by Phil Tucker
He'd cut his plate armor off over the course of the day, simply slicing through the leather straps so that sections of it fell by the wayside, leaving him in his quilted undershirt and leggings. If there were brigands waiting by the roadside, they could stab him to their heart's content. He'd not fight back.
Morose, eyes half-lidded, head swaying from side to side, Tiron gazed ahead. He knew this road well. Up ahead, it would curve to the left, climb a final hill, then descend through a pretty copse to reach the farthest edge of his old estate.
It was easy to summon memories of this road. Through narrowed eyes, he saw himself riding Farthest, his roan palfrey, when he'd first set off to serve the old Lord Kyferin as a squire some twenty-odd years ago. His mother had set a bowl on his head and sheared all the way around it, leaving his ears pale and exposed and the back of his thin neck prickly with stubble. But he'd felt like a true knight already. It almost made him laugh now, the foolish pride with which he'd ridden forth.
He could also see himself returning home with Sarah sitting athwart his saddle, the peals from the Ascendant's Temple still ringing in his ears, Sarah's arms around his neck, her body pressed against his chest. He'd felt so terribly alive, so filled with hope and joy, so determined to relish every moment with her, so eager to begin their new life. Her hair had come unbound, a glorious wave of black he had loved so much. He'd snagged a sprig of purple heather for her to tuck behind her ear, and the light and laughter in her eyes had spurred him to a gallop, so eager had he been to reach their marriage bed.
That had been, what, ten years ago? A lifetime. The image faded to gray, the memory of his joy turning to ash in his mouth.
A final memory came galloping toward him. Himself, three years ago, his face carved deep by new lines of grief and madness. He'd found Sarah and their boy lying dead in the old estate, their bodies left for vermin and crows. Up ahead, Tiron saw himself with bloodshot eyes, horror festering in their depths like swarming maggots. He watched himself approach at a mad gallop, full of pain and screaming vows of vengeance, then pass right through him and disappear, racing to his fateful encounter with Enderl's armed escort, followed by his years in the pit beneath Wolf Tower.
A lifetime ago.
Tiron lowered his head. And now he was returning, at long last, a final journey down this old country road. Old and battered and broken.
His horse struggled up the rise, its coat dirty with dried lather, its head hanging low. Tiron felt a stirring of pity. Treat your horses better than you do yourself, his father had always said. They're nobler creatures than we can ever hope to be.
Tiron pulled gently on the reins and slid down from the saddle. Pain jarred its way up his body. The terrible beauty of plate: it diffused all blows across the surface of your body, but that punishment still sank into the flesh like water into dry soil. The entirety of him ached, bone deep.
Tiron took the horse's reins and led it up the final rise. The copse was still there, two dozen slender birch trees. As a boy, he'd...But no. Be done with the memories. Enough.
As he trudged down the far side, his lands opened up before him. Not a massive estate, by any means, and now, with the fields years in fallow, it was hard to tell where the ground had once been tilled. Tiron could trace the hidden stone walls, however, and did so absentmindedly before forcing his eyes to take in his old home.
It hadn't weathered the years of abandonment well. Someone had pillaged its western side for its fine masonry, causing the kitchen, the pantry, and half the great hall to collapse in a chaos of broken beams and tumbled rocks. The windows and doorways gaped darkly, as if the place was still shocked by the crimes that had been committed within its walls. The stables looked fit only for rats, and the well in the central courtyard was nearly hidden under creepers.
"Father, you'd not be pleased," he whispered, then urged his horse to follow him down. The bodies of his slain servants were gone, he saw. He'd felt guilt during all the years he'd been kept in the dungeon for not interring them: old Ahane, who had served his family for three generations; Bartisch, the groom, drowned in a rain barrel; Cuno, whose head had been missing. Agathe, Nyse, and Ennelin had been laid out in the great hall, their throats slit and their legs still parted. The knowledge that the Black Wolves had helped with the raid had been bitter fuel for his hatred.
But the bodies were gone. Their relatives, perhaps, had come to collect them so as to perform their Mourning. Weeds now grew knee-high from the cracks between the flagstones, and when he finally reached the main courtyard he stopped, releasing his horse.
Sarah's plants were still growing on the windowsills, overflowing their pots, and the sight of them drove a knife deep into his heart. His beloved Sarah, with her green thumb, her passion for the wilderness. She had loved to take long, rambling walks along the moors, dragging him after her, showing him hidden wonders that he'd never have seen had she not bent down and lifted a leaf or pointed them out to him.
"Oh, Sarah," he sighed. "I'm home."
The silence was broken only by the sound of the horse walking to the rain barrel in which Bartisch had been drowned and slaking its thirst.
Tiron bowed his head and entered his ancestral home. Ruin met him at every corner. The place had been stripped of all value. Only a husk remained, with leaves and weeds and dirt blown in across the floors. Even the iron torch brackets had been pried from the walls.
Tiron walked through the shadows and gloom, his boots creating a crunch with every step, his hand on the hilt of his sword, till at last he stood in the doorway to his old bedroom.
He'd avoided this room when he'd last visited, after he'd been freed by Iskra from his dungeon a week before the tourney. He'd come back and labored at the forge behind the house, mending his armor with crude skill, and each night he'd vowed he'd visit the bedroom, but each dawn his will had failed him.
The old bed stood like a ship marooned in the center of the floor, its huge posts and massive frame having defied the pillagers. The mattress also remained, as fresh and plump as the day he'd slept on it last.
Tiron's heart began to pound.
Sarah was lying across the bed, her dress bunched up around her hips, blood on the sheets around her, her face turned to the left, her throat livid and swollen.
Fresh, as if not a day had passed.
His legs grew weak, and he grasped the doorframe so that he would not fall.
She turned her head to face him with sunken eyes and pale gums, her lips torn and opening to speak, to croak forth some indictment – a welcome, perhaps...
Tiron screamed, and the image disappeared. Only the bed frame remained.
He sank to his knees and covered his face with his hands. His chest was heaving, his heart racing, and a cold sweat bathed his brow. "Oh, fuck," he moaned. "Oh, Sarah. Oh, Sarah."
He sagged over and fell against the wall, then slid down till he was sitting, hands wrapped over his head, and deep, scraping sobs broke free at last, hacking cries like an ax being sunk into a tree stump again and again and again.
When he finally looked up, the shadows had lengthened, and the daylight falling through the window had become pale and attenuated. He felt like a husk, a dry and discarded thing, a shadow of the man he had once been.
Treat your horses better than you do yourself.
He rose and left the house.
His mount was cropping grass at the edge of the courtyard. He took its reins and led it to the stable, and there undid the cinches and heaved the saddle onto the hitching rail. He peeled the sodden blanket off its back, then scrounged around till he found an old cloth and a brush. He toweled the horse down, cleaned its face and muzzle, then brushed away the riding marks. He checked the hooves for pebbles, then removed the halter, reins, and bit.
For a moment he hesitated, unsure what to do with it all, then simply dumped the mess on the hitching rail. He clapped the horse on the shoulder, and it turned and walked to the closest clump of grass.
Tiron watched it eat.
He felt no hunger himself, though he knew from years of campaigning that he should force himself to eat. But why? To what end?
After all, he'd come here for a reason. He didn't expect to leave.
Tiron turned and left the courtyard. The old trail behind the house was barely visible, but he followed it without hesitation: along the ruined wall of the western field, then up the steep slope of the far hill to his old lookout rock. It took him twenty minutes to climb, and he was puffing by the time he found the weathered stone half-hidden in the heather.
He wiped its flat surface with the palm of his hand, revealing his family crest chiseled crudely into its face, then sat and rested his chin on his hand to watch the sun die gloriously beneath the western horizon. His old home was a dark shadow, the horse barely visible in the gloom.
Birds resumed their songs, and the wind caused the heather and the long grass to ripple like waves across the ocean in the fields below. Tiron felt a kind of peace settle over him. Nobody needed him. He had no more duties to fulfill. He was neither wanted nor loved by any living soul. He was alone, and that very solitude was a balm to his wounds, a release from the drive he had felt ever since swearing his fealty to the old Lord Kyferin.
At long last, he allowed his mind to turn to what had happened in the keep. He closed his eyes as he saw Wyland draw the blade, grimaced at the horror of it.
Roddick.
He thought of his own son, Mertt. A few years younger than Roddick, his throat slit in the same manner. What manner of creatures are we, he wondered, that we can kill our own young, not once, not twice, but over and over again?
A great weariness settled over him. A lifetime of campaigning with the Black Wolves had filled the vaults of his memories with horrific images. Burning villages. The innocent dead. The crippled, the screaming, the maimed, the grieving, the wounded, the raped, the murdered. Legions of the dead. All their bodies gone to ground, moldering and returning from whence they had come. Had their souls moved on to the next cycle? Fallen to the one below? Had they been rewarded or punished by the Ascendant?
Did it matter?
Tiron rested his face in his hands, thinking of Iskra. He was a coward. That was his final sin. In the end, he had been unable to face her, had been unable to stand before her and meet her eyes, to tell her himself that he had failed to defend her son. Instead, he'd fled. He'd left her alone with her grief, her pain. He'd abandoned her in her time of greatest need.
Tears gathered in his eyes, brimmed, and ran down his cheeks. He didn't bother wiping them away.
He was a coward. An old, broken, discarded coward with no home, no family, no friends, no honor, and no future.
The sun dipped below the horizon, swaddled in bloody clothes like a savaged corpse being wrapped for burial.
If his father were here now, what would he say? To see their old home so abandoned, their line ended, their reputation sullied, all their dreams come to naught?
Tiron hung his head. What was he waiting for? Why prolong his agony? He'd come here for one reason and one reason alone.
Hand shaking, he drew his dagger and held it in the palm of his hand. The tip was warped where it had punched through someone's armor. Its blade looked like dull lead in the dim light of dusk, but he knew its edge was sharp. Sharp enough, at any rate.
A quick, very deep cut. Then he'd sit and wait and let his pain finally fall away from him forevermore.
Tiron pulled up the sleeve of his quilted shirt and stared down at his wrist. His forearm was muscled and strong from years of wielding the blade. He'd have to push deep.
He placed the tip of the dagger against his skin.
He saw himself again as a youth, riding out on Farthest to serve his first day as squire. He vaguely recalled that young man's enthusiasm. His naiveté. His determination to become the greatest, the noblest, the toughest knight who ever had lived.
What a fool. Within a week he'd suffered a broken wrist, and within a year he was well along the path toward becoming a Black Wolf, a man grim and bleak, without illusions as to the nature of the world.
Tiron bared his teeth and tightened his grip on his dagger. Foolish thoughts. None of that mattered now.
A pale shape flitted across the fields below, ghostly and silent. An owl. Tiron followed its passage and saw it dive down into the murk, wings beating furiously, then lift up and fly away, something writhing in its claws.
Farthest had broken his leg badly a year after Tiron had arrived, when he stepped into a rabbit hole while galloping over the moors. He'd been put down that night, Tiron watching with tears running down his face, jaw set, forcing himself to watch.
The only thing that yet survived that first ride to Kyferin Castle was his family blade. Tiron set his dagger on the rock beside him and drew out the sword. It hissed smoothly from its scabbard, catching the faint starlight along its length. It was a thing of wonder, a thing of beauty. Its edge was perfectly straight despite its tremendous age, devoid of those curves and undulations that all old swords suffered due to endless resharpenings.
Light, supple, and perilous. He'd worn it then as a callow youth of sixteen, and wore it now as... what?
Tiron stared down at the blade. How many had he killed with it? And how many lives had this blade taken while in the hands of his forebears? When had it changed from a symbol of righteousness to a butcher's tool?
A wave of grief crashed over him, grief for the death of the young man he had once been. For most of his life, he'd looked back at that youth with scorn. Now he felt only longing. Oh, for that certainty, that determination, that clarity of view! When right and wrong had been so clearly delineated, and when he had believed himself strong and true and destined for greatness.
Tiron closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn't truly wish to be that naive young man once more. Not really – but he yearned for that sense of purpose, that sense of holding the world in his hands. Instead, he'd lost everything. All he had left was his blade and the ability to use it.
But to what end? After Sarah had died, he'd sought revenge. Then he'd fallen in love with Iskra, and had sought to impress her, protect her, make her love him in return. Here, alone on the windswept hill, the birches whispering behind him, his family blade lying across his knees and his death perhaps a hair's breadth away, he could afford to be honest. Had he truly loved Iskra? Perhaps not.
Perhaps she had been a means to an end. A new purpose. A new reason to live. But when she chose to marry the emperor, that reason had died, and so had his resolve to fight on. He'd tried suicide by combat, but by perverse luck and the sacrifice of his friends had failed.
As a youth of sixteen, he'd had no lady, no need for vengeance. He'd been buoyed by a noble purpose, one nurtured at the family fire as he listened to countless tales of Virtues and Ennoian warlords who had fought for justice, for the good of the people, for truth and honor and peace.
Exactly the kind of tales to amuse a young boy. But they had shaped him, inspired him. They'd led him to train with a practice sword long before it was expected of him. He remembered breaking holes in the ice on frozen ponds as a boy of nine so he could dive in and toughen his body – only to emerge gasping and shivering and cursing his own weakness. He'd clobbered every tree within a mile during his flights of fantasy, had attacked clods of earth in the fields with a wooden flail his father had made for him, delighting in how they exploded into chunks of dirt with each blow.
Justice. The good of the people. Truth, honor, and peace. His ideals had lasted not six months under the tutelage of the elder Kyferin. And yet, as he sat here alone as dusk became night, in the ruins of his life, bitter and broken, those ideals took on a new luster. They seemed more wondrous and valuable than any goal he had fought for during the many brutal campaigns of his life.
Could he take them up again?
Tiron laughed, shifting uneasily on the stone. Could an old whore wish herself to be a virgin once more? Was he growing senile in his old age?
Tiron pursed his lips and raised his sword up in front of his eyes. Perhaps it was foolish, worthy of scorn. But he had no pride left, no self-regard. He was a worthless man. Why turn so quickly from the dreams of his youth?
Seized by a suddenly restlessness, he rose to his feet and began to pace, sword held down by his side. What would it mean, to fight for such values? They were words outside the vocabulary of the real world. What did the Empire care for truth, when its rulers crushed all dissent? What did Agerastos care for honor, when its emperor was willing to sacrifice anything and everything for revenge?
Tiron stopped. What did Iskra care for peace, when she was willing to set the world aflame to rescue her children?
He lowered his head. Poor young Roddick, killed by a grown man who truly believed that doing so protected the Empire. Countless thousands like Roddick died every year. Again Tiron saw the burned villages, the dead, the smoke-filled sky; he heard the cawing of ravens and smelled the rotting of flesh.
He brought his blade back up. It flashed, catching the light of the rising moon. Only moments ago, he had been ready to open his wrist, admit to the ultimate defeat and slip away into the void like a true coward. But now? Now, a thought glimmered at the back of his mind. An idea.
All his mockery and cynicism rose clamoring to the front of his mind, urging him to discard it.
But why? In what way was he superior to the dreams of his youth?
"Not a knight," he whispered. "Not superior. Not..." He trailed off, trying to find the words he might have spoken twenty years ago. "A champion?"
He went to laugh, but bit the mockery back down. A champion. Not in the sense of a tourney winner, but one who fought for others. "By the Black Gate," he said. "If I ever try to explain this to anybody, I'll be laughed right out the door."
And yet, as he stood there alone and bereft, the idea of dedicating his worthless life to others had a strange appeal. His sword could become more than a butcher's tool. And if he failed horribly and died face-down in a muddy ditch somewhere, what would it matter? At least he'd be dying for something, for someone.
