As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  It was in that same moment she heard the rapture of a gun, and the plains thundered with its echoes. It sounded far, but as she hunkered down, she could not be certain.

  “Where?” Rowan asked. But she did not know where. She did not even know what.

  An hour passed without answers. There were no more gunshots, no sounds but the winging of birds overhead. The air they breathed was crisp—clean and light, and for all that, nothing in it to be seen. She reckoned the madness was far from them only by the fact that the smell did not touch them—for saltpeter was a potent taste, even in the open air.

  “We’ll be as fish on dry land out there,” Rowan said as she started to move.

  “As will he,” she countered.

  It was around that time she first felt the presence. No places here leant themselves to hiding, but she kept this feeling from Rowan; she would not have him looking back. Here and there she stole glimpses, and though what she saw were but flickers of motion on a dull horizon, she knew in her heart what she saw.

  Rurik was not the only one being stalked.

  They plodded eventually to the divergent remnants of footpaths, and stalked them into the golden hours. It occurred to Essa that they were leaving, in more ways than one, the boundaries of one world for another. She did not look back again. Did not try. The memories hurt too much. The actual act was something less. Trying to reconcile the two hurt even worse.

  There were too many things she wanted to say to too many people. Voren, for one. She wanted to shove him into the earth and scream at him until her voice could bear it no longer. What he had done, after everything—it was beyond comprehension to her. Those two visuals—that of the bloodied Rurik cradled in Rowan’s arms, and that of a smiling youth, so attentive to her words, could scarcely align.

  Truth be told, she wanted to do the same to Rurik, to demand what he had done to stir that creature to such rage. She wanted to tell him it was his fault. Unfortunately, truth would not bid her do so.

  Time frustrated her. It shamed her. She was not the same woman that had set out onto those foreign plains months ago, but there were parts of the old that still clawed for purchase on her soul. Until she could reconcile fact from fiction, she dared not say she would ever be free of them—and the path to that was in the salvation of another. If only that other would let themselves be saved.

  People were, she reckoned, too stubborn for their own good. Herself included. It made her intractable in conversation; it made her relentless in the hunt.

  Pride was a trap that did its trick. Luck was when the first trap was all one needed.

  The wire line of a rancher’s fence provided the catalyst. Forked branches supplemented it. There was no need to carve from there—all they needed was to twine, twist, set, and hope.

  By then, she knew how their shadow moved. She planned accordingly, and was rewarded, in time, with the shout of a downed man.

  Their quarry came over a boulder, parallel the footpaths to which they had taken. When his foot tripped the cord—as Essa had watched countless game do—the noose tightened. Falling broke the stick, and the jarring wrapped that noose all the tighter. For an animal, it was a deathtrap. For an armed man, it would be confusion and a few moments’ delay. Nothing more.

  A few moments were all they needed. Their shadow, as they found him, was a broad man, with the girth of a cow concealing the tension of a bull only stress seemed to out. Nothing signified him as anything more than a soldier—and this lay in the plated leather that settled on his breast and the sword at his hip—but that was telling enough. Already he had a dagger out and was sawing at the cord that bound him.

  Essa stepped in front of him with an arrow at full draw and a frown on her face. She made no effort at subtlety. Rowan sidled up behind the dumbfounded spy and placed his sword ever-so-kindly to the disc where neck and back met.

  “Not your day is it, friend?” Rowan said. The man dropped his knife without further encouragement, and his sword shortly followed. Only then did Essa lower her bow.

  She did not recognize the man from Ivon’s merry little band.

  There were few other possibilities. She asked, “Bastard?”

  To which the man grinned.

  “Far as we’re concerned, the Bastard can go nut himself. What’s coming for you is—”

  He never finished the sentence. In one swift motion Essa pulled the string of her bow back to full draw and took the spy through the throat with a broadhead. Given how wide his eyes drew, he was as shocked as her squealing cousin.

  “He was unarmed!” her cousin screeched. “And no warning—no warning at all!”

  She slung her bow over her shoulder and stepped forward to take the man’s knife and rummage through his purses. “Gorjes,” was all she said. For any man that knew them, it was enough. That, she told herself, was just a start in Alviss’s name.

  For a few hours she could scarce believe, they actually lost Rurik’s trail. It was the terrain that did it. Hard earth, well-traveled. As had always been true, the wild world was hers, but the civilized belonged to Rurik. It seemed that he had finally come to terms with that, and be damned the souls that might see him: he walked among them as an equal. She hated to give him respect for that, but he was clearly learning.

  Neither were those equals of any help to her. Most men were in a hurry—“What fool tarries on the road? It’s war, fool-child!”—more than one man shouted for her questions.

  People crowded the road. West to east, east to west, and north to south. The whole world seemed to have gone mad. True north no longer existed—there was only away, ever away, from one evil or another.

  Merchants guided trains of oxen and full carts where profit seemed to offer some stability. Shepherds, often as rundown as the beasts they tended, roved the dewy land to either side of the roads, driving their flocks toward them for safety. Most trying of all were the families. On carts or cows, horses or foot, there was no less than a herd of people from rags to fine wool clawing for a way out. Some of these asked desperate questions in turn, or shouted them from the roadside—questions of a village, or a friend, and the answers were not always cheerful.

  They split here, in this mass. Rowan, clad for once in the same outfit two days in a row, would be easy to spot—and he assured her she was as obvious as a bear with a hat, whatever that meant. She had not the energy to bicker over it, and this way, they covered more ground.

  Hope remained reclusive.

  This boy here! Right height, right hair but—ah, no, the eyes. Ever the eyes.

  A pistola, and the cloak is a—She backed away from more than one. “Sorry ser, no offense, ser, no need to be such a rabid cunt, ser.” Reminds me of him in more ways than one.

  Many were surprisingly generous, though. For all that they had gone through, there were whole families that offered her a seat, and food—offered to carry her away from all this madness. She could not tell them why she could not go. In truth, she supposed no sane woman could explain it. Instead, she thumbed her bow, and shook her head, and let another face fade into the blankness of the world’s many might-have-beens. There was a time, she sullenly remembered, such offers would have meant another night’s survival.

  Then along came Rowan, with a farmer in tow, and a tale that set her heart to racing. A tale that ended in a church not so far away.

  * *

  Rurik’s stomach gurgled; he was tired and confused. Following upon everything that had happened in the last week, his encounter with what he had first taken for a shade had proved too much to bear. He hadn’t wanted to collapse. It had been his intent to reach the nearest inn and partake of sleep under a lie of a name.

  Part of the way through the crowded road, however, the bustle became too much. He remembered slowing, even stumbling a few paces. Several voices called out to him with sharp concern. This had stuck through sheer surprise—he had simply expected these folk to go around. A wagon was passing him and he leaned on it for support. Apparently, it was not enou
gh. There was a sensation of falling, then a distinct lack of consciousness.

  Images followed—intermittent, disjointed. He tried to rise. Failed. A hand forced him down. Over him, a cloth cap loomed—a muddied man blotted out the sun. “Stay still,” the man said. A child tugged at his boots. He tried to wave him off, but the sun seemed so hot, so unrelenting. Someone shouted for people to move. Horses whinnied as they twisted aside. There was a sound like rushing wind.

  Or water. Like the Jurree.

  He opened his eyes. Father knelt. Cold eyes, cold as death, and a sword dangled against his neck. Storms. Everywhere were storms. He could see her, standing above them all, the woman with a golden sword. No sun behind the clouds. Only the draw and the swing and—

  That he found himself in a church was less surprising than the loneliness which accompanied it. No one waited for him to wake. A smattering of benches hemmed him in, a wooden table encircled the center of the temple, and above his head, he squinted to see the prismatic light of a stained glass window blinding him with the slanting of the sun.

  He rolled to his side, then to his feet. Something rustled with the motion. A hand under his tunic quickly identified a fresh bandage. Similar sensations suggested likewise elsewhere. Whispering a soft blessing to whomever had done him that particular kindness, he limped—and cursed, for the stiffness in him yet—his way down the short aisle, using the pews as support. Something oozed against his fresh bandages. He was quite certain, from the warmth that flushed him, it was not entirely blood.

  Footsteps behind him. He ignored them. Even as someone called for him to wait, he took the door by the handle—and nearly wrenched it clean from Essa’s outstretched hand.

  In the same breath, they both reeled with all the grace of kicked coyotes. As once had befallen Voren, Rurik stood dumbfounded as a clearly unstartled Rowan surged across that void. Rowan had him in a headlock before he even registered the need for flight. Beyond them both, he spied the visage of the Samaritan farmer. Nothing in his eyes suggested he had the slightest idea of what to make of all this.

  “Messars! Messars, please! This is a church, there is no reason—”

  The voice came from behind. It was the same man that had shouted before—a priest, most like. There was nothing the man could do, but there was nothing Rurik could do either. Reluctantly, he loosed his hands and lifted them to the heavens in supplication.

  Rowan didn’t let go, but he did shift his attention momentarily to the priest. “Forgive us father, but the Lord don’t like a runner, and that’s what this one’ll be if I let him slip.”

  “I hardly think—” the startled priest began.

  “Lord don’t much care for that either, in my experience,” Rowan added cheerfully.

  As if regaining a far older composure, Essa cut in to mitigate the damage. “Stop antagonizing the man, Rowan. Father, I—were you the one that tended him?”

  “You might think to ask me,” Rurik said, best as he could with an arm around his throat.

  The look she gave him suggested that, no, she had not even considered that.

  “Might we make use of your church again, father?” Before the man could even answer Rowan, though, the swordsman had already thanked him copiously and pushed inside. Essa, looking exasperated, apologized, conceded and followed. She did have the sense to turn and thank the farmer for his help, though.

  Duped traitor, Rurik thought bitterly.

  Rowan pushed him down the aisle, two rows in, and shoved him squarely into one of the pews. It was hard enough to make a point, but not enough to reopen his wounds. Then the man put a boot between Rurik’s legs, and left it there, leaning forward against his knee. His point could not be misconstrued.

  Meekly, the mewling priest followed, interrupted only by the occasional attempt at placation on Essa’s part. The farmer, clearly thinking better of intruding on this reunion, needed no prodding to pull the door shut on his departure. It left the rest of them to a cramped dome, with too many questions between them and too much time for any of them to be comfortable.

  Rurik sighed and leaned back into the pew, doing his best not to wince. Some things, one simply had to accept, no matter how hard they had resisted before. He raised a hand in a half-hearted wave to Essa and bowed his still-rattled head. She scoffed as he said, “When one runs, you know, the general goal is that he does not wish to be found again.” These words should have sounded more defiant had not their conclusion been marred by Essa’s cousin leaning forward and casually flicking the bridge of his nose. It was his turn to scowl.

  “Children,” the priest interrupted. “I say again, this is a house of the Lord. Who is this boy, that you would detain him so? By what right?”

  “He knows,” Rowan murmured.

  “Do you mean to…to torture him here?”

  Essa looked down on the wiry man from the side of the pew. “I assure you we mean no such thing. And my thanks for tending him.”

  The man was befuddled. He looked from captors to captive but, possessing no capability to do anything about either, slunk away with a few paltry words. To Essa’s credit, she waited for him to escape their vicinity before she joined her cousin.

  “I don’t like it when people abandon me, Rurik,” she said. Her fingers tapped a veritable symphony on the handles of her knives.

  Truthfully, there was no threat in this. Rurik felt her disappointment break his skin, but he had steeled himself against that many days past. On some level, he had already resigned himself to inevitable capture. He was in no shape to evade anyone, and he might have had the commonsense to know they would not let him simply go. Surprise’s only real shape came in the realization that this pair had come without his brother’s rattling sabers.

  “What might I say? I left because I had to, Essa. Time to be something other than a child of excuses.”

  “As I recall,” she said without missing a beat, or bearing a hint of mirth, “it was precisely this brand of mannish thought that burned us all at the first.”

  Rurik read, without surprise, an unfortunately cynical truth in her eyes. She was scathing when she wished to be, and he knew he held no rebut that might satisfy her anger. He spread his palms against his knees and nodded away. There always seemed a weak link in his logic.

  At that moment, Rowan eased back his outstretched leg. “You know, it stands a tragic flaw in human logic that we must be recognized to be something; we never seem to catch that one must first be someone to be recognized.” They both watched him with something approaching wry admiration. Then he dismissed them with a guffaw and a flick of the wrist. “You twit.”

  Vibrations thrummed through the floorboards as a bell began to toll. It washed out of the walls and over their words, rolling thunderously out to the countryside. Rurik watched Essa wince. This was a universal call, and it meant they would not have much time alone.

  “It can’t possibly be Sonntag,” Essa murmured.

  Truthfully, the war had wreaked havoc on Rurik’s own sense of time, but a moment’s thought did leave that possibility somewhat…dubious. The world moved in octaves—eight days to every cycle in the Ademii Calendar. Sonntag, the last—or first, depending on whom one asked—was the day priests had set aside for their rituals, and on that day, the bell rang eight times for each day behind them, to emphasize that ritualistic quality, or so he took it.

  He looked for the priest to have out his answer, but the priest was gone. The back door slammed, which raised a whole other question. Who’s ringing the damn bell? Rowan let up on him, exchanging a hard glance with Essa, and another, more pointed look at him before heading for a canvas-shielded window. Concern darkened Essa’s face—and the moment Rurik realized the bell had not stopped at eight rings, it darkened his as well.

  “Fire?” he asked.

  That was the only reason he had heard the bells ring as such in Verdan. Aside from watch bells, the cast iron monstrosities in these buildings were the easiest way to draw attention.

  “I do
n’t smell anything,” Essa said.

  The doors burst inward. Rurik sat up on his haunches, forced himself to look past the fear Essa reaching for a knife engendered. Then he laid a hand on her arm, but she did not ease.

  A woman and child thrust their way inside. Sweat slicked the mother’s features and wild abandon licked her light eyes. “Father?” she called, and her eyes did not seem to spare even a moment for them. Behind her, a half dozen other poor souls soon followed, in various stages of dishevelment, and with a distinct lack of the hodgepodge items Rurik had grown accustomed to on the road. If these were refugees, they were lacking.

  “More coming,” Rowan called.

  A man with a scythe and a poorly carved pistol—a farmer, no doubt—broke through, headed for Rowan. It was the sword that seemed to draw him like a beacon. “Please,” he said, eyes locked more on the blade than the man. “Are you a soldier? One of the count’s men?”

  Rowan dipped his hat in assent. “More a man for coin than a noble’s knee. What seems to be—”

  Another pair made it inside and these, near to panicking, began to thrust back against the doors. The others saw this and began to scatter. Essa, however, darted forward to intercede.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.

  “They’re almost here,” one of the men screeched. “For Assal’s sake, get the pews up against the doors! People, help us!”

  The first thought that came to mind: the Bastard never gives up, does he?

  It struck a chord in Essa though. Her hand left her dagger and she turned on him like a shot. “Move,” she said, and her voice left no room for dismissal. He started to rise, but Rowan and the farmer were already streaming across the church toward them.

  “Not a bad idea with the pews, gents,” Rowan said. “There’s a whole stream of gryphon riders coming, without color or creed. And they’re almost close enough to spit on.”