The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  Once, she heard them talking of killing her. Their leader was for it. Some of the others were against. “What good is she to us?” their leader asked, but their haunted, desperate stares were all he needed. They did not lust for her. She doubted any man could. Fallit, what about Fallit? But men had needs to fill, and in the darkness, her body was as any other woman’s they had known.

  They had tried raiding other points on the road, unsuccessfully. They had no food, but plenty of water. They would take the snow in a bowl and melt it over the flames of their campfire. The main roads weren’t worth it, they said. They were patrolled. Supply trains were worse, guarded by a dozen armed men, some on horseback. They tried the side roads, spoke of rumors of other men that had set about smaller villages. Too much risk, there. A bandit here or there was a thing expected. To raid a village drew an eye, and lords, reduced or no, would rarely allow their serfs to be so intimidated on their own, taxpaying lands.

  They could just fade away, a lanky man with a lazy eye reasoned. After a raid, no lord would find them. Hide in the trees. There weren’t a man alive could find them. The bald man laughed at that, for their leader seemed to have some sense. It took but one man that could track, or dogs that had the scent. A risk too great, especially for a band so much reduced. Highwaymen they were and highwaymen they would remain. Even if it got them nowhere.

  They bickered over her letter. From what she could tell, they had tried to ransom it, but found no one to ransom it to. One of their men didn’t return from the effort. Verdan was in disarray, they said. Patrols were still out, but of the lord, there was no sign. They had no one to blackmail save the sons themselves, and they were unnamed.

  Once, she awoke and they were simply gone. Every last one. She thought it was a dream, but the pain was real enough. Their fire had been left to burn—if only she could free herself, she might cast herself into it, to undo all that they had done. She felt her belly churn, and she winced, pondering what else might stir inside beyond her growing hunger. Across from her, the other ropes remained, though the man did not. Blood stained the ground—they made no effort to clean it up. The man that was. Fallit. His body had been taken, all coated in red, stripped to the waist and tossed in the snow. As far as she knew, they had not even attempted to bury him, however shallowly. There were always bodies in the winter drifts.

  But when the darkness came again, and fled, she saw him there, and he was sitting before her, looking at her with those sad, squinty eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, as though from somewhere far, far away. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them.” His hand was on her stomach and she wanted to tell him it was alright, but she saw the blood on his throat and on his lips and she knew it would be a lie. “You were stronger than me. My little bear. Verdan’s grizzly. Can you forgive me?” His hand had not left her belly, but his voice had grown near to desperation.

  “I forgive you,” she said. “I forgive you.”

  I forgive you.

  He visited her like that, but only rarely. Sometimes she saw him in a corner, watching her in solemn resolution. Other times a flicker of a glance: she would see him standing behind a man, raising his hands to strike—and then he was gone again. Other times he would sit with her. This was the only time he spoke, but she could not bring herself to weep over it. Whatever tears might have been had long since spent themselves. She was empty now, as dry as a dusty hole.

  Daylight. She could see its glimmer on the rocks.

  They came back when she opened her eyes again. She heard them running, shouting. Two of them stumbled in—the leader and the shortest of them. The leader’s clothes were coated in blood, and he no longer had his club. The other looked frantic, but bore no injuries of his own. The one with the lazy eye stumbled in not long after, but he was clutching at his waist, and his neck as well. There was a bolt lodged in his neck—and though it would kill him, it had struck him just so, that it would be a slow and painful thing. He slumped against the wall as the others shouted at him.

  “To Hell, to Hell with you…” He gargled. The leader started to roll him from the cave, and he resisted as he might, but his strength had fled him.

  “Assal’s breath, kill her. Kill the whore. They’re coming.”

  The short one turned to her, fidgeting. He brandished a knife. He stepped forward to do her, but outside the shouts grew louder, and the sound of hoofbeats and barking was on the wind, and in his panic, the short one cursed the bearded man and fled. The leader tried to seize him by the arm, but the toad-eyed dwarf ducked him and darted past. She heard him scream as he rounded the bend, up, up toward the light, and there was the sound of bones splitting.

  The leader took the knife the man had dropped, and kicked at the embers of the fire, as though hoping the darkness would save him. In those flickers, she caught the embodiment of his fears. Around the bend stepped a man of silver and ruby—a knight, bedecked in blood speckled plate and bits of reddened cloth. He took one look about the room as he entered, and his eyes went immediately to the leader. His sword was out, his shield bared, and she could see no face, merely shadow behind the visor of that man’s sheer helm.

  With a roar, the bald man surged forward to meet him, spitting curses, but it was a futile gesture. The bandits’ leader fought and died in a span of breaths, and the knight stepped over him, pulling his sword from his clutching hands and collapsing throat. He cast about in the shadows, and only then did she hear his voice, and the utter revulsion held within. He looked to her as he spoke, and there were words, but she could only dimly recognize their meaning. The tone was comforting, but she had lost all sense of comfort. He stepped forward and she flinched away. He withdrew his hand and drew up his visor.

  “Bayer, watch the horses! Cranst, Vachter, come here. I need assistance.” Sheathing his sword, he reached instead for a knife at his belt. Then he leaned forward, watching how she bent away from him, and only slowly pressed his dagger to the rope. “It will be alright. Hold still, now.” Quick as a rabbit, he sawed through. She sagged, and he reached for the other one, repeating the process.

  Others came in then, and at first they were walking, but as they saw her they broke into a run. Unlike this one, they were adorned with chain hauberks and fine leathers. One had a crossbow on his back; the other set a spear down as they hastened. She watched them until the second bond broke, and then she simply fell, no strength left to hold her up. Darkness came on swiftly, then, and all she heard was the man’s voice, pressing near to her. She did not know whether to embrace, or fear it.

  “It will be alright now.”

  She came around several times before she had the bearings of herself. She was on a horse, and her arms were wrapped around another man, her pale but swollen digits chill against his winter-frosted armor. Her head was on his back, and her hands were unbound, but they ached regardless. Someone had wrapped a heavy cloak around her, and it did much to ward the cold. Snow crunched underfoot, and she was aware, for the first time, that she was no longer in the cave that had been both prison and tomb. The purity of the light burned at her.

  She cast about suddenly, wildly, searching for the place, and her guardian listed in his saddle saying, “Woah, woah,” but she was not to be comforted. The cave, it was gone, and the men that had done her were dead and dying and she was cold—so very, very cold. “Easy, now,” the man said, and she became aware that she recognized him. It was the knight from the cave, though he no longer wore his helmet, and his red hair spilt freely down his head. She wanted to strike him, to spring free and flee into the woods, but she knew, even then, that she could not. Immobility had weakened her legs. Starvation left stomach and mind too rattled for flight.

  “Where…?” She croaked, surprised at the hoarseness of her own voice.

  “You don’t need to speak, if it’s too hard.”

  That only deepened her resolve. Despite the cracks in her throat, she said it again. “Where are we?”

  “Far enough away from that hell.” He shook his head, gl
anced back at her sympathetically. “My apologies for that, lady. On the road east, to put it to your question. Near Helmsvelle, if you know it.” It dawned on her that he spoke with the slightest of accents—some lilting, high strung thing. Asanti, perhaps, but it had been tempered by years abroad. She figured he had not been to his home in a long, long time. “My company is set upon the road to war. This trek to Helmsvelle is no trouble though, mind you. We shall see you sheltered and fed before the day is done.”

  She blinked, tried to focus on the words. They took her back, far and farther, to a request, and a face, and a letter, hers to give. But there was only one face, then, and she saw it, clear as day, and was wild to reach it. “Fallit,” she cried, and swung so violently about in the saddle that the horse reared and her knight scarce had time to rein it in before she leapt free. “Catch her!” She heard cries behind her, and she staggered on, limping, gasping as she moved through the snow, only then realizing how deep the pain in her muscles went. Her stomach growled in protest and she felt woozy with the burning rising through her throat. A horse circled her and a rider snared her in his arms, and even as she screamed, he bore her up and back to the knight.

  “Goodwoman, we cannot have you running. You will catch a cold, and die, when it is already such a miracle you have lived. Take ease. It is over now.”

  “Fallit,” she murmured to the knight, shivering. “We have to go back for Fallit.”

  The man looked confused at first, but slowly the realization hit. He turned aside, whispered something to another of the riders and offered her his hand. “My lady, I am sorry but—the man, of which you speak, do you mean—do you mean the man in the snow, lady?”

  Did she? She felt dizzy, unable to breathe. She nodded, teetered, still nodding. Her captor caught her arm and held her up. The horses neared one another, nuzzling affectionately against each other’s necks. The soldier that had caught her said she was in poor shape. Far too poor. The knight shook his head and pulled her back onto his horse. With an unexpected tenderness, he wrapped her arms around him. “Close,” he instructed her. She had to stay close.

  It was a long time before she spoke again, but it was as sudden as the rest. Rearing up in the saddle, she no doubt made her knight fear she was to bolt again. Others hemmed in behind them. “The letter,” she cried. “They took the letter…”

  The knight glanced back uncertainly. “This?” he asked, tugging a bit of parchment from his belt. It had been stained with blood. So many blood-marked fingers. She snatched it from his hands like a greedy child, checked the remnants of the seal, running her eyes over the words she could not read. Elation, in the bitterest of sorrows.

  “This, this is it.” Then she eyed him suspiciously, remembering her place. “East, you say?”

  “To the east.”

  “You will take me.”

  The man might have laughed, but for the seriousness in her voice. “I will do no such thing. You are addled. Helmsvelle, for you.”

  There were a dozen of them, maybe more, but she was not afraid. Clutching him tightly about the waist, she shook her head and resigned herself. It was the only way. Another way to throw her mind. No longer could she sleep, so she had to focus on something. Anything.

  “My thanks, but I rode east, for the camp of Lord Kasimir Matair of Verdan, with note for his men and his children, with word of urgency. This note. They—I was to deliver it. But they-they took it. And us. On the road.” She canted, tried to catch her words. Too much, too soon. “I need to reach them. There is evil works afoot.”

  “I should say,” the knight replied after a moment. “Matair? Truly?” One of the others said something she could not quite hear, and did not wish to hear again. The knight nodded to him. “True enough,” he said back. “It pains me to inform you that he lies dead, then. The count palatine took his head from his shoulders and mounted it upon a traitor’s gate.”

  After that, she was silent for a time. There was simply nothing more to say. She tried to picture her lord, but couldn’t. His face kept melding into Fallit’s, the man and the ghost as one. She could hear his voice, could capture the essence of his being, and memory, so much memory, but it all seemed hollow. Dead, gone. Was all…that, pointless? Again, the dizziness, and the nausea, but she held it back. There was but one thing left. One thing, she had promised. It would do neither of them any good to turn her back on it now.

  “What is your name?” she finally asked.

  “Ser Ensil of Hafae.”

  “And these men of yours—are you honored?”

  He stiffened, slightly, leading her to suspect that they may have been at one time. No more. “We have fought under many lords and many banners, goodwoman, all to great honor and distinction. There are twenty of us here, and not one among us might call himself a vagabond. Free men. That is what we are.”

  “Free men,” she repeated, apprehensively.

  In other words, dust knights and sellswords. The title might have sounded noble, and Ensil might have been a great man, but in the eyes of the world, he was little better than the sword in his hand. Masterless knights and lordless men, who sold their souls for the man with the coin. The road was their home, then, their hearth for the night whatever tavern would have them.

  Even so, she felt there was something to this man. Something above the whispers of his station. Trust might have been too far. Her bruises were far too raw for that. At least, she didn’t fear him. She could break from them at this Helmsvelle, go her own way. But she had no horse now, nor any way to pay for one. She had no weapons—and at that thought, she felt another pang of loss, for the bow her lord had gifted her—and no proper clothes to see her through the snow. She would never make it on her own. She would be forced to turn back, or die along the road, or worse yet—suffer a repetition of her trials in the cave. Nothing would ever bring that back, she swore. She would first die.

  These men, then, were all she had, and trust or no she would have to convince them, and rely on them, until she could afford another course.

  “I still need to speak with his sons,” she whispered hoarsely, but all the more forcefully.

  The knight nodded, hesitantly at first, then acceptingly. With a flitting of the reins, he drove the horse on, and rode into the daylight. It blinded her, and the wind bit at her, but she cherished the feeling. It meant she was alive.

  Chapter 14

  The days that followed the battle at Arnesfeld were some of the most bitter of the winter thus far. The brunt of the army came within a league of the village before a harsh storm rolled over the plains and trapped them all in banks of snow overnight. Temperatures plummeted and a chill that defied even the warmth of fires laid about the flesh and bones of the weary army. The advance guard faired a little better, taking refuge in the homes of the captive villagers, under hastily erected laws of quartering.

  Even so, it was a hard week. Few of the commonfolk seemed to terribly mind the trade of one lord for another, but they took great umbrage to the idea of soldiers quartering in their homes, and rightly so, for they feared for their wives and their daughters, and of being eaten out of hearth and home, or even that their fathers and their sons might be conscripted to fight in a war that they had no desires for, one way or another.

  An uneasy truce formed between the commoners and the soldiers, but the potential for disaster beat beneath the current of their daily lives and Rurik feared to what it might come.

  There were incidents, in the chill. Brawls between citizens and soldiers. There was one vicious incident where an affronted wife took a cleaver to a soldier’s ear. He responded by killing the woman and her husband, and raping the daughter. His own captain put him to the sword on the spot when he heard the news. Other soldiers moved in, and they tried their best to forget what had transpired. The daughter, suffice to say, could not.

  Rurik and the rest of the Company of the Eagles took shelter with another party out of Baharia, in a two-room hut occupied by a foreman of the local lumbering details
, as well as his son, an enterprising man himself of twenty-aught years. The groups settled into a sort of coexistence with one another. They shared the labors, and ate sparingly, and treated one another respectably enough. It was the foreman, more than anyone, that came to them with tales of what was going on about the village. Most the soldiers did their best never to leave their shelters.

  By day, it snowed, and the walls rose up around them. By night, it rained sheets of ice that bombarded the roof, like lances cast from heaven. So they learned to sleep through even nature’s bitter roar.

  Outside, the ground grew iced, and slick, and branches cracked beneath the weight of their loads. One branch snapped over a homestead on the outskirts of town and plunged through the roof below, impaling a soldier that slept there. He was still entwined in his sheets when he died. It was at least a day before they could remove the body.

  Despite their relative shelters, the men still suffered. They had it easier than the camp that struggled to inch closer to them, day by day, but the cold still pervaded their existence. Men froze and died in those long and cruel days, and were stripped of anything of use, only to be tossed outside like so much waste. Compared to what they might have been their losses were few, but each was still a bitter defeat.

  Essa seemed to feel the losses worst of all. Rurik had been surprised at first—not due to any lack of sympathies on the girl’s part, but rather, to see them expressed for humans. At night, as they huddled beneath their blankets before the life-giving fire, she told him the reality of it. Each death, each loss, took her through the snow and the wind to that perfect hell of tents that pitched somewhere just beyond the trees. They seized her and dragged her back and back again to Voren’s face, lying frostbitten and purpled in some iced bank, a lifeless corpse. She could not bear to think of him in such suffering whilst they sat huddled in these walls, and her thoughts tortured her, like little else could.