As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  He sagged, uncertain. “Anelie? Kana?” The girl gave nothing away, but the stillness told him as much as any words. So. They were still alive, then. “You are worse than the whore’s disease.”

  He could have expected many different reactions to that—though silence most of all, for there was a chill to the girl that struck him unnatural. What came, however, was beyond him, caught him so offguard she had him backpedaling toward the sleeping beauty’s bed with a sort of involuntary panic. Charlotte advanced, a veil sudden lifted, with a fire in her eyes as only killers tended to know.

  “Listen to me, Matair. I fucked you, because I needed to do something my father didn’t have his paws in. I fucked you, because I needed an escape from all this structured nonsense. That’s it. You were available, and obviously willing. What? Does my frankness offend you? Did you think it was because of your strapping looks? Don’t make me laugh. You were a cock at hand when I was at my breaking point. And if it makes you feel any better, the whole thing damn well scuttled me as well, so it’s not as though you’re alone in suffering.”

  He could but stare, such was his surprise. This was nothing of the girl he had thought to know over dinners and dances years before. Then, she had been the proper lady, and he the smitten lord. To hear her speak like this…unfathomable. Crude beyond a noble’s bearing.

  His reaction did little to halt her steam. “Men. You walk a triumphal road, and do you ever stop to look it? No. You chatter, and you preen, and you expect us to fawn behind you; you’re so caught up in yourselves you don’t notice the mean little alleys you’ve forced us down. Well? Where’s your anger? Freedom is so much your due, even to prod it as I have is to make your kind angry. Come on, Matair. Where’s your rage?”

  It had always seemed to Rurik that the best leaders in the world were those with gentleness in their souls. This creature was so opposite of that vision, so utterly removed from expectation he felt…off footed. Even his anger felt stunted, off kilter.

  There was a fact Alviss had taught him about learning: to grow, you had to change, and to change, you had to sometimes let go of what once had been seen as true.

  Either that, or this woman was simply mad. The verdict was still out, insofar as he could tell.

  The theory was not aided as the woman’s fire ebbed and the forms of jurti slowly overtook the emotional outlashing. She slid back, but slowly, as though testing the waters into which she had fallen, the lines of her face easing as delicately as her steps. Slow, steadying breaths reclaimed her, but her eyes never left him, defiant as anything wild. Truly, a lioness.

  “Rurik!”

  Such raw pleasure spun the word across the room that Rurik could not help the disorientation which followed it. His body trembled—friends dying, bound by a woman’s hate, and then, impossibly, a sound he had thought lost. A child’s voice was like music in the midst of an empty ocean. It breathed new life into the mirror, brought ripples to the stillness.

  Anelie. He started toward the sound, jaw slack, but feet knowing purpose. Their eyes met and his heart leaped. The girl child had grown in the last year, her hair longer, her limbs ganglier, but that smile, those eyes—they were the same as he had ever known. But slowly, slowly, did his mind expand to encompass the other figures stretching from her hands. Tan skin. Smoldering gaze. Usuri watched, the guide and protector both—unshackled, yet bound. And little Kana beside, her little legs grown larger, the shape of her childhood taking stubby form, but with a gaze wide, unknowing. She did not recognize him; could not possibly recognize him.

  He made it perhaps two steps before Charlotte ground a heel into his foot and sent him tumbling. Anelie shrieked and surged, but her arm went only to the end of a chain formed of a witch’s all too mortal flesh. She tugged, but Usuri tugged her back, and Rurik was left sprawled on the floorboards for the third time, hands bound and dignity nonexistent. He snarled like a rabid dog, but he doubted it worried anyone.

  “Stop it, the both of you,” Usuri snapped.

  “What in Assal’s name are you doing, Usuri? Kill her! Kill her!” he screamed in turn, attempting to lunge as best he could at the noblewoman. She stepped back just far enough to crack the flat of her foot across his face.

  “I SAID STOP.”

  There was something in the words. It felt as if his innards were jerked against the walls of his body, a man picked up and slammed back to earth. From the way Charlotte crumpled beside him, he was not the only one. The words spun in his head and pounded notes there; he felt shame, overwhelming shame, and yet he could not put a reason to the feeling.

  He was still staring into nothing when he felt the children’s hands upon him, his family loosed to preen and weep and wonder. It felt like ants crawling up his cheeks, and where he touched was only so much air. Brother! A whisper in the dark. Brother! A pleading howl to the mournful moon. “Brother!” He groped for them, felt himself weeping tears as though he were some addled newborn pup.

  Why do you stop me? he shouted into the dark. With the words, an ember in his pocket trickled and burned its way into the hollows of his chest. It spread, radiating not the warmth of a campfire’s embrace, but the vehemence of a forest fire. At that moment he knew it for the coin he held so precious to his breast and pondered just what its hold on him was. What was nothingness before that moment became certainty: that coin was not a gift, but an anchoring line through which she might always reach him. It was not a winging messenger pigeon, but some back alley plane. Usuri needed no bit of hair or blood to own him.

  The storm spread its wings and enwrapped him, her eyes the center of its wrath. He winced away, in fear not of her, but of what she could do.

  We came to set you free upon your road. Why? Why do you do this?

  “Rurik. Look at me.”

  He could ignore that. In this light, she was too terrible to behold.

  “Ru!”

  That, the child inside could not ignore. Zu-zu. He forced himself to meet the tempest billowing from her, lending her a formless power which could not be matched. Dimly, he was aware of the rest around him, but this was something else—something apart. She’s killed them!

  It was the childhood name which had summoned him back to her, which she used to creep back into his graces even when the ills of the world were great. They were children here. It did not make them equals. This was Usuri the magician, Usuri the witch, and he was nothing more than little Rurik, her erstwhile playmate, senseless crush and inveterate wastrel. He was alone with her, and she was angry with him.

  “She has done nothing of the sort.” The words lashed him unerringly. “You hear the words and read nothing of the weight behind them. She remains a better actress than you! If she wanted them dead, why, why would you have been brought here? I told you not to come!”

  I came to help you! The thought faltered—it felt suddenly childish, needy. He scowled, knowing it was her will that pushed it in that direction. What would you have me do?

  “I would have you listen.” Her reply was savage. “Do I look bloodied, to you? Do I look ill-struck? I am not here because they wish me, Rurik. I am here because I wish to be.”

  That stoked a chill up his spine. You would work for those that killed my father?

  “If even one board survives the rot, the foundation yet has hope. Stop building people to hate on what you expect. Look at what is and—”

  She did something. Or someone did something to her. Suddenly he was slammed back into prescience, into harmony with the disjointed world around him. All was wailing and splintering sound, and he sickened to his core, but he could see and he could feel without the hoary weight of a man beneath the waves. What’s more: his nostrils exploded with what he could only describe as a cross between dead dog and soured fish.

  Bodies poured into the room, and elsewhere he could hear a voice he did not know screaming, “Assassins! Assassins in the castle!” He did not know how long had passed. He was on his back, with Charlotte sitting—no, he shuddered, let the world reali
gn—Charlotte was laying on her back beside him, eyes wide as the point of a sword bore down on her dainty neck. It took him a moment to process the shadow which clung to its ends.

  Rowan!

  Grimness tugged at his bearing, but the swordsman would not have done it. He thought. Further on, following the looks of shock on his kin’s faces, he spied Chigenda standing over Usuri’s own crumpled body. The Zuti had her pinned, a hand wrapped around her throat as she battered his arm for life. Horror flooded so palpably through Rurik he could taste its oily texture. Yet the children held him down, and his body was weak, dizzy—the sounds he made were so small.

  “Don’t kill her!” Essa shouted from the doorway. Her back was pressed against the door, foot jammed in the crack beneath. “Chigenda, do you hear me? Leave the witch alone!”

  The witch. That was all she was to them. He winced, groping for an image of the child that had been. It was precisely why Chigenda would kill her—he had seen what she could do once, and he would not suffer a witch to live.

  Essa started to shout to Rowan instead, but the phrase pinched off in the midst, took on a sharp and sudden scream. The sword point moved, not down but away as the swordsman twisted sharply, and steel rang against steel as a shape swept in from the same servant’s quarters Usuri had occupied but a moment before. Like a black mist, that one, steel leading, and it was quick. So bloody quick. Rowan staggered back under the sudden ferocity of a series of blows, barely able to keep his footing, let alone riposte. Essa sprang from the doorway at that moment, flinging a long hunting knife ahead of her.

  It gave her cousin the breathing room he needed, but nothing more. A few feet back from a rasping Charlotte, the pair split apart, Rowan sliding his feet back as his blade drew up to a defensive guard, and the shadow pirouetting out of the way of the speeding knife. It thunked into the far wall hard, and Essa had the good sense to stop where her cousin hovered.

  “Rurik, are you alright?” she called.

  He nodded, clutching at his own throat, feeling more than merely seeing Usuri’s pain. But the hands loosened with the new entry. Where one left off, the other began. The shadow was scarcely a hand’s span away when Chigenda leapt into the fray, jabbing through a quick set of probing thrusts with his spear.

  “Protect her! Protect her!” Charlotte pleaded, though to whom he could not say. The girl on the bed or the witch on the floor? He no longer had any clear idea what was happening.

  Kana looked at him, and then away, without speaking. Anelie pulled his upper body against her and whispered sweet praises in his ear. “Oh brother, brother, you finally came. Someone, I knew that someone would have to come, but I tried, I tried so hard…” And she was crying, without concealment or pretense. He found an arm folding around her, felt the promises welling up that he would not let her see him cry, that he would be strong until this was done.

  Who am I to make such a promise?

  They were not a match. Terror trilled through Rurik to see it. Chigenda was a warrior born and bred, but this shade made killing his art. Desperate were the exigencies, the mindless bob and weave—they went by feeling, both of them, no set forms. Chigenda blocked a low thrust, just, and chopped through the aftermath—was parried, rebuked.

  No jeers or taunts as some men did. There was a simple blurring, especially as Rowan joined the dance, the pair hoping to pull the one between them. It was more embrace than dance, in truth. They seemed as one. Body ruled, faster than thought. Thought’s only place was observation. The constant hunt for flaw. There was, by Rurik’s reckoning, none to be found.

  Rowan knew his weapon. Chigenda made it an extension of himself. But their opponent? It was a piece—the whole body was a weapon. It tripped Rowan at the knee, slammed an elbow into Chigenda’s gut when Rowan caught the blade.

  And what a blade! Rurik hissed, staggering against his sister in an effort to move closer to the battle as furniture shattered and flung, men tripped and stumbled and punched and kicked and sweated into the killing, and no one died. Rowan had one of the guardsmen’s swords—a broad, flat blade, one he knew but with which he was not at home. Chigenda had the sweeping extravagance of his feathered spear still, but the other held a blade unlike any other in Idasia. It was curved, elongated, yet slender—it had more in the cut than the thrust. Yet for all its slimness, it was sturdier than those which met it. It marked him. It was singular.

  Rurik knew him then, and he gaped in the purest terror he had ever known.

  That terror leapt across time and space, gilded under darkest skin and hammering pain, to a place far, far from here, at the other end of the country. He was an exile again. They were nowhere, in the asshole of the world, but there they had found one of his father’s friends, and that friend had been fleeing for his life. What came for him came also for them, and silver eyes had reflected in the horribly graceful motions of that bizarre blade as he cleaved through those in his path and picked the rest to pieces. At that time, it had been the closest Rurik ever came to death. For his father’s friend, it was death—and there had been nothing they could do about it.

  In that nightmare, the shadow drew close indeed, pressing every crack in the obsidian features of his shadow, every strand of the equally charcoal strands of his hair, into horrific focus. Words reached: “There’s a bounty on you, little one, but it’s none I’ve been given.” Pain, so much pain, but worse, perhaps, that he had known and not ended the rest. The shadow receded from that day, but left a blemish in the darkest hollows of his heart which he could never shake.

  And here, now, the creature was again. He began to scream.

  “It’s him! It’s him!”

  A fool’s note. Doubtless, the others already knew. All his screaming did was wake the terror in his kin’s hearts, and they too began to cower, and Kana to weep, and would that he could take them in his bound arms, but he shrank, abruptly a child again.

  It was Essa who slapped him, let the pain do what words could not. Anelie screamed at the presumption, and threw herself at her, beating her with her tiny fists, but Essa threw her off, shouting for her to be still, and with a dagger she severed the bonds that still held Rurik firm. Then she pulled him up by the collar of his shirt, saying, “There are moments here, Rurik. Moments, and nothing but. These screams are not ours alone. Do you hear me? This is no longer our time.” And when he did not reply she shook him, and shouted it again, but she had no need, for he was nodding his head emphatically, no matter how blurry his gaze.

  “Usuri,” he croaked.

  “We have to go!” Anelie pleaded, needling her way back into his graces.

  Undoubtedly she was right. But even so. He looked at her, tried to harden some piece of his wearied heart. “We will. Anelie. We are. I just—please. Be calm.”

  Her gaze was terrible, a thing of doubt and fury. “I have been locked here, among the people who killed father, for months, and you tell me—be calm?” Her bottom lip shuddered, and her fists clenched, and she was not, in that moment, the little girl he had known and protected throughout his youth. “I would kill her,” she said, with a nod at the wobbling Charlotte.

  The door shuddered, punctuating that madness with the felling blows of an axe. Essa twisted back, said, “Go,” and then she was gone, racing for the door. He reached out and squeezed his sister’s hand, tried to give a reassuring smile to Kana, and tottered toward the fallen witch.

  Beyond them, in their own pocket of the world, the fighting took another turn. He saw the assassin feint and then swing his blade the opposite way, saw Rowan—whose blade had once shattered under a similar blow—parry that blow and turn it into a driving thrust, low, so low, and the assassin—fast as older men might dream—snatched it aside and stepped back in time to face the Zuti head on once again. They gave him no room to breathe, and the cluttered room gave him no great space for dexterity. It was that alone which contained him.

  No faltering here. Not now. On the ground before him there was friendship, tainted and burned by too ma
ny trials, but still. It remained.

  He ignored the noblewoman pulling herself away from the scene and went to Usuri. She retched onto the cobbles, and a purpling bruise had already taken shape around her neck like the outline of a noose. It would have been pleasant to hold her, the thought came to him, to take her away from all this and sit and bask in the silences that had grown since they were children. A part of him feared this would never again be the case in this life.

  At his touch upon her back she riveted, fear and hate warring in her eyes, but the tempest startled, and eased, when they took him in. Could he bear the loss, once more, of such a friendship as this? Must he?

  Someone went down, beyond the tangle of his vision. He offered Usuri his hand.

  There was a moment he watched indecision war in her. Then her walls tightened and she shook her head. He glanced back, saw Kana and her caretaker were gone. He looked further abreast, saw their shadows disappearing into the servant’s room. Then he looked back to Usuri, and he could not keep the water from his eyes any longer.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  So she touched his hand and whispered, “Love, if it were me alone, I would put this all aside and I would leave with you. But it is about a war. It is about an old man set aflame. It is another with his head lopped off, and families set to kill one another at a word. It is so much, so much we’ve all forgotten how to change, forgotten how to live beyond and there is…there is a chance we can…”

  The hammering was growing louder. Someone shouted. The three men were shadow-figures in the back of his vision, a tangle of dark shapes on the hard floor. “Charlotte,” Usuri said. The name chilled him. “What?” he asked, but then he saw she was not speaking to him.

  “Call off your dog.”

  A flash of anger defined the voice behind him: “I will not!”

  “We all must choose,” Usuri pressed. “You chose long ago to lie, and brought them to this door. Choose now to change that, as you attempted to do with the children.”