As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “All those that flout Imperial justice, are sentenced to death,” Ensil pronounced grandiosely. She looked at him crosswise, but deciphered no mirth there. She might have said he had a flare for the grand gesture.

  The tavern exploded. Men bolted from every corner, but the Bastard’s men shoved off any that got in their way. One of Roswitte’s men went down when a pedestrian was flung into him, but the others crashed into the rebels before they could have first strike. Caught off guard, and many of them left to daggers for their work, the soldiers went down quick. A few seconds, and the bloody work was done. A shout from outside told her someone else had tried to get out the back door.

  When all was done, they had four dead men in this bee’s nest, one dying informant, and a pair of prisoners to spare. Only one of their own men had been hurt, though several townsfolk had been injured in the chaos. Ivon came out of the back rooms after, alongside the innkeeper and the willowy Mariel—Witold’s Master of Words, and the reason he had been gone so long.

  He took one look at the prisoners and said, “Fine work, everyone, but you know what we do with traitors.”

  Amid protests from the rebels, grinning men dragged them outside, and made an impromptu gallows from some horse rope and the tavern’s personal willow tree. In war, there were rarely trials.

  Roswitte oversaw their deaths, from beginning to end. They made her think of home, oddly enough, and what her own lord used to do with bandits. Harsh measures were demanded of otherwise good men—the weak, no matter their ethics, were doomed otherwise to be subverted.

  Rope creaked in the twilight. Limbs dangled, still now. Into their shadows, Ensil slipped. She did not look at him, though. Could sense his presence. He was not a creature made for shadows; they rejected him as surely as he rejected them.

  After a time he offered, “Ivon wants us moving out tonight. He says the Bastard is taking his lure.”

  She nodded absently. It would not be long before the crows came.

  “Ensil.”

  She heard him shift, look over at her. Startled, probably. She never spoke his name.

  “What sets us apart from them?” She gestured idly at the bodies.

  His gaze flickered. “Doubting?”

  “No. Just…curious.”

  There seemed a long silence after that. Already, she could hear the sounds of men readying themselves for travel behind her—horses and gryphons and jingling packs, all somewhere behind the crunch of hurried boots. No one else watched the dead men swing.

  Then, “Something more than taking orders.”

  Life, in a nutshell.

  Chapter 11

  It was summer by the time Charlotte returned to Usuri’s cabin with a request. The witch had no keepers anymore and nothing on her hands save soot from an evening fire. She listened attentively, even demurely, which struck Charlotte as so out of character as to be a cause of alarm. Yet Charlotte had many causes for worry that night, and by her own estimation, none without reason.

  The last time she had danced in the shadows at her father’s back, a boy had lost a great deal more than a name, while she still saw eyes slight her for what bigots would name her now. Some things demanded action, though, and there was no path to action save through it. Nor could she expect Usuri to take the risk she intended without taking some herself.

  Charlotte had ridden out with no more company than a single guardsman—no knight of legend, no dedicated paramour, just an aging man with a blade and a bow, still low in his saddle from injuries this very witch had wrought. There were times when Charlotte would look at Dartrek and wonder what could possibly drive a man to such devotion, and every time she would flush away again, remembering the words of adoration the witch had once hooked upon his gaze.

  A single shieldman, a hooded cloak, and a starless night. All for a question any sane person would refuse: “Could you be seen to die for a cause?”

  Her father had poets. Her father had writers and artists and sculptors under the weight of his purse, men and women that could create the history he sought to weave, but even the most creative of souls benefited from a muse. War was fodder, but death—singular, absolute—was unparalleled in this regard. Martyrs made a cause—proof that death was not the end of ideas.

  It was Usuri who came up with the details. Even Charlotte blanched at their notion. It was summer, growing hotter every day, and passions would be enflamed by an act traditionally associated with the transition into death. Furthermore, Usuri pointed out, she had committed too many men to fire herself—she was practiced in it, and it was time those departed men should see she knew how they felt. A ritual suicide like this would not only fit into the martyrdom Charlotte sought, but serve to shake the fence sitters from their pondering.

  Which was why, three evenings later, Charlotte smuggled herself out of the keep once more, on the auspices of visiting her uncle’s war camp. A small train accompanied her, as befitted the act, men and women who, once safely extracted from the confines of Vissering, surrendered their identities, giving themselves over to messengers’ markings. On the road, this gave them an excuse for speed and steeds besides.

  In Usteroy, this made for little issue. At journey’s end they crouched instead in the crown-invested twilight of Corvaden, too near for any comfort to the riverbanks which were the lifeblood of the capital. There, at a point that seemed to Charlotte too far from the town Usuri had chosen, they waited. Summer wind dampened them, the dark gathered swift about them, and all she could think was how, if all went wrong, there would be no out for them save the babbling waters of the Klein, deep and black. For Usuri, there would be no out at all.

  She tried not to think of it, but she was too intricate a planner not to dwell on even the minutest possibilities. Instead, she tried—unsuccessfully—to sort out the array of feelings she had begun to associate with the witch. Too anxious. Too hot. For once in her life, she even seriously considered prayer.

  Those thoughts fled as quickly as the witch’s speech to the populace ended—how it echoed amongst those hills!—and in the place of words was lit the largest fire Charlotte had ever laid eyes upon. Her heart leapt, moved by some strange, tangled collision of disgust and admiration and hope when the townsfolk began to shriek.

  A woman had just set herself down at the edge of a bridge and set herself alight.

  It skipped another beat when that same woman, as though a dandelion caught on the breeze, wafted backward over the water and plummeted down into its frothing depths.

  She nodded to Ser Edwin, who pulled the messenger’s satchel off his shoulder and dove into those same depths without a second thought. For a moment, both were gone, both lost. Then the disheveled knight reappeared, swimming up the bank with one arm, cradling the girl in the other. Trailing behind them were clumps of matted hair—horse hair—and coarse brown dirt, bleeding into the heart of the riverbed. From the beach, they all helped pull Edwin up, and he shrugged Usuri to the sand where both lay panting.

  It was Dartrek who threaded a hand through her hair—her long, ratty hair—and plucked the ashen remnants of the last horse hairs from the sodden mass. She shed it as a mantis might shed a limb, shrugging it off and letting the rest breathe its short life, stiff now from whatever had woven it. When Dartrek let it go, it was dust on the wind breaking away and floating down the length of the river. This sacrifice from a shaved steed, like the body itself, could never be found, or the ploy would be undone just as it had begun.

  Pride guided her from her steed then, to crouch beside the girl that might have drowned for a notion. She laid a blanket over her still muddy, peeling skin and, together with Edwin, patted the shivering witch down—for the water, though summerstruck, had yet to warm as the earth around it. The others averted their eyes as Edwin—a man that could be trusted not to ogle female flesh—stripped her flaking clothing and bundled Usuri into new, if dusty layers.

  Spiced wine kept her heated as they rode, Usuri slumped at the fore of Charlotte’s own horse. They trun
dled out of town to the south and east, across floodplains and prairie for the invisible border with Usteroy. Behind them was a town in turmoil, word of the bright-haired girl who had committed suicide rather than submit herself to child-killing fanatics racing out in all directions from the tumultuous influx of soldiers.

  Though there were times, on the way back, where Usuri jabbed at Charlotte with some stark bit of humor or another, Charlotte found for once she had nothing in her to rebut. She looked at the girl and saw no means of petty rejoinder—let her instead bask in the warmth of the sun and the silence of awed men. It felt unnatural.

  Only when they were across the border did Sara dismount with the rest of them. “How is it,” she asked, “the witch still breathes?”

  “As well to ask why a wind blows east instead of west,” Usuri rejoined.

  Charlotte turned to her friend and laid a hand against her shoulder. “Easier to weather the wind than to change it,” she said in a deadpan.

  Taking Sara so deep into her confidence had not been easy. There were walls, years of walls built about the confines of her heart and her mind designed to prevent that very thing. Some had been hand-carved by her father. Most had been sealed by her own doing. Letting others inside had that unpleasant tendency to make one vulnerable.

  Above all, Charlotte detested the notion of being seen as vulnerable.

  The art of diplomacy was in knowing more of another’s secrets than they knew of yours. If one could not deal from a position of power, they were best off not dealing at all. There was no power gained in showing Usuri to Sara, nor in taking them so far from the safety of her home. Truthfully, there was a distinct feeling of vulnerability to it, and also—it felt freeing to invoke.

  As they rode across the plains that stretched the middlelands of Idasia, she found herself a great deal of time to dwell on this notion. They paced themselves, so as not to stand out too sharply from those with whom they mingled. At night, they slept under motes of stardust and slivers of moonshine, their blankets nothing more than the cloaks on their backs and the soil beneath their toes. It was a unique experience for the palatine’s daughter, made altogether more so by the presence of sound around her—men and women that spoke, discussed, even laughed.

  Laughter, in her household, had always been one of two things: a child’s indiscretion, or a useful act. Nothing more. Dartrek—scarred, stalwart Dartrek—shared warmth in his own ways, but he was not a talker. These others—they were adventurers, men accustomed to the travails of the road and the company of brothers. They spoke with an ease that uneased her, and Sara—well, Sara could speak with anyone.

  She thought back to the day she had first met the princess. A pretty face is all she thought she had beheld. An empty, pretty face, not so unlike her stepmother. How wrong she had been.

  While Dartrek headed out to negotiate the purchase of a brace of chickens, Sara hooked an arm about Charlotte’s and pulled her close. “I should very much like to have our moment now, if it would do well with you.” She looked back at the princess—uncertain, tittering, but eager for all that. It would not do well for her, she suspected, but she had promised it all the same, and at some point words had to count for something.

  A week before, Sara would have liked nothing more than to see Usuri impaled and spitted outside the castle walls. A real, live witch—she could hardly fathom. How could anyone? Neverminding, of course, that the crown had been burning supposed witches as far back as antiquity. The Vorges were very clear cut on the matter.

  In stormy eyes, she saw death, as once Charlotte had—where now she saw only the turbulence of possibility.

  People. Why do I detest you? Because your lengthened shadow is ever fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What we want above all is safety, and because in the sun of truth its protection wilts, our shadows only grow the closer we come.

  Why had she told Sara the truth? Part of her—her father’s part—said it was to study what seeped into its wake. More likely: she could not bear the burden alone. Nor could she continue to ask so much of a friend and yet deny her the truth that had brought them together at the first.

  She stared at Usuri: those eyes, like cut diamonds. One could be excused for thinking they could see through anything.

  “Usuri,” she murmured, “come here.”

  She clenched Sara’s hand tighter, remembering her own fear from long ago—of long, bracing sprints down yawning halls, the coppery taste of blood in her mouth and visions of a butchered friend splayed against the walls of her mind. This time, it was not the same. Usuri watched them for a moment, then with a careless nod drifted—Lord, such an aimless wind, that woman!—to a seat before them. Different, and yet so much the same. Fear, still, but different than before. She feared losing them, she realized. It was not her father she was worried about.

  “In this…you did good, Usuri,” she said belatedly, fumbling for how to begin.

  The witch pursed her lips. Something passing for amusement curved a corner of her lips. “She must have, if two birds of a feather should be let from the cage to watch her weave.”

  She smiled. She has the right of it. “Without accompaniment, I should never have been able to leave, and to gain an accompaniment, I needed those I could trust.” She flicked a quick glance to her friend, and back. “In Sara is both.”

  “Such certainty! Quite a song this one must—”

  “It comes at a price, as all things do. As I am sure you are well aware, Lady Usuri,” Sara entered with formal severity.

  For a heartbeat, Charlotte was terrified. Then the hand in hers squeezed back, and in the gesture came unveiled a princess every bit as uncertain as she. There were no forms for this, no practiced, ritualized jurti cure.

  Silence bundled the witch against its breast. She licked her lips, and lately bowed her head in consent. More hesitant, then, she was certain not to look the princess in the eyes. Her hands began to fiddle with their own thumbs.

  “Tell me how it is you did what you did today. You were not yourself, goodwoman. I saw it mine own self.”

  “What good is it to be yourself, if you should mean to die?”

  “Usuri,” Charlotte cautioned.

  The edge of the witch’s lips twitched and settled. Her hands too, folded like a blanket over her bony thighs. “You people name me witch. What does that mean?”

  It took a moment before either woman realized the girl posed the question literally. Sara answered, “You twist the world to your whims. I know not the how of it. I know not the why of it. Today proved it well enough, though.”

  “Did it?” Palms rolled in her lap. Usuri stared a moment before they retracted, one rolling up the long sleeve draped across the other. Tanned skin greeted them. Tanned, puffy skin, red enough for a sunburn in splotches. “Magic is nothing more than manipulation of the natural order. Substance is already there. In everything. Twist? No. I merely tweak it to my own whims.

  “And this, princess, is the cost. This itches, by the way. Hurts. I could scratch it raw and still it would not desist. This skin will boil and bubble, itch and rash and burn, like I rolled in ivy, for a few days to come. My hair,” and for this she touched those brittle locks, even flinched as pieces flaked away, “will thin. More will fall out, as if I were an old woman. It will return, of course, but slow, slow…

  “Transmutation’s tricky. Always is. Can’t produce more than there is, nor take away more than you need. Has to be exact. You don’t change. Your appearance does. Example: I can become a black-haired beauty with long, curled locks—but I’ll need something extra to account for the hair. That horse hair, for example. The chalk on my skin, to brighten this dark tone of mine. Then that little something of self to form the link between what is and might be. Equal exchange, princess. That’s what makes other races tricky—or men.”

  The deadpan was convincing enough it took a cackle from Usuri for them to realize she was joking. Or, if not, at least ribbing them with the last bit. The witch let
her sleeve drop, flicked her arm as if to dispel whatever sensations lurked there, and clasped her palms together.

  “My skin doesn’t like being toyed with. Taking other things into its pigments. My hair doesn’t like taking on new roots. So they make me pay, in so many fun little ways.”

  Sara, one dainty hand over her otherwise gawking mouth, swallowed and flickered a pained look to Charlotte. Some things were perhaps better left unsaid.

  “You are quite candid, of this.”

  The witch shrugged. “It is what I am. As you are what you are.”

  “And what am I?”

  A trap, perhaps. The witch’s lips tugged into a lop-sided grin. “A songbird with a crown. And a woman with a friend. One, perhaps, not suited to this earth.”

  “Are any of us?” Sara asked.

  Usuri inclined her head to concede the point. “Let me guess: as a babe, the little songbird thought a witch was one who could do anything. Oh, pretty, pretty petty thing—so do we all. She should think the same, to listen to the droning of her father’s words. A witch is no different from any other soul. Time grows them, knowledge nourishes them, and the world narrows the path on which that lanky body and that overfull mind can travel. Narrower, narrower, into the darkest wood, until at last it seems she chooses nothing, doing only what can and must be done. No miracles. Just someone who more quickly reaches their stride.”

  “You have a curious manner of answering. I had thought your madness an act.” An exasperated look peeled Charlotte’s way.

  “The best acts have grains of truth,” the witch mused.

  “Be glad you did not see her before,” Charlotte answered. It was a note that twinged, an odd sort of possessiveness to its utterance.

  “I might also say that you’ve a curious manner of asking,” Usuri added.

  Sara spread her palms, a gesture of conciliation. “Such is my right.”