At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  She ran her fingers along the witch’s chains. Cold iron. “I suspected.”

  The witch actually smiled at that.

  “Tell me. Why do you not just burn it all? These chains—they are surely nothing to you. And for that—why did you not finish what you started, in your quarters? Not a one of us might have stopped you. As you say—a prophecy is but words. As are the people in it.”

  “But I like those words,” the witch countered coyly. “Tell me. Do you act now, as once you might have?”

  “It does not change what we have done to you. What we—”

  “Hush.”

  When had the hands slipped their bonds? The witch leaned forward, and as she stretched Charlotte beheld, clearly, the bruises her father’s soldiers had left her. She winced where the witch’s fingers graced her cheek. Felt herself grow smaller and smaller within the lion’s shell. A word. It was all Usuri need utter.

  “I am nothing. But through me…it is the mantra of many men. I remain because for all the pain, there is something to be seen. An ideal or a spirit. I will die a thousand times for it, and I will suffer for it, because I know that for I others may suffer less. Odd to hear from a murderess. From a mad woman. But so it is.

  “So tell me, little bird,” and the hand pressed more heavily against Charlotte’s flesh, nails coiling against the rings of her hair, “Do you think your death will do this?”

  Something flared beneath her skin, and Charlotte—the lion, the wall, the little bird all—shed her masks for a whimper.

  The night was long, but it made the sun brighter for it.

  No one should ever have to wake alone. Not even a witch.

  Chapter 18

  It was dawn, and the light streamed bright and clear through the trees, tingeing leaf and earth alike a ruddy scarlet. Men were not long in waking, though the cocks had already crowed the waking anthem. Not even the loggers had yet set to their tunes. Verdan was at peace.

  For a moment in time.

  Trumpets scourged the ears with frantic notes. The men staggered from sleep, but with the fury of the fearful. Someone shouted for the gryphons—what cavalry they had needed to be saddled. Powder was rolled out. It coated the earth and its bearers’ hands black where it leaked.

  Then the first crack of gunpowder shattered the vision. In the trees, it seemed to echo all around them, and the frightened men grew frenzied. Shouts broke, scattered between layers of canvas. Another trumpet blew, but its note bit off into an echoing death rattle. Arrows swarmed the aftermath of the confusion, fletched with death.

  A man’s sweaty palms wavered on her wrists, looking for purchase. She would not look him in the eye. Not him, and not the general that had sought their end. The Bastard stood low before Essa, for all his height. Sunken eyes turned east to the river, as the men about him crouched and shuddered away with pleas and plans. Tessel knew, in that moment. Knew she had not lied.

  And she knew he hated her for it.

  Lips smacked behind her as the sweating soldiers fidgeted away. He wanted to run. She knew it. Almost prayed he would. Tessel swung sharply on their jailor, and the man drew still. “Cut them loose.” The dark eyes swiveled, taking the others in. “I’ll not be caught in robes again. Arms, all of you. Arms and to me, and we’ll see what these frogs can belch up.” They flicked over her, dismissed her at a look, and turned away again with nothing more than a grunt. No thanks. The mind was elsewhere.

  Soon, so was he, and the guards with him.

  Voren stumbled to her, taking her hands in his and trying to get around to her gaze. “Are you alright? If only the fools had listened…”

  Three figures had stalked along the flushed dawn, the only ones that knew what crept as wolves into a shepherd’s pasture. Yet the wardens had barred them at the gate. A man there knew their faces, and named them traitor. Long guns. So many long guns, all pointed to their hearts. A flourish of Rowan’s steel, but the guards were many, and they were deaf. A messenger ran as the others dragged her cousin down. Hands bound. Eyes set to earth.

  Scowling, the wardens told her what she could not have known: that Rurik still was not returned to camp. Yet Orif of Kellsly was, and soon enough, he descended on them like a black wave. “You!” he roared, for surely he knew their presence meant the death of his own men, and he would have killed them if their guards had not feared Tessel’s wrath all the more.

  By the time the general came, they were decided. Voren’s blubbering convinced no one, and Essa’s stony silence only seemed to egg them on. But Tessel listened, though he did not speak. The runner he sent—the niggling fear of confirmation—was all that gave his camp the briefest warning call it managed.

  Now she stared at the baker. Words spilled at a flood from him, and she blinked at the sudden feeling in her wrists. Bodies skittered away. The clamor rose. She winced against it. It rang in her head and heralded the flesh’s end. But Rowan—Rowan had been borne away. There was only Voren. Frantic, she searched for any sign, but Voren gripped her, crying, “No, no,” he had seen him, and he fought her to make her know it. Tessel’s men had taken Rowan, not that swine.

  When he talked her down, he held her bow to her, and she took it reverently. It felt foreign to her, the wood rough where it should have been smooth. Something like ash graced her tongue, and she shifted it around the words. If Rurik had not returned, then Rurik might yet survive. Perhaps he had the sense to flee after all.

  But good sense, the roiling pit of her stomach beckoned, had never been any of their strong suits.

  “Essa. We need to go. He’s not here. Surely, we—”

  He did not see what she saw. Men pushed out, away. Where the tents butted against the plain, where war met memory and children fled the dust of it, she saw them blossom into men, and these men, as a dark and terrible scar on the sun-dappled field, pushed toward the violence.

  Essa need not ask if the boy was among them. Her stomach heaved in answer, regardless.

  * *

  The first pop of gunpowder was little more than a crackle of fire before a sleepy dawn.

  What Rurik, as so many others, only belatedly realized was that the raiders did not come by land. No one had thought to watch the river, and least of all he, the native, for anyone could guess this time of year that bloated, raging beast should have been a haven only for the crazed. Witold was apparently that. His men were already among the Bastard’s camp before they ever realized something was amiss.

  Only later did he learn the camp’s own watchers, many slumbering, were slaughtered beneath the mists of spring, or fled, such that none were able to give voice.

  What he heard was fire. It was enough to rouse him from slumber, but not enough to move him. The mind, hazed, flitted with the question of why someone should strike up so great a cooking fire, but it could not wrap around the answer. It was dulled by blankets, by the feeling of solid floorboards beneath his back and the sister that lay curled beside him, as if it to loose him might be to condemn him to a thing of phantoms. As if he were smoke that would flutter away.

  As the door to the sitting room snapped wide, he realized it was not so far from truth. Both started, and he, putting himself before his sister, flailed for the pistol off his belt. Liesa flinched. He, too, froze to see the thing finally rest before his eyes.

  Men had entered. They screamed things at him until the noise turned to words again, and he to a man, settled in the taut flesh of the starved and weary soldier. Night had nearly given him humanity again. In an instant, it was all but stolen, and even as he turned to his sister’s pleading eyes, he felt the darkness seeping into everything that was him.

  Screaming soldiers pulled him toward camp by the first shudder of a cannon. Liesa groggily stalked him to the walls, and there both saw it. Blazing, billowing smoke. Pale ghosts flooding through the trees.

  His parting words to his sister, made in the haste to arm, were thus: “Make for the trees, with all you trust. Bear the white flag. Speak to none but their master.” Th
en he was away, swept into the fields by the terror of Tessel’s soldiers.

  Essa and the Company had escaped. This, in his heart, he knew. So too would Liesa. He held no regret as he shifted the pistol in his hand. As the smoke enveloped him. For him, Hell would be a blessing, and fitting.

  All war was chaos, but this—anarchy. In the streets of Verdan, many formed ragged bands of bucket crews, children rushing to the river for water, men and women battling to keep the flames at bay. The ground was damp, and the trees, too—it was the only thing working in their favor.

  At the edge of camp, the cry of his name spun him, but whoever cried out was lost in the swell. Here was the source of the fire, and it swept through the tents. Even in daylight, he could see the bobbing of torches, like so many cackling spirits. He only hoped it did not reach the powder magazines, or they were all done. Every one of them. Men moved not in ones, or twos, or Tessel’s beloved columns, but hordes—some fled, axes and swords nipping at their heels, while others scrambled for the river and the sounds of battle. Orders were but shouts in the wind.

  Yet here, Rurik found a voice. With a bevy of men at his side, alert, all spoiling for a chance, he presented a sort of calm in the storm. Thought, at least, put him a step above the animalistic flight about him—a point of normalcy to which the many could flee and find chance to breathe. Forgetting his hatred of this place, and of the one that commanded it, forgetting the threats and the pain and thinking only of the terrified, breaking mass, he called to Tessel’s soldiers and formed a block with which to advance. Then they pushed forward, all the while reaching out to any that would have them.

  The closer to the river they pushed, the harder it became to breathe. Smoke drew thick and murky, and the dry canvas went up like kindling. Among the screams, the ghosts of Oberroth stalked. This he knew. It did not matter.

  I will never walk from this alive. Whatever the reason, that thought gave him a greater clarity with which to strike. For with it died fear. Watch me play soldier now, father. I have done all that I could with the rest.

  They had nearly reached the river when the first assailants fell on them. A squad of them came howling from the dark, their weapons gleaming like beacons from the oily smoke. They came roaring cries of “Idasia!” over the ash and bodies, whipping their maces and axes in a blood hazed fury. Those not skewered on the pikes of Rurik’s wall died as Rurik and the second line stepped in to carve them down with cold steel.

  As these died, another group—some of their own, Rurik realized almost belatedly—rushed past, shouting rallying cries. For Assal. For Tessel. For Freedom. Rurik stared after them, as they thrust themselves on a band of soldiers scrabbling to shore from a raft. Too late, he noticed the other rafts sweeping down the current behind them.

  “Shields!” he cried, and the men around him sank to a knee with practiced purpose, casting bucklers to the sky or simply cowering into the smallest targets they might. Arrows fell like barbed rain along the coast, and more than one man in Rurik’s own party cried out as they fell. One bolt took Rurik off his feet, when the man beside him toppled under his meager shield.

  When the sprinkle of death was ended, however, and Rurik pulled himself from the heap, he found his own men only lightly touched. A few walked or limped away with new scars, but none had been killed outright. The party that had rushed ahead was not nearly so fortunate. Only a few rose, bloody and uncertain, and these—stranded along the river’s edge—sank soon after as another raft bobbed near, and wobbling bowmen picked them off.

  Bodies choked the river, but as they regained their feet Rurik spied the rafts forming a beachhead. While teams of Witold’s men had already dispersed amongst the camp, to sow confusion and madness, these later comings were organized, forming a shield wall while boat-borne bowmen provided them the cover to hold it. Time and again smaller bands of Tessel’s followers broke against the wall and were repulsed. Neither wounded men nor promised booty would draw the staunch defenders out, and they watched the myriad smaller battles breaking around them with only a passing sort of satisfaction.

  “Ser,” a grey-haired veteran called from Rurik’s right, “If they take the bank, we will never throw them back.”

  “Push,” another cried. “Push now! We have the men!”

  Of that, Rurik was certain they did not, and the longer they remained in indecision, the more of a target they made for the paddling bowmen. Near frantic, he cast about, trying and failing to force the strangling sounds of the wounded and the dying and the oppressive heat of the flames from interfering. When a cannonball snapped apart a nearby tent and scattered his men, however, that thin concentration fractured.

  Dirt searing into his cheek, the winded youth twisted to the opposite bank, where he plainly saw cannons and men now gathered. Boats merely shuffled between, cast out from the shore.

  From Surin. A white dread seized him. Witold had utterly outmaneuvered the army. It was not simply the river they had mastered. Surin had so long been enemy to Idasia, surely no one could have thought, but Witold had always cultivated friends among the petty nobles of that foreign shore. To cut the raids and bandits in peacetime. And now, this.

  If they had firing positions there, it could mean a massacre. Tessel had no men on that side of the river, for he had neither wished to provoke the Surinians, nor deal with the petty banditry that stalked its shores. Thus, Witold now held an unassailable position.

  They needed their own cannons. Few of Witold’s men seemed to bear long guns, but their own camp held them in abundance and…Rurik’s thoughts halted and his eyes alighted on the barrels left along and adrift among the crumpled tent beside them. A dead Asanti cannoneer lay bloody and black amidst the leaking powder of the kegs.

  Perhaps there was a way. “Puncture those barrels! To your feet, men, to your feet, and grab me a torch.” Bodies heaved the toppled barrels. More than one man looked horrified at the thought of dragging the powder so near, but no one disobeyed. “It’s downhill, fools—cast for the shore!” And his plan suddenly became clear.

  Then five barrels of gunpowder were sailing down the bank toward the cloistering soldiers. Men had returned with torches, and even as Rurik took aim with his pistol, they cast them to the powder as the barrels clattered off the gathered soldiers. Looks of confidence disintegrated into sharpened horror. Someone had just begun to cry out for the river when the flame took hold and Rurik’s shot split the morning.

  It seemed an instant. Then the fire sparked, and the air with it. Powder screeched and the earth thundered every man about the beach clean off their feet.

  Everything ached. From his back, Rurik lurched with his stomach as something wet touched upon his skin. The air, he realized, had grown heavy with blood. It choked him. Yet there was no sound, save the distant ringing.

  Witold’s men no longer held Verdan’s side of the river. Those who remained wandered or swayed in a bloody daze, but many more would never leave the dust, scattered in bits and pieces where the explosion had torn.

  If only he could find his head again, it was the chance they needed.

  “Push forward! Forward!”

  At least, that was what he hoped to say. He had no idea if the words actually tumbled off the end of his rattling tongue. Feet lurched under him and hands seized him up. The sensation of the lift set his head spinning even more. He squinted, then blinked through the reeling world. Only slowly did it right itself, but he remained focused on the point before them. The shambling and the broken. He shook, clawing for purchase on the world, but all he managed to shake off were the hands supporting him. Using the momentum, he stumbled forward, and the men, soldiers that they were, had no choice but to follow.

  When had they so grown? Dozens of them stepped in line on his mark, and not as the howling horde that had dragged them here, but in line, in formation, the clap of their boots setting a haunting undercurrent to the gargle of the river. Ghosts stared up at them—wrecked, bloodied husks—some missing limbs and others vainly strugglin
g to regain their positions, but Rurik’s force marched forward unphased and unturned. Whatever the nature of the men, these raiders had sought to kill them, and for it, they would be driven into the icy water.

  Something popped. Cries of “to me, to me,” echoed at their backs. It startled Rurik, for the low thrum of its repetition broke through whatever barrier surrounded his thoughts, pierced the numbness and the hum of clustered feet to beckon back the sound. Yet he had little time to revel in it. Everywhere, the little battles gave way as other columns reformed under competent commanders, and pushed the same as Rurik. On the far bank, an explosion toppled an oak that sent men scrambling as it careened across the river. One boat, unable to turn quickly enough against the current, gave up a heavy sigh as it crashed against the bark and sent its passengers swimming.

  Rurik twisted back just long enough to see the camp’s own cannon—larger cannons than Witold could bring to bear—rolling into position. The world began to stink of sulfur.

  We will do it. The bodies were forgotten. Father, do you see? I’m not hopeless. The haunted faces. I can—I can…The scream of neighbors as they were cast into the waves. Red became all. He did not think of his name being shouted.

  Somewhere, a father’s voice echoed: “Steel your heart or lose your mind.”

  There was cheering on the bank. Swords rattled. Even Rurik felt his heart leap, for knowing what salvation could be like. It wasn’t about Tessel, or the Farrens, right and wrong or anything else. It was a victory of the self. A knowing affirmation.

  Until his father’s eyes arrested him.

  No—not a father. A brother.

  At the far bank, the one he had so long sought stood among the shadows and the sand. Their eyes met. A hand faltered, then chopped down. The cannons had twisted, now trained on their position.

  Fear had a second to trickle through realization. There was not enough time left to that instant even to cry out before the world sundered. Heat engulfed him. Flame licked his arms and he felt himself hurled like dry hay, engulfed in the screams that so suddenly, so horrifically returned to him—only to cut once more into that rising, ringing nothing.