Brune looked down at the body with puzzlement, as though he’d closed his fist on a gold coin and opened it to find a lump of coal. Cura clamped a hand over her mouth and stared blankly at the man stretched out at her knees. Freecloud, his ears sagging, watched the forest beside the road with eyes the colour of dull iron.
Moog slumped down beside Gabriel’s body. He took his friend’s head in withered hands and kissed him lightly on the forehead. “You bastard,” he slurred through a rising sob. “You brave, stupid, beautiful bastard. How could you? How could you go on without us?” The wizard laid his cheek on Gabe’s chest and sobbed until his tears dried up, then he straightened, sniffed, and choked on a phlegmy chuckle. “Clay’s gonna kill you when he finds out. He won’t—”
In the forest, a woman screamed. Not in fright, but in fury—a rage so powerful and painfully violent Tam wondered that the trees themselves didn’t splinter at the sound of it. Freecloud started like a hound beckoned to its master’s side, but Branigan clasped his shoulder and shook his head.
Freecloud settled onto his seat, and minutes later Rose emerged from the woods, climbed into the wagon, and ordered Bran to go on.
And so they went.
Clay Cooper owned a modest two-storey inn on the road between Coverdale and the Free City of Conthas. There was a stable out back, a bare-branched maple out front, and a shield-shaped sign above the door upon which the word Slowhand’s had been spelled out in blocky script.
They rolled up sometime around midday. The road running past the inn was thick with refugees fleeing Coverdale, and the yard swarmed with mercs swapping stories and arguing over what to do next. Roderick offered to look after the horses. The satyr had been glancing skyward all morning, as if expecting Doshi to return at any moment with the stolen skyship.
That, or he fears the Simurg might come swooping down on us. Unfortunately, the latter was a far more likely prospect.
Branigan stepped off the board and offered Tam a hand down. Cura, Brune, and Freecloud followed. None of them said a word, even when their names were called by mercenaries watching from the yard.
Rose didn’t move. She was kneeling at her father’s side, as she had since she’d returned from the forest. She’d shed no tears, and might have been watching paint dry for the lack of expression on her face, but the sound of her scream still echoed in Tam’s memory.
The mood on the lawn was changing perceptively, from generally chaotic to genuinely curious. Traffic on the road congested further as passersby slowed for a look. Tam heard a hundred voices whisper Rose’s name in the sudden hush.
And another name, too.
The inn’s door opened, and a man stepped out from inside. He was big—taller than Freecloud, broader than Brune—but aside from his size (and a vicious-looking scar slanting across a punched-up nose) he was otherwise unremarkable: brown hair, brown eyes, a brown beard shot through with flecks of steely grey.
Clay Cooper, Tam assumed, whom the songs called Slowhand (when they called him anything at all). Gabe’s faithful friend was Saga’s least notorious member, barely a footnote in every story Tam had heard featuring Grandual’s greatest band. He struck an imposing figure now, she thought, glowering beneath a granite brow.
Moog drew a shuddering breath. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll tell him.” The wizard climbed down from the wagon and ran a trembling hand over the bald crown of his head, then tottered up the beaten lane toward the step where Slowhand waited.
A serious-looking woman—Clay’s wife, Tam supposed—emerged from inside, followed closely by two girls. One of them was very obviously their daughter. She looked to be a few years younger than Tam, but was just as tall, and sturdily built. Her face was broad and sun-browned, her hair bound into a thick braid she tugged on absently as she surveyed the yard. The other girl was much younger, with hair like a bolt of pale green silk and bright eyes that grew wide when she caught sight of her parents.
“Mommy!” She squirmed from the older girl’s grip, slipped the grasp of Slowhand’s wife, and came running barefoot across the snowy yard. Freecloud moved to intercept her. He scooped his daughter up and whispered something into her ear before carrying her off, away from the wagon and the woman grieving within.
Moog finally reached the inn’s step. Whatever he said rocked Slowhand like a punch and left the big man swaying like an ox with an axe in its skull.
The bard heard whispers ripple out from where the two of them stood, a low murmur of dread and disbelief. The wizard was weeping openly now, and Clay Cooper’s wife reached out to graze her husband’s arm as he looked toward the cart. Her touch appeared to ground him. He said something Tam couldn’t hear from so far away, then laid a hand on Moog’s shoulder as he brushed by and started down the track toward the road.
By now the yard had grown deathly quiet. Several hundred mercenaries stood in rapt attention, and but for a few desperate travellers, the torrent going past had come to a standstill as well.
The silence startled Rose. She blinked, glanced over her shoulder to see Slowhand coming. Tam was near enough to see some new pain rise in the dark pools of her eyes. With an effort that seemed titanic, Rose dragged herself from the wagon and stood waiting for Clay as he approached.
“My father wanted—” was as far as she got before the giant embraced her, pulling the freezing plates of her armour against him, cradling her head in the palm of one massive hand. Neither spoke for a long while, and neither—unbelievably—cried. Rose, Tam suspected, had closed her heart off like a valve, and Slowhand, perhaps, had endured too much or had watched too many friends die for one more to matter.
More likely, Tam figured, he’s doing this for Rose, knowing that if he breaks, she’ll break—no matter how tightly she’s turned that wheel.
At last, Slowhand set her free. And then, like a man resigned to stare into the sun even as it burned his eyes to ash, the grizzled merc turned his gaze upon his dear departed friend. Tam saw his barrel-wide chest rise and fall once, and again, and then, when he trusted himself to speak, he said to Rose, “May I?”
She nodded tersely. “Of course.”
Slowhand leaned into the wagon and lifted Gabriel out. He did so gently, with deliberate slowness, as though his fallen bandmate were a child who’d fallen asleep by the fire and was only being carried off to bed. Rose’s father, who’d appeared larger than life when Tam had met him just days ago, looked diminished in the other man’s arms. His charisma, his easy charm, the assured grace with which he’d moved, and listened, and spoke … all of it was gone. Whatever gold remained in his hair seemed to grey before her eyes.
Clay Cooper bore Gabriel across the yard by the most direct route. Rose went after him, wordlessly bidding her bandmates to follow. Tam and Branigan trailed some distance behind, a pair of far-removed cousins bringing up the rear of a mourning procession.
The mercenaries crowding the yard shuffled to make a path. Helms were removed, chain coifs pushed back from lowered heads. Some of the warriors placed a hand over their heart, others offered prayers to the Spring Maiden. A few of the older ones brushed tears from their eyes, and even the youngest stared in open reverence.
There wasn’t a merc in the world who didn’t know Golden Gabe, though in truth not everyone thought kindly of him. Tam had heard some newer fighters claim he was overrated, that he’d come up in a simpler time and didn’t have the stomach for fighting in the arena. Many who’d known him during Saga’s touring days called him arrogant, brash, more concerned with exploiting his fame than earning it. Such sentiments, Tam imagined, were most often born of envy, but since the dead didn’t warrant envy, what happened next was no great surprise.
Not to Tam, anyway.
Moog went to his knees, though whether anguish or admiration drove him there, she couldn’t know. A pair of greybeards followed suit, bending a knee and bowing their heads. Beside them, a woman Tam identified as Clare Cassiber—better known as the Silver Shadow—stooped as well. A platinum-haired youth
in black leathers, who she thought might be the frontman of the Screaming Eagles, knelt in the snow, then hissed at his bandmates to do the same. And suddenly, in a chorus of clanking mail and creaking leather, every single merc in the yard was kneeling.
They might have been stalks of grass for the attention Clay Cooper paid them, but Rose slowed and stared around, clearly amazed. The bard saw more than a few men and women offer Gabe’s daughter a solemn nod, and Tam, to keep herself from gaping like a fool at every famous face she recognized, fixed her eyes on the door of the inn ahead.
It took forever to reach it, but eventually Slowhand and his burden disappeared inside. Rose went after him, flanked by Cura and Brune. Moog and Clay’s daughter slipped in behind them. His wife held the door open for Tam, but the bard paused with one foot on the stoop, unsure whether or not she belonged inside.
“Go on,” Bran urged. “I’ll wait here.” When she didn’t move, her uncle nudged her with an elbow. “You’re their bard, Tam. Whatever happens inside, you should be there.”
He was right, of course. A bard’s duty was to watch, to witness. For Tam to turn an eye when glory faded, when heroes were forced to endure heartbreak and hardship no strength of arms could overcome, was to betray that duty.
Tam stepped through the door.
She never sang about what happened beyond that threshold, nor spoke of it to anyone who wasn’t present themself. What was obvious, though, to those who knew her before and after that morning, was that the woman who emerged was distinctly changed from the girl who’d entered.
Her smiles were shorter. Her laugh was louder. She became distracted at times, and would stare at nothing with a look of shattered sorrow that passed like a cloud the moment someone spoke her name.
She loved less quickly, but more fiercely, and made certain that those she cared for knew it well.
Sometimes she wept when it snowed.
Chapter Forty-four
Ashes on the Wind
Tam was asked to look after Wren while the others built Gabe a pyre. The young sylf, who was so chatty it was a wonder she found time to breathe, led the bard into the stable out back.
“All these were full yesterday.” Wren indicated the dozens of empty stalls nearest the door. “But Auntie Ginny is a horse trader and she traded them all for money. Except, um, some people didn’t have any money, but she gave them a horse anyway and told me not to tell Uncle Clay.” She whirled on the bard. “So don’t tell Uncle Clay, okay?”
“Uncle Clay?” Tam pretended to ponder something. “Is he the great big one with a long scar on his face?”
“That’s him. He got that scar from falling down some stairs.”
I bet he did, Tam thought with a wry grin.
The girl scampered over to a black stallion whose mane and tail were dyed a deep red. “This is Mommy’s horse. His name is Heartbreaker and he only lets girls pet him. See?” She stroked the stallion’s nose in demonstration, then pointed at a snow-white mare in the stall next door. “And this is Greensea. She’s Daddy’s horse, but Ginny lets me ride her sometimes because she’s very gentle.”
Tam’s smile widened in the dim lantern light.
“Here is Tally’s horse.” Wren patted the nose of a speckled brown-and-white palfrey. “She calls him Bert. And this big brown one belongs to Grandpa. She’s really mean, though, and she bites everyone, and she doesn’t like Grandpa very much at all.”
Sadness slipped like a blade between Tam’s ribs, but she kept her smile intact for the girl’s sake. “What’s her name?”
“Valery. Oh, and look over here!”
Moog had left the inn a while earlier (to decompress, he’d said, whatever that meant), and now Tam picked out his white fringe and beard in the gloom at the rear of the stable. The wizard was vigorously scratching the head of something in one of the larger pens.
“These are Uncle Moog’s owlbears!” Wren announced.
Before Tam could ask what the hell an owlbear was, she saw for herself—and realized she’d seen one dying on the battlefield north of Coverdale. True to their name, they resembled nothing so much as brown-feathered bears with sharp black beaks and round yellow eyes. One of them squawked as Tam approached. The other purred like a cat beneath the wizard’s scratching fingers.
“The big one is Gregor,” Wren told her, “and the little one is Dane.”
Tam wouldn’t have called either creature little, seeing as though both of them were taller at the shoulder than she was, though one wasn’t quite so massive as the other. “Are they your … pets?” she asked Moog.
“My dear companions,” the wizard replied, with nothing but a sniffle to show for his earlier grief. “I wouldn’t normally coop them up like this, but every mile between here and Conthas is swarming with mercenaries who might mistake them for enemies.” He withdrew a cluster of badly bruised bananas from the gods knew where and dangled them in front of Wren. “Would you like to feed them?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Please!”
Tam scowled. “They eat bananas?”
Moog shrugged his bony shoulders. “Everything eats bananas.”
While Wren and the wizard lobbed unpeeled bananas into the owlbears’ gaping beaks, Tam moved into the grey light by the stable door. The day was growing colder; her breath steamed white in the frigid air. They were done building Gabriel’s pyre, she saw—a pile of splintered chairs beneath a heavy oak table—and mercenaries were beginning to gather in clumps nearby.
She saw Lady Jain standing at the edge of the crowd, and recalled her admitting to robbing Gabe once upon a time. They’d become friends since, Tam guessed, since she’d rarely seen someone look so lost while standing still. The Silk Arrows, rainbow-bright in their garish attire, were gathered around her, but their numbers were diminished since Tam had seen them last.
Tam heard the scuff of a boot on the stable floor. Turning, she found Clay’s daughter standing at her shoulder, gazing north. The sky above them was partitioned into halves: the pale gold of morning and the lavender wash of dawn. To the north, dark clouds—snow clouds—piled the horizon. Windblown ribbons of black smoke reached southward like the fingers of some spectral hand.
Tally had hold of her braid and was tugging it idly. The girl’s knuckles were scabbed, and her nose, in profile, bore the telltale kink of having been broken at least once. Despite her size and sturdy frame, she didn’t strike Tam as the aggressive sort, and her parents, from what little Tam knew of them, seemed incapable of raising a bully. She assumed, then, that Tally had come by her injuries honestly—perhaps in the course of standing up for someone incapable of looking out for themselves.
We all have a bit of our fathers in us, Tam thought, admiring the girl in silence.
“What?” Tally asked, when she caught the bard staring.
“Nothing.” Tam returned her attention to the sky up north, fearing to see the first harbingers of Astra’s undead Horde winging toward them. “How far is it to Conthas?”
Tally shrugged. “A few days. Less, if we ride hard.”
Oh, we’ll ride hard. “Do you think they know what’s coming?” Tam wondered.
The girl’s brow furrowed. Her knuckles went white on the braid in her hand. “What is coming?”
The bard considered the question as she peered at the distant storm. She didn’t want to scare the girl, but it wouldn’t do to sugarcoat it either. “Hell,” she said finally.
To Gabriel’s credit (and despite the looming threat of an undead Horde shambling south to kill them all), close to a thousand mercs, bards, bookers, and teary-eyed admirers were on hand to watch him burn. Cremation, of course, was a necessary precaution, since burying dead heroes seemed inadvisable when a necromancer-queen was on the loose.
Tam stood shoulder to shoulder with Cura, whose penchant for dressing all in black was, for once, appropriate to the occasion. Roderick joined them, hatless and bootless among his peers for the first time ever, so far as the bard was aware. The satyr collected
an assortment of curious looks as he clopped his way across the snowy yard, from astonishment to outright scorn. One dour-faced merc amassed a noisy mouthful of phlegm, but a deadly glare from Rose forced him to swallow it with an audible gulp.
Slowhand pulled the cork on a green glass bottle of Longmourn Whiskey. The distillery had been destroyed by the Horde as they came south, which meant every remaining dram was a thing to be cherished.
“Matty sent me this when the inn finally opened last fall,” Tam overheard him say to Moog, as if their old bandmate—now the emperor of Castia—was a kindly neighbour who dropped off a meat loaf from time to time. “It’s been aged forty years in treant casks, apparently. I’d planned on hanging on to it until the next time we were all together.” He shrugged, took a swig, sucked his teeth, and passed it to the wizard.
“Treant casks?” Moog sounded genuinely intrigued. “What does treant taste like?”
Another shrug. “Vanilla.”
The wizard took a tentative sip. One of his eyelids twitched rapidly, and he heaved like a cat retching up a hairball before passing the bottle on to Rose. “Vanilla?” Moog hissed under his breath. “It tastes like an ogre’s loincloth! And don’t ask me how I know that!”
Rose drank deeper than either of them, then stepped forward and splashed the bottle’s contents over the makeshift pyre. Afterward, she stood by her father’s side and spoke as if the two of them were alone.
“You were a shit father,” she told him. “Selfish and arrogant. Wholly unfit to be a parent.” She looked toward the stable, where Wren could be heard telling Slowhand’s daughter how many colours of horses there were in the world. “Runs in the family, I guess.” She waited for a spatter of laughter before going on. “You told some good stories, though. You used to go on for hours about your endless adventures, your grand tours of the Heartwyld. You made it seem as if your life was a lot more exciting before I came along. And you never stopped talking about getting your band back together. Until, finally, you did.”
Bloody Rose Page 34
