The dirk traded hands. Shit. Ambidextrous. He jabbed and she jerked back; her improvised weapon slid away quick, to keep from severing fingers. The Gorjes man grinned, his brown eyes gleeful and mad, making a horrific comedy of his sallow, curly-haired skin. The dirk traded again. More jabs. He was trying to get inside her head.
She was thinking too hard. A fake stumble gave her a flat-footed look, and the man lunged for it. Essa grabbed him by the knife hand and jerked the man off balance. Even so, he recovered quick. As her arrowhead drove into the gap of his leather coat, his fist beat bright, copper pain into her ribs. It was a good hit. It rattled her, winded her. Had her arrow not sank up under his breastbone, and lost itself in his heart, he might have had her.
Yet she had nothing left for the bowman. The pistoleer sank into her, rather than away, and she found it a struggle to pull her arrow free. She cast back, considered leaving it, but the bolt was clicking into place. No time. Essa winced, in the anticipation of death.
Death was instead delivered by a forgotten farmer. There was a sagging grunt. Essa blinked, and found the farmer had gathered the courage to lodge a scythe through half the bowman’s sinking corpse. For all that, the farmer looked more horrified than the bowman.
“Is everyone…”
There were three breakaways. By that point, two of them were on gryphons, and the last trailed behind, cursing from flat feet. She recognized the cap, the broad rim that so often hid the hideous smile. It rode away from her, feathers flapping in its wake; Orif was fleeing with the last shreds of his dignity. Another pair of men scrambled after the others, but one made the mistake of grabbing for a rampaging gryphon. The beast rode him down, and then there were four.
Her hands burned. Behind her, there were still the heaving, squeezing crunches of men at war. Yet she could not forgive. She could not forget. The bow was in her hands of, she told herself, its own accord.
She registered the wind in the field by the way the smoke drifted overhead. Fifty yards. The sun was not in her eyes—clear sight, with only boulders for the lightest of covers. Sixty. She knew where he was riding. He wanted the road. He desperately wanted the road. There was a pounding in her head, not her hands, as she stood tall and drew wide. Seventy yards. It was her last thought as she let the arrow fire—a shot was only spoiled by too much thought.
The Gorjes’ captain rocked violently forward with the impact, but this time it was not just fear that shook him. Under that brilliant sun, he heaved as he clung to the last precious seconds of his miserable life, the arrow sunk deep into his lung. It was as though he had suddenly gained feathers—grey-fletched, to set him apart from the panicking steed beneath him. He was almost upon the road when he toppled from the saddle.
To Hell, Orif, and all your madness with it.
There was nothing refreshing in the breeze. Slowly, as she drained back into the awareness of the present, she felt the burning nausea of her wounds, and let her bow sag. There were more men she might have killed. She had no stomach for it. Instead she rose, turned back, looking for her knives and the dirk.
The orjuk was dead by then as well. Chigenda sat atop him, breathing heavy beneath a face swollen and purpled by blows. Given the whistle in his breaths, she doubted Orif was the only one that had taken a hit to his lungs. Underneath him, though, the orjuk’s neck hung at an odd angle, the long, thin braid of its knotted hair draped across its ape-like chest.
Rowan had a scarf tied against his leg, where the bolt had gone in. She went to him and tied it tight, after probing the wound. It was clean, in spite of everything—it had not splintered bone. She would need to sew it, but not here, not now, not in the midst of all this.
Rurik sat beside him in the grass, wheezing, dazed. He looked past her, which she thought odd, but it occurred to her there might be more. A squawking, manic rush in the distance told of the flight of half a dozen gryphons, though, panicking their way in every which direction across the plains. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong for the Gorjes.
A hand touched hers and squeezed. She smiled at Rowan, patted him with her other hand. “It’s not so bad,” she reassured him, but his eyes suggested otherwise. Not that, they seemed to say, though his lips were dry. There was no easy grace in this, no acceptance. She frowned, put the question to her lips, but there were tears in his eyes as he winced away, gesturing toward the rocky cleft beyond the church.
There were bodies. Scorched earth. She shambled along, Chigenda rising somberly beside her as she went. More men had been trampled, torn. The rumble she had heard in her fall, she now took for a clamor of claws—of beasts, rushing for safety. Was the fire too much? She stepped wide. The Gorjes were fools, but not so great fools as all that.
Though the fire at her back still burned, the separate scorching that brought this seemed to have burned hot, burned deep, but most of all, burned quick. It was a flash—an explosion; the outward ripples of it painted the portrait.
At the center: four scorched bodies and a burned gryphon. Seared steel. Dirtied iron. These things, she recognized. The last, though—the last…
Four fingers. They were clutched around his heart.
“He want…help,” the Zuti said.
And in that want, a baker consumed by fire.
The others had gone by the time Rurik came to her. Essa sat alone in a copse of trees, on a hill above the little town and the little church, where a little boy had died in the tiniest hope of recompense. Why. She asked herself that question over and over. One word.
Such great evils. Such great hates. Acting and masquerading, and all it seemed that she had ever been, to any of them, was a game.
In the end, one had died for that game. Did that somehow make it better? Forgive what had gone before? She knotted her fists and shook her head. She wanted to scream, but there was nothing left in her with which to do so.
He would not look at her. A burning sky above, he stared out on the fierce vibrant character of the world and twisted the chaos of his self, improbably, into a semblance of order.
He said, “I understand it now, Essa. You hate me, and truly, I cannot blame you for it.”
How long had she steeled herself against this? Still, a twinge ran through her. “We do not need to talk this out, Rurik. I don’t…”
“We do, and you do,” Rurik said, doggedly resolute.
Shakily, she clutched her arms and scooted a little further into the shade. “Is it your idea that somehow in talking this out you’ll retake what once we had?” She meant to put anger into it. She meant to pour all of her pain and doubt and depression into those words, but all that emerged were the bleak, weary words of a woman too long left with those things.
It was not either of their faults. Did it change anything? No. But it meant something. Somehow. She just couldn’t put it to words—perhaps because she herself could not even frame it yet. They could never be what they had been, though. Not again.
“No, I don’t.” To her shock, he turned to her with none of the melancholy or persistence she had spied in recent days. He spread his hands, as if in offering. “But I don’t think either of us can live until we have it out—and Alviss, he saw that, and I think he died thinking that neither of us would open ourselves up to life again. That we would fall to obsession, and be consumed.”
There was another word between them, there. What she wouldn’t have given to let it lie, but like all the rest, she knew it couldn’t. That they would never be the same if it did. Still, she closed her eyes and tucked her head away from his puzzle.
Does one act ever redeem a man?
“Like Voren,” he said, completing the puzzle and the agony.
Essa shook her head, trying not to think of the baker and remembering only his face, his beautiful face, there in the open field, arrows sheared through his fragile, mutilated corpse. A year. If only she could have a year returned to her, she should have never taken his hand, never lifted her head at the beckoning of her name, should have denied him and let al
l the rest come what would. They had mutilated that poor boy, and they had killed him.
There was a reason only some plants stretched for that ragged forest light. They were the ones that had the strength to grow.
This confidence she soon saw for the act it was. When she looked to the one boy still left to her, she read exhaustion in every line and gesture. He slumped and he sagged, and she could tell he wished dearly to be anywhere else. Human, after all.
She took a steadying breath before her plunge. “I don’t hate you, Rurik,” she ventured. More, to her surprise, was the truth of the words.
“How could you not?”
Essa could almost hear him thinking on it. She said, “Because you already named our proof of where hate leads. And besides…” Too long she had blamed, and too long let him handle the blame. Voren was many things, but now she had to admit a sane man was not among them. “…he was the real villain, here. I’m sure that’s what you’ve been waiting for me to say.”
Rurik had drawn very still, another shade in the twilight. “You always guess what I think, do you not? Will it hurt more to name you wrong once more then? Do not do this to yourself, Essa. Do not. I have more cause than any to say it but—Voren was, well, a baker taken out of his element. He was not a villain. Not a willing one. Another victim, I think, in many ways.”
So the boy has grown. In too many ways to bear speaking. She studied him a moment—studied the shadow of a face she could no longer see. Older, yes. Battered. But wounds aged a man, and formed the bedrock of his wisdom.
Or so Alviss had embodied. And he would ever remain a bedrock of her own soul.
“You’ve changed,” she said instead of all the myriad thoughts dancing through her skull.
The ghosting of a smile. “About time, is it not?” How she had come to loathe that smile. Yet it faded, as swift as his accounting.
“Why did you follow me, Essa?” he asked.
“What do you really hope to gain in leaving?”
Rurik sighed and sank down on his haunches, letting his hands fall lamely between his thighs. For a long time he looked back at her.
“There is an admission somewhere in growth,” he said at last, working it through. “That we do not deserve what we have come to accept, that we are not free and never will be until we at least try to right the wrongs that have bound us. You see me fleeing. I see myself moving toward Cullick. My own insurrection, too long left to lie, for he lies at the heart of all of this.”
A mass of men, bound forever to fight battles their own grim resolutions have concocted.
This was the nadir of a thought too long in her own battles. She shivered with the slightest twinge of cold’s breath in the air, in this endless spring night under the utter stillness of the plains. Moonlight slanted on them both, seemed laden with the weight of their thoughts.
She was cold and too disturbed for words. The ice had gone from the world, and yet its specter clung—the end’s preservation, never to be forgot. She had left Rurik alone a long time. She saw that now. Other shadows had crept into the absence and done him grievous hurt; malevolence had festered where otherwise might have been acceptance. What had he done to deserve her scorn? Nothing, in truth—nothing but be himself, and it was her wrong to have known him and said that she accepted him, only to turn on him for it in another moment.
Long ago, there had been a chance to save them all. Instead of being a friend, and standing in opposition, she had demurred at his press. They all had. For what creature should deny a friend? Honest ones, she saw now. Real friends did not demur.
“How do you mean to do it?” she asked.
“With a sword in the night, if it comes to that,” he said, echoing an old note.
She winced, for the spirits of the dead no doubt abroad that night. “What will it change?”
You, she thought. People always moved for themselves, to the detriment of those around them. To the detriment of themselves. The world was blind. Ignorance made her uneasy.
The words came unbidden, not tampered by thought. “Home. It and he lie at the heart of everything, and I’ve too long misdirected; we do foolish things when we surrender our freedom. I have been the world’s greatest fool, but sometimes it takes a fool to see it reflected in the world.” She quirked an eyebrow at him, started to say something, but he hastily backtracked. “Forgive me. Have my words ever been the most inspired? I don’t think myself a hero, Essa. I truly do not. I merely mean to right a wrong, in what ways might be left to me.”
“There are easier ways to die, you know.”
He laughed then, bitterly, as a man possessed. Then, “Oh, Essa. I know. But there’s been too much of that afoot. I mean to play my part in stopping it, not adding my own spirit to it.”
What was it old Father Bentham had told a girl-child so many, many moons ago? There are only trails. Whether right or wrong—they are only such because we make them. She wondered why that bothered her; why it didn’t bother her more.
In the darkness, Essa smiled and lay back against the earth, drinking in the celestial paths the view opened up. Freedom. Freedom to live, freedom to be, the freedom of the open plains, where one became wind and drifted away—this was what people had always seen here. It was not until later that she heard him go, but night did not swallow her; the restlessness did not abate.
Lives could be defined by inaction. They weren’t built on it.
* *
A short ways away, on a small knoll that gave them leverage over the village and the youths, Rowan and Chigenda watched patiently over the dead. They were neither of them happy that this day had come. Yet the moons would rise soon, both bright as they swelled to fullness, and there was, they thought, no one left, for the moment, who might do them harm.
Rowan thought he might never eat again. It could be no other way after so bloody a day’s work; all the worse that they were forced to burn another friend. There was gratitude in him—even the betrayal of a knife to lordling flesh and a hot poker to the head could not quite cleave that away—for the manner in which that friend had gone. At times, he thought it might overflow. The boy had come to a crossroads and made his choice.
Fortunately for them, it had been the right one.
It was time now to be away, wherever took them furthest from such killers. The world could be a beautiful place, if one accepted it for what it was, but that should have forced him to be blind to his own cousin’s danger. That he could not do.
Which is precisely what left him with a Zuti where no one could hear them, discussing how, exactly, that Zuti had known what would happen on this day. Is only way. De boys and de girl—it go, it go, till both man and woman be. So is seen, the Zuti said under the light of those moons. It was enough to leave Rowan knuckling his temples, trying to resist the urge to box his ears. So much might have been prevented. So much.
“You knew about this?” he said at last.
Such a simple phrase to hide such agonies. There was hesitation in its asking. Yet the Zuti had hinted as much. That he knew about the arasyl, about the rape and the lies and even the torture. It seemed inhuman, to watch so much pain and do nothing to abate it. Still, it seemed as if Rowan were the one laid low, as if he were the fool for having to ask at all—as if the Zuti acted from some divine inspiration that set him apart. Inviolate.
There were reasons Rowan had always found gods capricious. That all of them seemed to hold some unnatural distaste toward his own appetites was often least among them.
The Zuti, grinding a rock against the edge of his spear, didn’t look up. “Is obvious.”
“Why? Why would you let this happen? Let it go on?”
“Stupid asking,” said Chigenda. “Look at dem. Is better, dis. What boy do? He go whitmaan king, get de title on his head. Dey teach him sword. Teach him how swing—you see him battle, yes? You tink you learn him dis? And de girl—de girl focus. Put head to string. Put eye to trail. Open mind. De rest…” With an uncommonly delicate effort, he lifted the
head of his spear and laid it reverently in his lap. Open palms rested on it. “All distraction. Noise. Is better, dis.”
Slowly, Rowan shook his head. “You never stopped to think this might hurt them? Break them?”
“Hurt? Coursing. Dis what make strong.”
“No,” Rowan said, frowning into the darkness, “this is how we ruin them.”
Even so, he knew that he would never tell. This knowledge he would carry with him until ice and flame consumed the earth, and all descended the final cycle to the last farewell. Nothing could come of its telling but further pain and disarray, and already, they had undertaken enough of that. The world wrought many horrors, but life—life thrived in the guarded silences, as much as in the maelstrom of noise and reaction.
He would bear this weight for them. Such was the nature of love.
Chapter 9
“You will not.”
“I will.”
“You cannot!”
“I will.”
“You will not endanger this family further by dragging that creature back into these halls. You think he is stupid enough to come alone? You think these degenerati senza valores will stand for one moment against the certainties he brings? Where, where is my love; where is the man that carried us all but reluctantly into this Hell?” Ersili screamed.
“Sitting here, watching his wife make a fool of him,” Leopold screamed back at her, their faces mere inches apart. Those others stupid enough to be present wisely made themselves scarce now. “I am Emperor, by God, and you will support me or stay out of my way. I cannot take this right now. I will not. Already you send my children away...”
“Your children?” There were steps and there were leaps. He could tell he had leapt—and nowhere with a firm handhold. “I sent my children away because the man who is supposed to protect them cannot even protect himself. From himself. And I do not need to stand here and take this from you,” Ersili all but spat. Then she turned on her heel and strode down the long trail of the throne room.
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