by Kaleb Schad
The knight’s face went even harder, if that was possible. After a long moment, he swung out of his saddle with large, elaborate movements, as if stiff in old age. Marcen was pretty sure his knee never actually touched the ground.
“The king sent a messenger,” the Airim’s Lance said.
“Didn’t you see the new walls? Thought you guys were better at this.”
“Aye. New walls and children holding swords. That’s my fucking point.”
“Easy, son.” The man was barely ten summers younger than Marcen. He stepped forward so his chest was touching the knight’s, forcing the man to look up at him. He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. “I’ve followed the king’s orders to the letter. Let’s withdraw inside to speak.”
Three of them followed Marcen into the hall, the lead knight, the Daughter of Airim and another knight with long red hair and an even redder beard. The leader introduced himself as Sir Banton. He didn’t introduce the others.
Marcen wished the girl would stop staring at him like that. He tried to stare back, but couldn’t do it. Something in her eyes. The way they rippled, flickering flecks of orange and yellow, as if on fire.
Isabell had spotted them and now strolled into the hall, her sword bobbing at her hip. She’d taken to wearing it everywhere, as if she were one of Marcen’s new militia. He could smell the envy on her, the way her eyes glinted as she drank up the Airim’s Lances’ stupid sparkly armor and stupid sparkly spears.
“He told you what?” Sir Banton demanded.
“To do exactly what we’re doing. Stand. Hold until reinforcements come.”
“Where is Bevins?”
“Who?”
“The messenger.”
“Gone. That same night. I know not where.”
He felt his daughter’s look, that wash of ice. This would get dicey if she said something. He charged forward, leaving no opening for her to speak into.
“I do as I’m commanded, sir. The king orders us to stand and fight, that’s what we do.”
“Right. You Blackhands are known for doing as you’re commanded.”
“To the fucking letter.”
The way Banton smirked, Marcen was suddenly aware of his own sword, as if Seven Claws begged to be drawn and re-sheathed in this man’s throat.
“We’re to collect horses,” the red headed knight said, cutting the silence.
“The Therentells,” Banton said.
“The horse breeder lives a couple miles northwest of here,” Marcen said.
“He killed two, you know,” Isabell said.
Everyone looked at her.
Marcen’s chest seized tight. Isabell. She could undo everything with a word. Gods, why did she have to come down at that moment?
He looked at the Airim’s Lances in the hall. Scanned his own soldiers from the corners of his eyes. Two to one odds in his favor…against Airim’s Lances. It would be close…
His hand twitched near Seven Claws.
Isabell’s heart walloped its way up into her throat. Ella Stonehome! The Ella Stonehome. She was here, standing in front of Isabell. The Daughter of Airim who had killed dozens of Wallwraiths and Fletchers single handedly. The girl who had survived on the other side of the wall and escaped, bringing her sister and a gnome ally with her. Who they said burned down the entire breeding hall before she left. An Airim’s Lance. A woman—no, a teenage girl—younger than Isabell—who had not only made it into the Airim’s Lances, but had outshone the hardest of the men.
And she was standing so close Isabell could almost touch her.
Gods, she wanted to be her.
Isabell didn’t know if she could breathe or keep talking, but she charged forward.
“Fletchers. Daveon Therentell killed two of them. Went south to warn the families of the coming wall and he had to kill two of them to save a girl.”
“Two,” the red-headed knight said.
Sir Banton turned and looked at Ella and Isabell could tell something passed between them because she nodded, then spun to leave, the other knight turning to follow the girl out.
Don’t go!
Now. If she was going to say something it had to be now. But what? Once the Lances left, her father would pack their household and they would leave for her marriage to Olisal. It was over. Whoever was left in the village would have to fend for themselves now. She’d done what she could…
Unless she told the Airim Lances everything. Blurt it all out, her father’s schemes, the murder of the messenger, the plot against the king. If she did that, though, she might as well slit her own throat. Humay’s laws were clear on that. It’s justice would fall not only on her father, but on his entire household, her brothers and her included.
She felt like she might puke. She watched Ella walk away, Isabell’s dreams leaving the great hall with her.
“I did, too,” Isabell called. “I saw the wall and—”
“Isabell,” her father barked.
“I want to join you! I want to be an Airim’s Lance! I’ve—”
“Airim’s cock, girl!” her father shouted.
Sir Banton was confused, looking from Isabell to her father.
Ella Stonehome and the other Airim’s Lance stopped at the door and turned to look at her.
“I’ve been practicing my whole life. I know I could do it if you let me try out. And the wall, it’s a lot closer than we thought and—”
“They know where the wall is, Isabell!”
“I could join you and take you—”
Her father’s hand moved so fast she couldn’t have blocked it even if she were ready. He slapped her with the back it. A flash of white. She stumbled and fell onto the stairs behind her.
“Enough!” her father roared. He stared down at her panting.
Sir Banton took a step forward.
Her father turned on him, leaned forward, ready to fight. “She’s manipulating you,” he said. “She’s trying to run from her duties to this family, but I won’t let her and you won’t either.”
Sir Banton looked at her and she knew she was crying, that she had blood trickling out of her mouth. Some hero she must look like. Weeping at a slap? They’d never take her for an Airim’s Lance now. Never.
“You can’t interfere,” her father said. “The law is clear.”
Banton wasn’t happy about it, at least. She could see that.
“She’s right,” Banton said. “It’s close. Very close. The Eighth and Twelfth were able to slow it at Cutter’s Junction, but they’ve since fallen. It looks to climb the coast and take Nove, but it may come here first.“
“Nove?” her father said, genuine tension in his voice.
“Yeah,” Banton said. “If the port falls, it’s all over.”
Her father drummed his fingers against Seven Claws’s scabbard.
“I don’t know how you misunderstood the orders,” Banton said, “but consider yourself to have new ones. By morning, get these people the fuck out of here.”
The vulgarity slapped her father. Flames raged up his neck, across his cheeks.
And that was it. Like the inky mucus of the Rot, she felt darkness drench her soul.
It was all over. Her chance at any future that didn’t include being a pawn in marriage had closed.
“We’re Blackhands,” the baron bit out, then looked down at Isabell. “We do as we’re commanded.”
Isabell followed her father up the tower to their chambers. Their footsteps echoed against the stone, the great hall falling away behind them, still filled with her father’s men. Her nose still bled and she refused to staunch it, letting the red spatter down the front of her dress, leaving a trail up the steps. Let him see it when he looks at her.
What good is it if he doesn’t care, though?
Humiliation boiled from her toes to her scalp. He’d hit her before—many times—but never in front of other people like that. Never in front of the Airim Lances.
“So that’s it,” she said.
They swept
up the circular stairs so fast, she was getting dizzy, her injured thigh burning.
“That is just the beginning.”
“It’ll never work. They’re going to report to the king what they saw today and people will believe their story. I mean, look at them. You saw them.”
“What I saw were a bunch of gilded cocks spewing insolence all over my keep.”
“The gilding is why people will believe them.”
“Once the village falls, when word spreads of the lives sacrificed here, the outrage will take care of itself. When it comes to the details of how and why, Olisal will back us.”
Us. If I only had the stag mark on my skin instead of in me. Then I could cut off my hand and be free.
“Sacrificed? Or murdered?”
“We’ve covered this.”
“Mother would not approve. She weeps to see what you’ve become.”
“Enough!” Like a thunderclap, her father’s fury was on him. He moved faster than she thought possible, slamming her head against the wall, his fingers wrapped tight around her neck. She felt her feet lift off the floor.
“I don’t desire your approval.”
His nose crushed into hers. Her blood smeared across his face. She tried to turn, but he followed her.
“But I do demand your faithfulness. Give me that or give me your very breath.”
Blackness creeped into the corners of her vision. Her pulse hammered in her ears. Behind her eyes.
“Your—”
A sickly clicking sound in her throat. Tilting walls.
“—very—”
She worked her mouth, trying to beg.
“—breath.”
When he let her go, she crumpled to the floor. It took several seconds before she could truly draw a breath, before the blood had receded enough for her to hear again. She couldn’t look at her father, only studied him from the corner of her eye. He panted and looked down on her, his hands bunched into fists.
“Ready yourself,” he said. He shoved his shirt back into his pants, straightened himself. “The Lances will leave tonight, by morning at the latest. When they do, we do also. Nattic can keep the sheep in the stall until the wall comes. We have a wedding to get to.”
“I’ve faced a Wallwraith,” Isabell said. She looked up at him. “I saw how it harvested souls, how it tried to take Anaz’s and mine. I fought Fletchers.” She leaned over and spit, wiped at her mouth. “And yet the greatest horror I have ever faced, is the idea that I came from you.”
“You want to be a warrior? Some wench with a sword? Keep pushing me like this and you better hold on.” He pulled his lips back in a violent smile. “Because I’ll bring horrors you ain’t never seen yet.”
52
Daveon stepped back and maybe because he was exhausted, or maybe because he felt that the world’s finger ground on him, he slipped on a pile of Fennel’s discarded entrails, the intestines roping around his ankle. He caught himself before he fell and he laughed when he realized his legs were jutting out at odd angles just like the foal’s.
It stood under Ember’s belly, tugging on a teat. Its four legs lanced out from it in a desperate struggle against newly discovered gravity as Ember licked at the amniotic fluid in the young filly’s coat. Ember would be a fine nurse mare. Her own colt was growing well and would wean soon. The king would need to feed her a little extra for the extra nursing, but she would be okay. And Fennel’s filly looked like she’d be a beautiful animal.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Alysha said. She threw herself into Daveon, not a care about the blood soaked through his shirt, pants, painted across his face. When they broke their embrace and looked at each other, they appeared as two demons from a charnel house, dripping with their work. Inside, however, they sang of victory. Something near pride thrummed through Daveon’s fingers as he touched Alysha’s cheek and he lost himself in his wife’s eyes, those magnificent, brown pools.
“It was heroic,” she whispered.
Daveon could taste horse blood and amniotic fluid and his wife’s lips all at once in the kiss and he didn’t mind any of it.
“Gross,” Nikolai said. Elnis laughed and held his nose and said, “‘Oss.” Even Miria was smiling.
Alysha gave a pained expression when she broke the kiss and he knew she was realizing what Daveon had been thinking about the entire time he’d been cutting into Fennel.
“Syla…”
The one thing Daveon had dreaded had come to pass. They would have to beg and plead for the king’s stable master to take the two foals as part of the contract and he’d have to include Syla in the sale. His favorite horse. The only animal who’d ever stuck by him no matter what.
“It’ll be okay.” But Daveon knew it wouldn’t be. They’d be afoot. With three children. Running from the undead. It wouldn’t be okay.
He heard horse hooves from the road.
Two armored men followed a girl riding toward them. Was that an honest to Airim ursinine? It was a massive beast, a strange blend of bear and mastiff. If it weren’t so terrifying, it might have been cute.
The men wore full plate armor and purple tunics and the girl wore a silver and orange breastplate, an upside down emblem of the Daughters of Airim on her chest.
“Blessed Airim,” Alysha said, tears already tumbling down her cheeks. “They’re here.”
Anaz laid on the dirt floor of Henley’s butcher cellar, his head on a backpack and he thought it might not be so bad to be strung up by his hind hocks, hanging, with his head in another part of the country from his body, everything liquid and covetous drained from him.
There were a lot of bags and gear in the cellar. Sunell had been busy preparing for tonight’s run.
He coughed and once started, couldn’t stop. Black blood speckled his palm when he pulled it away from his mouth.
Mouths. Her mouth. He had tried not to touch his lips, to try and not feel anything that might erase Isabell’s kiss. Black angst nagged at it all. What about Reyn? He couldn’t even remember what it had been like to kiss her. Isabell’s had been different, though, he knew that, softer, more fearful. Or were those simply his own feelings projected on her?
How had he let himself get in this situation again? Was he that stupid that he couldn’t learn a horrific lesson like that the first time? He couldn’t save them. He was trying and the hsing-li was punishing him for it, blocking his connection to it. Again.
An explosion of light charged down the stairs and across Anaz. He lifted his head from the backpack he’d been using as a pillow. Squinting, he saw Sunell’s girlish form silhouetted in the door.
“Are you sleeping?”
Anaz tried to sit up, but the world sat up with him and wrapped a sludge arm around his neck and dragged him back. He lay there massaging his temples.
He heard Sunell squat next to him. A hand touched his forehead. So cool, like ice.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
“Hell hath no furnace greater than man’s ragged soul.”
“That’s…” She pulled her hand back and he could hear her breathing, studying him. “There’s a big group for tonight already. Lelana says we have to try for more, that there are too many left.”
“You cling so hard, that you don’t realize you hold nothing.”
“I don’t…what’s going on?”
Anaz opened his eyes and looked at Sunell and there was a struggle between frustration and fear in her eyes that gave Anaz a distinct and recognizable feeling of being back with Hakkana.
He tried to sit up again and this time locked out his elbows against the dizziness.
“I have done what I can,” he said.
“What do you mean? You’re not going tonight? Are you too sick?”
“No. I mean, yes, but that’s not…yes, that’s part of it.”
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “Maybe I could help? Or Lelana? We could distract the guards. You wouldn’t need to—”
“It’s over, Sunell. I’m done
. The rest is up to the hsing-li and whatever gods watch this land.”
“Please. We need you, Anaz. Let us help you. Together we can get this group tonight. The Pennywells are in it. They have a daughter who survived the Rot, who can’t walk very well. If they’re in the village when the wall comes…”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t.”
“But why? You don’t have the strength?”
“I can’t be this connected, this involved. I’m trying too hard and it’s all happening again. It’s just like last time. This disease, it won’t quit. The hsing-li is leaving me. I won’t be able to protect them. They’ll die and it’ll be my fault. She’ll die…I can’t do that again.”
“Who? Isabell?”
Anaz nodded his head, kept his eyes closed. He didn’t need to see to feel the frustration coming from her, the sense of betrayal. “All that is left to me is to pray that your gods or the hsing-li will spare those who remain.”
“You are the answer to those prayers! You’ve been given a gift, Anaz. Just like the Yul Crafters. Like Ella Stonehome. The gods cannot do anything without us. Your hsing-li can do nothing without you. Don’t you understand? You are their answer.”
Anaz shook his head and slid down so he could lay again. “I’m sorry.”
“Isabell’s going to be heartbroken. Devastated.” Sunell was quiet for a long time and Anaz wondered if she had snuck up the steps, left the cellar, when she whispered, “She loves you.”
Tears stung Anaz’s eyes behind his closed lids.
“That is why I must leave,” he said.
The sun was three hands into the sky by the time Sir Nattic was sober enough to mind the rock grinding against his spine.
Every night it seemed to take more and more of Malic’s shit ale to mute his mind and last night, one drink decided to chase the other before Nattic could even finish swallowing the first.
He sat up and wondered how many had snuck out last night. He had no doubts there would be some. The goat fuckers in this village couldn’t barely buckle their new armor, much less catch runaways. Not runaways. Traitors. That didn’t keep Nattic from having the nauseous thought of when would it be his turn to run? That wall wouldn’t wait forever. Blackhand, however, might. Don’t start. Not already. Give me one fucking minute? Please?
