Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  Since they’d left the Silverwood, the bard had begun composing (in her head, at least) a song about Brune’s trial in the Faingrove. She picked out the opening chords on Hiraeth’s strings and sung the first verse. Cura, her nose buried in the memoir of a goblin torturer entitled Grime and Punishment, seemed not to mind.

  “Not bad,” said the Inkwitch, once Tam had played it through a few times. “You could try singing a bit lower, maybe? It might sound more ominous, less frivolous, if that’s what you’re going for.” She shrugged. “Up to you, though.”

  Tam grazed her fingers over the strings. “Show me,” she said.

  Cura closed her book. “Let’s sing it together,” she proposed. “Stay under me, okay?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Take the low notes, dummy.”

  Tam swallowed, blushing, and wondered why her heart had just skipped a beat. Two beats, actually. “Right. Okay. Yeah.”

  She repeated the intro twice before Cura picked up the words. Tam joined in tentatively, careful to keep her voice pitched lower than Cura’s. The summoner wasn’t a bad singer, actually. Her voice was untrained, raspy and raw, but now and again a note of airy sweetness slipped through like a cooling breeze.

  At first the two of them stumbled along, but soon enough they were flying, soaring wing to wing and riding the music’s current until, inevitably, they ran out of sky.

  “That’s all I’ve got so far,” Tam said.

  “It’s good.” Cura returned to reading her book by firelight. “For a song about Brune, I mean.”

  Tam considered it a compliment. She replaced her lute in its sealskin case and went to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Woes of Diremarch

  It snowed the next morning, but thankfully not for long. They headed northwest now, making straight for Ruangoth. The mountains reared, monolithic, to either side, dotted here and there with hollow towers or sacked outposts. They were passing through the ruins of another village when Tam’s curiosity finally got the better of her.

  “What happened here?” she asked the Warden.

  Hawkshaw didn’t answer, though his flat gaze slid over the barren houses around them.

  “Was there a war or something?”

  “Not a war,” said the Warden.

  “What, then?” Brune asked, reining his garron in beside Parsley. “I’ve met a few Marchers in my day. They were proud, and tough as old leather. And Diremarch is said to be the hardest place in the north. I’d bet half the king’s bodyguards are from around here.”

  Hawkshaw glanced over. “So?”

  “So, what happened? Where is everyone? Marchers are supposed to guard the realm against the terrors of the Brumal Wastes, but it looks as if the Horde itself rolled through here.”

  “It did,” said the Warden.

  “How do you mean?” asked Rose, riding a few paces behind them.

  Their escort cocked his head. “They mustered up north, beyond the mountains. But most of them weren’t there to start with. They were down here.” By here, Tam assumed he meant Grandual. “They fled north to escape the hunters, so they wouldn’t end up as arena meat. Brontide offered them refuge, and promised them a shot to put right what went wrong at Castia. To die fighting, instead of just … dying.”

  It was as many words as she’d heard Hawkshaw say at once. Speaking out loud seemed to cause the Warden pain.

  That, or he doesn’t enjoy explaining the woes of his land to strangers.

  “We always expected an attack would come from the Wastes.” Sunlight sparked on his coif as the Warden shook his head. “We were facing the wrong direction.”

  These people, Tam thought, surveying the devastation around her, should have been able to rely on mercenaries to defend them. Isn’t that why we have bands in the first place? But Diremarch is remote, and bitterly cold. Why would anyone come so far north to rescue a few measly villages when they could entertain an arena crowd and then visit a tavern to drink and dice and whore until their stupid dicks fall off?

  Was that why Hawkshaw was so hostile? Did he resent Rose’s notoriety, or hate that she and her ilk had been elsewhere while his country fell prey to the monsters mercs were supposed to fight? She was deciding how best to get answers to these questions when the Warden brought Bedlam up short and reached for his crossbow.

  “What is it?” Rose squinted up the slope before them. Up ahead was a roadside chapel that looked relatively intact. Standing before it was a cluster of what Tam at first mistook for people.

  Except they weren’t people.

  “Sinu,” said Freecloud.

  Hawkshaw slipped a bolt into the crossbow’s upper slot, then another in the lower. “I’ll deal with this,” he growled, even as Rose cantered past him. Freecloud went after her, so Brune and Cura did the same. Tam, unwilling to be left behind with only Rod and Hawkshaw for company, nudged her own horse forward.

  “Frozen fucking hell,” she heard Hawkshaw mutter behind her.

  All but two of the fox-like sinu retreated into the chapel as Fable approached, but the bard guessed there were around eight in total. Four of those who’d gone inside had been smaller—females or pups—and one of the two who remained was female as well. She was sleek and slight, white-furred, with untrusting green eyes. She wore a sword-belted tunic and a hooded wool cloak. Her companion was male, and much older, his colouring more grey than white. The fur around his neck was coarse and shaggy. He carried a short sword in one hand and a small buckler in the other.

  He began speaking, but in a series of shrill yips and clipped syllables Tam couldn’t understand. It sounded as though the creature were speaking a foreign language backward.

  “They have nothing of value,” Freecloud began translating, because of course he could understand the Sinu tongue. “They mean us no harm, and merely wish to shelter here overnight.”

  The pair of fox-creatures shared a glance, seemingly amazed the druin could comprehend them. The male said something more before lowering his sword.

  Freecloud related his words. “They will happily go elsewhere if we’d like to stay here instead.”

  The entire band looked to Rose, who palmed the back of her neck and chewed her bottom lip. The sinu appeared harmless enough, sure—but if they’d encountered a party of helpless travellers instead of hardened mercenaries, would they still have been so gracious?

  The female barked a series of guttural yaps.

  “They were cast out of their clan for refusing to join Brontide’s Horde,” explained Freecloud. “They were once”—he struggled to translate the word—“more, but are now few. They clashed with four-arms recently—I’m guessing she means yethiks—and were attacked by a warg two days ago.” He paused as the sinu vixen finished speaking. One of her hands withdrew a talisman from beneath her tunic.

  Do the monsters have gods? The thought occurred to Tam out of nowhere.

  Freecloud relayed the female’s final words. “The warg killed three of their leash, but those who perished do not … uh, rest. She says the dead hunt them now.”

  Rose exhaled a frozen breath. “Ask her—”

  Something whizzed past her, and a white-feather bolt sprouted from the vixen’s throat. Blood spilled over her hand and the talisman clasped within it. The male barked something in anger, or grief, and rushed them.

  Hawkshaw’s crossbow shuddered as a second bolt streaked over the snow, burying itself in the sinu’s shoulder and spinning him around. The Warden abandoned the bow and drew his bone sword as he strode forward.

  “Warden!” snapped Rose.

  The sinu recovered, snarled, and lunged.

  “Hawkshaw, stop!”

  The Warden caught the creature’s blade with a gloved hand, yanking it off balance, and drove his sword up through the sinu’s belly. The old fox whimpered, blood frothing over his mangy whiskers, and died as Hawkshaw dragged his weapon free. The Warden released his grip on the sinu’s blade.

  Before anyone in Fable could
stop him, Hawkshaw stepped into the chapel’s shadowed interior. A chorus of snarls and painful howls followed, and then a menacing silence. Tam couldn’t have said which of the two was louder. Eventually he reappeared, his sword sheathed in gore. He was dragging a dead sinu behind him, and tossed it unceremoniously on top of the vixen’s corpse.

  “Bloody gods, man!” Rose was livid. “They were harmless!”

  Hawkshaw was peering down at the gloved hand with which he’d caught the sinu’s blade. The leather was shredded, but not deep enough to cut, obviously, since he wasn’t bleeding everywhere. “They were monsters,” he said finally. “Their presence here is strictly forbidden.”

  Freecloud’s ears were stiff with supressed rage. “You could have asked them to leave. There was no need for violence.”

  “Says the merc who kills monsters for a living,” said Hawkshaw gruffly. “What’s the problem? Doesn’t feel right without a crowd to cheer you on?” He plunged his sword into a snowbank, then knelt and wiped it clean on a sinu’s cloak. “Or maybe you only kill when someone pays you? I’ll toss you a few courtmarks if you help me clear the bodies out of here. We’re spending the night.”

  The druin’s fingers tightened on Madrigal’s hilt, and for a moment Tam feared he might draw it and cut the Warden into two equally dour halves, but at last he relaxed his grip.

  Hawkshaw grunted and walked back into the chapel.

  Rose was the first to dismount. She walked to where the sinu lay dead in the snow and examined the corpses. Her gaze lingered longest on the female with the iron bolt in her throat. When Hawkshaw emerged from inside—hauling two smaller bodies this time—she charged him, punched him left-handed, then pinned him against the stone wall. He struggled against her, but found a scimitar’s edge tickling his throat.

  “The next time I tell you to stop, you stop. Got it?”

  The Warden bared his teeth. “You have no—”

  “Do your fucking ears work?” Rose asked him. Her blade must have nicked him, because Hawkshaw jolted wildly and made a strangled sound.

  “Yes,” he growled.

  “Do you understand what I said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Rose gave him a hard shove and backed off. “Because if you piss me off again—and I am very easy to piss off—I will kill you. For free. And I won’t need a crowd to watch me do it.”

  That night Tam dreamt of being chased by a leash of wild sinu whose eyes burned with ghostly fire. When she awoke, gasping a lungful of frigid air, Freecloud was kneeling by her side. The druin laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  Brune and Roderick were snoring—one slow and steady, the other sporadic and sputtering. Cura had her head buried under her saddlebags in an attempt to drown them out. Rose was asleep, but tossing fitfully. Hawkshaw was standing in the chapel door, his frame cast into shadow by the pale snow beyond. Since they didn’t have the means to burn the sinu, the Warden had offered to keep watch in case they came back from the dead.

  “You were dreaming?” asked Freecloud.

  Tam nodded.

  “Me too,” he said.

  The chapel’s interior was lit by bands of bright moonlight streaming through high windows. Considering the state of every other structure in Diremarch, the hall was in surprisingly good condition. There were no pews here, like in the Summer Lord’s shrine in Ardburg, though there was a bowl-shaped altar. Freecloud stood and went to stand before it, indicating with a tilt of his ears that Tam should join him.

  “Something’s rotten in Diremarch,” he said, once they were side by side and as far away from the Warden as possible.

  “Rotten how?” she asked. “I mean, besides the fact that everything’s in ruins and everyone’s dead.”

  The druin sniffed. “That’s just it. Hawkshaw says monsters passed through here on their way north. He claims they attacked towns and drove the Marchers from their homes. But the monsters are gone. The Horde is on the other side of the country, so where are the people now? Why haven’t they started rebuilding? Humans are nothing if not stubborn.”

  “I think you mean resilient,” Tam said teasingly.

  The druin shrugged. “Manticore, monticore.”

  “It’s definitely manticore.”

  “Agree to disagree?”

  “Or we could just agree that it’s manticore.”

  Freecloud’s ears twitched dismissively. “I think there’s more to what happened here than the Warden is letting on, and I fear it’s got something to do with Brontide’s Horde, and with Kaskar’s undead dilemma.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Are you pious, Tam?”

  She almost laughed. Considering the behaviour she’d either excused or indulged in since joining Fable (vulgar language, excessive drinking, rampant drug use, and indiscriminate sex with total strangers—not to mention frequent acts of extreme and unwarranted violence), the druin had probably guessed her answer already.

  Tam could remember praying as a child. She’d asked the Frost Mother (who southerners called the Winter Queen) for lots of snow to play in, and beseeched Vail, the Autumn Son, to make all the pumpkins as big as he possibly could. She’d attended festivals to Glif each spring and watched fireworks crackle in the sky above Ardburg, and hadn’t missed one of the Summer Lord’s parades in years.

  Once, when she was much younger, she’d asked her father if the gods were real. Real enough, he’d answered.

  Unsatisfied by his reply, she’d gone to Lily instead. Her mother had told her the same story the priests had, except she told it better, so that Tam nearly wept when the Frost Mother died giving birth to the Spring Maiden, and again when the Autumn Son, who was abhorred by his father, sacrificed himself so that his mother might be reborn.

  And so, her mother concluded, goes the cycle of seasons. And so it always will.

  Is that story really true? Tam had asked.

  She could still remember the sorrow in her mother’s smile. I hope not, she’d said.

  Freecloud, Tam realized, was still waiting for an answer.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not very pious at all.”

  The druin put a hand on her shoulder. “Good. Because the gods are a lie.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Something White

  As Freecloud explained to Tam why the Holy Tetrea—who were worshipped in every court of Grandual—were false, she watched specks of slanting moonlight move across the altar before them, slow as stars wheeling in the night sky.

  “So the druins are gods?” Tam asked, once he’d finished speaking.

  “The gods are druins,” he corrected. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “But the Summer Lord is actually the Archon of the Old Dominion?”

  “Vespian, yes.”

  “And the Winter Queen is really his wife …”

  “Astra.”

  “Astra,” Tam repeated. She saw the Warden’s shadow stir in the doorway.

  “The Archon’s wife died giving birth to their daughter,” Freecloud was saying, “and Vespian, driven mad by grief, instilled a sword he called Tamarat with the power to bring her back from the grave.”

  “Like necromancy?” Tam asked.

  “The druins are immune to necromancy,” he told her. “Whether it’s because we’re immortal, or not native to this world, I have no idea. And yet the Archon found a way. He was a powerful sorcerer, and many of the weapons he crafted were not merely weapons. They were tools, created to serve a specific purpose. Vellichor is one. Tamarat, another.”

  “Tamarat,” breathed Tam. The bowl of stars whispered the name back to her. “It can bring people back from the dead?”

  “Not people. Only Astra. But to do so, the sword requires an immortal’s life in exchange.”

  Considering how precarious the druins’ tenure in this realm was (since each female could give birth to but a single child), the Archon forging a sword that consumed his own kind seemed to Tam like kind of an asshole move. “So Vespian killed one of his people?”
/>
  “His daughter,” whispered Freecloud. “He killed his daughter, Glif.”

  “What? Why?” Tam was horrified.

  “I suspect he was trying to keep Astra’s death—and her revival—a secret. Or else he was ashamed of what he’d made and hoped to conceal it. It’s possible he blamed the child for Astra’s death. But I think …” Freecloud paused, gazing down at the altar. “I think Vespian surrendered a piece of himself when he forged that sword. He’d been a hero, once.” The druin sighed heavily. “But he did what he did, and so granted Astra a second life.”

  Tam, who considered herself something of an expert when it came to stories, had a strong suspicion this one didn’t end with the words happily ever after.

  “Suffice it to say, Astra was no longer the woman she’d been before. She was different, darker. She took her own life several times in the years that followed, and each time the Archon brought her back. But with every incarnation there was less of the woman she’d been and more of … something else. Eventually, she bore Vespian another child. I know,” he said before Tam could interject. “It shouldn’t have been possible. But nevertheless, Astra gave birth a second time. To a son.”

  Tam pulled her eyes from sweep of moonlight constellations. “Holy shit,” she said, her voice amplified by the bowl in front of her. “It was you!”

  She heard the druin draw a sharp breath and then stifle a laugh. “No,” he said. “Nice try, though.”

  They both turned at the sound of a scuff by the door. The Warden’s shadow remained where it had been throughout the night, but its shape had changed. His head was canted sideways, the rough planes of his mask cut in profile against the luminescence outside.

  He was listening.

  “Who was Astra’s son?” Tam asked, a whisper.

  The druin turned his back on the altar. “Ask me tomorrow.”