The two-pronged gryphon of Idasia, the crown still bright and gold atop its writhing heads. Sunset’s purples and oranges caught the colors of its threads and made them shine, and he knew then that somehow they had won.
Stragglers were loping away into the west to lick their wounds. A tide of gryphons swept after them, descending on men with beak and claw. A great cry went up as the last of them scattered, leaving their dead and their dying behind to bloodthirsty swords. Pockets held out, but only pockets, and they were swept away before the tide. Rurik watched this and whispered a prayer to whatever spirit might take it, sinking back against his sword in the dust.
The soldier snapped his fingers before his face, then blanched at some new and distant terror. He retreated, as Rurik wrenched around to see what shade had come to take its dues.
Alviss caught him, but Rurik only smiled up at the man. He wanted orders. Reassurance. But Rurik had neither to offer. Only silent exhaustion stirred as the army turned its eyes to the open streets so near at hand. Through the smoke, he could see the outlines of buildings. Oberroth. The hollers rose to a fevered pitch, but all Rurik could think was: He did it. He actually did it.
* *
Essa was already in the streets of Oberroth—a name she had taken off a merchant fleeing with all his possessions—when the rest of the army began to trickle in.
She and her fellow scouts—Rowan among them—had flanked the whole of the battle, picking skirmishes where they could, but kept purposefully from the thick of it. Gedler had been wroth at the prospect, wanting to fight and to die with what he called “the fury of the divine,” and had taken most of their band to Father Narve’s collection of the horde. Their loss had bothered Essa not at all. As the direction of the battle became apparent, Rowan suggested they lay an ambush in the town, where they might intercept any soldiers seeking to shed arms and armor and blend in with the populace. It had been a sound plan, though none of the enemy obliged them.
Residents barred their doors as they swept into the streets. It was not a large place, Oberroth, but large enough to host the region’s market, if not the walls that might have spared it. As Essa picked her way through empty streets, she found that it reminded her of Verdan, only with more sunlight. That thought disturbed her more than she knew it had reason to.
When the soldiers came, the others at first rejoiced, and went to them with open arms. Essa dared a smile with them, for the victory, if not the men at its helm. We are here, she dared to think. We are here at last, and even armies cannot deny us. Rowan threw an arm about her shoulders and hugged her tight, and at first she thought it was for the same reasons she smiled.
But the men came on like something out of scripture. Like rabid, howling dogs, or some orjuk horde. They weren’t soldiers anymore, only beasts. They fell upon the streets of Oberroth and began to tear it apart.
Before the march, Voren had held her hand. It seemed a sweet gesture, so unsuited to the bloody work that was to come. It was all he had wanted. To hold her hand and tell her…tell her…but she had not let him. In his tender mercies of days prior, he had done enough. She kissed his cheek instead and promised to return. Then she had left, not knowing if that was a promise she could keep. Nor what that kiss would mean to the addled baker.
How could she reconcile that, and this?
She watched men sunder doors and set thatched roofs aflame. Men she had served beside for months on end, drawn steel with, suddenly turned that steel upon wood and flesh, and pawed at anything that glittered. Coins were carried into the street. Necklaces. Keepsakes. Women wailed against them, as men fought or fled their coming. Children were skewered in the dirt. The streets flooded with the misguided—the ones who had remained.
Blood stirred with the bodies in the street.
They were people. Her people. Their people. Not that it mattered whose they were, but the thought that they could do this to their own—it turned her stomach.
Is this war’s truth?
“By Assal.” The man at her side blanched, his all too green fingers shuddering on the hilt of his mace. “There can be no mercy for this.”
She turned on him, finding a sudden fury inside. “And that is how we know there is no Maker, fool. Come on.” These others followed her as wide-eyed lambs to slaughter.
There was a notion stirred in her. Blood, that little voice cried at the back of her head, they would drown our earth in blood! A savior, perhaps a martyr, that was what they needed—was not the Church always on about such things? She sprang between the houses, set to a frenzy, and made for the first band with whom she locked eyes.
They had broken the shutters off a simple log home and forced their way inside. Since, they had emerged, tossing wife and husband before them. They laughed as they pulled at daggers, and one in a flopped cap clicked back the hammer on his pistol. How she wished that they were Gorjes! She searched for sign, but nothing marked them—their clothes were ragged, their faces varying through the lines of age, in every way mere men, save the darkness that haunted their eyes.
So close. She raised a shout, and drew within a few yards. Before she realized it her dagger was in her hand, and one of the men had turned to meet her, eyes clouding in sudden uncertainty, but the others had not noticed. The woman, a townie wife by the somewhat finer patching of her dress, she threw her arms around her husband as they circled him, and begged them to spare his life. Please, no! Essa could hear the echo of her own scream, but it mattered not. Laughing, the soldier with a hat rested the pistol on her shoulder, and where it touched her husband, shot the man dead.
So near belched the flames that they scorched the sleeve of the woman’s dress, mingling with the blood her screams answered. That same foul beast kissed her next with the pistol’s butt, and should have descended on her prone and weeping body, clutching still to the fleeting lifeblood of her husband, save that Essa cleared the last few yards.
The youngest of them stumbled from her path, and in the clear, she hurdled her tiny frame into the far larger soldier’s bulk. He let out a startled shout as her legs connected and he was flung over his victim, clipping the dirt face-first. He was up quick, for a man of graying years, but Essa was right behind him, foot to his groping wrist and dagger at his rasping throat. She might have cut. The voice screamed at her to cut, but she held that beast back.
That was what separated her from them. She realized, too late, she had left her back exposed, but at the huffs of her own approaching companions, she lost whatever fear remained of these startled men. The old man fidgeted under her steel, and carefully drew up his hands.
Her eyes darkened to the point of storms as she demanded, “You would take them? Your own countrywomen?” The cries still lit the air—and more wails, growing all around.
The thought—or her tone, more like—seemed to sit ill with the soldier. He began to squirm, but he still managed some small act of defiance, reminding her: “The men take it as part of their battle right. To the victor, as they say.” When Essa’s fingers tightened against the hilt of her dagger, the man edged back. “It’s true, mum! Ask any man.”
“Get from my sight,” she spat. The dagger lifted, though the little voice howled. The man was fortunately quick to oblige.
In his wake, she raged, taking her wrath upon the nearest crates and all within. Property. It’s all just property, she thought, as her foot smashed open a crate. The tent, the camp, and even the women. It wasn’t rape if they had earned it. It wasn’t rape if it was their property.
When a hand touched her, she whirled, ready for a fight, but as the hand fell away, Rowan stood before her, his own face lined with grim portent. She felt her resolve crumble—briefly—and the child within remorse, but she would not let it out. She stiffened and pulled back, demanding what he wanted. But her cousin only shook his head. He looked to her companions, brandishing blades as the rapacious soldier sauntered off, shielding the grieving wife. Then Rowan turned back to the town, as if looking for something. Some sign.
<
br /> Essa snarled and twisted on the still prone woman. She took her by the arm and forcibly lifted it from her husband, shaking her as such. “Get gone, woman,” she said—too harshly, but nothing else would be heard. The woman, broken, only sobbed the louder. “Get you gone, if you’ve any sense in your head. They’ll be back, or others. Leave him. This whole place is soon for the torch; he’ll not be left for the worms.” If the woman heard her, she gave no sign, head rocking back and forth to the murmurs of the dead man’s name.
With some small cruelty, she thrust the woman at one of her fellows and asked him to get her to her feet. She did not need to ask twice.
Her dark gaze swept over the rest of the street, judging the best spot to intercede herself. The question of standing aside, of disengaging, was not even in her mind. That would make her something less. An accomplice, somehow. She scarcely noticed that Rowan had turned back, eyes carefully fixing her.
“Should we tell someone?” another of the scouts—a paunchy, moss-bearded hunter named Gregor—asked. Words did not even seem worth the effort of calling out his ignorance. Who was there to tell? Who was there that could not possibly already know?
Accomplices. The world is filled with them, in silence or in shouts.
Yet the words were enough to shift her gaze. Just enough to catch the tightening of Rowan’s knuckles, the paleness so sheer it might have been snow. “By God,” was all that uttered. The world widened around her, though she was scarcely even aware of Gregor’s flight.
It wasn’t even rape. What they beheld went beyond that. Men stood about the body, framed in back by the logs of a tenderly built home. Cedar, perhaps—whatever was near at hand—yet the wood, while firm, was haunted by the rot of flesh before it.
On the ground, the boy could not have been more than ten summers. His hair was a wisp of blond, his cheeks still smooth in the way of babes and blades. A whole squad of ragged soldiers had stripped him and tied him to the shaggy legs of what could only be a plow horse—his own family horse, most like. The horse’s legs pranced before the menagerie of iron, sensing and not wishing what was to come. It was in the beast’s eyes. The fear—fear echoed in the mismatched pleas of that boy’s own. Such vivid color.
She had known it once before. It twisted in her gut and before she knew it she was forward, daggers leading.
When the nobles played their games, it was always the nameless who suffered, but this—this was too much.
Rowan caught her, wheeled her back to face him. “They’ll kill you, you stupid girl.” He snapped. “Can’t you see he is already dead?”
When had the cries gone soft? When had the horse whinnied with the cut of the hot iron? It bounded through the street, circling the place both had once called home. Men, or visions of men, they did but laugh. And red was the only color.
She started, but he drew her close, wrenching at the wrist that held the dagger. “I won’t,” she hissed, but his grip only tightened. The dagger wavered, and so did she. Pleading, she looked at him, and saw the tears answered in his own eyes. He caught her and drew her close, shaking his head as if to a child’s frantic question. He drew her close, into his arms, and held her as he had when she was but that child, and all this blood, but another blackened eye.
“Turn away, Essa. There is nothing for them now.”
* *
Ash drifted through the trees, coating the bark and the soil with an unearthly pallor. Men gagged on it as they loped toward the heart of the flames. Yet they could not give this to war. This was something altogether darker.
It gagged Rurik. As he shuffled nearer, supported on Alviss’s shoulder and in step with a dozen other wary and excited faces, he tasted the flames and shuddered for what they meant. It was the same smell that clung to the figure of their guide—it draped from the moss of his beard and ran in reams from the rolls of his arms. Pig—it tasted like pig. Yet as they neared, buildings naught but dancing lights between the brush, the reality drew so much worse.
They were inhaling people.
Oberroth was not like Hell. It was the model to which all others aspired. Not sated by plunder, several men had stripped three girls naked and tied them across barrels in the village square. Laughter—that vile sound!—dared drift between them as they did it. Still, it was the silence that haunted most. The silence and the cold, dead looks. As if screams and tears alike had been drained from the women’s battered forms, they lay still as men hitched mail and breeches both to grunt into them.
The banner of the twin gryphons wafted in the ashes of its homeland, bodies scattered beneath its wings, and the men cheered it on. Is this vengeance? Tessel’s voice called through memory—“the first step.” Then what is the end? He shuddered away, retching, but his cohort went on as if in trace—all save Alviss, who stood at his side and never left. Likes times of old.
“She is in there, you know.” Alviss’s voice carried like a mother bear’s mournful growl.
Essa…Rurik wiped at his chin as the queasiness ebbed. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Rowan is with her.”
As if that answered everything, Rurik nodded regardless, shambling to his feet. Oh Essa, Essa, what will this sight do to you? He could not watch this, but Essa—Essa had proved she could manage her own affairs. She would emerge. She had to. Yet the guide waited, red-eyed, waving them on.
At the edge of darkness he could see them, child and protector, colors muted by the drifting shower.
He looked to her as the heads rose. Was it hope, they saw in him? Or something less? The eyes were hollow now.
“We tried to stop them,” the hunter-guide explained.
When they were near enough to be heard, Essa looked him dead in the eye for the first time in many moons. Death clung to her hair and made a swamp of her features. “It is time to go.” A voice, so soft he could scarcely hear it. Like it had nothing left to offer. “Will he let you?” she asked, and he was uncertain, for a moment, if it was a wraith that now stood before him.
Dead men moved the living. A woman wailed, to the crunch of many boots.
“We are not slaves. We can—we can…”
A small cloud descended with the shaking of her weary head. “Aren’t we?” The words set a quake to his frail shoulders. How long had he missed this voice? “This is your bed. And you will do what you will with it. You always have.”
Say my name.
“He would burn it all. You see that, don’t you?” She bit the edge of her lip, held back the sound that dwelt there. Rowan’s arms enclosed her tighter, but her cousin’s eyes bore sharp into Rurik. Condemnation dwelt there.
Where once there had been fire, this man’s hair and voice, too, had been laden by the ash. Still, the power beckoned: “Long ago, you made a choice. Do you even remember it now?”
“He knew not,” Alviss began, but Rurik held a hand to his words, and they fell away.
Absently, he noted a few of his men had trickled off, moving to join the ruckus. “Essa.” Her eyes lowered from him, and from herself, deep down into the earth. The others closed a protective ring about them. “Essa, I have tried. You won’t listen. He won’t listen. Everyone changes and—and I have never asked you to listen to me, to follow me, but, I just…” The weight of the world and all its false promises lay upon his shoulders. In his long silence, he had let it rise. Rage and bitterness so deep he could not know if it was for her or the bodies or Tessel or the whole goddamned mess of a world before his eyes.
This woman stood before him—a woman he had known from scraped knees and climbing trees—and yet he could not say what he wanted to say. It was all muddled in so much waste. Words could not suffice. It was to this they had come. Yet still she asked: would the Bastard let him go?
There was nothing else. Nothing but that little town, somewhere to the south, where a boy and girl still played across the fields of memory. He took a step back, and another. Silence unmanned him.
He twisted around and ran for Tessel’s banner as s
wiftly as his throbbing leg could manage. Pain no longer seemed to matter.
* *
Blood was a sinister thing, ever plotting escape from its bodily host.
How many more scars? Roswitte swatted at the relentless cloud of black flies that attacked her face and neck. Yet the gesture aggravated her side, and soon she clutched it anew, feeling her own life ebb warm and wet against her fingertips where the shrapnel had caught her. Goddamned swamp. If only she had time, she might have found the needle and thread it would take for her to bind it.
As things were, infection was the least of her worries. At least the bullet had missed her. It was the trees that seemed to have it out for her.
She could not stop. I will not stop. There were no breaths to take. I will not stop. It was a limping gait, but dead men would rise before she would be left behind. I. Will. Not. Stop. Ivon and the rest were lengths ahead, but she could still see them.
When the shield wall had broken, it had not been so clear. Screaming hordes struck like battering waves, but these waves had crumbled the cliff. Traitors swarmed over the gaps in the lines, and forced them wider, and still more came, sweeping away men and banners both. They had been strong. A clutch of dust for all that gathered before them, but they had been strong, their ranks stacked tight, and then they shattered into pockets of men desperate to fend off the spears that hungered for them.
Those in the rear ranks began to flee. She and the other archers remained for one final volley, and the air had thrummed with snapping strings as barbed, triangular broadheads tore into their enemy. At such a range, they could not have missed, and many a traitor had made their final prayers whistling through an arrow in the throat. Some men, by then, had dragged up mauls and axes, and made to give a final stand, and Roswitte might have joined them, save for her lord’s voice that beckoned her from the field.
Then the shot, the splintering, the searing choir—and flight.
Simply: they had lost the battle. All the rest was detail.
Now she scanned the trees, silent between the leaden green. Shapes moved, some near, some far, and the voices carried—the echo and the clouds, they were too great to establish truth. It had been the same since the start of the battle, when Ivon had whispered praise of her to Scheyer, and Roswitte had stepped forth from the lines and joined the other bowmen for the opening shots. A woman. A soldier.
At Faith's End Page 36
