As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Yet even in this, he could manage an act of will. He walked. When he could no longer hear the dog’s huffing, he walked a little further. Only as he walked nearly face first into a tree did he dare stop. He heaved against it, gathering his breath as he waited. Death’s jaws did not close on him. He thinks me a coward. Then, slowly, carefully, he pressed his head against the bark and scythed back and forth until its edges caught hold of his blindfold. Doing his best to levy the mossy bark as far from his flesh as possible, he began to pull.

  Light, after even so short a time in darkness, dazed him. Until he convinced himself of the need to keep moving, he sat in it like a dumb child. That, he quickly realized, had been the easiest part of valor.

  There was no easy way to loose the knotting at his wrists. They were sure enough to outwit even the deftest of sailors, and the angle needed to claw his way free seemed utterly beyond him. So he began to rub. And rub. Until he winced from the repetition. Until skin bruised, cracked, and peeled along with strands of rope. Eventually, it burned more than it scraped. Tears came unbidden as his career shed still more flesh for causes in which he had no part.

  Blood lapped him for the second time that day. It rolled down his wrists with a sickly dampness. It even began to balm what the rope incinerated, but it also dampened the rope—made it that much harder to cleave.

  By the time the last thread snapped, even his long lost pinky throbbed ethereally. Instinct bid him check the wounds, but the very sight nearly stirred him to sickness. Mangled skin clung to him as weighted shackles. Like the remnants of his dreams.

  Focus. The dirt was never going to go away. Retrace your steps. He breathed, but his head swirled with the imagined stench of his own blood. Run. Run away. He forced his burning hands into the dirt and pushed himself up, though it sent shivers running down the length of him. Can’t run. Not my fight but…but. He used the tree as leverage and focused, instead, on the fact that his wrists at least distracted from the resurging burn in his torn side. They would only know me for their traitor.

  The trick was to think like Essa. Fear only seemed to blossom with his pain; it did not detract from it, as he had seen in some men. Yet as long as he focused on the details, he could force himself forward.

  Even through the blindfold, he remembered the warmth of the sun on his face, the play of its spots piercing even through the cloth. That meant the hunter had guided him from the west, and so, in turn, he began to move that way. When he watched for them, he realized his own shuffling, uncertain steps—cast in blindness—left distinct scuffs in the otherwise solid earth.

  Overhead, he could just make out the rising, almost translucent silhouette of one of the moons, biding its time as the sun bled color into the open sky. It leaked between the branches and left him nothing more than a blackened mote on the world. Alone in the shadow in, what he began to realize, was a corner of his own making.

  Other things had driven him, but it had been his hand on the knife. The world could be reduced to a multitude of “if only’s,” but they did his present no good. He saw his own trail into bondage. At the same time, he turned north, and saw a path into nothing. No trail. No precedent. Only nature as walls. Only the paths one’s own feet forged.

  The man wanted him to run. The others knew he already had.

  Part of him wanted to go back. He thought it the better part of his valor. That voice screamed at his cowardice and drove him to focus, to put all the other noises and doubts and agonies aside—but the rest was too much. He could not go to Essa. Not now. They would know him for their traitor, and whatever else he might do, he could not face that judgment. Not yet.

  For a moment, he imagined a long howl keening through the woods. It passed like a whisper in the night. Nothing came. So he went, haggard from his road, toward what he hoped was home.

  His tunic was already ruined. As such, he felt no qualms about tucking his sheared wrists up under his shoulders and hunching into the damp warmth. He avoided the thickest bits of brush, taking the easier path where he may, but some points left any other avenue simply impossible. Vines tugged at him. Fallen trees denied him. Yet the earth provided, as it would—and when a man had no destination, it was hard to call him lost.

  Backwoods. That was what the Ulneberg had always seemed to him. Miles and miles of naught but unused potential. This far out, he could not even hear the chop of axes. Yet there was the bog stench. Miles of it, thick as a summer storm. Between them, only those remnants of people, dregs that were barely human even before death and war came to their door. Those that could not live in civilization. Men that did not deserve it—like the Matairs should have been.

  Appropriately, time drifted here, or fell in equal measure. Stars bore it twinkling through, dragged by the drugged light of the sun, or rushed terror-struck onto the edgings of some lurking wolfhound’s pallid maw. The elements took it, as they took him, and guided him deeper into the scraping indelicacy of their bosom. It was a place for reflection, he suspected, but he did not wish to reflect, and so he stole fear from them in feet—his feet, plodding step by step. The only measure he or any other man served to leave upon the soil.

  This indelicate plodding cast him beyond the reach of even the songbirds’ cooing notes. Every hair-curling stroke of sap against bare skin steadily dulled—he came to think of the sounds it rendered as the bleating of some distant calf. Respect the earth. It’s all you have. The earth, which scraped in needles along his shirt, caught in muck beneath his boot. Which gave, he had to remind himself, the flour that kept his family eating. Which gave him space to run away from the eyes in the dark. Away from sounds of war. From the encroaching patter of knowing feet on unsteady ground.

  Knowing feet. The thought snapped his drifting mind back to the exposure of the present, and though its sound echoed, he threw himself against the nearest stretch of maple and prayed for sanctuary. But the feet drew nearer, and the sound of men grew louder with it, and even as he cursed, the feet became a clearer clatter, and he began to form another picture in his mind.

  Not men. Not a hunter at his game.

  His hands shook as he peered around the tree and found a team of horsemen bearing down on him. All he could think—in the capacity of thought which he still could muster—was: Be the Hells so full, they must see fit to spit so many dead men back?

  * *

  Contrary to her friends’ beliefs, Essa had long ago parsed out the flaws of possessing the eyesight of a hawk. Detail became the nature of one’s world, but there were times it became too much for even the most practiced mind to handle—and for one already pushed past the point of breaking, focus became a matter of what little shards of world the mind could still process.

  Which was to say, when she turned to the rush of driven paws, she turned with the despair of the broken hearted straight into the bleeding horizon. It made shadows of her scene, stretched out the color, and sent spots dancing through her squinting, watery eyes. This was the benefit of the trees: an infinity of shadow—a tender pall through which even the most determined light should have to filter.

  Yet the woods were no longer theirs. They had come into the light to let their friend die beneath the sun, and something had taken that same moment to stream howling through the modest protection of that wall of trees.

  Alviss was dead at their feet, and all she could think was that some beast had come to take even his body from their care.

  Howling. It was that she had to focus on. A flicker of movement aligned with the tune of it, and she speared toward it, across the field—low, so low as to be another hound among the dust—with her bow coming easily to hand and the arrow, instinctively, perching across its neck. Howling. A wolf, it seemed most like. The bow guided, tracked the shade and loosed.

  Too soon, and had it been any other moment she would have known it to be so, but she had ground all her grief into this moment’s rage, such that there was nothing behind her, only the hunt before her. This wolf, or dog, or whatever it was—the shape loped
and bayed again, crossing the trees and sashaying back more deeply into the light—would die, because it had to die. Because it was better than the alternative.

  She kept her eyes low, bobbed with it, but as she would have fired it strafed again and she cursed, waiting, as it plunged from the dimness of the trees into sight. There was an instant she might have fired true, but in that instant, even through her rage, came the flicker of a ghost that stole the wind from beneath her taut arms. There was something to be said for never forgetting a face, and four legs or two, that hound was one she should not soon forget.

  Its pitiful, mournful wailing still pierced her dreams sometimes late at night, and in the split second she realized that she was not the hunter here, the beast ceased coming at her straight, but went around, with the lithe mayhem of a killer. She fired an arrow as the world exploded with sound—snapping jowls and her cousin’s alarm—and pitched back to outdistance its maw.

  It struck ground and kept running. She struck the ground and scrambled to retake it.

  And in that moment, the name: Cathal. And only that, because by then the beast had already turned and taken its next leap. Instead of going with its momentum, she dug in her toes and shoved out at it with the sturdy curve of her bow. The wolfhound had pounds on her, but it was enough to put off its aim and jar it. Froth spattered her chest and she simply wasn’t where she thought she had been standing anymore. Its weight hit her just below the sternum and jolted her back, even as the same resistance rumbled up her arm with a painful sting.

  She went down to a knee, forced her numbing fingers tighter across her bow. The dog was already snapping. She backpedalled, lashing out with her bow, but it was like beating it against a tree. The dog shook, but it did not let up. She fumbled for an arrow, but there was nothing. As her foot nearly slipped across a bundled girth of unsteady ground, she realized that was because her arrows were all across the ground.

  It hopped back, but even as she got her feet under her, it lunged, catching her beneath the arm. Even if the leather guarding there were enough to stop the teeth—which mercifully it was—the force was enough to snap her around, as the hound wanted. A practiced takedown. She knew what would come next. Even as they careened across the dirt in a sort of death roll, she knew its teeth were going for her neck.

  Sweat slicked her grip, but she caught hold of her knife even as she bowed forward, trying to writhe from their dynamic. Cathal was on her, more agile, heavier, and hungry for the kill, but she was every bit as stubborn.

  Her knife was bigger than even his razored teeth, and it levied its way through flesh as readily as a scythe to wheat. Teeth clamped and she felt more than heard her own cry, that scream of a tormented animal, hanging in the air between light and dark for what seemed a maddeningly impossible time. Tracks of tears as she began to hammer and dig with her knife. Mud, slicking wet against her as its jaw shook her tiny frame—a doll by any other name.

  She held on. They beat each other ragged and bloody in their clash of wills, but she won through. Cathal relented, beating back with a whimper and a wrenching shake of the head that finally knocked her senseless against the earth.

  For an instant, she thought that was it. There was nothing more. Hurt arched through her, exquisite and terrible as a heated blade, and she knew that either she would return to walk another path, or this would be the end. Two paths, and neither within her control. Her stomach churned, and she was alone. Again. She had never wanted to die alone.

  But in the very heart of pain, she heard a child speak her name.

  Essa.

  Perhaps she was already dead or simply dreaming in the delusion of the blooded heat, but she heard it, she knew she heard it, and only gradually did she come to know it for her own.

  This is not it.

  And she beheld life as a river. Man could dam it, man could stop it up, or turn the flow, but it would always flow, it would always come on and the energy—the energy would always turn somewhere. That was something man could not change. Yet how they reacted to it, how they rode it, and how long they did so—these were the natures of man’s journeys.

  I am not weak.

  She had been raped. She could say it. The power of the word lost none of its vehemence, but its immediacy, its presence, flowed out like poison from her open wounds. She had been beaten. Yet she had lived.

  The dead cannot whine. And the living waste time in doing so.

  Anguish itself became irrelevant with the opening of her eyes to an evening she had not wanted. Or rather, not irrelevant, for it would always be relevant, but she came to see it as only pain. Women knew pain. They owned it. It was a part of their very being. The moment she came to that realization, so too did she come to the realization that she was free.

  Nobles were bound by more than title—they were bound by what they looked like, what people thought of them, what they did not want to be.

  As though from somewhere far away, under the deepest depths of the translucent waves, she struggled through the foaming snarls of the hound behind her, and the press of fresh energy, to the men dying about the field.

  Alviss, cold and grey and wilting as the autumn hills.

  Rowan, whose sword knew little equal—and yet ran red with life, as daggers danced about him not in measured duel, but in the flying grace of an assassin’s ingenuity. Too many gaps. Too little time. He wove. They wove. They bled.

  And Rurik. The name hit her tongue and rolled off with the snarl behind her. Gradually, she was becoming aware of the danger again. Yet still the name. The face. Just a boy, she reminded herself. Still but a child. She blinked, for the horror of it. As are we all. Children on an ageless world, lost and alone and pining for what they could not have.

  He, and they—all of them knew pain. And loss. But not like woman. Not like that which had brought the fury she had once seen in Roswitte’s eyes.

  The dog howled.

  She turned, dazed yet poised, her hand steady for all the unmanning thoughts.

  Too long, she had faulted that boy for her loneliness and her torment. Made it a focal point of her existence. Built up on something beyond them both. It did not change the evil of the act, but it changed the nature of the rage. Hypocrite! the voice rebuked within.

  No one—not a victim, and not a champion—needed to live for another. Existence was in and of itself. It needed no other hand to validate it.

  “Isaak…” Rurik’s voice broke through the maddening quiet, and through Cathal as well.

  The dog limped, but it still had the force to go for her throat. Her arms extended, and in herself and in that moment she embraced what was to come. Met it, rejected it, for she was an animal, as he was an animal. They crashed and scampered in the graying gold, and in a moment of panic, when that beast’s teeth snapped at her and would have torn her, she managed to catch one paw and wrench herself upright, and with a silent prayer for forgiveness, pulled her knife tight across its bulging neck.

  She sank into blood. But death returned her to life.

  And in taking that life, she moved with the ferocity of purpose.

  Perhaps that was the lesson Roswitte had tried to teach her, so many moons ago. One could not allow themselves to be prey, but unlike that hunter, neither could one allow rage to split them into callousness. The self could be reclaimed, but there was a line one had to walk, and too deep to either side: the trenches that could claim an unwary mind.

  The dog died with a whimper. A pang of remorse tracked through the ruddy remnants of her tears, but it was kill or be killed. She heaved her own aching body up and snatched up her bow. It was beaten, badly—the wood had begun to fray and some of the sinew that had gripped it had frazzled and snapped against the animal. Still she persisted. She fumbled for arrows, and drew on the figures across the field.

  Just in time to see the dagger that felled her cousin.

  It danced between the curves of his blade like a point of light, with flesh its only partner—and when it lashed out, it buried itself
in his hip. Blood flushed him, should have unmanned him, but he surged forward, and even as Isaak shoved his weight into the blow, Rowan grappled with him.

  They were entwined. Yet in their destiny came a second of clarity, and it was into that instant she drew.

  And screamed. She fell, clutching her torn shoulder, for which the pull was too much. Still the arrow sang, but the scream was its warning. Both men struggled back, hearing but not heeding, and what should have been death sank tooth and root into their hunter’s shoulder.

  A limb for a limb. She had not the wit of the moment to clasp the fairness in that equality.

  The force shoved them both aback, but Isaak, winded, still had his footing, and he used it well, tripping up her cousin and hammering a fist into his sopping gut. He folded like a chopped tree, but he did not go down until the elbow caught him on the skull.

  Then did Isaak turn, with none of the masks of his station, a creature of seething flame, dagger poised and dropping predatorily low. A hand caught the scruff of Rowan’s tunic, and he, groaning, could be but the fleshy shield for his tormentor, who sought her out. Their eyes met, but in that meeting did he raise, and though she cried inside, Kill me, just turn to me and kill me, for her heart could bear no more death among its halls, she knew what he saw.

  Change was on the inside. The flesh was still what it was, and the battered ligaments of her shoulder were not what she needed. His hand held back blood, and he saw her for wounded.

  The hunter kicked her cousin aside. She screamed at him and flung herself up, raging forward, her good hand taking up the knife that had killed that hunter’s dog. All the while Rurik, sitting stupefied beneath his killer’s gaze, held his pistol square at the man’s chest.

  Essa staggered only as the clatter of horsefeet took the trail from her and stole her wind. They seemed to come from all around, which made no sense to her, for she had not heard their approach. Yet suddenly they were thundering out of the browning twilight—half a dozen men, on wearied but vigorous beasts of war, dressed more as outlaws than as knights.