As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “Deserters,” Essa whispered in his ear as she helped Rowan to hunker him down.

  It made sense enough. No matter how badly a pair of guardsmen stuck out on the open road, it was only fools like their company that should have treated them as an abnormality. Even those that thought better would see the colors, lower their heads, and wait until the next town to ask their questions. You never wanted to guess wrong with soldiers, and end up interfering with a lord’s business. That was a good way to get one’s head chopped straight off.

  Or hanged, depending.

  A look to Chigenda earned a shake of the head. If one among them was to leave for the gathering of kindle, it was not about to be him. Eventually that person was Essa, and in short order they had a fire going, if not an impressive one. It gave Rurik time to cross-examine the leaps his mind took him to in regards to the soldiers. “Don’t believe everything you see,” a foreign voice slithered into his brain. It gave him just enough of a kick to slither out of his stunned non-momentum.

  The other man proved deft with his hands, plucking old, soaked bandages and replacing them with better stock from his bags. He knew his herbs, and scraped easily with a knife. For all his initial concern, Rurik never detected a threat from him now.

  “You were sellswords,” the man observed almost casually. He grinned when Rurik flinched. “Easy. It’s not a hard tell. That’s good steel you’ve got there, and folk mismatched as you are—not exactly farmers on the way to market.”

  “Rurik von Sorbia.” It was an easy lie, albeit an uncommon name. “We were with The Blue Coats, in the east. Things are…they’re much worse there, I’m afraid.”

  The smile turned somber. “Don’t know them, I’m afraid. Or much of your war. We’ve had our own, if you hadn’t noticed. Though I lament the state of yours, if they should be recruiting so—”

  “We’ve eighteen summers to our names,” Essa interjected indignantly. “And getting rather ill to have so many call it into question.”

  Rowan, touching a hand upon his cousin’s shoulder, added, “Yet still too young to realize that anyone who needs shout it might still be young at heart, if not in flesh.”

  There was a stunned pause before the soldiers burst into laughter. Rowan, finding his audience, grinned brightly, not even Essa’s withering stare enough to subdue him.

  “No offense meant, goodwoman,” one of the soldiers amended. “Merely meant as a kindness. Would that we were still so young.”

  “And pretty,” the other added, over a budding flame.

  “And pretty,” his partner confirmed.

  “I don’t know,” Rowan jibed, “our knowing might be somewhat impaired by seasons lost to men and horses, but I’d say you’re fair enough to beat the horses at the least.”

  “Must be some rotten horses you kept in the east,” Jarvis said mildly.

  The other, still smiling over Rurik, stepped around him and offered out his hand at last. It was an offer Rurik quickly took and shook. “Rosswald—Ross,” he said. “And you should be done up for a bit now. Those wounds are nothing for an open road, though. We could run the lot of you over to Bad Sulzheim. Quiet place. Sound medicus, from Walim. Knows his stuff, keeps quiet. At the least, it would be a bed before curfew—it’s not far.”

  Perhaps he was turning into Alviss a little late in his life, but the thought of civilization put an unexpected crimp in Rurik’s gut. He thought of the last, and the last before that, and all he could summon up were visions of fires and steel and laws, too many laws, which would never see him home again. He took a steadying breath.

  “We would be grateful—” Rowan began for them.

  “Too far,” Chigenda broke in unexpectedly. “Dusk. Is bandit time. No horse, no—no greffine. People there, they speak yes. Is no good, war time. Not for foot men. Night will mild here. Still.”

  Given, it was the first time they had the opportunity to ask the man’s opinion since Verdan, but even so, the intensity he mustered for it startled Rurik. He glanced at the Zuti, expecting suspicion or some doubt which colored his view—a focus on the men, rather than the destination. The Zuti’s disposition was easy though, actually, his gaze attentive but not alarming.

  “Oh come now,” Rowan blurted.

  Chigenda stared him down. Not a moveable man, if he chose to be obstinate.

  “I am afraid that our friend here does tend to know best with these things. We owe him a great deal.” Essa sighed. “I’m sorry. It does sound like a wonderful offer. I don’t believe Adisa here—” she looked pointedly at Chigenda as she said that, “—would have us sleep easy until danger rests well enough behind us. Not an easy opinion to stomach, I grant you, but it does keep us moving.”

  “Which has its own merits,” the soldier Jarvis mused.

  “We would still take you up on the fire,” Rurik said, though he still wasn’t sure what Chigenda was on about.

  “Just as well,” Ross countered, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We would be glad to have you. Besides, what inn would allow for more of that drumming?”

  Rowan’s lips opened and fell upon a reply. He looked directly at Ross, then bashfully lowered his eyes. There was a hint of a blush to his cheeks that spoke to Rurik, however, of many jokes to come in the nights ahead.

  “Do either of you play?” Essa quickly cut in. Rurik blinked, uncertain, but for a moment it seemed she wasn’t trying to twist the dagger deeper—she loved to make her cousin squirm—but to ask, in earnest. Neither of the soldiers seemed overly concerned by her, or overly engaged.

  “I do,” Jarvis said after a moment.

  “It’s fate, then,” Essa said crisply. “My cousin Rowan, here, is a fine musician when the evening calls for it, and I can dance and sing—” she twisted at Rurik’s own snort, at the mention of “singing”, “—so I dare say an extra tune would do our humble efforts well.”

  There was a routine to the twilight. Many might have felt more comfortable with more people, but Rurik knew that Chigenda was not one of those people. The Zuti kept to his usual strides, staking out certain places in the glade they chose, without ever explaining what it was he stalked. When they had horses, he might have taken to them, but they had adapted with the changes of time, and this night, Essa gathered her share of herbs and set some small snares as Rowan laid out the sleeping rolls and organized a few things with their new accompaniment—as well as a few private conversations away from Rurik. Try as he might, no one—not even their new guests—let him do anything.

  Which left him, at least, more than enough time to observe their new companions. For as night turned to day, and the hours of conversation stretched over food and music and boots on dewy trails, that was what the men became: additions to a depleted party, boosts to wearied spirits and a distraction from the journey they had taken on themselves. West they moved, and south as well, border-bound, though in this country the borders had been abandoned, toll stations forgotten by the small bands of vulnerable soldiers that were supposed to man them.

  Drafted for the fighting—Jarvis and Rosswald told them as much. Or abandoned their posts. There were men that did that, though they were hunted far and abroad. The Cullicks were not a family which forgot such offences. Rurik tried his best not to point out the obvious, there.

  Though the obvious came out in time. They were both of them deserters. Soldiers in Cullick’s army, true soldiers—not drafted peasants—from the eastern reaches. It wasn’t the duty that undid them—truth be told, they hadn’t much cared for the idea of country before either entered Cullick’s army, nor did they still. A soldier’s life put food on the table for oneself and one’s family. It was the same story told in a hundred places, in a hundred lands.

  Why had they gone? This he could not seem to pry from them, no matter how hard he needled. Fear, he guessed, though their fear did not strike him as that of death. Being caught, certainly, but death itself? No, these were strong men in the prime of their lives, who (seemingly) had up and left their brothers at a
critical venture. Something about it didn’t set well with Rurik.

  One couldn’t trust deserters. But then again, he mused, one wasn’t supposed to be able to trust sellswords either. Paradox, there.

  The breeze was in their faces and the clouds moved swiftly east, away from them, like men fleeing a storm. It was warm, though earlier storms had broken the worst of the heat, and they were dry, which was its own mercy. Together, laughing—and stripped of any identifying colors—they strode into a little burgh amongst the hills, a place where no one had any real reason to be. There were no archways there, no high stones. A wall ran the length of the place, but had fallen through in wide gaps. Its stones had been carted away to shore up farmhouses long ago. The grass and earth were overgrown, villagers scarce.

  It was far enough from the border they did not worry about fighting, retreats or disarray. Yet it was close enough to carry them both still vaguely in the directions they needed. Together they took rooms at the local inn—its burbling spring really the only reason this place existed at all, so far as Rurik could tell—and settled in for a long night away from the stars.

  There was a medicinal smell, sulfur and bubbling milk. The windows here had no coverings and light seemed to make frescoes of the world around. Panels displayed prominently or—no, characters, men, men and horses and gryphons, figures dotting an ostentatious hall. Blurs. All of them were blurs.

  Their colors were faded. Dusk was a saint’s sun above the hall. It moved, all moved—it took him a moment to realize he was being dragged. There were arms on him, arms in arms like chains, and everywhere they moved a long, black trail went behind them, into darkness.

  What he thought was perfume became the stench of war—sweat and ash and gunpowder, and he would have choked if he possessed his own lungs. Shadow stretched before as well as behind—those beside, no faces. A broad man, undead he nearly called him, for it was a pale shadow, pale and broad and terrible, its eyes like—

  Silk, he realized. That was silk upon his breast. Silk-smooth hair. Silken eyes, a confidence that dreams could not bring.

  Again, they danced. Again they stirred. He stepped from her and she from him and they were caught, she shaking off the men along their trail, into a disconnection from the scene.

  “I know your name,” she whispered, a breath.

  There was nothing, in the old stories, worse than a sorcerer who had the true measure of you. Your name. Through it, they could work such terrible things, such malevolent wonders…but none of them had ever been Usuri, or, likely enough, a real sorcerer.

  The men let her shadow-self fall prostrate before the lion, a huddled mass of forgotten being. She had forgotten to be, and the world had forgotten she was, and all of them, together, had made her something very much less than she ever should have been. He thought: I may fall. Her laughter was an ocean around them, but the shadows did not seem to notice—they were a part of something else.

  Which is when he noticed they had stepped back, but were not lost. The soldiers. He squinted, froze. “How did you…?” And she smiled, knowing what he saw, seeing what he saw.

  They were men he knew, men that slept beside him in an inn on a road not so far away. Another life. The scent, belatedly realized, was her—she reeked of the deaths which she lived.

  “I told you I saw. I told you I know your name. And I told you not to come. Your place…is not here. Not in these valleys, not in these fields. Not in the lands where a red sun falls. Owls are meant for trees, Ru. Go home. Go away. Forget that I…”

  The sound of something, some distant shudder, unknit her strength. She looked away.

  “My father made a prophecy, Rurik. I’m making of it what I may.”

  The lion lifted her shadow-self up, looked into her eyes. Storm and sun met, colliding above a green sea. Gryphons slid below, forgotten, drowning, something less than what was around—he blinked, and he wanted to say that every man had tasks, that there were always more, that no matter how far one traveled there was duty and there was destiny, and there was nothing in them but what one made of it, but these words sounded hollow, and she already knew them anyways.

  Prophecy, she had told him long ago, was what the individual made of it. Her father spoke of destiny, but destiny was a word, no different from any other that man concocted. You could see something, without ever living it. You could die, and all that had been destiny could be unmade as soon as your head lay pressed into a pillow.

  Yet he had heard her scream once, in a distant place. Under the protection of this lion-man. She hurled words at him. He closed his eyes and let them fall. Dream within a dream, life within a life. He had made his choice, as she had made hers. Stubbornness was not just a trait for children—it was the bread and butter of prophecy.

  * *

  Too many thoughts. Too difficult to parse out how she felt about a village like this—apprehension or distaste. There was something inherently heartbreaking in such a town, where ordinary life was once the norm but nothing thrived there now but husks of people waiting for news of other husks—bad news, or worse. There was no good.

  The southern provinces were safer, in spite of everything. Ravonnen mercenaries—or so the soldiers claimed—might have crossed the border, but there was no fighting yet. So far. The whole of the east—madness, everywhere she looked, in what had, for generations, seen no armies marching anywhere but out. There was an irony there, in ruin of a heartland.

  She hated these places because they were places for ghosts, and this wa how she viewed all cities: clusters of noise in life, giving into the unfulfilled in death. Wailing, eternal wailing, instead of freedom under the blue skies and the green leaves. Or maybe it simply made her think of the camps, to the north, where her mother’s people were said to lie. She would never know—she made a promise, long ago, that she would never look upon those places.

  They would haunt her.

  Despite the oppression of the place, she sank into its crystal waters, a tiny, insignificant pool really, but heaven all the same on her aching muscles. The water was warm, bubbled, the air more than a little sulfurous, but sedate for all that. She closed her eyes and tried to forget her insignificance in the wide fields beyond, to forget that she was such a small person in a very large world. She was not and would never be another ghost.

  Outside, another thunderstorm. She dared not go out. What few trees lay scattered among the village struck her more as targets than protection. The inn, thankfully, was sturdy, its staff hardworking, unassuming folk. They reminded her, in their way, of Voren—or rather, what she had thought Voren was, once. Quiet, caring—their work was their life. She frowned. No, not like Voren at all. As it turned out, that one had wanted more than he ever might have let be known.

  Through the thin walls, she could hear Rowan and their new companions speaking next door. Laughter, sometimes. They clicked in a way she recognized, eased her frown away. She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate on the heat. She couldn’t help herself—some of the words leaked through regardless.

  She was happy for him. He needed this. They all needed this, in truth. Chigenda had been the first in the pools, oddly enough. His people did not seem to have the holdups in regards to bathing that some of hers did.

  Silence, for a moment. She wondered if they had kissed, if they had finally let down that wall in front of Rowan. She knew what they saw, the looks of one spirit recognizing a kindred. They had tried to hide it from the rest of them, but she was a keen observer. People did not jump to that conclusion because they did not tend to think in that way. If two men were to say they were brothers, one would take them at their word. If a man and a woman said they were brother and sister, most would nod, but the scrutiny would still be there. Competition, in its way. People were always sniffing it out. This…they thought something else about things like this, unfortunately. She was not even certain how Chigenda would react, if he knew. And Rurik…

  Clueless as ever, aren’t you, love? She rested her head back against t
he stone, teased her tongue over that word. It felt right, in its way. Wrong in others. Too much between them now. Another struggle. No wonder everyone called them children.

  The knock startled her back, rattled some of the water from its confines. Bits of her skin had pruned, her head spun a little—she must have fallen asleep.

  “Essa?” Rurik. Hells.

  She lifted herself up—swooned a little from the heat—and stumbled onto the rock floor. “A moment,” she called, and he obliged, waiting as she plucked her way through discarded clothes. There was something about purged flesh sliding back into stained garments—one might have been reborn, but it made the process feel terribly half-assed. She did what she could.

  Outside, he inclined his head to her—shyly—as though he had expected her to emerge sans clothes. If that’s what you hoped… She frowned, but he came to the point swift enough.

  “We’ve been looking for you. Then I realized: no one had seen you get out of the springs.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, ignoring the obvious.

  He shook his head emphatically. “Though I want us gone by morning. Few folk have come in this eve, tales of a Sorbian force moving up the plains.”

  “That would be a horrible conflict of interest for you, oh Rurik of Sorbia.”

  Rurik flinched, a smile slowly spreading. “Sellswords have no country, really.”

  She shrugged, though what she thought was this: Sellswords are the habitual wanderers of the world, different only by trade from actors and poets and troubadours. Home became more about people than any physical confines. She watched him, a little longer than she might have otherwise. It was strange, sometimes, the people one picked to populate those homes.

  They went to bed early that night, not long after, intending to be up early as well. For all that, the hour was late when Rowan—last of all of them—heel and toed into their room, a child sneaking home from a forbidden night. She shifted the sheets up over her smile. She would give him this moment—he had put up with so much from them. The man was out and snoring before long, though, and not even a stain of alcohol about him. That had never been his vice.