At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  Chapter 16

  A person can suppress hurt, but they cannot destroy it. They can try to put it from their mind, but the beast is an insidious thing. It only squirms between the fingers, wiggling deeper and deeper beneath the skin until the mind no longer hunts it out. It waits.

  So it was with Rurik.

  The night Roswitte told him of his father’s death, Rurik had felt what little piece of his heart remained shatter into fragments. He sank into himself until the frost was all he knew. But he wouldn’t face it. Not truly. Instead, he fled into winter, leaving the beast howling amidst the winds of his subconscious until he could harvest some semblance of himself.

  Reconcile began in the concept that his father was the same man that had exiled him. This was the same man that caused Essa to leave with her own drunk of a father and robbed Rurik of love for all those years. It came in visuals of a hard man, a quiet man, a distant man. It regurgitated itself in memories of a child, motherless, unattended—a father turning a blind eye in favor of other, brighter seeds.

  At first, he tried to pretend death didn’t matter before such things.

  Then he convinced himself he hated the man, and for that too, death did not matter.

  Lastly, he tried to convince himself that he had moved on.

  Pain always outed the lies. When the empty streets of Verdan loomed, it all surged back to the fore.

  For all the trials and tribulations that family might put one through, there is a longing deep in the heart of every child, for the acceptance of their parents. A love that lies beneath even the darkest turns of tongue, the deepest cuts to heart. It is why, in fact, those cuts reach so deep—for they, as no one else, command a place reserved within.

  As Rurik looked on the home he had once known, he realized that place was empty now, deprived by an act of sacrifice. He had spent so much time on hate, and yet, his father never had. Kasimir Matair had beheld his son before the flames and pulled him back before they caught.

  But the act had, in turn, left Rurik utterly alone. Essa. Kasimir. His mother. Even his siblings. All, in one way or another, had been undone by his own stupidity. He knew it. Kneeling in the dirt, he knew, in the way of old men faced with the long and final sleep. For all that he had wrought, he had nothing. An army stood at his back, steeled arms and voices filling the void of their victory, and it was all so meaningless.

  Yet men did not cry and he could not bring himself to do so there. Instead he drifted from house to house and street to street, as if upon a dream. No one moved to stop him.

  Nothing stood barren before his eyes. Though uncertainty hastened steps or gathered peering eyes at the edges of the town, people still moved along old lines. Loggers put back to axe and struck trees to earth. In counter to that splitting note, the ringing chorus of the blacksmith echoed hollow and shrill, each bleat hammering as a nail. All the while the old women fussed over equally old tales—other armies, other horrors, and other trials—as they plucked and sewed and cooked and cleaned, those little ones not otherwise occupied listening in with eager ears.

  After the initial tension of the army’s arrival the day before, the people of Verdan drifted back into the cycle of routine. It was as though nothing had changed. As though the death of a good man meant nothing, and the people could simply forget. Perhaps they could. Yet Kasimir’s ghost moved everywhere among them. The very lanes to which they moved had been built along lines he laid.

  From every nook and crag of the nurtured earth, the smallest of voices whispered to him: This land holds your father’s bones. Never surrender your father’s bones.

  At some point, Voren, following silent as a ghost himself at the back of their little train, departed with as little notice. Rurik twisted back only at a touch from his once-guardian, and the boy nodded, half-realizing, but not truly caring. That one, at least, still had family to attend. Family that waited anxiously for word or body. This could not be begrudged. Every man followed their own trails to their ends. Would that Rurik’s led anywhere but a dead man.

  Kasimir had ever been a strong man, for all the injury he bundled under his cloak. Winter had passed, but Rurik could still spy his broad strides leaving pits in the snow-strewn lanes, his black cloak brushing the earth behind him, snapping orders to men at the watch. Where to dig. Where to kindle the fires. Where to let it all drain out. It was a silent phantom now, but still he moved, ignorant of the little boy leaping hole to hole to try and catch his footsteps.

  He followed those old ways, through the streets and along thatched and slate-struck foundations to the field beyond. The field had grown wild, its grasses thick, save where horses rode them still to ground. No one had ever been allowed to make pasture here, along the road that connected manor to town. Rather, soldiers had always been here to cut it down or grind it. Here was where they trained—not locked behind high walls, removed from the families for whom their swords were taken up.

  They were gone as well. Ridden with Ivon or hitched to the Bastard’s army, and some, they still lay scattered over foreign earth, never to return. Prayer could not have sufficed for them. They were gone, and he remained, and all a living man could do was wonder why.

  Alviss shook his head here, running a hand through the long trails of green. “Shameful,” he muttered. “Any snake could slither unseen...”

  An old saying. Kasimir’s. Let the land about my home be bare, that even a snake should not slither unseen across my threshold.

  The man had seen everything. Rurik moved before Alviss and off the paved lane. One of his father’s guardsmen moved with him, muttering, “Careful, careful,” but Alviss only nodded. Rurik turned about. Like a sliver, the light fell through the distant trees, casting streams and shadows on the empty pasture. A boy had played here. So too had a boy trained here. A younger Alviss stood beside him, the threads of his beard still gold as the spring light, hand axe snapping at the youth’s weak thrusts. A poor fighter even then.

  A heavy hand laid against his shoulder, and they moved on. He tried not to think of those times, for the boy, feeling only the pain of landed blows and wounded pride of his own poor showing, had seen this as first among the signs of punishment. Of an uncaring host, putting him off to other men. Other concerns.

  The manor sat as an untouched peak amidst the wild. What vines and ivy claimed the low stone walls had ever been there. Its gates, never tested by war, lay open to them, its ramparts manned only by a single sentry—a nodding husk of a man made skeletal by the girth of his armor setting at the winch, a lonely man set to a lonely duty. Rurik slowed, but the man did not call out. The eyes were on him, but his were all for the yard within. Several servants trotted up to the gate and stood waiting, receptive. As though to receive a lord.

  There was a reason he had evaded this house until now.

  The last time he had visited this place it had been by dead of night, slinking in like a mouse through a hole, hunted, unnoticed, and brimming with a fire that no one here had earned. It all seemed a dream now. A night of heavy hands and quick blades. A night of kind words, undeserved. It was made all the more unreal by how quickly it had ended—shuffled out again like prisoners put to march, and never again to see a father’s face.

  “Go on. I will join you shortly,” he said to the others.

  There was some hesitation in the guardsmen. No doubt they had their orders. Yet they went, as such men would, when they were sure he would not vanish. He stepped off the trail again, to the wall, and peered through the gate cross-wise, as a child stole into their parents’ secret places. Alviss waited with him longer, watching until at last he too went, and Rurik could hear his voice rise at some near sight, which set Rurik’s own hands trembling.

  This was a mother’s domain. Tenderly raised, painstakingly imagined. The father stood as but a caretaker, and it stood in memoriam. This was the heart, he knew, in the teeming greenery, the simple beauty, the shadows that pulled at a person night and day. In their wake remained the man, still as a statue, and th
is was how Rurik should forever remember him: not some pompous lord, but a man without extravagance, stark, thin, and tall, staring out wordlessly at the life around him, though his own face betrayed no hint of that existence. One never saw the limp here. Nor heard the whip-like voice. They saw but a soldier at his home.

  Cold blue eyes turned to him, and in their place there stood a living vision—one he had never hoped to face again.

  His sister was poised within the courtyard, hands clasped demurely against her skirts, but great pains taken to present the image of nobility through the braided hair and the flagrant color of her dress. “Liesa,” he mumbled by way of greeting as he inched into the yard. For a fraction of a moment, she guarded her silence well. So well, in fact, Rurik feared she would not even grant so simple a bounty as her voice.

  Alviss crossed behind her, and the passing shook her with the touch of ghosts. Then, like the cracking of a dam, she wavered, broke, and ran to him with his name on her lips, its sound born of tears. He opened his arms and took her tight against him as the sobs heaved to a fevered pitch. There were words, but they were lost in the torrent, so he contented himself to gentle whispers and still gentler caresses of her hair.

  Then he saw it—the burned husk that stained the visions kept. Blackened beams lay strewn across the yard where the stable had sat, the ground still bearing the scorch from their collapse. Horses nickered from a pen nearby, pecking at the grass and hay that survived the harrowing. Nothing might have stilled him swifter.

  It was a long while before either moved. She was the first, pulling away from him, but not so far as to allow his arms to fall from her. There was more of the real Liesa in the look that met him then—puffed and tear-torn, yet possessed of a tempered fire waiting for its moment.

  “I did not honestly think it would be you, brother.” Even through the tears, her look appraised him. With a frown, she slapped his arm. “Even thinner than before! I thought war put muscle to a man’s bones.”

  “Such things do, in fact, require the food to see it done.”

  “You starve?” Concern flushed a dark veil over her. “Foolish boy—and you Alviss, fie on you!” She twisted on the old man sharply, with all of a mother’s scorn. “This one has been your charge. Starving…” A sincere apology tipped Alviss’s head, and she nodded grudgingly, accepting it as she turned back. “Come, come, we’ll have the servants set us something, and I’ll be sure you eat the better half of it while you tell me of this war of yours. Alviss, would you—?”

  “Family,” the Kuric offered in explanation as he stepped aside from the door.

  Another, grayer man stood beside Alviss, buried under his shadow, and from the way Alviss looked from lady to scrawny servant, Rurik knew them for old friends—and knew, too, they meant to talk. Suspicious, Liesa quirked an eyebrow, but shrugged at last and left them to it. Rurik looked back, but Alviss gave him a knowing nod. They both had things to attend, it seemed.

  Willingly, Rurik followed his sister’s quick-step to the manor and the promised supper. Her tone, after all, had brooked no question, and he was not yet so great a fool as to refuse her graces.

  The servants were quick, too—no doubt the dinner had not been as spontaneous as Liesa made it seem. Likewise, it granted her ample time to recover from their greeting. They were barely at the table before fresh bread had settled at their laps. It was to be a loaf shared for, though the long tables of the manor were set to host dozens, Liesa took the chair beside his. She tucked her legs beneath her as she had when she was little, and laid her head against his shoulder as they ate.

  And he tried not to wince, for it reminded him still of younger lives—of another sister, still lost for his indiscretion. Anelie.

  No doubt Ivon had already told Liesa anything she needed to know of the Bastard’s little war. Even so, Rurik gladly offered up his stories—as much to unburden himself as to sate his sister’s curiosity. Nor was it difficult to tell where the brothers’ stories diverged. From the point of Tessel’s stabbing and the massacre of the nobles, Liesa drew upright and watched with a certain gleam, picking all the while at the pork the servants had brought for dinner proper.

  “Alas they missed,” she concluded, hardening. The vehemence behind it startled even him. “Good man or ill,” she added, tempering it, “it might have saved us all unnecessary woe.”

  Of his own questions to follow, the first was also the most obvious—one that had stalked him from first glimpse of the yard. “The stables. Did our men…?”

  Liesa’s face warped in scandal. “Stars, no! This was days past, before even Ivon. Merten says one of the boys must have left a candle alight. A candle! The whole thing went up like one big piece of kindling, I fear.”

  “And the horses?” Their father had loved those beasts. As had Isaak. Raised and meticulously bred them through generations.

  “Fine, thankfully. Only one remains elusive but—so too does its body. Likely one of the ranchers took her in. No. The real loss came from Isaak’s pens. Isaak will have my head.” She frowned into her cup.

  It went unsaid: if she ever saw Isaak again.

  “The kennel? The whole kennel?”

  “A good deal of it. We’ve had some back but…” The rest need not be said. Strong animals, but how they took to the wilds would be any man’s guess. It was not as if, in the midst of all this—especially with the brief loss of horses—there had been any time to look for them.

  Rurik let his own thoughts go unspoken. Liesa may have been right. All this could have been the workings of a stray spark. As she noted, “late winter fires, dry as all is,” could be vicious. To him, though, it still reeked of arson.

  But for the moment, there were other concerns. Like Ivon.

  “Sister. I hate to turn things but…”

  “Ivon?” She countered, on a teasing note. Rurik nodded uncertainly. “Here two days, truth told. Like a whirlwind. Took most what of the fighting men remained and headed south. For Witold, of course. I barely even…but then, when I told him of the edict, and poor Lotte…”

  Unstable ground. He squirmed in his seat. It was not a place he could yet walk. “Of course,” was all he said.

  “You,” Liesa paused, considering her words. Then she lowered her head and let the subject drop. “You only just missed him. He’s worried about you, you know.”

  Words, he supposed. Dry air to fill the space between knowledge. Nothing real.

  There was some discourse, thereafter, as to a brother’s love. Of certain less than manly activities of youth one brother had ostensibly undertaken for the other. Rurik smiled, or occasionally parted with a sound, but otherwise let her go—Liesa could be an accomplished storyteller, when she wished it. In her words even he might have hoped, for a moment, but the world was as it was.

  Belatedly, he stirred her back to the present, querying, “And why is it you did not go with our brother when he left?”

  She sipped her cup before answering. “It is my right to see both my brothers, Rurik. And more to that—Verdan needs someone guiding it. They may have given Merten the manor for now, but he is, that is to say…”

  Merten. Kasimir’s old steward. The man in the yard with Alviss. What did she mean, “given?”

  Liesa tossed her head thoughtfully, roving slowly about the room as if seeing it for the first time. “It grows lonely. I could not let it lose more.”

  “You’d no way of knowing Tessel should have sent me. Did you hear of Oberroth? It could just as eas—”

  “Tessel would not be our first wolf,” she spat bitterly.

  “Only the biggest,” he finished for her. “Who else? Cullick?”

  Her stare hardened on him before she shook it off. “Do you even…? No. And yes. I suppose. Our neighbors. Witold held them off a time but we no longer sit this land, Rurik. Not by Imperial grace. I am a lady only so much as these people look to me as one. So the vultures peck.”

  “Have they come here?” When all he wanted to ask was: how did you com
e here, than?

  “No. Nothing so bold, but Rurik, I…”

  A sudden rattle at the door drew them off, to find an old servant—Michel, Rurik recalled—standing near breathless. Before they could ask, he rattled off something about guests—of Rurik’s, no less—come in all their pomp and station and forcibly setting places upon the walls. Soldiers, the leader of which sought to join their little audience. Rurik cursed under his breath. He might have known better than to think he would be trusted for a diplomat.

  “Tessel,” he said through clenched teeth, answering his sister’s unasked question.

  The servant was sent to fetch his lady’s caller as the siblings brooded over the remnants of their meal. Even this small time, Tessel, you would have me owe you? In a greater house, for a greater family, there might have been another room in which to receive the lord. To stick him with sweet things and put him off a time in waiting. But this was Verdan, where lord and peasant were not so far removed, and this was Tessel, who needed and who knew no nobility but his own.

  There was scarcely enough time to caution. “Liesa, know that this man is no friend of mine, and certainly—”

  Then he was there. The doors clacked and Merten entered to announce him, with Alviss a towering attendant at their backs. These were the only ones to enter, though Rurik spied Berric’s shape snapping orders at guardsmen left to the hall. With a gentle dismissal from his mistress, Merten slipped away again as quickly as he might. Neither Matair rose to greet the remainder.

  Even so, Rurik watched the mask clamp down over Liesa’s face. Studious eyes ran Tessel’s gamut, sharpened with Rurik’s warning, and smoothed effortlessly into the glossy countenance of the proper noblewoman their father had always hoped she would be.

  Likewise, Tessel made his most gracious bow and tempered his tone to such a patient note that Rurik scarcely recognized it. “My noble Matairs—excuse me for interrupting, but Rurik, you well know, patience is neither of our greatest virtues, and my lady, I simply could not put off meeting you.” He rose on a smile and flicked a hand back to indicate Alviss. “I hope you do not mind. I know how close the lot of you stand, and I found the goodman…” He paused here, letting the note linger as he grasped for the name. A stark look from Alviss painted another picture all the while—calling into question whom had happened on whom.