by Nathan Hawke
Gallow flicked the red sword aside again. ‘Then take your Lhosir and walk away.’
‘I cannot.’
‘Then I have no other choice to give you.’ Gallow lunged and Beyard only moved at the very last moment. The jagged edge of Gallow’s steel slid off the side of the Fateguard mask. The iron man stayed where he was. He didn’t raise the red sword. Instead he lifted the mask and crown off his face and looked Gallow in the eye.
‘There would be tears in my eyes if I could still weep.’
‘Yield, old friend.’
‘I cannot. No more than you.’
They looked at one another a moment longer. Beneath the pale scarred skin and the hollow cheeks and the red-rimmed eyes, Gallow saw the Beyard who’d stood beside him in the Temple of the Fates, holding closed a door, young and strong and fierce, the best of the three of them by far.
‘Don’t let him lessen us,’ Beyard whispered and put back his mask and crown, and Gallow knew he meant Medrin. Medrin, who’d been with them that day and had run away.
The iron man lowered the Edge of Sorrows and was still. Gallow drove the spike of his broken sword through the bars of the iron mask. Beyard spasmed. The red sword fell from his hand. His weight sagged forward and Gallow eased him to his knees. ‘Farewell, old friend.’
Beyard still had some strange strength to him. He knelt, head bowed, a spike of iron through his skull, and yet for a moment he didn’t die. He gripped Gallow’s leg.
‘Peace.’ Gallow pulled away. He picked the red sword out of the snow and brought it down with all his strength on the back of Beyard’s neck. Solace. The Comforter. The Peacebringer.
Achista knew she’d die. The last dozen of the Marroc from the tower were pressed together. She’d never even fought a man with a sword and half the other Marroc were the same – pathetic, desperate – while the forkbeards were forkbeards. Even as she dodged and ducked and lunged, inside she cringed, waiting for the end. And then suddenly the forkbeards were drawing back. A score of them and they were pulling away, all of them staring down the trail from the gates of Witches’ Reach to the pyre where one man stood holding the sword of the Weeping God. Gallow.
Slowly, with their shields still high and their spears still raised, the forkbeards drew away and melted into the night. They were Lhosir, after all, men of fate, and fate had spoken. Achista stared long after they’d vanished into the darkness. Stared as a horn sounded in the distance, deep and mournful. Stared at Gallow as he stood there doing nothing but looking down at the fallen iron devil. Then figures appeared out of the shadows heading up from the forkbeard camp – Marroc, led by a man with wild mad eyes, scarred and spattered with blood. He looked at her and at the others and then back again and held out his arm. ‘Valaric,’ he said. ‘They call me Mournful.’
It was a miracle. She clasped his arm. ‘Achista. They call me the Huntress.’
‘Why did the forkbeards run? They never run.’
She pointed at Gallow. There was the answer, somehow. “But they didn’t run. They just . . . left.’
Valaric nodded. ‘Well get your men together, Achista whom they call the Huntress. We’ve work to do. There’s plenty more forkbeards left where they came from.’
He ran back yelling orders and Achista watched him, too dazed by fate’s sudden turn to take it in. The forkbeards would come again. Another army, bigger. But this time there would be enough Marroc to hold the walls for months.
She left the gate and walked to the pyre. Gallow was dragging the body of the iron devil towards the flames but it was too heavy and awkward for one man to lift alone. She took the iron devil’s feet. Burning it felt right. Burning it into ash. Together they heaved it into the flames. ‘You won,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how, but you won.’
Gallow picked up the iron devil’s head, still with the spike of his broken sword driven through its mask. He threw it into the flames and whispered words amid the crackling heat. Achista stared into the pyre, lost. It was like watching all the forkbeards she’d ever known burn, all the things they’d done and all the bitterness they’d wrought.
When she turned back to Gallow to ask him what he would do, he was gone.
48
READY TO DO WHAT A HERO CAN
Gallow stared at Beyard, wreathed in fire, his head still mercifully cased in iron, the crown and mask of the Fateguard pinned in place by the spike of his broken sword. He’d been a man once. Even at the end neither of them had forgotten. The right thing now was to speak out his deeds, shout them to the sky loud and clear so the wind would carry his words across the world and through the Herenian Marches to the Maker-Devourer and his cauldron, but what was there to say? ‘Beyard. A Lhosir of the old way. The best of us all. Maker-Devourer, take him to your cauldron. A friend once.’ That was what mattered the most.
Achista was staring, mesmerised by the flames and their ever-fickle meanings. Her eyes were black and wide. Words grew in his throat and then died on his lips. He almost reached out to touch her, to bring her back from wherever she was, and then stopped. He was a forkbeard and she was a Marroc, and that would never change. Only Arda ever saw past to the man inside. Arda, who’d kept his heart alive for three long years, and now he had to leave her again.
The heat of the pyre burned his face. He stepped back, and then turned away and slammed the Edge of Sorrows down. Its point bit deep into the frozen earth, ever hungry for the piercing of things. He left it there and walked through snow pounded flat by a thousand fleeing footfalls. The Marroc from the keep were out by the gates now, the few that were left, dancing and singing and whooping. Addic was there and somehow Valaric too, Addic drunk with delight that he was still alive, Valaric yelling orders at his men who’d come from Maker-Devourer-knew-where on this night to save them. A miracle? A sign from the gods? Luck? Fate? Gallow passed them by and felt none of it, no joy, no pride, no glory, just the weight of a lot of dead men whose blood had spilled for no great cause one way or the other. He walked up the steps to the keep, and there she was in the shadows beyond the doorway, looking out. Watching. Arda. He opened his arms to her and she walked to him and let him hold her tight. In his mail and his furs he felt like a bear and she so fragile.
‘Arda.’ He nuzzled her hair and held her, and for a long time that was enough.
‘I know that look.’
‘I killed a friend tonight.’
She didn’t say a word.
‘You are . . .’ He shook his head. Oribas would have found words of magic power, drawn patterns in the air with them, made them dance and sing to the tune of his heart, but that was Oribas, whose art was knowledge. Gallow had no idea how to tell Arda what was in his heart. Neither of them had ever been good at that.
Oribas, whom Beyard had sent away to be hanged, whom Gallow had walked away from once back in Varyxhun.
‘Clod-head. I know. Come.’
She led him away to the cellars, to a quiet place where the Marroc left them alone and kept him there until the creeping grey of dawn spread across the mountain sky to the east. And when he thought she was sleeping and turned back the furs to slip silently away, she looked him right in the eye. She’d known all along that it would come to this.
‘You’re going to go again, aren’t you?’ She tried to sound like it didn’t matter but she couldn’t. Her voice was flat and dead.
‘Yes.’
The Arda he’d left behind three years ago would have sworn and shouted and thrown things, screaming about family and loyalty, but now she only looked at him. ‘Why, Gallow? Why?’
‘Oribas.’ And that was all. As if that should be enough. She stiffened, the old anger and resentment and all those other things still burning away inside her, hard to push away.
‘Pursic doesn’t even remember you.’ She knew he’d seen back in Middislet: Pursic at the top of the cellar stairs staring at Tolvis. Dada!
Gallow closed his eyes. His voice broke to a whisper. ‘I know.’
She snorted, and for a mome
nt she was herself again, the old Arda who was used to being around mud-brained forkbeards. ‘Well, if you’re going then you’ll be not much use if you freeze to death.’ She picked up a handful of furs and threw them at him. ‘At least keep yourself warm.’ She waited while he put on his mail and buckled his belt and arranged his furs, and then when he was dressed she led him by the hand to the gates of Witches’ Reach and handed him his spear. ‘I won’t be here when you come back. Three years was enough. I’ll not do that again.’
‘They’re going to hang him. He was my friend. I have to go.’
Her lips were dry. ‘I know. And so do I.’
‘If you ask me to I’ll stay.’
She didn’t doubt he meant it but it was such a stupid thing to say. She pushed him on and then stepped back. ‘You stole my heart with all your forkbeard pride and your courage and your strength. I love you for what you are, Gallow, but what I need is a man who’ll feed my children and protect them. Someone who’s there. War clouds are coming. I need a man who’ll stay at home and that’s not you. So yes, Gallow Truesword, Gallow the Foxbeard, I want you to stay, I want that more than anything, but I’ll not ask it. Only you can say which matters to you more. And if you ask me to wait, I won’t. Not again.’ She stepped back into the shadows of Witches’ Reach.
‘There’s no peace for us, Arda.’ Gallow shook his head. ‘No peace. Not while Medrin lives.’
Arda nodded and turned her back and walked away because hell would freeze over before she’d let a forkbeard see her cry. Gallow called after her one last time but she didn’t dare look back, and then he was gone. She climbed to the top of the tower and looked out over the dawn and saw him again, standing by the pyre of Tolvis Loudmouth, and she watched him pull a sword out of the ground where he’d left it the night before and turn and go. Watched until she couldn’t see him any more, until she saw that he didn’t look back, not once.
When he was gone, she dried her eyes and went looking for Valaric the Mournful, the Marroc whose men had her children back in his hideout. There were things to be said about that and in no uncertain manner.
More Lhosir came later that day, the half-an-army that had been waiting by the Aulian Bridge to fall on Valaric’s Crackmarsh men. They were righteously furious, and from all the stories told afterwards it was a vicious and bloody little siege until the forkbeards finally took the walls and built the iron devil’s ram again and smashed down the gates and stormed inside. But at the end, the stories said, all they found was an empty tower. And Arda heard those stories too, but she couldn’t have said if they were true because before the first of the forkbeards came up from the bridge, she was already gone.
No one had taken the red sword. A hundred upon a hundred Marroc plundering and looting the dead, and not one of them had touched it. Gallow pulled it free and sheathed it at his side. The cursed blade. His and his alone, stained by the blood of his oldest friend. He turned to face south, the road to Varyxhun, and when the Lhosir came later that day he was long gone too.
EPILOGUE
There were riots in the city. Oribas couldn’t see but he could hear them and he could smell the smoke. The Marroc had been restless for days. Something had happened but no one would tell him what. Down in his cell he picked up rumours now and then and saw the odd Marroc being dragged off to the torturer and then later he heard their screams and sobs. He heard everything they cried, not that it added up to much, but there were more every day.
His cell was underground, but on the day they hanged him they hauled him up to the castle yard and he could hear and smell the turmoil clearly at last. He could see it too, written on the Lhosir around the castle, on their faces and in the way they held themselves. He looked up at the gallows and he could see it even there. They were going to hang him but he wouldn’t be the only one. There were some Marroc to die too. Out here in the yard, pressed together with the other prisoners, he’d heard what it was that had the streets of Varyxhun filled with revolt. The forkbeards were beaten. The iron devil was dead and Witches’ Reach still held.
Witches’ Reach still held.
He stared up at the waiting gallows and knew that Achista was still alive. He would hang a happy man.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When Simon Spanton, who commissioned this and with whom I war perpetually on the subject of prologues, called me up to ask if I could do fantasy without any dragons, he didn’t know I was surrounded by Vikings at the time. If there are a lot of axes in this, that’s probably why. So thanks to Simon for his endless faith, sometimes rewarded and sometimes not, and to Marcus Gipps for his editorial input, to Hugh Davies who did the copy-edit and to the proofreaders, even if I never know who you are. Thank you in particular to all the booksellers who are are real people with real enthusiasms and not an algorithm in Luxembourg.
And thanks to all the crazy people who thought the best way to spend a week in February was to strut though York in mail carrying an axe. And thank you too for reading this. As always, if you liked this story, please tell others who might like it too.
COPYRIGHT
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Nathan Hawke 2013
All rights reserved
The right of Nathan Hawke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This edition published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 575 11511 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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