I lay awake a long while. When I finally slept, the dreams were worse.
V
We made poor time the next day. Krin and I were obliged to lead the three horses as well as Ellie. Luckily, the horses were well behaved, as Edema-trained horses tend to be. I thank my luck for that, if they had been as wayward as the poor mayor’s daughter, we might have never made it to Levinshir at all.
Krin and I did our best to keep Ellie engaged in conversation as we walked. It seemed to help a bit. And by the time our noon meal came around she seemed almost aware of what was going on around her. Almost.
I had an idea as we were getting ready to set out again after lunch. I lead our dappled grey mare over to where Ellie stood. Her golden hair was one great tangle and she was trying to run one of her hands through it while her eyes wandered around in a distracted way, as if she didn’t quite understand where she was.
“Ellie,” she turned to look. “Have you met Greytail?” I gestured to the mare.
A faint, confused shake of the head.
“I need your help leading her. Have you led a horse before?”
A nod.
“She needs someone to take care of her. Can you do it?” Greytail looked at me with one large eye, as if to let me know she needed leading as much as I needed wheels to walk. But then she lowered her head a bit and nuzzled Ell in a motherly way. The girl reached out a hand to pet her grey nose almost automatically. Ellie nodded to my question, and actually reached to take the reins from me.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Krin asked when I came back to pack the other horses.
“Greytail is gentle as a lamb.”
“Just because Ell is witless as a sheep,” Krin said archly, “doesn’t make them a good pairing.”
I cracked a smile at that. “We’ll watch them close for an hour or so. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t. But sometimes the best help a person can find is helping someone else.”
Since I had slept poorly, I was twice as weary today. My stomach was vaguely sour, and I felt gritty, like someone had roughly sanded the first two layers of my skin away. I was almost tempted to ride the horse and doze in the saddle, but I couldn’t bring myself to ride while the girls walked. It didn’t seem right.
So I plodded along, leading my horse and nodding on my feet. But today I couldn’t fall into the comfortable half-sleep I tend to use when walking. I was plagued with thoughts of Alleg, wondering if he was still alive.
I knew from my time in the Medica that the gut wound I had given him was fatal. I also knew it was a slow death. Slow and painful. With proper care it might be weeks before he died. Even alone in the middle of nowhere, with no medical attention at all, he could live for days with such a wound.
Not pleasant days. He would grow delirious with fever as the infection set in. Every movement would tear the wound open again. He couldn’t walk on his hamstrung leg. So if he wanted to move he’d have to crawl. He would be cramped with hunger and burning with thirst by now.
But not dead from thirst. No. I had left a full waterskin nearby. I had laid it at his side before we had left. Not out of kindness. Not to make his last hours more bearable. I had left it because I knew that with water he would live longer, suffer more.
Leaving that waterskin was the most terrible thing I had ever done, and now that my anger had cooled to ashes I regretted it. I wondered how much longer he would live because of it. A day? Two? Certainly no more than two. I tried not to think what those two days would be like.
But even when I forced thoughts of Alleg from my mind, I had other demons to fight. I remembered bits and pieces of that night, the things the false troupers had said as I cut them down. The sounds my sword had made as it dug into them. The smell of their skin as I had branded them. I had killed two women. What would Tempi think of my actions? What would anyone think?
Exhausted from worry and lack of sleep. My thoughts spun in these circles for the remainder of the day. I set camp from force of habit and kept up a conversation with Ellie through an effort of will. The time for sleep came before I was ready and I found myself rolled in my cloak laying in the front of the girl’s tent. I was dimly aware that Krin had started giving me the same vaguely worried look she had been giving Ellie for the past two days.
I lay open-eyed for an hour before falling asleep, wondering about Alleg.
When I slept I dreamt of the night I had killed them. In my dream I stalked the forest like grim death, unwavering.
But it was different this time. I killed Otto, his blood spattered my hands like hot grease. Then I killed Manst and Josh, and Tim. They moaned and screamed, twisting on the ground. Their wounds were horrible, but I could not look away.
But then the faces changed and I was killing Taren, the bearded ex-mercenary in my troupe. Then I killed Trip. Then I was chasing Shandi through the forest, my sword naked in my hand. She was crying out, weeping in fear. When I finally caught her she clutched at me, knocking me to the ground, burying her face in my chest, sobbing. “No no no.” She begged. “No no no.”
I came awake. I laying on my back, terrified and not knowing where my dream ended and the world began. After a brief moment I realized the truth. Ellie had crawled from the tent and lay curled against me. Her face pressed against my chest, her hand grasping desperately at my arm.
“No no,” she choked out, “No no no no no.” Her body shook with helpless sobs when she couldn’t say it any more. My shirt was wet with hot tears. My arm was bleeding where she clutched it. I made consoling noises and brushed at her hair with my hand. After a long while she quieted and eventually fell into an exhausted sleep, still clinging tightly to my chest.
I lay very still, not wanting to wake her. My teeth were clenched. I thought of Alleg and Otto and all the rest, I remembered the blood and screaming and the smell of burning skin. I remembered it all and dreamed of worse things I could have done to them.
I never had the nightmares again. Sometimes I think of Alleg and I smile.
We made it to Levinshir the next day. Ellie had come to her senses but remained quiet and withdrawn. Still, things went quicker now that she was truly with us. The girls decided they had recovered enough to take turns riding the tall roan with the saddle.
We covered eight miles before we stopped at midday. The girls became increasingly excited as they began to recognize turnings in the road. The shape of hills in the distance. A crooked tree by the wayside.
But as we grew closer still, they grew quiet, almost frightened.
“It’s just over the hill here,” Krin said, getting down off the roan. “You ride from here, Ellie.”
Ellie looked from her, to me, to her feet. She shook her head.
I watched them. “Are the two of you okay?”
“My father’s going to kill me,” Krin’s voice was barely a whisper, her face full of serious fear.
“Your father will be one of the happiest men in the world tonight,” I said. Then, realizing it was best to be honest, I added. “He might be angry, too. But that’s only because he’s been scared out of his mind for the last eight days.”
Krin seemed slightly reassured. But then Ellie burst out crying. Krin put her arms around her, making gentle words. When she had calmed a bit, I asked her what was the matter.
“No one will marry me,” Ellie sobbed. “I was going to marry Jason Waterson and help him run his store. He won’t marry me now. No one will.”
I looked up to Krin and saw the same fear reflected in her wet eyes. But Krin’s eyes were angry while Ellie’s held nothing but despair.
“Any man who thinks that way is a fool,” I said, weighting my voice with all the conviction I could bring to bear. “And the two of you are too clever to be marrying fools.”
It seemed to calm Ellie somewhat, her eyes turning up at me as if looking for something to believe.
“It’s the truth,” I said. “And none of this was your fault. Make sure you remember that for these next couple days.”
“I hate them!” Ellie spat, surprising me with her sudden rage. “I hate men!” Her knuckles were white as she gripped Greytail’s reigns. Her face twisted into a mask of anger. Krin moved to put her arms around her, but when she looked at me I saw the sentiment reflected quietly in her dark eyes.
“You have every right to hate them,” I said, feeling more anger and helplessness than ever before in my life. “But remember that it was a man who helped you when the time came. Not all of us are like that.”
We stayed there for a while, not more than a half-mile from their town. We had a drink of water and a small bite to settle our nerves. Then I took them home.
Levinshir wasn’t a big town. Two hundred people lived there, maybe three hundred if you counted the families in the outlying farms. It was mealtime when we rode in, and the dirt road that split the town in half was empty and still. Ellie told me her parent’s house was on the far side of town. I hoped to get the girls there without being seen. They were worn down and distraught, the last thing they needed was to face a mob of gossipy neighbors.
But it wasn’t meant to be. We were halfway through the town when I saw a flicker of movement in a window. Then a woman’s voice cried out, “Ellie!” and in ten seconds people began to spill from every doorway in sight.
The women were the quickest, and inside a minute a dozen of them had formed a protective knot around the two girls, talking and crying and hugging one another. The girls didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps it was better this way, a warm welcome home might do a lot to heal them.
The men held back, knowing that they were useless in situations like this. Most watched from doorways or porches, six or eight came down onto the street. Moving slowly and eyeing up the situation. These were cautious men, farmers and friends of farmers. They knew the names of everyone within ten miles of their homes. There were no strangers in a town like Levinshir, except for me.
None of the men were close relatives to the girls. Even if they were, they knew they wouldn’t get near the girls for at least an hour, maybe as much as a day. So they held back and let their wives and sisters take care of things. With nothing else to occupy them, their attention wandered briefly past the horses and settled onto me.
I motioned over a boy of ten or so. “Go tell the mayor that his daughter’s back. Run!” He tore off in a cloud of road dust, his bare feet flying.
The men moved slowly closer to me. Their natural suspicion of strangers made ten times worse by recent events. A boy of fourteen or so wasn’t as cautious as the rest and came right up to me, eyeing my sword, my cloak.
I sprung a question on him before he could do the same to me. “What’s your name?”
“Pete.”
“Can you ride a horse, Pete?”
He looked insulted. “S’nuf.”
“Do you know where the Walker farm is?”
He nodded. “’Bout north two miles by the millway.”
I stepped sideways and handed him the reins to the roan. “Go tell them their daughter’s home. Then let them use the horse to come back to town.”
He had a leg over the horse before I could offer him a hand up. I kept a hand on the reins long enough to shorten the stirrups so he wouldn’t kill himself on the way there.
“If you make it there and back without breaking your head or my horse’s leg, I’ll give you a penny,” I said.
“You’ll give me two,” he said.
I laughed. He wheeled the horse around and was gone.
The men had wandered closer in the meantime. Closing around me in a loose circle.
A tall, balding fellow with a permanent scowl and a grizzled beard seemed to appoint himself the leader. “So who’re you?” he asked. His tone speaking more clearly than his words, Who the hell are you?
“Kvothe,” I answered pleasantly. “And yourself?”
“Don’t know as that’s any of your business,” he growled. “What are you doing here? What the hell are you doing here with our two girls?”
“God’s mother, Jake,” an older man said to him. “You don’t have the sense god gave a dog. That’s no way to talk to the . . . ”
“Don’t give me any of your lip Benjamin,” the scowling man bristled back. “I don’t got to take it from you. We got a good right to know who he is.” He turned to me and took a few steps in front of everyone else. He eyed the lute that was slung over my shoulder. “You one of those trouper bastards what came through here?”
I shook my head and attempted to look harmless. “No.”
“I think you are. I think you look kinda like one of them Ruh. You got them eyes.” The men around him craned to get a better look at my face.
“God, Jake,” the old fellow chimed in again. “None of them had red hair. You remember hair like that. He ain’t one of ’em.”
“Why would I bring them back if I’d been one of the men who took them?” I pointed out.
His expression grew darker and he continued his slow advance. “You gettin’ smart with me, boy? Maybe you think all us are stupid here? You think if you bring ’em back you’ll get a reward or mebbe we won’t send anyone else out after you?” He was almost within arm’s reach of me now, scowling furiously.
I looked around and saw the same anger lurking in the faces of all the men who stood there. It was the sort of anger that comes to slow boil inside the hearts of good men who want justice, and finding it out of their grasp, decide on vengeance as a substitute.
I tried to think of a way to diffuse the situation, but before I could do anything I heard Krin’s voice lash out from behind me. “Jake, you get away from him!”
Jake paused, his hands half raised against me. “Now . . . ”
Krin was already stepping toward him. The knot of women loosened to release her, but stayed close. “He saved us, Jake,” she shouted furiously, “You stupid shit-eater, he saved us. Where the hell were all of you? Why didn’t you come get us?”
He backed away from me as anger and shame fought their way across his face. Anger won. “We came,” he shouted back. “After we found out what happened we went after ’em. They shot out Bil’s horse from under him, and he got his leg crushed. Jim got his arm stabbed, and old Cupper still ain’t waked up from the thumping they give him. They almost killed us.”
I looked again and saw anger on the men’s faces. Saw the real reason for it. The helplessness they had felt, unable to defend their town from the false troupe’s rough handling. Worse yet the failure to reclaim the daughters of their friends and neighbors had shamed them.
“Well, it wasn’t good enough!” Krin shouted back hotly, her eyes burning. “He came and got us because he’s a real man. Not like the rest of you who left us to die!”
The anger leapt out of a young man to my left, a farmboy, about seventeen. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been running around like some Ruh whore!”
I broke his arm before I quite realized what I was doing. He screamed as he fell to the ground.
I pulled him to his feet by the scruff of his neck. “What’s your name?” I snarled into his face.
“My arm!” He gasped, his eyes showing me their whites.
I shook him like a rag doll. “Name!”
“Jason,” he blurted. “God’s mother, my arm . . . ”
I took his chin in my free hand and turned his face toward Krin and Ellie. “Jason,” I hissed quietly in his ear. “I want you to look at those girls. And I want you to think about the hell that they’ve been through in these past days, tied hand and foot in the back of a wagon. And I want you to ask yourself what’s worse. A broken arm, or getting kidnapped by a stranger and raped three times a night?”
Then, I turned his face toward me and spoke so quiet that even an inch away it was hardly a whisper. “After you’ve thought of that, I want you to pray to god to forgive you for what you just said. And if you mean it, Tehlu grant your arm heal straight and true.” His eyes were terrified and wet. “After that, if you ever think an unkind thought about e
ither of them, your arm will ache like there’s hot iron in the bone. And if you ever say anything unkind, it will go to fever and slow rot and they’ll have to cut it off to save your life.”
I tightened my grip on him watching his eyes widen, his face covered in a sheen of sweat. “And if you ever do anything to either of them, I’ll know. I will come here, and kill you, and leave your broken body hanging in a tree.”
There were tears on his face now, although whether from shame or fear or pain I couldn’t guess. “Now you tell her you’re sorry for what you said.” I let go of him after making sure he had his feet under him and pointed him in the direction of Krin and Ellie. The women stood around them like a protective cocoon.
He clutched his arm weakly. “I shouldn’ta said that, Ellie,” he sobbed, sounding more wretched and repentant than I would have thought possible, broken arm or no. “It was a demon talkin’ out of me. I swear though, I been sick worryin’. We all been. And we did try come get you, but they was a lot of them and they jumped us on the road, then we had to bring Bil home or he’d died from his leg.”
Something tickled my memory about the boy’s name. Jason? I suddenly suspected that I had just broken Ellie’s boyfriend’s arm. Somehow I couldn’t feel bad for it just now. Best thing for him, really.
Looking around I saw the anger bleed out of the faces of the men around me. As if I’d used up the whole town’s supply in a sudden, furious flash. Instead they watched Jason, looking slightly embarrassed, as if he were apologizing for the lot of them.
Then I saw a big, healthy looking man running down the street followed by a dozen other townsfolk. From the look on his face I guess it was Ellie’s father, the mayor. He forced his way into the knot of women, gathered his daughter up in his arms and swung her around.
You find two types of mayor in small towns like this. The first type are balding, older men of considerable girth who are good with money and tend to wring their hands a great deal when anything unexpected happens. The second type are tall, broad-shouldered men whose families have grown slowly prosperous and strong because they have worked like angry bastards behind a plow for twenty generations. Ellie’s father was the second sort.
The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Page 55
