As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “Goodness! Fireworks!” Sara clapped her hands together with a squeal as she gazed out the window. “Come, come. We should be out on the terrace, watching this…”

  Doubtlessly smuggled in, and so many of them. Who on Lecura could afford that, and who would have heard of victory ahead of us? Unless father’s messengers…her brain twisted and wracked the question, hunting it to its core. Her father would not have left such a thing to messengers. If he wanted some grand gesture, he would be at the heart of it—and so would she, most like. Something in the keep, or a crowd at the mayor’s abode in the city.

  If he had distributed fireworks, they would be given to a purpose, not the casual, half-hearted cavalcade of colors which they were watching. There was no pattern to it. Just a mash of noise, echoing over the landscape, drowning out all else.

  Sara was already at the window. Charlotte turned back instead, intending to dispatch one of the guards to fetch her father’s ear. She would get to the bottom of this.

  There was a clatter on the hardwood just before her fingers grasped the knob. It was the only warning she had before the door plunged inward and all but battered her down with it. By the time she had her feet under her again, the man was in the room with them.

  He was a gaunt, jittery fellow with a winestain mark across his neck and pale, sunken eyes that raced across the room as little mice. Anywhere else he should have been unremarkable, another bony face in a shuffling crowd, but here, now, he was a man with a knife in his hand in spite of a steward’s linens shrouding his pale skin.

  In that second of hesitation, she looked to Sara, and wondered for which of them he had come. “Don’t,” she whispered, even as she spied the crumpled body just beyond the door.

  Someone would hear. Someone had to have heard the clamor.

  “Charlotte, get back!” Sara shouted, and the instant passed as Charlotte watched his eyes narrow on her friend. Then, she knew why he had come.

  He did not say anything, their little killer. Sara started to scream, but he lunged faster than Charlotte could have thought and punched the princess in the gut. She crumpled, and he stabbed down after her, but Charlotte launched herself at him. One hand clamped at his elbow and the other swung around to anchor it back. She wanted to claw him, to bite him and tear at him, but all she could think of was saving Sara, who crawled and rasped beneath them.

  Instead of pressing for Sara, he swung around and hit Charlotte with the elbow she had been pulling. It was her turn to crumble, her ears ringing with blood. I should have screamed. I should have— He hit her again as she pedaled away, then pulled her up by her hair—by her pride. Some of the long, golden locks fell past her; most became a fire that lifted her off her feet. The blade came against her windpipe, and all she smelled then was wine. He reeked of wine.

  “Nobody cares about another Farren’s girl, Charlotte,” he said stupidly.

  Then he was the one to scream. Immediately, Charlotte seized at the knife with one hand and dug the other hand’s nails into his cheek. Already tottering, he swung into her with his free arm and batted her aside. As he rounded, though, she saw Sara’s fingers yanked from the ornate hair needle she had jammed through the back of his shin. Charlotte sucked in air and screamed, but in the same moment he slashed Sara across her beautiful face.

  As Sara pulled away he hit her and she went down. Then he was standing over her, shaking hard, blade slick with Sara’s blood. “Royal cunt,” he spat, and stabbed. Her blood felt like summer rain as it sprayed across Charlotte’s face.

  For half an instant, there was another within her. Eyes that looked with her eyes, which felt with all the same nerves the pain in her skin and the blood on her face. Let me, it cried, as though it could take her far and away, and let someone else weather this. She knew the voice. She knew, too, the dream that it could weave, the same dream that had bid her join a midnight walk to a dead Matair’s cell so many moons before. Yet then it had been a demand, whereas now it was a question—and she would not let it. Not this. Not now.

  The first step was the hardest. After that it was nothing but momentum. She bled all thoughts from her head and charged, slight though she was. She barreled into him as the hand drew back for another stab at the rain-slick pool of a body at his feet. Though she did not cry out, he must have sensed some motion of her coming, for he started to turn all the same.

  Her hands were on his throat. Something started to leave his lips but it was lost as she hit him. They went down together in a heap of mangled humanity—he, under the force of her and tripping over a princess, and she, with the desire to claw out his eyes. He’ll kill me, she thought, and strangely, she was fine with that. Then they hit the ground. She struck him and rolled onto the wooden floor. His head hit the cobbles of the window well, and when the rest touched the ground it did not move again.

  For a time they sat like that, heaving and breathless, under the flickering lights of distant explosions. Blood pooled like a halo about his head, eyes wide, unmoving. It reminded Charlotte of another pair of eyes that haunted her still. This was as close as she had ever been. She thought her stomach would revolt, but it was still as a sunken stone. Perhaps it would have if she looked at Sara, but she could not look at Sara. Not yet. Their blood mingled. She was not sure whose was whose any longer.

  All fell to darkness soon enough. No more fireworks, just the hush of the rustling wind. When she could, she started to crawl, feeling with every needling inch the emptiness of that extravagant chamber. Cloth and silk, lace and wool. Blood. All colored to the shade of blood. Yet she could not fathom going to the door, screaming herself hoarse. Sound seemed a violation of this tomb.

  Her scalp throbbed where little clumps of hair had torn free. Already her face swelled from the blows done her. Scalded fingers quested over the savaged body of her friend, though, finally pulling the head into her lap, searching for a quiver of life.

  Faint came the breaths, fainter still the thrumming of her heart. Her hands crossed the worst of the wounds—shrouded in the woman’s own life—and pressed down, doing her best to staunch the final flight. Once, Maynard had told her that victims were given to hysteria. What of this other, colder thing? What did this make her?

  Her eyes shifted to the man beside them, the little man with his little blade, a nonentity before this moment. Only the winestain told anything at all—the winestain and a name, given in the rage of a moment’s variance.

  I’ll protect you, she lied, again and again, to the darkness of her friend’s quarters. This was how they found her, a mess of poor timing and poorer inconvenience. People would do what they would do, particularly if they thought it was in their interest. For family. The words rested bitter on her tongue, choking her like bile.

  Armored men carried her past the sounds of tears in the halls, an emperor’s tears, confined to his rooms for reasons beyond him. Other men bore Sara the other way, down, down to the halls of her father’s surgeons, whom would either stitch the wounds or finish the task. An accident, they would call it. As surely as, no doubt, her step-mother’s insanity had become, or the death of a child.

  “Where do we stop?” she had asked her father once, when the witch was still alive between them. He had evaded her then. He evaded her still.

  They locked her in her room until other physicians came to her, pouring over with prodding fingers and feverish questions. Later, Boyce came, watching her with the force of eight eyes in two. He said little. Scarcely met her gaze. He was a fabulous liar—in any other instance she should have taken it for distress. She knew it for disappointment, spied it in the way he hovered at the door. He was a runner for another, prying at what she might know before the time came to run.

  Only after he was gone were her mother and brother allowed inside. Family descended on her in a feverish storm of tears, and probing touches, desperate, a different kind of fever to them. She scarcely felt them, was numb but for the burn the blood had scalded into her.

  To think, she had wanted to beli
eve. To think he still did.

  There was a great fallacy inherent in the culture old males built: that of age granting wisdom. Simply because one learned care did not mean they had grown wise.

  Chapter 12

  Pirouette. Not a person—the world was spinning. He was huddled in the deep of it, hands wrapped across his legs, a smaller person.

  Now. It was distant—it fell away again, lost in the absence of stable ground. What he saw was the entirety of the moment his father’s head was taken from his shoulders, a sea of eyes and ears and silence, so much damnable silence, looking on as a fat man hacked and hacked at a man who deserved, at the least, a quick death. No one deserved to die like Kasimir died, no one.

  It wasn’t there. None of it existed beyond the borders of sight, and sight honed, slid sidewise to the event. All the blood was trickling down, and all that was honed in on a woman, blond-haired, blue-eyed, a mockery of the moment. A doll, playing house while the world burned. He shuddered, felt the whole thing tingle with the presence of a hand.

  It took him a moment to realize that all the eyes were grey, even those of his father.

  She had a way of making herself known.

  “This isn’t the first of your dreams I’ve seen,” he shouted, suddenly aware, suddenly…apart.

  It was because she wanted him to be. Thoughts, she had told him once, required much less to play around with than the real world. So long as she had a piece of you…and years past had seen more than enough trophies taken.

  “Why?”

  The eyes blinked in unison, went dark. All except Kasimir’s…his father’s, he corrected himself. Odd, how it could suddenly seem she had been there all along, bright eyes staring into the dead man’s. She was stooped like a protective gargoyle above him, hands folded in her lap.

  Little of her was recognizable as the girl that once had been. This witch had gone pale and wafer thin—bone shone beneath her skin, the outline to the storms. She did not look at him.

  “You stopped talking to me,” she said.

  “And you to me,” he returned.

  Somewhere in the dark, there were foundations—mere silhouettes.

  “I felt pain. A lot…a lot of pain.” She blinked, was staring at him. “There are those who learn, and get no wiser. It makes them murderous, Ru. Murderous for those who inherited their ignorance free.”

  He didn’t remember speaking but somehow she had an answer—a convenience, since he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “Servitude’s funny. Most grow to love it and live it. They’ll never dream of revolt.” She ran her hands through his father’s hair, and he saw, for an instant, a different face entirely—her own father’s face, like a statue. “Why couldn’t you be like them?”

  “What is this?” he screamed, and screamed, and the words rippled around him and split him in half, making a world of reflective pools, each showing a different him. It was a fire in his gut—and they said dreaming knew no pain. “Usuri? Did you—did you watch my father die?”

  Only the last word echoed this time. It rippled the bubbles of reflections, until the whole world shook. In one, he saw them standing in an empty hall, ash-strewn footprints dragged to where she now curled.

  “Do not come here,” she said. “Just because a man smiles doesn’t mean he’s not a villain. Just because a woman weeps doesn’t mean she’s not as guilty.”

  Queer was the road before them, a path that bespoke the wintering of another age. Familiarity rested nevertheless in the summering earth about them, green-gold in the warming light and open, so open, to their guarded moods. It was a quickening world, stirred by the notion of war and the promise regardless of sap on the trees and dew on the morning fields.

  Across time and distance this road spoke to Rurik of a younger self, striding with friends into the hopelessness of an exile that was supposed to have had no end. No whisperings of civil war, then. No fire in the heartlands. Men toiled in the fields while children ran from teachers, everything was open and yet insulated, no one cared, and he was just another face on the road.

  Then, they had gone south, looping the perimeter of the country, rather than heading straight through. To go through Usteroy then—it would have been a death sentence. Too many eyes, too many ears, and all focused on a single rotten point: him. No valleys here, no great hills or the horizon of mountains, but the vibrancy was the same, the people on the roads and the endless miles of life uninterrupted.

  Without the Gorjes sniffing their trail, a great weight had been lifted from them, and for all the world cared, they were nothing and no one. There was a freedom in this life. Anyone with a shred of sense should have considered simply fading into the scene and forgetting all the rest.

  He caught Essa looking at him with a curious half-smile—a look that did something all but forgotten to his blood. It was enough to make a man wish he could dance.

  In the nights, when Rowan would set him down—he was too weak yet to walk the distances on his own—the fencer had taken up the strange habit of drumming on a piece lifted from a dead Gorjes man. It was an infectious thing. Not mirthful, exactly, but it was a release, and one that spread even in Essa, at a point.

  Fortunately for all their ears: not enough to make her sing.

  Chigenda observed them all reprovingly, but they were young, too young for a world given over to things so very old, and for once, Rurik did his best to act that age, grinning back at the man and shrugging.

  It was a winding trail they took, passing along Usteroy’s southern skirts before sweeping north to make for its heart. Roundabout, but this time they would take care. At least, this was the goal. Then one eve, at sundown, they overtook another pair of travelers. In itself, this was nothing unusual. Usteroy was populated country, and though they had since left the trains of refugees behind, this was a land of busy highways for people of every class. Soldiers patrolled the roads and even bards were not unusual entities here.

  To happen upon only a pair of soldiers beyond the confines of a town, at dusk, however, was ponderous enough to set both Essa and Chigenda examining the roadsides for any sign of ambush. Simply because they had dropped off the map, after all, did not mean others might not set them back upon it.

  Nothing in the men’s bearing suggested martial purpose. Though they bore the colors of House Cullick, their helmets dangled from their belts and their weapons were sheathed. They tittered at the Company’s approach, but only so long as it took to see that uncertainty was a shared trait. Bags weighted them down and a flute hung from a band around one’s neck.

  Though Chigenda split from the rest, circling wide the trail, the men had turned to them by then, waiting, with nervous smiles. The sight of Essa seemed to put them slightly more at ease—one of them bowed to her at least—but on the lonely road it seemed terribly out of place, and its boon was not so grand.

  “Ho, friends,” the bowed soldier called, straightening. “I spy the drum your man carries there—might I be so bold as to ask if you were the ones striking up so lovely a tune the night last?”

  Though it was the armor that made them from afar, up close it was every bit as clear that war had been these men’s trade. The one was tall, with long, hardening blonde hair whisking over a tattered beard, while the talker was every bit as tall, but darker skinned and haired, with the sort of quick eyes and smile one might better expect of a player than a soldier. Even so, they were hardwrought, well-fed but wiry with drilling, for all that. Leathery men, the sort Rurik’s father had kept about him until the day he died.

  Rowan, never at ease with stealth, brushed past the others at the compliment. “That we were. No professionals, certainly, but travelers all have need of music.”

  The soldier’s smile grew into the sort of broad, full thing for which the inner provinces were known. “That we do. It’s why we tarried. A quiet road’s just not the same.”

  “Headed south for the war?” Essa asked, politely as she might. “Did we miss a muster?�
��

  “Everyone’s running west from the Bastard, north and south and all about—pretty much the only safe way’s west,” Rurik added, eager to play up the worried locals.

  “No, no, it’s…” The soldier trailed, glancing back at the other. That one’s stare had hardened, his manner utterly lacking in repose. Rurik glanced back, saw the animal response in Chigenda, knuckles whitening. “West, I’m sad to say, is not much safer. Lines have shifted—the Lion’s lost some ground and, well, I’d circle abreast of Fairmount or Dendreeburg. Hear tell there’s Bloody Friars pitching camp there. None in or out through there.”

  “You?” the taller soldier asked, eying Chigenda.

  “South,” Rurik said, trying to take a step. “We’re…” The step failed, the pain flared, and he nearly went sideways with how his head spun. Rowan was quick enough to catch him, fortunately, but not quick enough to keep it from their fellow travelers.

  The Zuti lurched forward, spear no longer so tightly pressed to earth. Bloodshed was not the answer, though. It was the tall soldier that melted most at the sight.

  “Boy, sit, rest. All of you. We have been ill-mannered. I know not which side you’re fleeing, but on the road like this it don’t much matter. Jarvis, set the fire, and give me the bag.”

  The other soldier, Jarvis, did as asked. He tossed his bag over freely and motioned for Rurik to sit. Then he sat in turn, producing in short order flint and tinder, with an eye quick-turning for signs of quality brush.

  For a moment, they hesitated. The colors alone demanded that. What was obvious, however, was that these men might have been soldiers, but they were not soldiers now. Not if they were acting with such abandon. Soldiers had purposes. They could be as slovenly or slow-paced as they wished—the Bastard’s camp had proven that—but the purpose remained. They moved toward it, lost themselves in the lack of it. These men gave too freely of themselves.