And he stabbed. He stabbed wildly, he stabbed without any real thought at all, except to kill, kill, kill, but all he got for his trouble was air. Precious air. He breathed it, tried to get it deep inside, to soak up all the blood and confusion, but his head practically rang; it was as though he were still in Effise, ears blasted to bits by those damnable cannon.
But he had space. A man had to be grateful for that.
Someone had once told him space was an illusion. Or he made that up. It seemed…wrong. Important somehow. But wrong. At least, this was where his thoughts circled around and around again as the soldier seemed simply to reach through his wild blows and shatter his confidence, his poise, and maybe a few other things as well. Contact. It was enough to leave him vibrating with energy—the other man’s—and wincing with pain and shock. His knees wobbled and he thought, Hells, I wouldn’t have half a chance if I was in full form.
The axe flashed down with great force and he somehow managed to sidestep it, but the axe was already whipping around as he tried to stab into the gap. For such a big man, his opponent was quick-footed as a wolf, and gave him no time to act. Tactics, Rowan would have drilled into him, but none came to mind, and the man had no rage for him to stoke. In a lucky stroke, Rurik got inside the man’s guard but, finding his sword poorly poised for it, hammered the man with his knee.
The oaf grunted. That was it. The whole of his effect. Oh you must be… And an elbow battered him down, an irresistible rush. A meaty hoof followed it, pinning him squirming to the earth by the chest.
“Matair?” That word alone brought hesitation to the bulky guard, though it was not his own tongue which intoned it. Cullick, creeping in from the sidelines, looked aghast, but his displeasure slowly slipped into a knowing smirk. “Oh this is rich. Stubborn youth, I shall grant you that.”
He might have even had a witty repartee, if he could have breathed. The guard looked askance of him, to his master. “Yeah?” he grunted. Cullick tapped a finger against his lip, then shook his head. “Take him,” he said, and the relief Rurik felt in being able to breathe again was quickly crushed when boot traded its spot to a fist. The ground drifted beneath him, and before he knew it, he was skyborne.
“After,” Cullick granted as an addendum.
Comforting.
The count started to slink back, his bodyguard following with Rurik dragged in a headlock alongside. They were not quite back to the road when another guardsman all but collided with them, in a panic. “The Zuti, he’s, he’s…” he clamored, obviously at wit’s end.
“Compose yourself, man,” Cullick lectured.
There was no need. Following not far at his heels was Chigenda himself, bleeding from a goodly number of places, and shaking like a willow in wind, but somehow striking all the fiercer a figure for it. His spear looked more walking stick than weapon at this point, though; a good chunk of the bottom had been splintered, and tattered bits still dangled there. In his other hand now was a short sword, and given its finery, Rurik imagined it had been plucked from one of his assailants. Both weapons were coated in his trade.
“You, there. Blackguard,” Cullick snapped. “If you can understand me, mark this. You’ll drop…”
Or he’ll kill me. Whether from the pain, or the laughter the heady blood rush brought, Rurik felt as though he might lose himself then. Tears mingled with the strangled notes, even as a second man stepped up beside Chigenda, pale-faced and poxed, but with a strong arm. Some tavern brawler, most like. He licked his lips, sizing up the other men before him. Weighing the worth of the coin we paid him. Rurik wondered if it would be enough. It seemed it hadn’t helped his friends, after all.
“Boy,” Chigenda barked.
Cullick glanced between them. He motioned at his guard, and the grip on Rurik’s neck loosed ever so slightly.
“Y-yeah?” he squeaked.
“Alvise. He would forgive?”
The other soldier circled in front of Cullick, holding his sword before him but looking far from eager for another fight. The brawler eyeballed him, but made no forward movement. Chigenda, street rubble cracking under his sandaled feet, kept watch only on his charge, and his captive.
It was permission for a sacrifice. Rurik smiled. A few months ago, Chigenda wouldn’t have even asked. Growth was a beautiful thing to behold.
Hands on his captive’s arm, Rurik nodded as best he could.
The sword dropped to the cobbles. It was heavy anyways, and the Zuti was not one accustomed to fighting with two weapons. Balance was key. Rurik knew what he intended. It was why he cringed. Despite himself, his eyes drew shut, fingers clamping all the tighter at the arm that bound him. Essa, if you have not gone before me, I just want to say… There was a sharp jerk that jostled his thoughts and choked them out, then a sharper smack as something collided, and they were both pitching back.
A hand had gone to the bodyguard’s eye, closing around something. The arm tugged at Rurik for all this with a deathlike vise, and though he kicked and squirmed he could not free himself. When the hand moved enough, he could see the spear point buried there, in enough to wound, but apparently not far enough to kill. The man staggered, growling, but Chigenda was already closing the distance.
The other soldier stabbed at him, but Chigenda wove around him and shoved him back. He kept running. The bodyguard started to swing, and shout, as wildly as Rurik once had, but Chigenda jerked to his left and swing his retrieved sword with every straining ounce of his muscles, and the short blade swung round and clanged deep enough into the bodyguard’s coat it cleaved a piece of it. He screeched and tottered forward, hardly able to breathe, and Chigenda came around him and struck him again, this time all but crushing the plated helmet atop his shaggy head. He dropped, and almost pulled Rurik down with him.
Chigenda sank to one knee, breathing heavy atop the body, but Rurik took the hand he offered. Felt the quiver in the tendons, the strain through every exhalation. Yet he looked back, to Cullick and his final soldier—the brawler had fled, it seemed—and beheld terror for all this on both. Cullick shoved at his man, and as if pressing himself from a haze, the soldier started forward on them.
“Back,” the Zuti grunted. “Back, littel man.” He started to heave himself up, but Rurik forced himself between the two men, reaching down to take up the bodyguard’s axe.
“You’ve done enough, Chigenda.”
Smoke had drawn a sooty veil across the quarter, given the whole scene a hellish quality. It hardly seemed at all like celebratory city that had first greeted their arrival. Wherever I go, he thought more with a laugh than a grumble. Some things, one simply had to come to peace with. Reasonably, he should have frightened at every empty doorway about them. He had eyes only for the final soldier.
“They’ll come running soon, little man,” Rurik shouted, taking inspiration from his comrade. “Consider this your only chance.”
“Bluffing!” Cullick snarled.
“Not talking to you.”
The soldier had his sword pointed forward, both hands at the hilt. A good, strong grip. Practiced. Rurik swallowed. The axe was heavy in his hand. He doubted he would be able to lift it over his head, let alone swing the blasted thing. Yet he kept his back straight, tried to let no ounce of his uncertainty leak into his face.
“You come at us, even if you kill us, those folk back there will tear you down. With bare hands.”
The soldier hesitated. Cullick had aimed him at them like an arrow, but unlike an arrow, he remained a man. He had thought. He had fear. And Rurik had seen that fear when he first returned to them. His eyes darted from Rurik to the alley, back to Rurik.
“Moment of—”
The soldier sprang down one of the other alleys, without a backward glance. It was so sudden Rurik found himself blinking away shadows. Cullick’s jaw dropped. It took them both a moment, but Rurik then squeezed Chigenda’s hand. “If you’d be so kind.” No running for Cullick. Even the old man had to see that.
Liked a startled ra
bbit, he bolted anyway. He made it as far as the nearest conjunction before backing up, hands making desperate, shaking circles at his side. At the point of a full drawn bow, Essa backed him from those shadows, into the circle of stone and angry men.
Rurik was moving toward him by then, dropping the axe as he went. How long had he waited for this moment? How long had he dreamed, haunted by the laughing visage of this cretin? He bent down just long enough to snatch up his discarded sword, listening to the shouts, to the burble of flames as smoke warmed and scratched his lungs. All the while, Cullick kept turning about, drumming on his cane, nowhere to go. Trapped in his own home.
“I think this is the part where I say—”
If anything, Rurik had suspected the old man’s cane. What he nearly received instead was a dagger to the face as Cullick came up swinging, slashing wildly. His heart hadn’t ceased racing from the fight, though, and he reacted with a sharp jerk, his left hand then snapping up to seize the offending wrist. Cullick gaped as he snared himself. He was still staring when Rurik’s other fist cracked into the bridge of his nose.
As Cullick crashed into the cobbles, Rurik reversed his blade and kneeled, letting the edge hover like a noose before the count’s neck. Though bloodied and befouled, the act was enough to earn the count’s reticence—though not his unmanning. He did not whimper, or plead, as Rurik had spent too many nights dreaming. A great many would have. Walthere Cullick’s gaze remained as ever: the steady, if malevolent calculation of the forest. It was not filled with rage. Quite the opposite. It was cold. Cold as the winter that had seen Rurik’s family fall.
He imagined what it must have been like for his father. His body grew cold as the cobbles, could feel the cobbles’ pressure on his knees. Blood was in his nostrils, and a feverish pounding—oh, but men always felt the greatest beatings of their hearts when they were about to die. He had to piss. Steel was there beside him and a hot flash of rage lit up through him, for that hot flash of scything steel should have been the last thing that old man had ever known.
Had he looked into Cullick’s eyes as the executioner took his head? What went through his own mind? Visions of the disappointment his children had wrought? Hate? Dreams of the wife, gone too long before?
Men made tools to lighten the burden. A solid blade meant one no longer need feel life ebbing through their fingertips. A flash of rage. He wanted that. He wanted to feel Cullick die.
Then he remembered the tears on Liesa’s cheeks when she had seen him living again. They were the same tears that poured out as the Bastard forced them apart, the same twinkling madness Kana had loosed when blood fell like a waterfall upon their “heroic” feet.
And Usuri?
Blade in his hand, blood on his cheek, moonlight casting shadows over all the rest, he saw. Even cruel men had their place, for strength forced change and change was needed, lest the world drown in its own blood eternal. Strong and cruel and forward-thinking was still a thousand times better than righteous and weak and content.
And it had to end somewhere. He didn’t want it to end with him, of course. There was a thirst in him that he swore only blood could curve. He looked down, craving a steady hand but finding only a shaking, human thing. We kill, and we kill, and we go on killing because the wrongs can’t be right except by other wrongs. We set one thing right just to muck up another, and all we’re left with is…
Charlotte. Usuri had pointed to Charlotte, and begged him not to kill her. The lioness ruled the pride, or so the legends told. Walthere was the greatest power in the land now, but all this, all of it, would come to Charlotte’s shoulders. Usuri believed in her for some reason. He believed in Usuri. And hate him as he did, he knew the truth: that the lioness should never see adulthood, if lion, cruel and evil as he might be, were not there to shield her from others as conniving. She had shown him mercy, when she had no reason to, when, in truth, she knew as little of him as he of her.
One night. That’s what it all came down to. No connection really, just a moment in time that meant nothing in the greater scheme. No one could know another in the course of a single night. Yet she had taken that chance. Even though she might have known what her father might do, or say—or what Rurik himself might do. What he had come to do, in fact.
If she could risk everything on a hope neither of them deserved, then so could he. For all the times he had not been there for her, he owed Usuri that much.
Even evil could be a means to greater ends.
Would any of this make a difference?
“When this night ends, remember one thing, Walthere Cullick. You have made me nothing, and no one, and war has stolen away what you have not, and for all this, I have found you, I have come to you at the epoch of your greatest hour, and were this any other day across the hate strewn multitude of lives you have given me, I should have killed you.”
As soon as he turned his back, the count could just as easily stick him for this.
He twisted his blade so it was the flat which greeted Cullick then, rather than the tip. As the man stepped back, realizing his shift in fortunes, Rurik just as quickly slapped that blade across his cheek hard enough to stagger the man. It came with a twinge of satisfaction, though Cullick’s eyes rounded on him like blazing coals.
“Come after me or mine, and we can do it again. You can keep your grand plans, your plots and deprivations, and shove them. The only reason I’ve let you live today is because this country is tired. And wicked as you are, you are the one person that can probably pull it back into some semblance of itself. So do that. Forget about me. About the petty little vengeances that can break us. Be someone.”
For all that grandiosity, Rurik found his words met by a disaffected rasp. “Is that it, little boy? All this, to show you have grown?”
He thought about that for a second, then dismissed it outright. “No,” Rurik said, waggling his blade. “I’m not the one who has grown.”
The count’s brows knitted together, but he ventured no more. Sensible enough not to push his luck. Or simply too confused to voice. Rurik wouldn’t have blamed him. He couldn’t quite make a go of it himself.
“Forgive me, Cullick. We’ll always have Verdan. And one day soon I hear I’ll be able to say: I bedded an empress, once.” He flashed that winning smile, much reduced for a few missing teeth, which had once won him into other fools’ beds. A child’s smile. So far removed from the blood pooled about his feet. It belonged to Cullick. He had to return it. “For that, you have my eternal thanks.”
He did not wait to see the count’s response. Rurik stepped over the bodies of his shieldmen and out of the alley. Out of his hand the rusted coin slipped, and one life turned to another, as the cycles of the moon, or the whispers of the seasons. They made it almost an entire block before Essa had to carry him. To her credit, she never called him fool. And she might have. She might have.
Chapter 18
On an evening in the autumn of the year, trumpets sounded in the capital. Its walls, but lightly touched by the wars beyond, had opened themselves to investiture by hands both foreign and familiar, to empresses both old and new. It reminded Walthere Cullick of the night, months before, when Rurik Matair had held a blade to his throat and threatened his end. It seemed a small thing now, but large enough to put a wrinkle in his smile.
At dawn that same day he had received the mayor of the city, with an array of noblemen who had, but moons before, swore oaths to kill him. Each and every one of them, he made them wait until he had concluded a hunt, before taking horse to meet them. They formally bequeathed the keys to the city and, for what it was worth, their honor.
Benevolence in victory, cruelty in war. Time and again, he had drummed this into his children. In at least one case, the words had taken. Magnanimously, he let these men keep their offices, their homes and, most uselessly, their heads.
Not everyone had been so fortunate.
At night, the city lacked the crowds it had boasted on that first entry. They had all but swarmed h
im then, cheering, howling, drunk on the presence of moment, as though they wouldn’t have done the same for someone bearing his head. He waved at them and played his part; as did his daughter, and the Empress Dowager, and all their train following after. Even the priests bowed before them, as was only proper.
When news of Leopold’s and Mauritz’s deaths had become common news, Cullick had demanded the crowning of their young ward, Lothen. The bishops had balked, had dared—in the face of everything—to think themselves above his wrath. So long as older Durvalles lived, they claimed, that ill-bred boy would never sit the throne. He planted evidence of corruption and had the loyalists finish it for him. Within a month, the Archbishop was confessing to high treason, stripped of land and title, and Cullick had filled the position with a man of his own choosing. Few failed to toe the line after that, and Lothen and Charlotte had been jointly crowned.
Empress Charlotte Cullick-Durvalle. The words were sweet ambrosia no matter how many times he repeated them. His child. His house! It made him chuckle even now.
It was she that had summoned him this night, at a time she should have been consolidating her power over the city. Quiet, old man, quiet. He calmed himself. The young will find their own paces. Do what you will, and she will follow. All is ours. Lion and gryphon danced together on flags above the city gates. Even by torchlight, they struck him magnificent.
Inside the palace, his guards left him, and he shuffled along well enough on his cane. He knew the passages, even if he could no longer navigate them so easily as once he had. What once might have been a few days’ bruising seemed to have become something permanent, a chipping of the bone perhaps. The cane was becoming less of a pleasant reprieve to pain and more of a critical necessity.
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