And he was gone. More: Rurik had never found the proper way to say goodbye. Again. He had died in the dark for events Rurik had set in motion, far from his homeland and far from his people, dead in a land of foreigners that killed their own with more barbarism than his people had ever visited upon them.
He had not seen him lowered into the ground and—while some part of Rurik thought this for the best—it left a hole in him that might never be filled.
There was much that old body, now wasted in the ground, had taught him. So little its eyes had lived long enough to see actualized. For in death, Rurik was forced toward the terrible truth: he had been not only stubborn, but ungrateful, and he suffered no doubts that his friend had entered into death knowing that picture of him more keenly than any soul alive.
“So far away…” he whispered shakily.
Rowan looked at him crossly. “What do you mean?”
“He never got to go home. All these years, he was nothing but a tool.”
“Is that what you think?” Essa chimed. His eyes rose to meet hers, but sheepishly, and he all but quavered for fear of what she might say. But in her gaze, he saw not the hatred he had known for so many moons. Only a gentle reproach. “Then you did not listen at all, Rurik. He died exactly where he wished to. Home is where the heart takes root. For him, that was in the companionship of those around him. Home…is not a place.”
Verdan rang in his mind. It rang in his heart and his soul until the word became a note and the note became a song and ceased to be something so simple as physicality. It bludgeoned itself against the wall of her words and left him ringing hollow for it. So much time, funneled into a place. Into a thought. He saw her point, but still…
He began to wonder where his own heart lay while, across the way, a prisoner listened and laughed, soft as a whistle in the reeds, at their displeasure.
“As home is my family. Think on that a time, Rurik, and what it will mean for you.”
Daggers in the dark and dogs howling vicious curses at the moonlight. He turned from one brother and watched the other near, knowing that this, too, rested sole to crown upon a single head. Catalysts and conspirators. They danced in his head until they neared something approaching determination.
So many dead. And one undeserving heart still beating.
It was a little shy of an hour later that Roswitte and her compatriots returned, none the richer for their efforts. Verdan’s little bear was ushered before Ivon’s fire, spoke curtly, and danced back into the night that had spit her forth. This, Rurik watched attentively, and not a little bit apprehensively.
No sign—that fact clenched itself within the woman’s gritted jaw. Another soldier followed not long after, dragging him up by the scruff of his tunic and shoving him along to the light of his brother’s invitation. There, he was forced back down and a bowl was dropped in his lap. Something that passed for stew swirled within.
“Small favors,” Ivon said from across the fire. “You walk with us now. I think it only right you share in the meals.”
They spoke no more over the long course of Rurik’s meal. It hurt to swallow. He had not realized how badly the sulfurous smoke had torched his throat. Nor had he reckoned how difficult it would prove to eat with only one good hand.
But Ivon waited, patient as a hound. Patient as Cathal. He nearly spit out the soured soup at that comparison. Another sacrifice to who-knows-whose miserable sense of ambition. He had not liked the hound. That did not mean he could not remember its bleating in the depths of the Ulneberg and despair the loss of something rare and beautiful.
Another death on his young conscience. They were adding up, nigh too quick to count.
“Where were you headed, Rurik?”
Nowhere and everywhere. This was the nature of the endless road.
“I am glad, you know, that you have left Tessel’s camp. He is a poison that would seep into the land. Give him an entry—any entry—and he takes root. Then his menace spreads.”
Rurik stared into the depths of the fire, watching it dance. Like all the fools pirouetting around a crown, with so little to gain and so much more to lose than they were willing to admit.
He wanted to say that the Bastard had meant well once. There was nothing for it anymore. Whether it was a calculated act, or that creature had simply died with time, there was no Tessel anymore. Only the Bastard, the avenging wave of reformational discontent and the hatred of blood’s confines.
“Liesa is safe.”
This last drew Rurik up. Good news—he was tragically unaccustomed to it. If he had done one good thing, it was to send her from Verdan while he was still able. He knew how vengeance’s blade could—and would—swing. The Bastard’s temper burned hot.
“Witold?” he croaked.
Ivon nodded. “Roswitte found her in the aftermath. Along with most our household. She is shaken, but well, and she will be gladder to see you than you know.” Unconsciously, Ivon scratched at an elbow. Discontent. “I was not the only one to think you dead beside the river.”
What you didn’t finish, a baker almost concluded. A stab of fear shook him from his melancholy. Voren. The tracks in the woods. It was a leap, largely because he could not see Voren evading anyone like Roswitte, but fear was hardly a rational affair. I am beset on all sides.
“Did you find anyone else in the woods?” he blurted. Immediately, he regretted it.
His brother’s face darkened, no doubt with the thought that Rurik ignored his attempt at recompense—and concern for his sister. Ivon said curtly, “From whom else do you run?”
Stories on stories. Ivon’s deflection was its own answer. Rurik saw no need to burden the man with an even fuller plate. The baker was, after all, wholly his own problem, and it was time he started taking his problems into his own hands.
Even if that’s what got me into this in the first place.
“What do you meant to do with us?” Rurik asked instead. “I doubt that Witold should look kindly on traitors.”
Ivon crossed his arms, but his gaze never let up. “No, he does not. But he also recognizes, far better than I, youthful folly, deception, and what it is to be forced against one’s will. Liesa explained how the Bastard used you, as I saw how he deceived you. You will go before him and you will swear our father’s oath to him. You will recant all that the Bastard did. Then he shall forgive you.”
Rurik let out a short, trill laugh. “Such that any one noble’s forgiveness means anything in a land of three emperors.”
Yet his brother’s stare only hardened at the rebuke. “A cynic, as ever. A man’s word means more than ever, in times such as these. You must take his, as you will take mine in assuring you: this will end, but your part in it is now done.”
The words did not quite sink in. Rurik was certain he had misheard. “Done? What do you mean ‘done’?”
“I mean,” his brother advised with a sigh, “that tomorrow I am going to ride to finish one of these wars, and along the way, I will place you in safe hands. And there you shall remain until I am done. There is much to do and it shall only go the slower if I am to be worrying after your own safety all the while.”
He leaned back on his haunches, stunned silent. By a logical light, it should have been everything he wanted. After all they had been through, for his friends as much as himself he should have leapt at the opportunity for freedom. But something else snagged Rurik. Nagged him and would not let go. Conscience, perhaps.
He stared at his mangled hand. If all ends in silence, what has any of it been for?
“And Isaak?” he finally replied.
Ivon’s answer was through gritted teeth. “He will come with us. I would not trust him in anyone else’s hands.”
“Cullick?”
“One danger at a time. Attack from both ends, lose your rear.”
The quip sank deep, and quick. Rurik’s lips opened and closed without sound. It was one of Alviss’s old phrases, from their sessions in Rurik’s childhood. It was not somethi
ng he had expected Ivon to know. He smiled, weakly, but that was all he could muster.
“But…what about Anelie? And Kana? He might—”
Ivon stayed him with a gesture. “Better than any I know. As, better than any, you should be eager to be free, not mired deeper. This war has ill used you, Rurik. I tell you again: think on it no longer.”
Do not think. Thoughtless. Without thought. Obedience—it was all they wanted, all any of them wanted. To do without thought or emotion. To be a child, eternal. It was no wonder he always thought as such. They told him one thing, then desired the opposite.
“At the onset…you never did want me, Ivon. It was father…” A dry laugh took him. “He thought I would be safer there.”
“We think many things. This is not a matter of want. It is a matter of keeping what family we still have close, that focus not be muddied. Do not remain a child. It no longer suits you. Accept this and be grateful. Many have died, wishing for the same.”
Too many. Burned away. By gunpowder and fire. Set upon the pyres. Like a witch. Or an oracle. A father, a friend. His mind lurched, caught hold of the thought. Usuri and Cullick. Magic and poison and whispers in the dark.
She had seen his father before he died.
And he felt like an idiot when he finally saw it, that the stars in that sky had not formed a constellation in his mind any sooner than this.
Cullick. She, too, was with Cullick. Because somehow it all came back to that petty man in his lonely tower in the middle of the civilized world, plotting moves and counter moves based on sins and ambitions inconceivable to anyone else.
The coin burned hot in his pocket. A word. That was all it would take. Yet he could not bring himself to ask it—not when the answer was already clear.
No one would do a thing about it, because somehow Cullick remained the lesser of evils.
There was nothing else between them—Ivon and Rurik. No one escorted him back. He was allowed to wander, insofar as he did not attempt to leave the camp itself. There was too much to dwell on for him to even consider the attempt.
So he wandered, ignoring the shadows that clung to his back. It was a small camp, carefully staked, with its proper share of watchmen turned in as well as out. Rurik trailed the trees, but his own gaze meandered inward, to the oak tree at the camp’s center, where Isaak followed his reaction.
Blue light washed over them. It was a damp, misty night that coiled about the ankles and emphasized the sense of stepping beyond. As though they had crossed the river into the realms of death itself. The mosquitoes that swarmed them seemed little more than fluttering thorns in the midst of it all.
You brought it all, dear boy, and you shall not take another step.
Revelation kept tugging him west. There, the camp anchored the bulge of its oval confines, with a marsh taken as a natural boundary. Woods swarmed the rest, the grass knee high in some places, while roots, dirt, and shade comprised those places the sun but scarcely stroked. They had no high ground from which to observe, but chose instead to take the opposite approach—to be as hidden as any shade which might desire to fall upon them.
It had its advantages. Advantages he turned around and around again, ticking off the number of steps between the perimeters of his cage. They were far from any road, and he knew not this corner of these woods, but so long as one could make out celestia, one would always have a direction.
An itch in his gut, reeking of depression, demanded to be drunk away. He turned, hands in his pockets, to the woods, and stared out into the palpable musk of its flowering.
It did not matter if they watched him. They knew as he knew: he could not run.
An odd position. He had always run in the past. Running toward or running away, in the end it all amounted to the same thing. The only thing that changed was how quick a pace one set.
There were thirty paces between the oak tree and the southern edge of camp.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, though to whom he could not say. His bruises were deeper than bodily. Rurik was raw, and it dragged his shoulders down as far as his heart.
It would, he thought, perhaps have been better to have died in the battle on the river. There was much he never should have lived to see, to react to and to learn. The web grew. The harder he pulled against it, the harder it enwrapped him, until all that was left was suffocation. Everything he had tried to do just ran him harder into the strands of madness.
There was a part of him that wanted to cave to hate. To cast it on Cullick, cast it on Ivon, cast it on the Bastard and Voren and anyone he could think up. But on some level, he couldn’t. Boys were meant to grow into men, to learn from their mistakes. It was the natural order. Yet his mistakes seemed to multiply into other mistakes, and he never could find the footing again to confront them properly. Everyone else was growing or dying. Here he was, simply hanging.
Beyond the edge of camp, a thick matting of grass and leafy shrubbery made the woods into a lopsided mass of brambles and tangled greenery. It did not make for an easy approach.
He was, in truth, dangerously close to falling back into the same melancholy that loomed about such thought.
Conversely, in his bruised and bound brother, Rurik saw the battered results of obedience. He turned, watched as his brother’s head hung and his cracked lips worked again and again over some soundless promise. A tragic figure. A vicious, single-minded figure.
As Rurik had been, the day he took Cullick’s bait and made for home. As Rurik had been, the day he fucked Charlotte in his father’s home. As Rurik had been, when he put his trust in men so far removed from him as to be beyond caring.
Too long have I reacted.
Everyone wanted him to do something, to act as though their way were the only way. Whether he agreed or disagreed with that path, his own mind took what was easiest, quickest, or most obvious, and threw itself into making it so.
Life was never meant to be easy.
It was time he started taking steps to correct the mistakes that had made it harder. This was not something that began with wallowing.
The face that greeted his solemn march had swollen somewhat since their confrontation. It still bore those unremarkable, yet unmistakably alien green eyes, and they looked to him with a sentence that might have made icicles of the empty air. Isaak had been beaten bloody in the attempts to rein him in, but for all that had befallen him, he remained Rurik’s brother.
Rurik knelt only a few feet from him, yet far enough to place him beyond the length of the man’s bonds. He moved slowly, deliberately, not just because of the way his muscles throbbed, but prolonged his movements to such an extent as to leave no doubt to his intentions.
Steadying himself after was the most difficult part. Finally, he convinced himself that he had already committed himself. His brother was there and so was he. The rest was simply air. If that was all it would remain, then he would be none the poorer for the effort.
“I would hate me too, Isaak.” He folded his hands tight against his thighs and kept his voice low but firm. “You were always right, you know. That day I showed up and you put my face into the floor—you should have killed me then. It would have been swifter than all this. Pride is a fault and fear is a weakness. I am ashamed to say I know them both. And you…?”
He left a space for Isaak’s reply, but the man was like one of the stoics. That he existed was not in doubt. That it could be called anything more than that—debatable, just then.
“Well. No…I don’t suppose you would have anything for me. It’s kind of funny, you know, in that sad way. I spent a whole hell of a lot of time trying to hide away, whether behind the rest of you, or my friends, or Tessel. It’s all the same, in the end. And I told the world I was exceptional, told myself I was exceptional—that what is natural and real doesn’t apply to me. Because I’m me. And the world…well, we’re meant to find a place in it. Not to force one on it.
“You don’t have to talk, really. I’ll be quick, I swear. I just…I cannot count
all the things that all of you have done for me. But I can probably count the things I’ve done in turn on one hand. I’m not a good person, not a smart person or a strong person. I’m just a child that never quite grew up. And I’m sorry for that. For all the paths it led to. And words…hell. What are words? I could weep for you. I could prostrate myself or bare my wounds to salt, but none of it changes anything. It would be wallowing, and I’ve done enough of that in my life.”
This last required a steadying breath. Some of the shadows were drawing closer, pondering at the notion of their prisoners’ mingling.
“I owe you. I owe father. I owe Anelie and Kana and-and everyone. It is time I took to the natural end…of all that I wrought. Cullick needs a death, and it has been me that ever should have given it. I would go to that end, Isaak, and in so doing, I would absolve you and everyone else. But I am, once more, within a cage, and the bars are too tight for me to fly away.”
That was all of it. From there, he simply had to hope that Isaak understood what he desired, and what’s more, could let flawed and fragile reasoning overrun pure, unfiltered hate. Yet when he let the night fall once more to silence, and when he rose, and even still when he departed, there was nothing but those sullen eyes, watching him with the malice of those unable to act upon such malice. Never once, even in a whisper, did a word cross Isaak’s scarlet-strewn lips, not even to wish him ill.
In the brisk, dry night, he told himself that supplication was the final act of the desperate. Come morning’s light, he would either be ahorse or afoot, and now, the question of it had passed entirely from his hands. He had ceded the seeds of his own want and need—and somehow, for the first time, that put him at a strange sort of ease.
He was half-way to the others before one of the soldiers called for their lord.
* *
“He is wanting to see you.”
Roswitte stood beside Ensil as he delivered the message. None of them had slept particularly well, but Ivon, who stood bobbing against the weight of this command, looked by far the worst. Heavy bags settled under his eyes, which darkened even as the rest of him grew wan.
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