As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  What he found there was disheartening. The battle had splintered. Little was clear, and less was certain. Men had formed pockets, and drifted farther back from the ravine. It was clear Ivon’s men had caught the Bastard at surprise, and scattered and run down a good deal of his band, but the Bastard’s force was biting back hard. He frowned at this. Stubborn or resolute, Isaak did not know which to name them, but in his short time amongst the Bastard’s camp, his measure of the captains therein had pointed to such, and he knew any number of them might form a potent rallying cry.

  But his present concern was more poignant. He was looking for a man. A man who might remember. A man who could be trusted to keep order in disaster’s midst. Neither were things he could abide in this mess.

  Only a fool would have said he was not scared by the prospect, though. In ways, it would have been easier to simply lie beneath the dead and hope. But Berric was not the sort to die on his own. He was not the fool Isaak had heard Ivon make the Bastard out to be; he was not the type to see shame in retreat and reorder, only sense, logic, and a bid for time. So Isaak had to wade back through strange places, taking fright at every twitching shadow, and surviving because of it.

  The Ulneberg, where Isaak and all his siblings had grown up, awed at the scale of the trees, the strangeness of the folk across the river, the sheer quantity of shadows impossible to find elsewhere, had become a firestorm of death. Ruins. He crept down scorched earth and shattered bark, past bodies of men throwing themselves at one another. Everything was hazy, choked, always echoing with battle—near, far, all around him.

  Wryly, he thought of a few priests that would decry this for Hell.

  More than once he was bundled into a charge or countercharge, arrows flitting over heads, sticking wobbling into chain links or bared flesh, spear points bristling with hunger for either. Shouting did no good. Nor did protest. He moved as he could, where he could, and simply tried to survive when others took the lead.

  A lot of men were still huddled in the open, crowded up and down the overgrown patch as far as Isaak could see. The fight had spread out, though, into the trees, into the shadows, become pitched, unclear. Most the cavalry on either side seemed to be down, or had surrendered their beasts for the moment—in these tight spaces, they wouldn’t have done much good. The only thing he could see to give blessing to his shitty luck, however, was that the suddenness of the assault had stolen the option of cannon from the rebels’ arsenal. An army on the move was always at its most vulnerable, for without its artillery, it was deprived of a bulwark most generals came to depend on.

  No pretty lines here. No drums and men lined up for it. No, it was shove pike up whoever’s ass you could find, and ask the question as to whom had kindly taken it later.

  No mistake, though; the former was precisely what the impeccable Ser Berric was drumming up when Ivon found him. The rebel captain had several dozen soldiers hopping to, closing a sort of box of bright, bristling spear points intersected with long guns. He was making himself a firing line on a little knoll, to give himself something to hold. It wasn’t ideal, but Isaak started running all the same.

  Others followed. Fools didn’t realize that the larger the numbers, the more of a target they became. He ignored more than one man’s screaming falter beside him. One even took a bit of lead from the very line to which they were scrambling. Others raised their hands, bellowing, trying to get their fellows to recognize them, but there was no way of knowing if they could. This, more than anything, was why lords gave their people standards.

  They might have all been mowed down, if not for the fact that a crowd of Ivon’s soldiers came pouring from the trees on the right at the same time they were shoving forward. Berric’s lines twisted, only managed to rotate through a single firing line before it was all to pikes and swords and whatever else men had to hand. An axe took the anchoring figure Isaak had picked. Split his skull like a ripe melon.

  Isaak and the others shoved and stumbled through. It sowed more chaos than add any weight to the lines, but that was all the better for Isaak. Men shoved, shouted, scattered. Some broke. The whole line was in danger of disintegration.

  Metal shrieked on metal, and as Isaak slid past a wobbling spear, he caught sight of his prey.

  He remembered hunting here with his brothers when he was younger. Not here, exactly, but in the forest. He remembered how different they had been. He and Rurik chattering away, Ivon always looking to their father’s lead, and Kasimir, well…always silent. Always watching. That had been among the first lessons. The wise man pays attention.

  The second lesson had been: he who wants to live does not hesitate.

  Ivon was the knight. He might have gotten off on the old stories, with monologues and challenges and two men pirouetting through the twilight. All nonsense. Berric only saw him when he was already lifting his sword, and that was as much of a challenge as he bothered to bellow. The only problem with the scenario was other people.

  Someone jostled into him from behind, whether pushing or pushed he could not say, and threw off his swing. His blade scythed along the edge of Berric’s arm but rammed itself into another man’s hip all the same. That one howled, went screaming down, and Issak, stumbling past, only just managed to bring his sword back around to divert Berric’s rejoinder.

  An arrow pinged off the helmet of a man next to him, and that soldier fell between them. They fought over him like jackals over someone else’s kill, the man’s dizzied baying emphasizing their blows. The point of something hot slid through Isaak’s shirt and down his right side, but it left only a cold line behind it. He wondered if it had nicked him or killed him.

  No thought. Berric struck him with a mailed fist and he staggered, managed a bemused, Huh, but in the same moment Berric raised his sword an axe sliced into the hand and sent a thumb bouncing off Isaak’s head. No hesitation. Isaak hacked Berric in the face even as the man goggled at his misfortune, his blade snapping through cheek and splitting the skull wide.

  In the stories, men threw down their weapons then, songs were sung, the fight leached out and jubilee united. Run, the little voice cried. Run to your daughter now! But before he could he was reeling, Berric’s body not even fallen yet and something heavy—a maul, maybe—hit him full in the chest and turned his limbs to mud. The world wobbled, all flying dirt and frayed men, and he was on his back again, staring up at a white sky for all of a second before another body fell atop him. The air sucked out of him and the hunter was returned to the realm of the dead.

  * *

  Her stomach churned. She was uncertain what to feel, but she was acutely aware of the raucous air in the world beyond. The sounds grew louder. Men, so many men, not at all like a herd of animals—no, she could not even think to compare them. The battle came alive around her. No drums, no trumpets—those were playthings, falsehoods. War horns sounded and she put her lips to her own, let their call be her call, let Tessel’s commitment be his own downfall.

  At the same time, twenty miles away, messengers would be delivering the word to Mariel, Witold’s Master of Words. On the merit of those words, other men would ride, the full force of eastern Idasia, to fall upon the Bastard’s leaderless and divided camps. It was a gamble. Every moment they drew breath was a gamble—a game they had no choice but to play.

  Then the arrows hissed and everything sang in tune to the iron song. Men lurched, fell. Some pled for mercy, some hurled curses. Too familiar. To think, there was a time they should have scowled to name me soldier. She drew and loosed and drew again, and death came wheeling down.

  “Give them freedom, lads!” Ivon shouted, and then the captured horses went free, scattering ahead of the soldiers, into the very thunder which terrified them. Gunpowder sent the animals into a frenzy, the roll of sparks in the dust, and everything turned mad as the beasts died by the dozens, shields for men, and others kicked each other to death beneath the trees.

  A waste. Such a waste.

  Then they began to run. Someone had t
o give, had to move, and it was the men of the Ulneberg who closed the trap. Ivon had to play the knight. She notched and fired, notched and fired, and meanwhile he rallied his cavalry, the lengthening shadows making ash and coal of hair and armor alike. A shot shattered a nearby tree, but the bark clattered off horse and rider both. The animals whinnied, bucked. He was there and he was gone again, the helm clamped down, sword raised in a final salute. To his men. To the God. To his family. Who knew?

  Who cares?

  The trap closed.

  And wheeled again.

  Some of the cavalry had swung back around, vaulting the ditch and pounding for the trees. Men shouted—more than a few hurled torches into the brush, trying to scare the horses off. It started smoke. It kicked up fires. Some were beaten down, others flared. She fired, and notched, and fired again. Ensil, does that make you dead? She peered across the bank, in those fleeting instants between the repetition but—bodies, just bodies, dancing to and fro. Someone clambered up the bank, another fell into it. Men slaughtered with abandon.

  The cavalry charge was broken, as trees often did, but they remained too much for the archers. A sacrifice, for a greater gain. Roswitte danced beneath a man’s spearpoint, narrowly evaded a galloping flurry of hooves as she scrambled with dozens of other men from the safety of the trees. Ash and smoke swirled, stung the eyes.

  It was in that instant an arrow thudded in the tree a few feet back. She twisted, hunter’s intuition pulling her back toward the fray, toward where horses and men and gryphons tore one another to pieces. “Move!” Someone shouted, but she ignored him, said, “He’s no archer.” For she could see him, the shooter, a squirrely man with steady arms, but not nearly the width to be accustomed to the draw. He had eyes for her, and he pulled back hard, fired again. This one thudded a yard short, embedded itself harmless in the dirt.

  An archer was firm as the oak. An archer knew where she would put the arrow before she ever drew. Roswitte raised her bow, pulled the string to her cheek and released, not even a shifting of her feet, and the man tumbled away as though struck by the hand of Assal.

  No time to gloat. She was too close to the fighting. Anchors formed before her eyes—those of the men who led the madness. Ivon and Tessel, each on horseback, laid about them in the fray, heedless of the smoke and the arrows, eyes only for the steel of the old world. Of that world fools always named for men.

  She started to draw, and another archer crashed into her, sent them both sprawling. The leg bent poor beneath her. She bit back the howl only with agonized force. That fire intensified as someone—or thing—ran over them, forcing her breaths into the muck. She reached for her bow and snatched it back, leaning on it as she put her weight to the lift, and it was not just her, but the dying man as well, their weights not equal, but her strength the greater. All she had to do was angle him, and she managed just that, heaving him off without thought for how it might have pained him.

  One of Tessel’s men loomed over them, fighting hand to hand with another man beside. Her free hand pulled the tanning knife from her bandoleer, and with a cold purpose, she hamstrung him. When he hit the ground, she ended his screams.

  She crawled over his body, found her feet. The crowd surged, seethed, receded. It swept her along in a frenzy of furious blades—a mind cast too wide would meet only death, here. She wanted to look, to know, but beyond the frenzy was nothing, was empty of all but the bodies separating her and it. Horns were blaring throughout the wood; someone was giving, someone was breaking.

  This, she had to laugh, was the music of the damned. Unnecessarily heroic. War was death, and dying, like any diseased dog on the cobblestones.

  Like Fallit, choking on his own blood in a dank hole in the ground, as dogs called men turned their hated craft on living flesh.

  They were as children, in their way. What distanced them from that comparison, though, was that there echoed no laughter on the field of their play. Succumbed to the rage of a duped man’s realizations, Tessel spurred his horse to wild abandon, intent on riding down his noble enemy in Ivon of Verdan.

  This, she was close enough to see: Tessel knew the moment he had lost, and he and his closest blades threw everything into the final rush, the headlong desperation of death built on others’ deaths. Always, his people had made him out to be a modern sort of hero, and though she might spit on the term, he had to give him this: he was no craven. He did not even try to flee.

  There were no words. A sweeping arc carried his arm and sword along, and even as she thought to cry out—belatedly—she saw Ivon take charge, and turn, and for all the fury of that blow, he slipped beneath it and quickly came about. For an instant, she dared to think Ivon had him, for he rapped a blade on Tessel’s helmet that should have felled a dozen lesser men. As it was, Tessel rocked in his saddle, his horse rearing past and giving him just enough time to right his momentarily jarred self.

  Tessel turned. Roswitte could not see the eyes; a man blocked them, screaming at her with an axe. She cast him down with a series of hard jabs of her knife into the side and gut chinks of his armor, but by the time he had fallen Tessel, blood making a sticky river of the helmet bent into the contour of his skull, had come once more against Ivon.

  That she had already notched her arrow meant nothing to the ceaseless march of time. Before her were two of the most superb warriors she has ever known, and yet battle was a quick thing, dispossessed of the grand gesture, and the blade that Tessel’s hand guided was a fury all its own, which he cleaved into Ivon’s neck.

  Or close enough. Though she was too far, her imagination picked up the slack, and for years after she knew she would claim the moment she heard the clavicle snap—the moment that descending blade tore through mesh and hammered maille and, in the haze of a battlefield’s madness, ripped blood from her lord’s neck.

  Yet as he rounded to be certain—to trumpet to the world the bestial triumph of a man atop a fallen, worthy foe—she saw the face Ivon’s blow to the helm had exposed, she offered a prayer, and she sent an arrow arcing over the heads of dying men to blot out the world’s foremost bastard.

  It took him just below the eye, but it punched through hard enough to rattle that unsettled helm. For her, it did not matter that he should never have seen his killer. She was a servant, a tool, merely finishing the necessary task her fallen master had already set in motion. Tessel fell from his horse, a dead man before he ever hit the ground, and in this she felt a trill of contentment.

  Too fleeting, for there beside him lay the shrouded body of Ivon, master of Verdan. Another Matair, lost to the darkness of their time. This she saw, but still she moved, only vaguely noting Ensil’s cries, barely registering the determined sweep of his steel in her defense as marshalls all throughout the field began their confusing cries. There had been no few watching the duel in the midst. No few that knew what a dead general meant.

  She fell at his side, gathering his head in her arms as Ensil staked a spot beside her and drew his old shield upright. To her shock—and her dismay—her lord still breathed, and remained enough in possession of himself to open his eyes to her touch.

  Doctor, she tried to cry. Had she? The word rained on her, screamed in her, but could not seem to come to fruition. Doctor. Such a little thing, rendered senseless. A hand tightened on her forearm.

  “Stop,” he whispered. “That’s…order.” The words were slurred, blood-slicked. It was even in his eyes. So much. It made him paler than he ever had been—this man, with a dead mother’s eyes.

  Silence stalked them both. Absently, she was aware of noises familiar to her. Noises of men fighting and bleeding and dying. A part of her demanded she turn, to kill until there was nothing left to kill; she found that she could not.

  “Mi—my lord, don’t speak,” she choked.

  Through a blur of tears, she watched his arm shake the blood-soaked grass, despite the sort of calm that seeped into his weary voice. Air snorted in bloody bubbles from his mouth, but Ivon said, “It’s done. You�
��guard that place, lady. Them. Listen. You’re…you’re…” The little bear of Verdan had been well acquainted with pain in her many years upon this earth. She had the unspeakable done to her, and to her friends, had killed and been bled in turn, and yet it was in this moment, in the midst of a swirl of death and destruction many times greater than this one life, in which she felt her heart break.

  She had not been able to protect the father. She had not been able to protect the son. And still, still he asked that she watch the rest. She was undeserving, she thought, and he was nothing but a fool.

  “You already saved them, ser. Rest now,” she murmured.

  Strong fingers squeezed at her, gripping her as a sailor to that last piece of drift. “You’re brave, Ros,” he managed to say after some effort. It was to be the last thing he ever said. He struggled to hold her gaze a little while longer. Then his fingers went slack and Ivon was dead.

  It took a long time before she could slip her hands free and close his eyes. Calm, in his way. That is all there will ever be, she told herself. Then she turned and found Ensil still waiting for her, and a great many men beyond him laying down their arms, as others pressed into their corner of the field to lament the passing of great men.

  It was the strangest feeling she had ever had to learn. Even in such moments: the world went on. It was a scratching at the edge of her vision, clawing for life. She found herself squinting into a pile of dead men, at a torn limb clawing for purchase on the realm of the living. She did not envy his return.

  Chapter 17

  There was something inextricably thrilling in knowing the world had eyes for nothing but you—and could not, for the lives of all those searching, find you. It might even be enough, Rurik hoped, to combat the utterly unexpected specter of a fear of heights.

  Theirs was a flat, grassy land. He had never expected to find himself dangling dozens of feet off the ground. Trees were one thing—and he had never been good with those anyways. This was…this was breathless, wingless flight, somewhere between clouds and inky dark. No handholds. Just a rope and a long drop.