The Far Far Better Thing

by Auston Habershaw

  “If you don’t surrender, I’m going to kill you, prince or not.” Artus raised his arm as though about to thrust.

  The man in the chair spoke up. “Kill him! Run him through, my liege! If you have any sense of justice, see him to hell!”

  Artus looked over at the man. He had a white beard and clear blue eyes. His face was marred by a massive purple bruise. “Who are you?”

  “The Earl of Tor Erdun and the rightful castellan of this fortress. Fawnse is my nephew, though I hereby renounce any relation, Hann help me!”

  Outside, another trebuchet stone exploded below. Artus didn’t have time to figure this all out. “Surrender, Fawnse! Surrender or the trebuchets toss you next!”

  Fawnse’s rabid angry expression melted into simple tears. His body shook with sobs. “It’s . . . it’s not fair . . . it’s not fair . . . I was . . . I was supposed to win! Me! I was promised!”

  Artus put up his sword. Ham and Mort threw the Count of Ayventry on the ground, where the boy curled himself into a ball and continued to weep. Everyone stared at the sight.

  Finally, Artus shook his head. “Somebody stop those damned trebuchets, strike the colors, and open the bloody gates. This battle is over.”

  Chapter 13

  Backup Plan

  Tyvian’s role in the Battle of Tor Erdun had been intentionally minimal. Without a horse of his own, he couldn’t ride with the knights and was left behind. This was just as well—Tyvian had very limited experience riding a horse toward danger, and Artus would have spotted him anyway. As for joining the infantry, that had been avoided most easily by hiding in Voth’s tent as the call to muster went up. Predictably enough, the White Army lacked sufficient sergeants or similar persons to go kick shirkers out of their bedrolls. Given the soldiers’ collective hatred of Dellor and Ayventry, however, such men were hardly needed. The vast majority of men had turned out in good spirits.

  Left alone in the camp, Tyvian had slept in late with Voth, for once, at his side. They only woke up to the deep boom of enchanted trebuchet stones detonating in Erdun town. He pulled on a shirt and some hose and went out to look.

  Eddereon was standing outside the tent, his hand shading his eyes as he looked up at the castle far, far above. His face was grim. “They’re bombarding the town. It’s burning.”

  Tyvian followed his gaze to see the black plumes of smoke billowing from the base of the cliff, visible over the chaotic debris of the battle that was still raging at its foot. He felt the ring twinge. “Do you feel it, too?”

  Eddereon rubbed his ring hand. “Yes. Nothing to be done, though. We should have joined the battle.”

  “Artus would see you. He’d know you anywhere.” Tyvian squinted into the rising sun. “It’s up to him and Myreon to stop it.”

  The two of them watched, side by side, their rings jabbing them every time an explosion echoed over the battlefield. Tyvian found himself holding his breath. Come on, boy, he thought, do something. Stop them.

  He felt another twinge, coming not from the ring, but deep in his spine. He wanted to rush out there and fight. To take up a sword next to Artus and help Myreon win her battle and bring a better day to Eretheria. He balled his fists and clenched his teeth. No. You’ve done enough.

  But the fact of it didn’t help. He felt impotent. Useless. Forgotten. He sat now on the sidelines and watched others claim glory. It did not feel good, but Tyvian knew from hard experience that charging off to right wrongs didn’t feel any better. They usually felt worse.

  When the trebuchets did, at last, stop and the Ayventry banner was struck from the spire of Tor Erdun, a loud cheer erupted from the massed ranks of the White Army. Tyvian joined them, clapping his hands. He looked over to see Eddereon smiling as well, but not at the castle—at him. “What?”

  Eddereon stuck out his hand to shake. “I never officially welcomed you back.”

  Frowning, Tyvian shook it. “To what?”

  Eddereon’s big hand squeezed his tight. “To the human race.”

  Tyvian pulled his hand back. “Let’s not get overly dramatic. We should have been out there, you and me. We should have helped them.”

  “You did help them, Tyvian. Without you, none of this would be happening. This victory was something you sacrificed your old life for. Don’t forget that.”

  In the aftermath of the battle, orders came down that the camp was to be struck and the army to move through the pass the following dawn. The remainder of the afternoon was spent looting the battlefield by those who still had the energy to do so after a hard day’s fight. Tyvian and Voth joined the mobs of scavengers tearing good boots off the feet of dead Ayventrymen. They were not there to loot, though, but to reconnoiter.

  The gossip running downhill was that Prince Artus had taken the castle nearly single-handedly, with only two of his most trusted knights at his side. Voth had a dark expression when they heard this from a skinny fellow in a bloodstained tabard with a large collection of shoes hanging around his neck by the laces. Tyvian heard her mutter, “Those two fools better be dead.”

  Tyvian pretended he didn’t hear. Hambone and Mort just screwed up, eh? What a bloody surprise. He suppressed a grin as they kept walking up the slope toward the village.

  Though the White Army had won, losses were severe, primarily because Count Fawnse’s fit of pique took the form of exploding boulders. It was impossible to get a firm count of the dead, but Tyvian estimated the casualties would run well over a thousand either dead or too injured to be any more use in any further battles. The knights of the White Army, such as they were, barely existed at this point—the word was that less than ten men lived, assuming you counted Hambone and Mort, which Tyvian felt was perhaps overgenerous. What remained to be seen was whether Young Prince Artus could convince any of the Ayventry peers to join them. As the White Army was preparing to invade Ayventry territory, Tyvian felt that was a slim hope—nobody was going to convince peers to invade their own lands and besiege their own castles. Not even the “Young Prince.”

  Prisoners would be a serious problem, then. Tyvian spotted a row of men in padded tunics—men stripped of their armor, in other words—walking, hands on their heads, in a row down the hill. Captured knights—at least a hundred of them. There were also more red tabards on newly shoeless levies than could be reasonably counted. Destroying the army of Ayventry was going to prove more costly than fighting it, he’d guess.

  Then there was the carnage of Erdun town. The only structure left standing was the hardy Hannite church at the center, its stone walls protected by ancient wards imbued by priests several centuries dead. The church had sheltered a significant number of townspeople, but not a majority. Those who had opted to hide out in their own cellars or homes to protect from looting had died as the rocks fell. Again, counting the dead was beyond him—Tyvian merely stared at the ruins of a once prosperous town, unable to verbalize his horror. He had travelled through here many times in his life. He had always enjoyed the grand fireplace in the common room of the Passage, and the taste of the mulled cider the innkeeper kept by the barrel behind the bar. Now only the fireplace remained—a lone cairn of stone in the midst of charred wooden beams and rubble.

  It was a disaster. No, it was an atrocity. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Eddereon’s words came echoing back to him: Without you, none of this would be happening.

  He felt sick.

  Voth, if she felt the same way, gave no indication. She surveyed the damage with apparent disinterest. “Let’s get to the castle.”

  Tyvian followed her, his body numb. If Voth had elected to stab him dead, right there on the battlefield, he didn’t think he’d care.

  A crowd had formed in the small courtyard of the castle. It was packed with an even mix of White Army soldiers, Ayventry prisoners, and townspeople who had survived the bombardment. All of them were howling for blood, which was perhaps predictable. What was peculiar was that they were all demanding the same person’s blood—the Count of Ayventry.r />
  Ducking just inside the portico, Tyvian and Voth hid toward the back of the crowd, hoods pulled up to conceal their faces. Standing on a balcony overlooking the courtyard were Artus, Myreon, Barth, and a bearded old man Tyvian recognized as the old Earl of Tor Erdun. The young count was nowhere to be seen.

  Artus was trying to calm everyone down by waving his arms. It was having a limited effect. “Please! Let us speak, will ya?”

  “He’s a murderer!” a woman in the crowd shrieked. “Death to him! Death to them all!”

  Roars of approval from the crowd. Tyvian wondered what the woman defined as “them.”

  Myreon raised her staff and tapped it down, which caused a heart-stopping boom to echo through the courtyard. Everyone fell silent. “There is little doubt that Count Fawnse has committed a grave crime. He is currently in our custody and, when the time is right, he will stand trial for his deeds.”

  This was unpopular, even among the people standing on the balcony. Barth’s expression was so grim, Tyvian would not have been surprised to see lighting shoot out of his beard at any moment.

  “No trial!” shouted a man in a white tabard. “Death now! Bring us a headsman!”

  The crowd cheered.

  Artus looked frustrated. “Look, we can’t just go chopping off heads! Isn’t that what this whole war is about to begin with—injustice? Fawnse is just a kid! He deserves a trial.”

  “Why?” screamed a man with a bloody face. “So you can let him go? So you can ransom him back to Sahand?”

  Artus tried to say, of course not, but the sentiment was drowned out by a sea of jeers. Tyvian looked at the crowd—he saw rage and fear in a lethal mix of faces.

  Myreon once again restored order with a booming blow of her staff. “People of Eretheria, we hear your concerns. I understand your anger—we all share it. His Highness is right, though. We must not become a mob—we must remain a people.”

  Voth grunted. “Fat chance of that,” she muttered. Tyvian noted that she was watching the faces on the balcony with keen interest. From his angle, though, he couldn’t tell whose face she was lingering on.

  “For now,” Myreon continued, “we must win the war first and punish its criminals later. We must take Ayventry and scatter Sahand’s armies once more—then, and only then, can we discuss the fate of Count Fawnse.”

  “Booooo!” the crowd howled.

  Artus cut in, “Remember who put Fawnse here! Remember who started this war! It’s Sahand—always Sahand! Fawnse is just his tool, and a stupid tool to boot! Let’s stay focused, okay?”

  More boos. Voth turned away from the crowd and grabbed Tyvian by the arm. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

  They left, arm in arm, like actual lovers. Walking down the winding road that led to the town ruins and then the battlefield and the camp beyond, Tyvian had a lot of time to think. Sahand had placed Fawnse here, and with a force far too large for the land or their provisions to support. Sahand had also ordered his mercenary companies to delay and distract the White Army, therefore slowing them down. He had to have known how this battle would go. He had to have known he was starving his own allies into some kind of horrific debacle.

  Sahand was brutal and, at times, terribly obtuse about some things, but he had always been a keen military mind. Assuming, therefore, that putting an immature and inexperienced commander in charge of a large, underprovisioned force was not a mistake but, in reality, a ploy, what then was the ploy?

  Well, for one thing, he had inflicted heavy casualties on the White Army and saddled them with enormous numbers of prisoners. He’d also angered them, goading them to come for him. Ayventry, as everyone knew, was not suited to resisting a siege, so what was the point of drawing the White Army to attack him at Ayventry?

  Unless it was all a trap.

  But what kind of trap? And for whom? And what could Tyvian actually do about it?

  Voth squeezed his arm. “Stay with me now, lover. You make me nervous when you think that hard.”

  Tyvian nodded. He forced himself to smile at the pretty assassin. “Yeah. Me too.”

  When Mort and Hambone didn’t return from the castle, Tyvian assumed that they had either betrayed Voth or been compromised. According to Voth, however, neither was precisely true—they’d just “lost their nerve.” The mission, it seemed, was still going. They needed to keep a low profile, though, just in case the two Delloran soldiers had given them away.

  Searching for any particular person in a disorganized camp of thousands of people would have been a difficult job for trained professionals, and that was assuming the person you were searching for was an amateur and unaware of their risk. In the White Army, they had no professional manhunters among them and, furthermore, Voth was a consummate mimic. A roll in the dirt, some white powder in her hair, and a couple minor glamours, and she looked just like a middle-aged washerwoman with a blind eye. She didn’t even have to switch tents—she just sat out front with a washboard and a bucket and scrubbed Tyvian’s hose and it was as though the farm girl had never existed. As it turned out, though, nobody ever did come looking. Ham and Mort, it seemed, hadn’t turned them in. At least not yet. Voth kept up the act, just in case.

  Tyvian was hiding in plain sight, too. It was astonishing how well it worked sometimes. Here he was—the crowned king of Eretheria—and not a single one of his subjects recognized him in the least. There had to be scores of people he actually met on the night of his coronation, and still nothing. Tyvian didn’t know how to feel about that. Part of him wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all—here was a war being fought over his death, and not a damned one of them could pick him out of a crowd.

  Voth stopped washing. “You can finish this. I’m not your servant.”

  Tyvian waggled a finger at her. “Appearances are everything, Adatha—don’t get cocky.”

  Voth rolled her good eye. “That nephew of yours is full of surprises, isn’t he?”

  “He isn’t my nephew. We are of no particular relation.” Tyvian frowned.

  “Good,” Voth said, walking past him and into the tent.

  Tyvian followed. Inside, the tent was dark, lit only by the faint glow of campfires bleeding through the thick fabric. “He’s why we’re staying, isn’t he? He’s your target?”

  “Too many questions, Reldamar.” Voth snaked her arms around Tyvian’s waist and pulled him close to her. She kissed him on the throat, then the chin, then the lips.

  Tyvian pushed her away. “If you’re planning to kill Artus, then I’m a liability. That means you’re going to kill me next, yes?”

  Voth sighed. “You always manage to ruin things.” She sat on the bed, hugging herself.

  Tyvian had seen this before. “The same exact trick as last time? You sulk, I come to comfort you, and then I find myself poisoned?”

  Voth said nothing. Her silhouette, just barely visible in the darkness, showed her to be facing away from him. But her shoulders weren’t shaking with sobs. There was no sniffling. Nothing like last time. Though perhaps that was part of the trap.

  “I meant those things I said, you know,” Voth said at last. Her voice was barely a whisper.

  Tyvian kept his distance, hand close to his knife. “What things?”

  “In your house. Just before I poisoned you,” she said. “I meant those things.”

  “You mean about feeling kinship with me? About you hoping I actually . . . wanted you?”

  Voth said nothing for a moment. “Once I’d met you, once I’d figured out who you were . . . I didn’t really want to kill you, you know. Not really.”

  “So, what, you poisoned me out of a sense of professional pride?”

  Voth turned her head. Her teeth caught just enough light to glow white in the dark. She was grinning. “Of course. It was a contract from the Countess of Davram—I wasn’t about to renege. You understand, don’t you?”

  Tyvian silently slid his knife out of its sheath and concealed it behind his back. Then he gingerly sat on the bed
beside Voth. “Yes, I understand. I think.”

  “I lost my eye to my father’s knife,” Voth said. “The world is a hard place and a woman has to be hard right back. That’s how I am.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill me.”

  Voth arms were still crossed in front of her chest, hands on her shoulders. She didn’t move. Tyvian, so close to her, remained coiled, ready to strike. What weapons did Voth have about her person? A poison needle concealed in her clothing? A hidden blade?

  “I still don’t want to kill you, Tyvian,” Voth said. She bowed her head. “I knew it when that animal Rodall had you on the ground. I was . . . I was happy you were alive. I hadn’t even realized I was sad before that, but when you looked at me and gave me that wink . . .”

  In spite of himself, Tyvian grinned and nudged her with an elbow. “Don’t take it too hard. I have that effect on a lot of women.”

  Voth laughed. “I have never been so stupid as I am with you, Tyvian Reldamar.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “If I tell you I’m planning to kill the Young Prince, will you stab me with that knife behind your back? I can’t kill you, but can you kill me?”

  The ring, of course, shuddered with warning. Tyvian, though, didn’t need it. He presented the blade to Voth, hilt first. “My murdering days are over, Voth. I’d just as soon not kill anyone anymore.” He grinned. “Especially not you.”

  Voth took the knife out of his hand and threw it, point-first, into the ground. She then wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. Tyvian pulled her onto his lap.

  The petite assassin hugged Tyvian close, pressing her cheek against his. She whispered in his ear, the softness of her voice making his hair stand on end. “I have some good news for you, Tyvian.”

  Tyvian was fumbling with the laces in the back of Voth’s shirt. “Which is?”

  “We aren’t going to kill your friend the prince.” She slapped his hands away and untied the laces herself. “Sahand wants him alive.”