale rustle behind him. “Damnit,” he hissed. He lunged to the side, and it was this desperate burst of action that saved his life. Instead of taking him in the base of the brain stem, the blade plunged deep into his shoulder. He bellowed as pain lanced through his body, fierce and jagged and hot. He whipped around to see the boy stumbling away from him, his eyes wide. The youth’s hands were covered in blood. His blood.
“You stupid bastard,” Aaron said in disbelief, lurching toward the boy on suddenly unsteady feet.
“I got him, Carl! Carl, wake up, I got him!” The boy shouted, his voice cracking. His eyes were wild as he stumbled back another step, his hands out in front of him as if to keep the sellsword at bay.
“Huh?” A gruff voice, thick with sleep, asked from the other shadowed bundle.
“I got him,” the boy repeated, and although his voice was full of fear, Aaron could hear the pride in it.
He stumbled toward the boy, swaying drunkenly as the pain ripped through him. If the other man came fully awake and came from behind him, Aaron knew he was finished. He growled in frustration and took another halting, excruciating step.
The youth, his eyes locked on Aaron, wasn’t paying attention to what was behind him as he shuffled backward. His foot snagged in his bed roll, and he let out a yelp of surprise as his legs came out from under him. He was still wrestling with the covers, trying to get himself untangled, when Aaron dove on top of him. The boy cried out in panic, wriggling in Aaron’s grip like an eel, but Aaron grabbed a handful of the youth’s hair in one hand, his chin in the other and let out a growl of fury and pain as he wrenched the youth’s head to the side.
There was a crack as the boy’s neck snapped, and his eyes opened so wide that they looked as if they would pop from the strain. He sputtered and choked, struggling, and failing, to draw a breath. Aaron turned away from the youth’s look of horror, hating himself as he tore the boy’s weakly pawing hands off of his shirt. With a grunt of effort, he pulled himself to his feet in time to see the other soldier, a man who looked to be in his early forties with a brown beard specked with gray, staring at him in shock.
“You—you killed him,” the man said, “You killed the lad.”
Aaron felt at his left shoulder gingerly, and discovered that the knife the boy had used was still in him. Blood loss was making him lightheaded, and he knew that if he passed out with this man still alive, he’d never wake up again. “Yeah, I killed him,” he gasped, a deep self-loathing settling over him, “now are you just gonna stand there like a … a fucking idiot, or are you gonna do something about it?”
The man growled, and drew a knife from his belt that was twice the size of the one sticking out of Aaron’s shoulder, “Oh, I’ll do something about it you son of a bitch.” He snarled as he started closer. The soldier was nearly twice Aaron’s size, but he consoled himself with the fact that, in his currently weakened state, he’d barely be able to overpower a child in hand to hand combat anyway. It didn’t help.
Gritting his teeth, he gripped the handle of the blade in his shoulder and tore it free. There was a sickening, sucking sound as it came loose, and fresh blood blossomed out of the wound. Breathing in rasping grunts, Aaron stumbled awkwardly, barely keeping his feet as a wave of dizziness swept over him. The older soldier grinned cruelly, “You’ll suffer for what you done to the boy. I’ll see to it.”
“Come on then,” Aaron said, trying, unsuccessfully, to blink away the darkness at the corners of his vision.
The man let out snarl of rage and rushed forward. Aaron tried to dodge the soldier’s first strike, but the man was a skilled fighter, and Aaron’s wound made him too slow. The knife cut across his side, and he bellowed in pain, nearly losing his footing on one of the dead boy’s legs as he reeled away.
The soldier was on him in an instant, swinging the knife in vicious cuts and stabs. Aaron put all of his dwindling energy into avoiding the strikes, giving no thought to attempting any counter attacks with his own, blood-smeared blade. He managed to kick the man away and grimaced as he pressed his unarmed hand to a fresh cut across his stomach. This isn’t working, he thought resignedly, he’ll have me soon.
I am blocking what I can, Co said in his mind. Her voice sounded strained, tired.
He’d figured as much. Without the Virtue’s help, he was certain that he’d have lost consciousness minutes ago, but, magical flying orb or no, the loss of blood was making him disoriented and slow, and it would only be moments before the soldier managed to close the distance and get in a strike that Aaron wouldn’t walk away from.
The grizzled man circled him, a hungry expression on his face. He feinted with the knife, and Aaron lurched to the side in a desperate attempt to dodge a thrust that never came. The soldier smiled a cruel smile, “Not much good when your opponent’s awake, are you, sellsword?”
Aaron set his jaw with grim determination, “Are you going to sit there and talk, or are we going to get this done?”
The man nodded, “Alright then, bastard. Say hello to the Keeper for me.” Then he rushed forward, swinging his knife in a vicious arc.
Instead of trying to evade the blow, the sellsword stepped into it, throwing his forearm in the way of the oncoming blade. He bellowed in pain as the sharp steel plunged deep into his arm and struck bone. With a savage snarl, he called on what little strength he had left, lunging forward and slamming his own knife up and into the man’s gut.
The soldier let out a grunt of surprise as the steel sheared through his flesh. He gave a jerk on the blade in Aaron’s forearm, trying to pull it free. Aaron cried out as the knife dug at the bone in his arm, but it was stuck fast and did not come out. He took another step closer to the m
an, growling, his eyes wild and feral, then ripped his knife free and slammed it into the man’s stomach again.
The soldier gasped, and took a step back, his eyes wide with shock and a dawning fear. Aaron pursued him forward, plunging the knife home again and again, paying no attention to the blood splattering him. A few more strikes, and the man’s legs gave out from under him, and he crumpled to the ground. Aaron followed him to the ground, bringing the blade down again and again. The knife pistoned up and down, up and down, blood fountaining out, nearly black in the firelight. For a time, he was aware of nothing except the feel of it on his hands and face, warm enough to be almost hot, and the rhythmic push and pull of the blade.
By the time he came to a panting stop, his good arm was aching fiercely, though the pain paled in comparison to the wounds in his shoulder and forearm. He let the knife fall free of his numb fingers onto the crimson-stained grass. For several seconds, he sat there, trying to get a handle on the pain that raged through him. Then he took a deep breath and started to his feet.
Before he was halfway up, the darkness which had been creeping into the edges of his vision surged forward as if with a mind of its own, and he crumpled to the ground under the weight of it. This is how it ends, he thought, and then there was the darkness and nothing but the darkness.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
He floated in a sea of darkness, on waves of darkness, and it was alright. Soon, he knew, he would sink beneath those waves, would fall into the still greater darkness waiting beneath, and that was alright too. There was no pain, there, no hunger or thirst. Only the darkness. That and nothing more.
--UP. AARON, YOU HAVE TO GET UP NOW! The words sounded strange, as if they were coming from some great distance, from some small, unremembered place, and he thought he could just make out some light in the distance, a weak, flickering thing that the darkness had not yet touched, had not yet consumed. But it would. He knew that now. It always did.
A Sellsword's Compassion_Book One of the Seven Virtues Page 21
