As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  He brought me for the hope of salvation and found in me only damnation.

  There was a piece of him which felt this knotting up inside, which threatened to scream and weep and tear at his hair. Portly Portir, they had called his uncle in life—made a joke of his very existence. A downward glance was all it took to drink in his own belly, though, warmly swaddled in the robes of his former station. They were not so different, and that haunted him.

  This was not the man that had been so close to the throne for so many years. Portir’s pale body was sweat-stained, his smallclothes bundled where he had thrashed—or perhaps been brushed aside in an effort to escape the moist heat of this terrible place. Either way, they had hunched up over his wrinkled excess, leaving him naked in places no royal should ever have had to bare to unworthy eyes. His eyes, half-open, seemed to roll in two different directions.

  Indecisive to the last. “How could you leave him like this? This man was my uncle, traitor or no, and you would have us look upon his soiled clothes?” He stepped around the body, rather than over it, as though he feared the dead man might rear up with some final accusation. To others, he knew, it would make him look frightened—as though the bags of his eyes did not already. There was no choice in this, though. Ersili had been damned if she’d let him go half-dressed, but he could not find the energy to care; they had killed his uncle as he slept, in a tower not a mile from where he dreamed.

  On its surface, it could have been the work of his family’s shade, as he had taken to calling her. He shuddered just for the thought of it. This held none of the malevolence, though. One brother’s windpipe had snapped. Another had burned alive. Even an old man had been drowned. Though he had soiled himself, the guardsmen still claimed Portir had died peaceably enough to have been brought to suicide.

  They had the rope. They even had the characteristic burn about his neck. Never mind the obvious question of where a man, inside of a locked tower, had managed to get a rope. Never mind the guards posted just outside the door.

  “All of you that do not need to be here: get out.”

  Ersili had a manner of voice not unlike steel. Command came easily to it. When she stepped into the room, those words were the first out of her mouth, and they were all she needed. She might as well have been an angel of death, bedecked as she was in purist white, her lovely hair hidden beneath a shrill bonnet, as though it had been hacked off; she had even found a veil that added just an ethereal touch without concealing anything of her wrath. Men scattered before it.

  Even now, after everything, they do not scatter for me. The thought made him almost too angry for words.

  Ersili moved inward before the last of the unnecessary train had fled, for to her they meant nothing. Her eyes were for the body and for her husband, though she came to both with hands tucked demurely against her belly. Then the anger was gone—a tool, discarded as quickly as it had been used. Her eyes met his and even he did not know the full gamut of her thoughts.

  “They left him like…”

  “I know,” he assured her.

  Unlike him, she did not hesitate before the body. She stepped past Makari, between the body’s splayed legs, bending down until the folds of her skirt touched dead skin. Leopold quailed, looked away to cover it—but her eyes were trained upon the corpse. Makari wisely looked away as well, so that he did not have to see his emperor’s cowardice. He had commonsense, that one.

  In the corner of the room, a pair of physicians still huddled with the Constable of the Tower, ostensibly engaged in whispers, but more truly, warily watching their betters. Leopold turned to them, tried to use them to distract his own discontent. “How did this happen?” he asked. How did you let this happen?

  “He must have bribed one of the guards. Smuggled it in,” the Constable offered.

  As with the poison, Leopold thought blandly. “There were three guards outside these doors. You are telling me none of them heard the commotion?”

  The Constable opened his mouth, thought better, and looked sheepishly away. No one ever wanted to take responsibility.

  One of the physicians answered in his place. “Save the kicking of the chair, majesty, there would not have been much commotion.”

  “Aside from the gargling,” the other physician added.

  “Yes, aside from that. More’s the question of how his…ah…girth did not snap the suspension.”

  Leopold scowled at him, sensing a jest. “Pardon?”

  “He…he tied the rope quite firmly, majesty. Yet he was not—that is to say…”

  “How on Lecura do you suppose he might have done this to himself?” Ersili asked.

  All eyes swiveled on her and more than one gasp followed how she bent over the corpse. In life, she might have been close enough to feel Portir’s breath on her skin. It was hardly considered kosher for the dead. She was not perturbed in the least by it. Rather, she reached a nail up and with it plucked at the skin of the dead man’s neck.

  “Majesty, nothing but ill humors might come from so closely—”

  She rolled her eyes, and they seemed to roll her all the way back onto her haunches. The look she turned on the doctors then was venomous. “Are you physicians, or oracles, if you would speak of truths without so much as touching it? Take the facts you’ve already given and couple them with the honest fact that a well-groomed noble’s nails have chipped, broken, and torn—as though they tore at something in turn.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning what sort of a fool would hang himself and then try to claw his way out of it?”

  The Constable stirred. “Majesty, are you…are you implying murder? Inside the Tower?”

  It was not really something that needed to be given voice, Leopold noted.

  “This cannot be,” the Constable said firmly. As though words would shield him.

  “As they could not get poison into the Tower either, I am sure?” Leopold said.

  The other physician wrung his hands together. “But we found no blood under his nails, no sign of struggle. There would have been something.”

  “Unless it was washed off,” Ersili said drily. “And you speak of a 70-year-old man who, by your own jibes, stood in terrible figure. I told everyone that did not need to be here to get out. I believe the pair of you should now add yourselves to that retinue, lest I grow more creative in proving my theories.”

  White-robed bodies fled from the cell. Of those that had gawked when the royal train first arrived, all that remained was the Constable, though red-faced now from the turns of the evening.

  “You realize, of course, that those guardsmen are to be apprehended and put to the question,” Leopold said. Then he turned to Makari. “As shall the Constable.”

  Though the man fell to what could only be described as infantile blubbering, in this Leopold was resolute. He turned his back on the man, ordered Makari to remove him. The man’s subsequent howling only served to fan the putrescence in his gut. The cries that stalked the man down the depths of his own tower did little to settle it.

  Can no one stomach consequence?

  For a time, it was but he and Ersili, and Ser Ontlaus loitering at the cell’s window, a faithful dog content to watch the world beyond his masters’ darkness. Slowly, Leopold sank down onto his knees, surrendering all pretense of godliness. His wife scowled at the gesture and made to rise—but by then it was too late. Dirty knees were a small price to pay. Were he to stand much longer, he might have fallen anyways.

  “He warned me about Mauritz,” Leopold offered. There was a piece of him that wondered if, one day, he would even get that much for a eulogy.

  Ersili nodded vacantly. “An eye for an eye, this. I told you not to kill that fool.” She closed her eyes and whispered something to the stale air. “Both will be laid at your feet, of course. And now we’ve another war on our hands.”

  “I still have my family,” he whispered to the shades.

  One of them stared him down across a dead man. “Two brothers, two sister
s, and one half-blood whelp. That’s all you have. Is this the dynasty you married me into, Leo?”

  Belatedly, he realized what he truly felt: guilt. It was he that had put his uncle in the Tower, choosing one brother over the next. Too late he realized: he had chosen the short term game over the long term. Now he was paying the price. He and all his kin. He should have killed the man as he kneeled before him.

  Chapter 10

  Growing up, Roswitte had a certain advantage over other people. Most met war through that abstract sort of fear all men knew. Stories from fathers. Nightmares mothers shared. Few were unlucky enough to actually experience it. In Verdan, though, war ran in the very water, like blood in the veins.

  This madness now was the worst she had known, but it was not the first. To her eternal regret, it would not be the last. Animals hunted. Men warred. It was the way.

  Dawn came. She pulled back the string of her bow and loosed an arrow that killed a man more than two dozen yards away. She would know it was hers by the grey goose fletching.

  Others also loosed arrows. In the night, when the rains came, they guarded their bowstrings against the damp, so that they could have these moments, unobstructed by nature’s futile efforts at peace. They played a role. Time after time, they killed, until another dawn wrought the same upon another band of their own, and this time it was they lying in the muck with their lives leaking into the roots.

  Many ghosts were said to stalk the forest of Ulneberg. Many more, she supposed, would scream in the nights to follow. This was the way of war.

  Orders were given. Despite her better judgment—which she kept to herself—Ivon broke from them for days at a time, with the order to keep moving. Where they encountered bands of soldiers, scattered amongst the shadows of the trees, he regrouped them, put them to task. Then they would split, they and this lot of men that none of them knew, and split again.

  In this way, the man they called the Bastard never knew exactly where they were, and yet, he never had any doubt as to whence they came. In the villages and homesteads they passed, she heard people whisper of the “Ghosts of Verdan.” It was encouraged of all their men to spread the rumor and wear the name like a mantle. When bands were sent to hunt them—an increasingly common occurrence—and they killed them, and left their bodies for the wolves to feast on under the pale moons, people said it was the ghosts that killed them, the restless ghosts, and Roswitte could not say they were wrong.

  It was a battle for the heart of these lands. The fighting itself was inconsequential. Ivon could harry. He could not destroy. The Bastard could fight, but he could not kill what he could not find. A bounty was offered for Ivon’s head. It did not seem to help his cause; Roswitte hanged more than one collaborator herself, and left them to rot in plain sight.

  The Idasians feared rot as few others could. They were a people of fire.

  Honor had no place in any of it. They both did things that, in times of peace, should have horrified them to no end. The burning of Oberroth had shown that, if nothing else.

  In war, armies carried with them a red violence that, once allowed room to roam, feasted without cause. By now, she reckoned, the manor she had spent her whole life serving in was likely to have been fired. Not all would be so lucky as to have simply been put to the sword. It would be childish to think otherwise. War was a thing for killers and victims; there was no middle ground between them. Vengeance could give birth to many horrors, and fear like it. Supposing they ever went back to Verdan, she doubted it would be the same place she had left. There would be too many empty vessels hanging from charred rafters for that.

  No court commanded them now. They fought and bled and died to preserve the notion of life in a world obsessed with death.

  Which gave her pause enough to renew her scrutiny upon her companions—the Dust Knight, in specific. This was, in spite of the title, an honorable man, by all accounts. A rare figure in a dark age, not so unlike the knight that led them, if bred of different circumstances. There was a night when she asked him about that, over a cup of stream water the men seemed to like to pretend was ale.

  “Those whose honor is so narrow a thing—they are not living long in this world, I think.”

  It was all he said. All he would say. He offered her food and a smile, and seemed content to pretend all the rest were things of dreams. He made it easier to believe in simplicity.

  They never returned to Verdan. They never came close to doing so.

  All around her, men crawled from their pallets, stirred by the terrible noise. How long she had slept, she could not say—dared not say, for she hated the thought that she had slept through something. What greeted her though was a sound so horrid that the body could not help but recoil from all things, sleep included. It was as though a stampede shook the roots of the trees.

  The man nearest her was still pulling on a boot. “What is it? What do we hear?” There was fear in his eyes.

  Before anyone else could answer, she saw it. It no longer sounded like a stampede. It was a stampede. A herd of deer vaulted between trees choked out of light by the night. Men stirred and shouted, plummeted from their covers. As Roswitte watched, a handful of squirrels joined the flight, leaping the branches overhead with a purpose that was decidedly beyond them.

  It took her a moment to register the stench. The mind was slow, and surprise, for all that it stirred the blood, deadened some of its uses. She gagged, cried, “It’s burning. Someone’s set fire, get up!”

  Too late, she saw that it was not night. Motes of grayish light broke through in shifting lines, in the manner of drifting clouds, and as the men scrambled, she saw clearly that the branches over their heads were not lost to eyes unaccustomed to a moonless sky, but to the coarse inkiness of smoke.

  It was always a terrible thing, those first fires of the year. In Verdan they set them deliberately, here and there, to cull the dead, to beat back the brush and detritus, to aid in the clear cutting. This too came with a purpose, of that she was sure, but there was nothing helpful in it. At least for them.

  Other sounds came shuddering through the gloom. Some fool blew his horn, as though the rest of them weren’t already aware. She cursed—it would only bring the pyros down about their heads, when the whole goal was likely to smoke them out anyway. Yet it had the desired effect: the horn meant danger, and the men turned swift from dressing to snatching the weapons at their sides. Roswitte shoved a man to his feet, shouted the others on. Then she started to run.

  Even from afar she could hear the sudden crack and whoosh as some tree vanished in an eruption of fire.

  “We’re too far from the river to fight it!” someone shouted.

  They had no water left. Not even to drink. Already, at the edge of hearing, she could make out shouts beyond the smoke and animals.

  “It’s spreading! It’s spreading!”

  Men with torches streamed through cracks in the distant clouds, fireflies deprives of wings. The forest had already had its first rains, though. No longer did winter dry the place like bones. It was, like enough, the only thing that would spare its entirety. There was nothing worse than a wildfire. Dimly, she wondered if the Bastard actually thought he could control what he was about to unleash.

  “East, too! Maker be good, it’s everywhere.”

  Another tree bellowed, and as she flicked her eyes east she saw the man was right—there seemed to be fires blazing everywhere. There was no longer any sign of the deer.

  These were a dozen trained men-at-arms, but there was something primal to fire. Even staunch men blanched at it—not unwisely. She tried to think, but she felt the itch up her skin, watched as Ivon’s band, left to her care, turned irrevocably to panic. Ash rode on the wind and the roaring of flames grew louder than the wisp of the winds.

  The Dust Knight was there beside her. A gauntleted hand absently touched her arm—too formal. Too much else to think about. His eyes were not on her, though. They were everywhere else, searching, calculating. “How many?” he w
anted to know. He coughed, urged her lower—the cloud was descending, and motes of light flicked through it as men hurled their torches into the mass. Everything seemed to be getting warmer, her skin flushed like when Fallit used to…

  A useless sentiment. She shoved him back, shouting. “More than we. And with the flames about us, they might as well be an army.” They couldn’t worry about the men. They had to run. It was all that remained to them.

  She would not die for something so stupid as fear.

  “Come on!” Ensil yelled back angrily. She followed him wordlessly, through the winding lanes of the burning wood. He seemed to know the way.

  Then she remembered another, and dared look back. Lord Isaak was many things, but he was no craven. Stubbornly, he sat before the licking flames, as all those around him broke and fled, his hands calm in their chains. His repose reminded her absently of the Zuti’s meditations. She would have been kicking and fighting every inch of those chains, looking for the weak point, trying to get out. To live.

  Yet she saw soon enough that his eyes were still roving. He merely reserved himself. It was not long before those eyes came to her—stark dismay. He thinks I mean to leave him. Still, she hesitated. Duty was one thing. But for a kinslayer…

  A thought of an old man, a promise, a manor. Another time when torches prowled the night, and this one had been the hunter. They had thought Rurik the rash one then. Three brothers. Three stars roving the perilous bleakness of the night sky. They could not have been more different from one another.

  She saw his lips spell the call: “Ros.” Too human to be ignored. She winced, plunged back despite Ensil’s grab for her wrist. Folly loomed here. She did not have the key. Instead, her hand caught a fleeing man, and then his axe was in her hand as she tugged the scarf tighter to her lips. The air was swirling with smoke by then like a hundred writhing black snakes.

  A burning clutch of leaves fell not far from their camp. She ducked low, closer to the earth where the smoke was not quite so thick. It was just spreading so damnably fast. The younger man turned to her, raising his arms, and again, that word, “Ros,” like he had some obligation to it, some geas. She threw the axe above her head and drove it against the chains hard enough to yank the fool down, and again, again, to split the chain. The effort drove the smog deeper into her lungs, however, and she began to sputter and cough.