At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  Beyond the flags and the banners of the individual houses and companies, the army was a scattered beast. Men sprawled and staked where they would until some higher power pointed them somewhere else. They spent their days stewing, or patrolling a broad and chaotic ring about the town’s more sensible walls. More than a few would look on their camp and see nothing but a senseless maze.

  Time and repetition drilled home all things, though. Even the formless gained shape with endless replication. Roswitte might have shut her eyes at this point and let her feet carry her the rest of the way. Ivon’s tent was east, and east she went, secretly loathing the growing sounds of the waking masses.

  “Might I escort you to your tent, lady?” Ensil had asked that first day beside the well, as gallant a figure as one could cut. A pity, because one could never quite trust a man that was prettier than most girls.

  Even then she had felt the burgeoning scowl—distrust. “If I can stalk them woods, knight, I can wander a camp unaided.”

  He had given her that, but followed regardless, like a lost puppy—no concept of where else to go. She didn’t stop him. So it became routine, day after day. The penniless warder of the woods and the honorless knight of the roads, navigating the lanes together.

  It was only after each walk, when she stood a moment in the tumult of the teeming city of their camp, that the little voice would whisper: Be kind to this man. Be good. This is the man that saved your life. All the same, their walks repeated. Only bitter tastes come of bitter deeds.

  They were nearly to the limits of Witold’s ranks before the dust knight spoke again. “When you speak to your lord, you should tell him there is some foul talk about the fires these nights. Many are worried as to the tension between the lord commanders.”

  “Gossip’s the nature of men. Let them have it. It’s foul deeds I fear.”

  “One may beget the other, if things do not resolve themselves soon, lady.”

  She stopped, acutely aware of the curious rivermen—those souls of Verdan and the Ulneberg at large that formed the bulk of Witold’s conscripts—watching from afar. “And you, ser? You and yours share such rumor?”

  “A man would be a fool to ignore the voices of his peers.” Ensil said easily. He never took offense. “All men are disconsolate when put to war. More so when they cannot find the war for which they march. It takes so little to push them into the ultimate miscalculations.”

  “Duty demands.”

  “For members of a house, perhaps. Their bondsmen. Duty means nothing to baser sorts, for it cannot see family fed, nor fields harvested, particularly if coin does not come. And for your sellswords, and your free companies, that coin is the only note. As I am sure you well know, duty and honor are oft enough realm only for those with security to afford them.”

  She studied the man’s eyes as he spoke. Wide and gentle, she beheld no sign of treachery tightening them. They did not look away, nor did they shrink before her gaze. A good man, in truth, she decided, shying away from him at length. Honesty—perhaps the man’s most redeeming quality. Unfortunately, it was as dangerous as everything else.

  “Thanks for ‘scorting me.”

  He touched a hand to his breast as he bowed. “Ever a pleasure, lady.”

  “And for your counsel. I’ll share it with milord.”

  “It is the duty of the eyes to forever watch the motions of others. Some are merely better at it than others.”

  With that, they bid farewell and broke their separate ways. A good man indeed, she told herself with a sigh. It changed little. Her coldness was, she reasoned, perhaps undeserved, but it was what it was. In his face she saw still the bald and bearded faces leering back at her. Smelled that male stink of sweat and ale. Hot breath. She saw a knife and blood and…Fallit. Most of all, she saw Fallit. She couldn’t forget, and she held Ensil at fault for her memory.

  Not for the first time, she told herself tomorrow she would smile. Tomorrow she would answer him with the mirth he seemed to seek. Tomorrow she would set aside death’s call, and play a human again.

  One look at his face and it would die, though, as sure as any concept of the flesh.

  He knew. That was enough to damn him.

  She handed the bucket to Ivon’s quartermaster and made straight for her lord’s tent. The guards there did not bar her way, though she waited with them long enough for one to announce her. Etiquette maintained, she drew the flap aside and stepped inside.

  Ivon was leaned against his desk, arms crossed to her approach. Tall, proud, he would have been the perfect union of mother and father, had his long hair survived his grief. His father’s muddied eyes watched her narrowly, though without guile. She bowed beneath them, pretending for a moment she was a lady she was not. Dogs, her master’s voice rang through her head. All men are dogs. She set her bow beside the entrance and turned to meet him properly.

  “Any luck?”

  She shook her head and raised unmarred hands for his inspection.

  “Pity. I should have liked some deer. Or a nice elk. It’s been too long.” His shoulders sank with a soft sigh, and the tension seemed to roll easily off him. The young lord parted with a smile, though the rest of him remained defensive as ever—a trait he shared with his father. “Just as well. I suppose the mess would seem unbecoming, at this point.”

  Her thoughts wandered to Verdan and the wealth of animals loping beneath the canopies of the trees. Fish in the stream. Deer amongst the tall grass. Wild goose and pheasant and turkey wallowing in their flightless fancy. She could nearly taste them.

  Her stomach turned. In ten days, she had known nothing but paltry bites of hard bread and the dull tack of leather.

  “Anyone?”

  “Nothing, ser. The hills are as devoid of men as beasts.”

  Would that there were more of a difference between the two, she thought bitterly.

  “Good. I would trust your eyes above a hundred outriders ahorse, Ros.” Such praise might have had more of an impact if his voice had flecked itself with an ounce of emotion. She bowed regardless. Then, before he could dismiss her, she told him all of what Ensil had said, and all that she herself had heard.

  The very basis of the feudal structure was that men looked to their leaders for guidance. Men looked to their nobles and their nobles looked to the royals, and all was simple, if not always easy. Unfortunately, the present discourse within the camp presented a unique and terrifying dilemma. In war, commanders superseded all other authority beside the royal authority. To serve them was to serve the crown. To disobey one’s captain was to invite the sting of death.

  Even in their own camp there were those that would no longer meet one another’s gaze. The lords of the homeland said it was time to go. Some preached—more openly than others—that the Bastard sought to disobey the royal family. There were whispers of letters and birds and riders in the night, though Roswitte put little enough stock in any of it. The men that followed these lords, however, receded deeper into their camps, like fortresses of cloth and iron. To disobey nobility—and especially the royal family—was death for any peasant. One’s loyalty, and one’s life, was to their lord.

  Yet the Bastard had called for the march. He was the son of the late emperor, lending him credence in the eyes of the people, if not in the eyes of the nobility. Bastard or no, he had led men before his father’s death; it seemed only natural that he should lead them after, while Othmann, for all his many qualities, was castrated by spiteful humor. If not for his failures, many of these men need never have come east to fight at all. To leave their families in the bitter winter and to remain through the beginnings of a planting season. The Bastard appointed men even from the peasant ranks to advise and support him. It endeared him to some.

  Which was right to follow? For Roswitte it was easy. Wherever her own lord walked, she would follow.

  “Men will do what is right, in the end.” Ivon said eventually. Fervidly. “Might I trust myself to you, Ros? A secret on my father’s name?”


  “On your—” She stirred at that. A certain heat rang through her ears. Not a light thing, this. Careful, girl. Such words were iron. “Always, ser.”

  “The Bastard oversteps himself. It is the curse of his breed to be consumed by blood. Theirs. Others. To prove themselves. I think that is what he would do here, with this fool’s march. Othmann may be a fool, but he is the fool we know.

  “We have made great gains here. We choke their rivers, anchor in their bays, and ride unopposed across vast tracts of their land. Yet what should it take to hold them? Not so many, I think. So few of them remain. Great gains—we might go home, content in that—and I would rather die in my own bed, at home, than in this forsaken waste.”

  Home. The word fanned the heat. It caught in her throat and she felt herself unconsciously tug away from her lord. The ghost of an old man and his cane walked the halls, an inquisition smile stretching pillar to pillar in the great room. There was a touch on her shoulder—a friendly touch—and a flirtatious laugh. A man strode through memory, and took her hands in his. Little bear, it whispered. Fallit.

  “As you say, milord.” Her eyes rose again to his. She kept the memories at bay.

  No lord should burden his people so with such a casual tongue. In this, more than anything, she knew Ivon for his father’s son.

  Ivon didn’t notice. He stared off into his own thoughts, occasionally tapping a finger against his arm. For a long moment, nothing more passed between them, until Roswitte began to wonder if she weren’t supposed to leave.

  Finally, Ivon scrutinized her as he had before. “We’ve all lost something in coming here. Such is the nature of war, but by Assal, I know I should have been at my lord’s side.” His gaze thinned and he leaned back against his desk. “So it is. There is nothing for it now.”

  So she was not the only one to suffer the clawing of demons. Still, there were other itches that gnawed at her, and given how candid her lord’s mood seemed to carry itself now, Roswitte found her own sense of kind stepping out of line. Such opportunities were rare, and for all her obedience, not a man could name her apathetic to curiosity.

  Rumors were plenty. The truthbearers few. Given how Ivon spoke of Tessel and the war…

  “Milord—if you don’t mind my asking—what about the Effisians? Word’s to the plenty that peace looms…don’t it?”

  It had been the talk of the camp. An honest hope. While other hatreds flickered in the dark, that one point burned like a guiding star. The men of the army saw only an out—an answer to their prayers. In this, Ensil had spoken true. They had not asked to come here. While even the lowest sot felt the heat of anger for their emperor’s death, it was an abstract burn, and the long months of idleness had cooled its heat, dulling the sense of their cause.

  All they saw now was an opportunity for home. Any affront the Effisians had once called seemed nothing more than a distant dream. Whatever they had done had hardly affronted them personally. They were the eyes that would forever haunt the living—pale, human eyes that raged and waned that they themselves might persevere. Truly, many of them stood more human than their own masters. Did not both suffer for the greed of the “higher” men?

  It had been years since any man had been given leave to speak for Effise within Idasian bounds. Those higher sorts didn’t see the point. So for these beleaguered men, the sight of that small troop riding into their camp had been as good a sign of home as any.

  We done well, we tell ourselves. Others have died that I might live but now—now I can live. I’m going home. Sometimes she pitied the weak hearts of her countrymen. Do we dare to hope? How many times before it was beaten out of them entirely?

  Rather than roar for the injustice of the call to march, there was only discontent in it misunderstanding. They knew they had to march if they were called, but that little spark inside still questioned: Why do we do so?

  Ivon regarded her sternly. “Not so long as Tessel answers. If you people hang your hopes on that, well—know he rejected that outright.” A woman of Ivon’s station might have asked in turn that immortal: Why? Roswitte only nodded, eyes answering: I see. It did not matter whether she did or not.

  “Therein, the injustice.” She winced. She did not wish to hear this. “They said letters have already been sent to Anscharde. So Tessel would see us march before the crown can issue its replies. Clever and stupid in one.”

  She spared him a bemused look.

  “If the crown cannot reach him, whatever he does in the meanwhile is legitimate. Supposing he were commander. Of course, the crown has already decided on that as well.”

  She smelled blood lurking at the edge of Ivon’s voice. “Milord?”

  Only then did he smile. Whatever had possessed the soldier to his moment of whimsy fled before the reality of where they stood. Ivon leaned off his desk and cleared the darkness from his tongue. “Fear not. It is a threat we shall soon remove.” Then he dismissed her.

  Four of them sat in the yard, surrounded by men of the watch and men of the Word. The stink of man was greatest at the heart, though Roswitte scarcely smelled it anymore. Months in the damp and the cold had long since drowned it out. Even before the war, none of them bathed. It was, after all, a privileged thing—a thing for nobles and for royals, not for the men and women of the earth.

  “Repent!” The word cracked like a cannonball across the fallow yard. “Repent all ye sinners, before ye be bound eternal to this soil—the aimless wanderer, the lost sheep, the broken step in the almighty cycle…”

  Alviss, Vardick, and the Zuti heathen joined her for the Word. None of them were terribly religious sorts. Still, Roswitte had always found a certain morbid fascination for men such as these—the dueling priests, so content in their humanity in so many other aspects of life, yet equally content to rain hellfire and destruction on the crossroads of faith.

  Across the yard, the crowds edged around the words of four men with faces ripe as tomatoes. Three stood in robes of varying hue, while their opponent was clad in the strict blues and the silver-trimmed sash of the Orthodox. There was no denying the fanaticism of either side, but if there was any fear that three would drown the one, the Orthodox man’s voice seemed to have time and training on its side, and proved more than ample competition for the Farrens.

  They had been going on for near an hour. Roswitte and the rest had not been there at its inception, but the shouts were close enough to the Verdanite camp that it was hard to hear anything else. At first, the Brickheart had brought her there in the hope of discussing her work—which she took to mean discussing his concerns of the camp’s discontent. When they had spied the foreign pair, however, that plan was quickly discarded. It brought her little grief. Besides, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have the time. In all likelihood, the priests could rattle for an hour more.

  And how they rattle!

  All spoke with passion and with zeal uncontested. They played to fears before they played to anger. Bits of logic tempered the fanatical whole—just enough to get the crowd talking—but there was no mention of any humanist tendencies. The Orthodox damned the Farrens to the abyss by virtue of the Word. The Farrens damned the Church to the abyss for usurping Assal’s will. Men’s souls, hanging in the balance, gaped lamely, occasionally shouting.

  “Is it like this in the north, Alviss?” Roswitte asked over the din of the crowd.

  Alviss’s eyes did not waver from the speakers. “In Kuruse?”

  “The oceans, damned fool,” Vardick snapped. “What’s fire matter, place to place?”

  “Orthodox are there. No Farren. Kuric keep their own gods. And our priests fight as sure as the rest. These? Talk,” Alviss said, emphasizing the point with a dismissive flick of the hand. “Too little we see of it.”

  There rose an image to Roswitte’s mind of a dozen Alvisses screaming across a frozen waste. Robes rattled about their ankles, circlets upon their necks, battle axes raised high in prayer, offering, and lustful sacrifice to the Maker. It took effort to suppress
a shudder.

  Holy men were monstrous enough with word and voice. The thought of battle hardened berserkers, steeled still further by religious conviction—it made her wonder at the greater questions in life. Foremost among them: how Marinidis had ever survived the Kuric raids of centuries past. Some would, naturally, chalk it up to the triumph of one faith over another—in this case, the Visaj over the multitude of pantheistic faiths that stole their northern neighbors’ souls. Roswitte, however, was a more practical soul.

  Luck was their divine wind. That was all.

  Her eyes shifted to the Zuti. The squat, broad-chested man sat apart even in this, legs and arms crossed, as if to section him off from the rest of the world. Beneath the pregnant light, his dark skin gleamed, and with it, the fires in his equally dark eyes. Time would prove if luck would be enough to stem his people’s tide as well. In the meantime, the people of Marindis would cling to their gunpowder and hope it was enough.

  Faith. Men would swing it where they would.

  “The less you see, the better it is.” Vardick groaned. Yet his eyes swept the lines as surely as a hawk, trying to pick out men of his own lord’s camp. If anyone had skirted duty for this, Roswitte had little doubt they would soon discover how Vardick had earned the name “Brickheart.”

  “True,” Alviss consented. “There are better places for faith.”

  “For you, Alvise,” the Zuti snipped. The man’s foreign tongue still couldn’t get the Kuric’s name right.

  Man, the Farrens claimed, was the only proper place in which to put one’s faith. Assal—God—had shown them the path. He watched. But He also waited. The divine was to be found within man, which was to say, all men. Not to be dictated by one man on a seat of veiled mysticism, a man who thought faith a mere extension of politics.

  Men make faith. It’s their right to sully it good, Roswitte mused. She tipped back against the sound and the fury.

  “Folk cheer it loud enough,” Roswitte said.

  “Not your noble. They’re smart to dread it,” Alviss countered.