“I did.”
“Then he will know why we have gone and he will needs not fear. Happy?”
She was not happy, but there was little he could do about that. Though her gaze remained malevolent, she slowly nodded her assent and began to search for paper. “But I will be writing it,” she said, as if he would object, “lest you color it poorly.”
Perhaps, admittedly, he was being a bit bull-headed. The baker had seemingly tried to help, whatever the reasons. He had fed them, warmed them and treated them, at a time when so much as sheltering them could rightly lead to death.
The thought of the baker’s long absence still unnerved him, and he would not apologize for that, but for the rest…perhaps. When they had a moment to spare.
Once parchment was found, Essa did not take long with the note. When she was finished, she breathed grains of sand into the ink to dry it, and left it to lie upon the table. Rurik did not bother to read it over. He trusted her to spare the dirty details, to have at least that much discretion. All Voren need know was that they had gone and they might not be coming back.
So long. Farewell. So it goes.
As they gathered their things, Essa sourly quipped, “I see many paths to ruin here, and all share a guide.”
Rurik paused, snorted, and moved on. To quote the Vorges was not so uncommon a thing. But from her? It was not something he expected, and even less enjoyed.
There was a touch of pride beneath the annoyance as well. She had only ever read the Vorges—the holy texts of the Visaji faith—because of him. So she did remember something of our lessons. It was what he had used to teach her, when they were young and their cares were more mundane. None but the priests and scholars would voluntarily subject themselves to so much scripture, but it was the easiest thing he could find to teach her how to read.
“I am not a king, nor do I lead a country into ruin, Essa.”
“Only yourself, and any of us hopeless enough to be caught following you.”
The lance of pain that brought was far more agonizing than any dog’s jagged teeth. Rurik breathed deep. He did not want to yell. Not at her. Not again. Too much of that had already gone before, and he already felt a wretched thing. Though hostile, the words were not entirely angry anyways. Behind the snap in tone, he could hear the traces of grief. When he turned to her, she had her head in her hand, rubbing at her eyes.
The king mentioned in the Vorges was one of the ancient rulers of Kassantir, a cruel, petty man that turned his back on his nation, surrounding himself with wicked and corrupt men, that he might never be denied. He warred with those peoples around him. He ruthlessly butchered his own. He surrendered himself to decadence and debauchery and flooded it through his court. At one point, he even declared himself a god, and wreathed himself in the blood and skin and bones of his enemies, in a wretched crown and cloak.
The only man to stand before him was the prophet Anduval. Anduval rebuked him before the court on the day of his “coronation,” refusing to bow before him or to accept him as his god. It was then he uttered the famous quote, which Essa now hurled at Rurik. Assal, the prophet said, had naught but love for all the peoples of the land, but even he could not save the king, if he so chose to hasten down his path toward destruction. The king roared in anger, and cast the priest down. He broke the old man’s legs and had him imprisoned in his highest tower.
The people followed the king until the bitter end. And bitter it was.
The parable ended in the death of the king at his enemies’ hands. His body was stripped and flogged, his head was crowned in thorns, his tongue and his eyes put out, and he was at last hurled from the highest point of his own castle to be smote upon the earth and feasted on by his ever-faithful dogs. In the wake of his demise, the kingdom was scattered, his people driven into slavery and exile, and even the names of king and country were to be scoured, that every trace of the supposed God-King would be erased for all time.
If only he had listened to the prophet, the jolly old king might have enjoyed a longer lifespan. Or in Rurik’s case, any one of the friends that still bothered listening to him.
He put a hand on Essa’s shoulder, then hesitated, waiting to see how she would react. She did not move, though he felt her tense, then shudder and gulp, and he thought, for a moment, that she cried. When he drew her back into his arms, though, she turned on him, all rage and tears, and he thought she would surely strike him. She shook, red-faced, but when she made no sound, he stepped into her and took her into his arms.
She sobbed and allowed herself to be folded against him, cradled like a child. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. She buried her face in his shoulder and rocked with all she had held back.
“No, Essa, no…I’m sorry. I never meant any of this,” and he closed his eyes as he gathered her up, saying, “Any of it. You have to know that. I never meant for this to happen to Rowan or Alviss or…or…” The words trailed off, and he lost them, suddenly unsure of himself. Or what? Himself? He could not say it. There was a reason he had been so nervous when the wind blew and the night beckoned.
You. That was what he wanted to say. He never meant for any of this to happen to her. And he meant it. He didn’t deserve her. Every inch of her was better than any inch of him.
“Don’t,” she replied. “We knew…” Her voice caught, cracked, struggled forward. “H-he knew.”
There was nothing more he wanted in that moment than to carry her away from it all. To draw the sheets over their heads and remain forever hidden from the world. He would cradle her and whisper sweet nothings in her ear, and there would be nothing but warmth and blissful darkness, so far removed from the world beyond. That alone could give him happiness.
But that alone he would never have. The world was relentless. One did not hide from it, merely drifted to and from its cold embrace. Life was found in the little fires that held the chill at bay for a day or a night, a week, even a year. But eventually, the fires would peter out, and the world would seep in again. There was no escape, not really.
“Rurik, are we going to die?”
A voice to the fears he himself could not admit. The thought of it made him cringe, but it had always been so. They lived close to death in whatever they did. At least in this, they stood a chance of doing something before they went to it.
“No,” he whispered. “Armies or no.” How are you not choking on the words? “Do you remember the trail? When we were young? If they never found it, then…it might work. They could have a hundred eyes for us and never find us.”
She stirred slightly, staring up at him. There was hope there, if only dim. Her face was wet, but he wiped at the tears, and she smiled as he touched her, though it was a ghostly thing—a hollow smile forced into being simply because it was needed. She thought him a silly creature sometimes, and it was so. He liked to think himself a man, as though the passing of a name day were enough to make it so.
A hand caught his as he started to pull away. It squeezed, gently, trying to hold him there.
“How can you be so kind and so cruel in a moment’s turn?”
He was at a loss. All he could think to say was: “I did not mean what I said about your friend.”
She shook his words off and leaned again against his chest. “Yes. You did.” They were silent after that, standing in the baker’s home, waiting for a moment neither hoped would come. Then she broke the quiet. “Don’t let jealousy be the last I see of you.”
His hug tightened and her hand fell away, her arms slipping around his back to return the embrace. He kissed her head and glanced toward the window. It had begun to snow outside.
With nothing else to say, he murmured: “We will get them back.” Finally, the girl started to pull away. Her eyes told him to follow, and he knew that he would follow her to the ends of the known world, if for only the chance to make her smile again. An army lay between them and the chains that bound, but for his friends, and for her, he would set them free.
Even if he could not fr
ee himself.
* *
Voren cowered as the note crumpled and fell from the captain’s hand.
He had been so careful, so swift. He brought soldiers, a half dozen strong, but all their steel met was emptiness when they arrived. Hysterics broke him. There was no way she could have known. Had she even suspected him? There had been no hint of it. Yet Essa was gone, and so was the exile, and Voren was left with nothing but a scrap of paper, hastily but kindly written. It was of little comfort before the hate-filled eyes of Matair’s roused men.
He dared not speak, hoping to shrink away into the dark. Still, the captain rounded on him all the same. “Craven swine,” he spat. Then a mailed fist cracked Voren along the jaw and spilt him across the earth. He was already spitting blood when the others fell upon him.
Chapter 6
Light flickered along the stone, dancing between the shadows. It was unnatural here, a foreign presence to be snuffed.
The manor dungeons were a place largely shunned, but necessity sometimes demanded the intrusion of life into the otherwise silent halls. A single guard stood on duty there at all times, though markedly little of the man’s time was ever spent on his duties. It was just as well. His attention was only scarcely needed. What criminals Verdan typically saw were put up in the cells at the magistrate’s offices, kept far and away from the lord and his family.
Certain prisoners demanded more personal care. The most recent additions were just such men, and it was for that reason Vardick had seen to it that there were two others posted to the detail. The men griped about it. Roswitte was certain of that, but of it she cared little. It was their duty and they would see it done, or they would join the men in the cells.
Besides, it was only the nature of the young to complain.
There were three of them in total. Three guards for three prisoners. It seemed only fair. Had the choice been wholly hers to make, though, she would have posted another three for good measure. Unlike many amongst her lord’s guardsmen, she knew the worth of the men before her. Two of them, at least. The third was unknown to her, but if the men that had brought them were to be believed, that one had tangled with the Brickheart and emerged more or less unscathed for the effort. When they told her he had done it with the handle of a broom, she could scarcely hold her disbelief. Or her laughter.
The Brickheart’s finger broken by a broom—what madness have we been brought? All she knew of him was that he had been the one accompanying Pescha’s daughter through Verdan.
She snuck a fleeting look at the stoic figure beside her. Lord Kasimir Matair was like old hickory. Thin at the waist, but deep-rooted and unyielding. If there were a tougher man in all of Idasia, she had never met him. His eyes were liquid fire—they could warm or burn at the slightest twitching of a muscle. Every motion was deliberate, purposeful, and filled with a graceful poise that was lost on younger men. He did not often speak, and his voice, when it came, was soft, but forceful. People did not speak over him. They hushed to hear him speak.
Still, the man was aging, and the signs were there. His once black hair had begun to color itself with a silver sheen. A limp was growing in his left leg that always saw him leaning heavily to his good side. It was a lasting memento of an old wound that had never quite healed. He struck a handsome figure still, but the skin beneath his eyes was beginning to wrinkle from a lifetime of toil.
The past two years had been especially hard on him, as it would on any father. Roswitte had thought if anyone could weather such torments it would be he, but even Kasimir seemed wearied by them.
One never asked about such things, though. The lord’s mind was his own, its counsel his alone to seek. Often he left the company of his men for the comforts of his own thought, and all knew better than to plum at their depths. Many saw the man, but few knew him.
Almost as soon as the prisoners had arrived, Kasimir had demanded to see them. His son, she told him, was not among them, but he had not seemed to care. In Brickheart’s absence—he and Isaak still hunting through the woods, along with a healthy score of the manor’s guardsmen—she gathered up two of the house’s best, at least of those remaining, and fetched the lord’s steward before guiding them all down to the cells. None of it was her domain, but Matair demanded her presence and she was not one to disobey. The woods were her home, but he was her master.
“I would advise you to answer his lordship,” Merten snipped. The old steward was always the confrontational sort, but his mood had only soured further by being wakened at so late an hour. He stood scowling between the cells from beneath his wool cloak.
“I cannot say what I know not.”
This one she knew well. The speaker sat propped up against the far corner, his long, thick legs stretched out before him. His blond beard was streaked with dirt and grime, but he otherwise lacked any of the bruises the others sported. Unlike the oddly-adorned one that shared his cell, he did not look away when they addressed him. Most men looked away when asked a hard question. He was not one of those. He met them full in the eye, like a man should, and she never saw a trace of fear in him.
Alviss was his name. Alviss the Kuric, or the Savage, or the Walking Mountain, depending on who one asked. At one time, he had been Kasimir’s shield. Like most of his kind, he was a purchase from overseas, likely bought in bulk from one of the Empire’s northern trade cities. They sold teams of them there, in fives and tens. The Idasians called them indentured servants. Their own people called them “Blood of the Restoration.” The truth was something more akin to mercenary slaves, and it was his own people’s fault. They beggared themselves fighting an endless civil war. Indenturing was the only way their kings could pay for it.
Kasimir treated this one well, though. Trust, for him, transcended race. It was earned, not set. When his children grew and the prospect of manhood with it, Kasimir showed that trust in appointing Alviss as a mentor and a guardian to them. He taught Isaak, the second son, and Rurik, the third. When the Lady Matair had died, Kasimir bound the Kuric in blood with Rurik, and made him his protector. It was an old Kuric rite, to guarantee his dedication.
As the ranger watched him, she could not help but wonder if he regretted that day. She had admired him once, many years before. She watched his sparring matches with some of the other men, watched how he weathered their blows and tore them to pieces in reply. Alviss was a beast, when he wanted to be, but he never wanted to be. In truth, it came as no surprise to her when she heard he had surrendered without a fight.
A man like Alviss did not forget his loyalties, no matter whom they walked with.
“Fucking Kuree, you dare spit this shite at our lord’s feet?” It was Darris, overreaching himself. The man was a fine blade, but far too hot-blooded. Hand on his hilt, the guard looked ready to gut the prisoner. “Just give me the word, milord, and I’ll set this dog straight.”
Matair stayed him with a motion of his hand. Darris slunk back, defeated, but fuming.
Leaning heavily on his cane, the lord of Verdan loomed mere inches from the bars. “Does he come here? For me?”
Alviss studied his lord carefully, their eyes meeting over some invisible notion. The colorful one glowered between them as Alviss gave a single nod in agreement. Kasimir nodded back at him, respectfully, and leaned back on his haunches, thinking.
The cell to his left was far less civil. A stream of curses flung from it, directed at him, the guards and anyone within earshot. Even Alviss was not spared the criticisms of his comrade.
This other creature, this Zuti, was by far a different breed from Alviss. Whereas the Kuric resolutely took his punishment, and went to it as a man deserving, the Zuti railed against his fate with every fiber of his being. It was all quite undignified. Once, he shouted that he would not die in a cell. He would die with a spear in hand and blood on his fingers.
His friend, the colorful one, had replied before anyone else. “You’ll not die in a cell, man. If they want you dead, they’ll take you into the open air and leave you
dangling from a fine, thick rope.” That had quieted the man for a while, at least.
Such barbarism, however, they could only expect from the Zuti. They all knew him, insofar as his name went. She had not believed it when the men that carried him in told her. “Chigenda,” his companions supposedly called him. They had Chigenda.
Many were the months since that name had become known. The Black Demon. The Hound of Zutam. He wore terror as a mantle, that one. Rumors abounded as to his doings, but all that was truly known was that a brown-skinned spearman calling himself Chigenda had wandered from the west, from the lands of Narana, long thralled by occupation to the Zutam Empire, and began to butcher his way across the borderlands. Such things were always distorted by the bards and by the commonfolk, but Lord Kasimir had seen and known the names of more than a handful of knights slain by the murderer.
Soldiers hunted for him there, without luck. Bounties had been posted in the west, hoping to sniff him out. Dead or alive, the decrees read. Many seemed to fear he was an agent of Zutam itself. Unlikely. Even Zutam was not so foolish as to sow discord through common murderers. Whatever Chigenda was about, it was an unexpected displeasure to see him come so far to the east, across the entire expanse of the Empire.
She could only imagine the harm it must inflict upon her lord to think of his son having stooped so low as to work with such a man.
At any rate, the Zuti’s actions at the Prancing Prixy had leant validity to the rumors about him. He was ruthless. One of the returning soldiers had told her that his own comrades had pleaded with him not to strike, but in his fury, the Zuti had ignored them. One was dead because of him, speared through the throat as the lot had circled him. Three more were injured for the taking, one of those with a gouged and shattered hip, the force of the Zuti’s assault having driven his spear right through the poor man’s hauberk. Whether he would live was anyone’s guess.
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