As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “I’m sorry,” he said belatedly. She did not look at him. “I didn’t mean—but this, all of this, let it change—”

  “Now is not the time,” she answered sternly, and the tone as much as the words told him to let it be. They would speak in time, he knew. There was no need to press. So he fell silent, and looked to his oldest friend.

  Shadows were longest where the old man lay. What time had not achieved in years, a blade had finally rent from him in hours. Days, perhaps—in the span between bitter rousings, Rurik had lost track of the time. Yet for Alviss, time was leaking out at an exponential rate. His skin was waxy, where once had surged the vision of a northern frost. Some of the braids of his hair had been cut away, and the grey strands in the blond seemed more prominent than ever before. He lay as if upon a bier, weaponless, defenseless, his eyes open—but scarcely—and his breathing shallow.

  Rurik refused to accept what the vision meant. Could not fathom it. So in its space he attached other words, other thoughts. There had been worse, he told himself. Blood was like water to the Kuric, Alviss himself had once said. And he recalled his father’s own words on the man: that he was like a mountain, that man could not shape him with his hands, that only time could bear him out again. He was wrong, of course. They were all wrong. The proof lay before them in the dirt.

  Over him, the shape of the Zuti remained unmoving. Hands folded over the Kuric’s breast, Chigenda’s lips twined again and again over the same silent prayer, eyes closed, head bowed. Tucked beneath him, his dark legs seemed to run into the very earth, though the dried blood upon his chest and his hands unraveled whatever serenity might be sought there.

  As Rurik and Essa hobbled nearer, the Zuti looked up and stopped them with the same. It was the fierce, wary look of a mother lion scenting danger to her cubs. They tittered. “Can I…?” Rurik asked, but it was the motion of Alviss’s hand that bid him nearer, not the Zuti. Chigenda sat warily back on his haunches, but said nothing.

  They huddled before him as children at their father’s feet. But there would be no nightly tale here. No sleep and no sweet dreams. Essa’s composure crumpled as she settled, and a tremor went through her, along with the wracking heave of a sob. Rurik could not bear to watch it. It was hard enough, he reckoned, to look on Alviss himself.

  Alviss said, “No children anymore.”

  Rurik reached out and took one of his hands. It lacked the warmth of flesh, though sweat slicked it. Words began to spill out. “I am so sorry, Alviss,” he said. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of it. If I had just stayed, none of this would have happened.”

  “I would have smashed your skull. For father, brother…you.”

  The truth of that pain left Rurik all but speechless. In the end, he pleaded, “Forgive me. I always learn too late.”

  Alviss grunted. “Nothing…to forgive. It is. Doubt undoes nothing.” In the same breath, he squeezed the hand that gripped him. Then the hazed mirrors of his eyes swiveled to Essa. “Sweet, you are stronger than this. Peace. Peace.”

  “How? How, even now, do you act so—how? I don’t understand. I’ve never understood. We don’t deserve you,” Essa said quietly, as she bundled deeper into herself.

  “I know.” Alviss laughed once, mirthlessly, though not painlessly.

  “Rest. Dis wait,” Chigenda added.

  Crossing the gap of the forest, where he had settled onto the watch, Rowan anchored down across from the Zuti, to join the vigil. “He is not the only one that should.” He looked to Rurik, but no anger moved him. He ran a hand through the copper stretch of his hair, wincing as it touched a bright bruise there. “If there is anything we can do, Alviss…”

  Alviss’s eyes closed. For a heartbeat, Rurik feared it would be for the last time.

  After a long moment, he seemed to find the strength to speak again. “They need you,” he uttered, without focus. Then, “Away. Nothing…here.”

  “Alviss?”

  “Free as wind. As…grey dreams, old hands wrought.” The Kuric’s head rolled with that, a shudder passing through the bulk of his frail form, and his lips opened as if to scream—as in any lesser man should have sprung shrieking from them—but made no sound. He blinked several times before coming back into himself, and by then, Rurik and all the rest had huddled closer. Clinging.

  “Where is…Bäcker?”

  Despite himself, Rurik flinched. That needled worse than all the rest, and he choked back a sob. It was not right. It was not fair. Any of it. Essa openly wept beside him then, burying herself against Alviss’s leg as Rowan, shaking his head, leaned closer still, until the old man could watch his lips.

  “He’s not here anymore, Alviss. He’s gone back to Verdan.”

  They had not told him. In all the rush, all the madness and the pain, they had withheld that final truth from him. If Alviss suspected, then he gave none of it away. His head moved in the slightest bobbing of a nod, and narrowed on some point between Chigenda and Essa.

  “So should we. And you, Chigenda…”

  Words trailed. They blended into some slurred nothing. Brows furrowed and the man lurched, seized, and Chigenda wrapped an arm around his shoulders, bearing him up. But it was no good. Alviss heaved, and rasped again, but nothing came. His eyes cast once, wildly, between them, yet seemingly saw nothing, before they fell on the practiced rage of the Zuti. Something passed there the rest could not see. Whatever it was, it chipped even Chigenda’s blank repose.

  It was always different, the poets wrote, when Death came for a friend. It was never the end any man should wish.

  There, in the midst of a forest in the middle of a burning province, so close to home and yet so far away, he shuddered once more and drew still. Soundless. Then Alviss was no more.

  * *

  It was dusk and the sun was in their eyes. They did not seem to notice. For all intents and purposes, they were blind from realms far beyond the reach of that mortal sun, with blood slick on their hands and a still man cradled in their laps. For hours, the hunter had watched them. Studied them. Waiting for his moment.

  Remorse, like a tick, drank at his heart’s blood, for the man they laid to rest. Were it any other moment he should have—no, not cried, for there was no moment in which he should have so divorced himself from the world—but he would have liked to say his piece to the man. Let him go without any doubts.

  The dead man was a good man, and a friend. He had trained them all when they were boys. He and Ivon. He and Rurik. Tonight, he was glad the man had passed, in truth, that he should not have to bear witness to their reunion.

  An hour before, the Zuti had gone. Heated words blew between the trees as the girl clawed at him, screeched at and beseeched him, but the southerner’s ears were filled with as much mud as his flesh. He left them, with shadows wrapped about him and blood in his eyes.

  More than one man had been laid in that ground.

  Still, the hunter waited. Waited long enough to know the Zuti was not coming back. For then there were three, and though the act would not change, he liked the thought of having to strike but three more than he liked the notion of striking four.

  He eased back a moment, motionless, holding himself above the earth. Listening. No wind through the trees. The squirrels had ceased their chittering. No sound except the weeping of the young and the huffing of an eager dog.

  With anyone else, he should have used a bow. Somehow, that one small distinction struck him as profane for this.

  If the Zuti did return, it would be too late. The baker would distract him. The hunter had seen to that—bound the fool and wrapped his eyes, and set him walking through the woods. He had played his part. Freedom was his, if only he found the courage to take it. The hunter suspected he would not.

  When the moment came, he snapped his fingers and Cathal—his faithful wolf-hound—burst through the trees. He tore from the cover of the woods on anxious, loping strides, his shadows streaming across the twilit field.

  The hunter leapt
from his perch and slit the rope that bound him there as his body sank against the dirt. He came on wordlessly, exhausted from the long night of no sleep, but lurching on for all this. The wind reeked of sage and lavender—unexpectedly sensual.

  Tonight, Isaak was going to kill his brother.

  The other voices were silenced. His trail followed Cathal, followed his slobbering announcement across the ground to the specks of men huddled in the blanket of leaves. He heaved over a bank and between the trees, hair snapping back in heavy chains across his face. They came for his brother as a pack.

  With the gathering dampness of the morning, his mind cleared. Purpose gave it an edge. He saw them, narrowed on them, alone among the trees, their heads twisting to the sound of his hound’s sudden baying. He could see the fear—it was a collar, and it pulled them back into the realm of the living with a sharper, simpler grace.

  The girl came to her feet with tears wet on her cheeks and a bow going natural to hand. The hunter strafed out of Cathal’s path with a whistle, and the hound copied him, its bounds taking on a serpentine reproach. The other did not rush as the hunter had supposed; he drew steel and kept his ground, digging in to meet the hound’s approach. An old hand. Steady.

  Only Rurik did not rise. He edged and struggled, but he seemed incapable. Feeble. Even in the washed-out light, he could spy the flecks of blood that dragged him down. So close. So close.

  He could see the boy’s eyes the moment he broke the line of trees: when all other eyes had laid upon his hound, when he stepped from the trees with a blade of sunlight in his hand, the breeze crying out the vengeance no flesh could steal from him.

  Some people spoke in moralities. None shone behind his father’s eyes. The longer people lived, the more chance they had to see it in all its myriad shades of grey.

  Chapter 2

  He might as well have been lost to the hold of a ship. Everything swayed beneath him, a nauseating mix of too little blood, too little light, and no certainty but his own palpable mortality. Never had he been accustomed to the ache of cloistered spaces, be they in the flesh or of the mind. It made him ravenous. Like a wolf backed into a corner. Or a man who knows he is being watched.

  After the ghost had staunched his wounds—and inflicted a few other, minor pieces for his trouble—they had wandered north, Voren hoping against hope all the while that he could either find a moment for escape or that, by some miracle, the Company had not moved on. Rurik, he tried to reassure himself, would be in too poor a shape for them to leave too quickly. If he had any luck left in his marrow, he might have even succumbed to blood loss.

  Then again, Voren had never been particularly lucky, and that one had a devastatingly infuriating habit of surviving all the treachery life could muster. Against such a thought, his heart was as stone. The one at his back made his own luck. And he would craft it on the bloodied remnants of his brother’s years of accumulated karma.

  The woods were not nearly so thick in this place; they were no ageless expanse chipped and chopped away by the lumberjacks of Verdan, but rather, the modest yield between villages, where lords and gamesmen went to hunt. Too much looked the same—he was no hunter—but so long as he could track the sun, and the moss on the trees as Essa had taught him, he knew where he was headed.

  They crossed but two patrols from the rebels. The one came twelve abreast, with sturdy armor and the swagger of men with blood to their name. These they let pass, but the second bore no such fortune. Isaak slapped a hand over his mouth and pulled him down, and there bound his hands to a tree with rope. His eyes said the rest.

  Make no sound.

  There were two of them. They were haggard, bloodied from some other conflict. In their motions, Voren suspected, they suggested that there had once been more of them. Yet they had bags across their shoulders and canteens traded between them. It was only then, as Isaak peered out at them from the brush, that Voren realized he had not seen his warden partake of any food or drink for all the hours they had shared. At first, he thought it simple dedication.

  The men took a game trail east, crossing their own path. Idle chatter did not join that passing. It was as if speech had been beaten out of them. Yet the unsteady thump and shuffle of their bodies gave them away. He could hear them as he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer. Could hear them passing beyond, even if he could see naught of them.

  A huff settled the dog beside him. He could sense the shape of it, waiting. There was a tension in the air with an intake of breath. Something heaved against the space. Voren shuddered, refusing to look. A string twanged. Then a rush of wind, as something toppled. Cursing. He could hear the other man twist, roaring defiance in the face of death. Its shadow rose at Voren’s side. The air gasped and then the silence was utter.

  It stretched on until it became too much to bear. When temptation overrode sense, he peeked through the darkness to find Isaak moving back, lips wrapped around the dead men’s canteen.

  At his side, the dog had never moved. It watched Voren with the rapacious mirth of a madman, settled on its haunches. Waiting, as he had waited. For one word. One motion.

  All notion of escape died within the certainty of those eyes.

  It took them but a day to catch up with his erstwhile relations. Isaak Matair graced him with nothing the entire way. The man was as stone. What words Voren attempted, what pleas he mustered, were met only by that featureless wall and the knowing snarl of a faithful hound. It did much to steal his own voice. That hound was more than half his size, with teeth liable to take a man’s arm clean off. It was a thing of death. Were he a holier man, he should have named it for a devil.

  So when the man uttered the word “down” with as much force and emotion as the rustling of windborne leaves, Voren nearly took it for a figment. Before he could verify its fact, a hand had him cuffed by the scruff of the neck and pressed squat against the dewy earth.

  In that time of the year, so deep in the Ulneberg, all was musky in its greening. What little dredges of winter the shadow had held so long had finally slipped away beneath the rustic reunion of the roots and the sun. Trees grew thick. Weeds had not yet encroached upon the undergrowth, though the many-colored petals of their cousin flowers had begun to stretch skyward.

  That was, in truth, what gave the Company of the Eagles away. All of the earth was united in the celebration of rebirth, while their drab, stained motions shrieked with the tunes of the dead. Lost in the scope of his own worries, Voren had nearly missed them, but the longer he knelt with Isaak, the clearer his ears made the lamentations.

  Their discolorations shuffled back and forth. The shapes, mere blotches at first, gradually dove into man and woman, bathed in the blood of the condemned. No animals neared, though Cathal let out the lowest of wary growls. A pang followed them, like the choking huff of tears, as the woman bent down, out of sight. He thought he saw brown hair.

  They crept closer, and he dared to hope it would not be them, but even as his heart ached with his own betrayal, he beheld the dark-skinned Zuti, and knew they could be no other. Amidst the pain of slithering his wound across the dust like a snake, the scene took greater shape. It closed around a field, leveled, and in leagues coughed forth the outlines of prone men.

  And so he began to hope.

  You shall never forgive me, Essa, but if he be dead, at least, I should have set you free…

  But Assal, it seemed, still punished those guilty of such desire, for even as he pulled forward, near to desperate with the need to see, stomach clenched with the knowledge of Essa’s own whimpering loss, Isaak touched him again and bid him back.

  When they had put enough distance behind them again, Isaak abruptly twisted and kneed him in the gut. Wind rushed out of him. He tried to cry out as he folded, but the hunter was quicker, catching his mouth in one hand and an arm in the other. He thrashed, but somehow the man hooked a leg under him and tripped him up, and Voren went down in a tangle of limbs.

  In haste, a rag was shoved in his rasping
lips and another wrapped over his eyes, committing him to darkness. Voren tried to kick out, but he took nothing but air, and the snarl of the hound too close to his neck drew him rigid. There he lay, until his captor bound him once again, as a pig ready for the slaughter.

  Creator, he whispered, as ever he had in his darkest moments, what have I ever done? Why must you always visit such pain on me?

  A presence loomed over him, close enough he could hear the shallow intake of his phantom breaths. Death, he told himself, and waited for the blade he had told himself a year ago this march would bring. Instead, its cold hands pulled him up and set him to his feet. He stumbled and they caught him, steadied and turned him.

  Idiot. Why should he bother binding you if he should only mean to kill you?

  “Walk,” the voice said. “Keep walking until someone finds you. If you turn back, or you stop, Cathal will tear open your belly.”

  So he should be denied the right to see even the fruits or rotted remnants of his own betrayal. To bear for an eternity the horror of his own imagination of how Isaak might make them suffer before he dispatched them.

  Voren felt weak in the knees, but as his warden stepped aside and the sound of Cathal’s displeasure built low and rumbling between its jowls, Voren committed himself to the walk.

  One never realized how difficult balance was until they lost the ability to confirm its execution. He wobbled and warbled, tripped over unseen roots and jumped at every distant crack. The whole of him was put on end. It was not as simply closing one’s eyes. That was an act of will. This was a binding, a sundering from the world that left every other aspect amplified. Closer. Walling him in.