At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  She cried out to him, and Alviss turned, but the little man leapt on him, wrapping arms about his neck and pulling up hard. Alviss coughed and heaved an elbow back. Viveld folded like a reed, and Alviss swung an arm up behind his head in turn, then used the angle to pitch Viveld over his shoulder, on top of his squirming compatriot.

  “They won’t touch you ‘gain, girl.”

  It took her a moment to realize it was Roswitte speaking. She was mere feet away, scarlet dripping off her blade. Essa stepped back, her mouth opening and closing against a soundless dread. In the huntress’s face, no recognition of what she had just done.

  The huntress stalked toward the others as Alviss anchored himself on Viveld’s writhing form. “Please,” the boy kept whispering. Every utterance was punctuated with a fist. They hammered his chest. Hammered his neck. “Please.” They smashed his comely face and stole his words away. “Pease. Pease.” Lips so swollen he couldn’t even form the sound anymore, but still the punches fell. Until he stopped squirming. Until the fists were punching nothing but the emptiness of the grave.

  Only then did Alviss stop. He wavered, as though the weight of his own breaths swayed him. He turned, meeting her eyes, and the blue of his seemed deeper then, like the blackest depths of a lake in the aftermath of rain. An empty reflection from which even the ripples had faded. Pain no battlefield could bring him. She knew that look was for her.

  “Roswitte,” he said, without turning from Essa. The huntress ignored him, advancing on the one man still crawling away. “Stop now. This is done.”

  Essa stepped toward her, bruises swelling into existence with every step. Only in the span of breaths recognized did the pain become real again.

  Still Roswitte moved.

  She would have killed again, feasting on the kills of that animal night, but for the thunder of the air. Armed and armored men of the Ulneberg fell on them from two directions, forcing themselves between the killers and the dead. Their line was interspersed with the curious and the newly emboldened, creeping from their tents, forming a mass of crowing, gawking whispers. Sound swam the space between tents, and as long guns leveled on Roswitte, Essa thought the crescendo of blood would go on.

  A step backward. Then another. The woman scowled defiantly at all around her before she let her blade slip and topple to the earth. Alviss closed his eyes and bowed his head as if to prayer.

  “What in the Maker’s name happened here tonight? What happened?”

  “Animals,” Essa answered as she sank to her knees in the dirt, hands pressed to the back of her head. “They circle the herd, searching for the weakest. But sometimes the herd won’t let them go.”

  The arrival of Ivon’s men were the only thing that saved that final Gorjes.

  The next day, Alviss and Roswitte were flogged for the crime. Publicly. The huntress had Ivon’s ear and Rurik had Tessel’s. For anyone else, the punishment might have been death.

  Strung up beside them was the surviving Gorjes man, his back torn to pieces by a whip. When the time came to pull him down, it was other Gorjes that did it, and there was not one among them that didn’t turn looks like ice upon her distant observation. It only furthered her sense of isolation.

  Part of her asked if there weren’t something about her that attracted such madness.

  All around her, the world bloomed brown and muddied with the noon, and Starlet bayed beneath her, disagreeably grinding a hoof through the muck. The gesture was enough to make her wince. Ever since Essa’s recovery, Starlet had gained a terrible stubborn streak, rebelling, no doubt, over the perceived snub her master had delivered through the long bout of confinement to bridled walks or stall-based imprisonment.

  If only one could explain vertigo to a horse.

  She stroked her horse’s neck to calm her and whispered assurance in her ear even as she bade the little black mare on. Like her, she was a wild thing, unused to such keeping. She did not like the stalls, and she was not particularly fond of the other horses. Some of the fault of those manners likely lay with her, but Essa did what she could, when she could. Still, Starlet wanted to run the open plains. She wanted to stretch her legs and feel the wind rustling through her hair. It did not particularly seem to matter what her master wanted.

  But she listened, in the end. She bowed her head to Essa’s coaxing and twisted around in the frost-licked field, back toward the farms. It was early in the season yet, but the farmers had begun their toiling. The farmers and no one else. There were no steel lines on the horizon. No dust clouds stirred by marching hordes.

  “Where are you, little sparrow?” Rowan called.

  Her cousin walked beside her, tugging his scarf a little tighter as the wind kicked up. He followed her eyes, but no longer her thoughts. Too much chaos, she supposed.

  “Far and away,” she muttered. Yet she still had the piece of mind to study the plains for crags, lest her horse meet the same fate as Rowan’s.

  Further back, Alviss and Chigenda loped after them, and beyond them, the idiot wardens Gunther and Marvelle—Bloody Gorjes, headstrong and tight-lipped, and always smiling like they shared a joke between them. Thieves, she suspected, with a relationship likely older and more profitable than the war had shown them.

  She was the only one ahorse. Alviss preferred to walk. Gunther and Marvelle had never been able to afford such a creature in their miserable lives—which was not to say, of course, that Essa had actually paid for Starlet. Chigenda had lost his to battle and Rowan to lamed foot. The men of the camp had seen Rowan’s carved up and served, as they did with any dead animal. At the time, Rowan had looked as though he would be sickened by it. Essa still was.

  One hand gently patted her thigh and she tried her best to smile for her cousin. Rowan’s amber eyes shone back, even as he gave her a playful pinch. Love, she supposed.

  “You know,” Rowan prodded her, “somewhere under there is a beautiful woman that remembers the worth of her cousin’s gestures. I would settle for the child that laughs at the absurdity of those gestures.”

  He often hid heart behind his jokes. Just as she did. A dear heart—it was a shame it was confined to such a frail form. Months of rationing had not done him well.

  Frowning, she called back over her shoulder. “Alviss, have you any more of that jerky?”

  The deep lines of the Kuric’s weathered face twitched thoughtfully beneath his thick, gray-blond beard. He wiggled a finger at her and reached into one of his satchels, for the remnants of Rowan’s beloved steed. Marvelle and Gunther looked on greedily all the while. She scowled back at them, but so long as they only looked…

  Rowan shook his head. “Darling—”

  “Shush now,” Essa snipped.

  Alviss walked up to them and held out a hand in offering. She took it in hers, gingerly, but disappointment blossomed swiftly. It was little more than a bite. She looked to Alviss expectantly, but his face took on a severe quality as he cast away.

  “Only one bit left. That—tomorrow.”

  The man knew how to stretch things out, to be sure, but Essa couldn’t help but ponder the virtue of it. Today or tomorrow, it made little difference. The hunger would come all the same. Regardless, she clapped the old man’s broad hand between her tiny fingers and graced him with sincere thanks. Unphased, he nodded, and swiftly turned back to their trailing Zuti. Marvelle called after him, begging. Essa didn’t look, but she could imagine the dark gaze that followed.

  Nothing like the frigid stare of a Kuric berserker to catch a man’s breath.

  She passed the bit of jerky to Rowan, all the while ignoring his protests. He took, eventually, as he always did. He ate it and he savored it, and then he still looked pale.

  Better than the roasted dog the camp followers had taken to selling, at any rate.

  Overhead, grey clouds stirred a heaviness to the air. It bristled, with that energetic tingle that so often set her head to pounding. Sunlight pressed through in fleeting rays, illuminating the wide expanse of flat land. There
was nothing quite so seemingly barren as fields mired between growths. Nothing quite so empty feeling as a land with nothing hidden—a place of plains and gentle hills. One could have gone for miles and it would have been the same. Clusters of civilization broke the monotony—made it worse. One could see them spread about the horizon.

  Sometimes, she dreamed of the Ulneberg—of stretching out beneath its great boughs. A person could lose themselves there. It had been too long. It would be longer still.

  Most of Idasia shared this present visage. The great expanse, they called it. Walk between the borders, and one would never know it. Idasia and Effise, they were not so different. It was only men that made them so. Always men.

  They trotted past the farmers and they trudged past their homesteads, most stripped bare of anything more than necessity. That was the foraging of the grand army of the Empire, now. She tried not to make eye contact as they went. She did not like the pity that stared back. Pity and hate.

  Powerlessness was never becoming.

  Essa bundled her cloak about herself and tried not to think of sleep. She rubbed the crow’s feet from the corners of her eyes and closed them to the feeling of frost gathering along her arms. Wet frost, for it all stank of the rain to come. The smell of insomnia.

  Nights in camp were always the hardest.

  At a time, fire would have warmed her, but with the melting of the snows, Tessel had forbid any fire to preserve grass and hay for the gryphons and horses. They had long since run out of any wood, and though some men whispered of smashing homes for kindling, their general had outlawed mistreatment of the townspeople. Pasłówska, he said, was a proving ground for all that would come. Men bettered themselves not in women’s blood, but in steel and tribulation.

  As she opened her eyes, Essa found her gaze drifting beyond the ring of their own tents. A pair of sellsword Gorjes roamed one of the footpaths nearby. One of them hooked her with his gaze, elbowing his compatriot as they shared some barb. Bloody-taloned falcons loping through the dark. If any wished to dirty their hands in the honey of their enemies, it was probably they. She looked away, to icy laughter. She suppressed a shudder.

  Caught between such birds of prey and their kills she felt, to some extent, as though sailing down the Marali Sea to walk oneself into a Zuti city. Which was to say, utterly foreign. There was no hiding. Soldiers of all colors looked at her like something less than what she was—and eyed with intentions somewhat more than what she desired. They saw the swell of her hips and pointedly ignored the rest.

  The camp followers helped ease the tension, but some men’s eyes still wandered.

  Somewhat absentmindedly, she brushed the gangly lengths of her hair over her ears and tried her best not to scratch at the growing itch beneath the rough texture of her skin.

  As if being a half-breed weren’t trouble enough.

  At least the Gorjes knew their place. Or had learned it.

  All men, it seemed, had dark possibility within them.

  When she closed her eyes, she could still feel his touch. She could still hear his voice. The eyes—they said they loved her. Even as Rurik’s hands shed her dignity.

  Alviss stood beside her in the grass. She cocked her chin just high enough to catch the bottom of his. He held a cloak to her, the lakes of his eyes warmly beckoning.

  “Come,” he said. “Dreams before darkness.”

  Without a word, she took his cloak and she took his hand, and let him guide her back to her tent. To nightmares.

  Morning, unlike night, brooked routine. They rose with the horns. They ate en masse. They hungered for more but were not given it, and spoke with Captain Haruld to see if they drew lots for the day’s scouts. If they did, they trudged again across the empty plains. If they did not, they spent their hours trying not to think of their stomachs.

  With this morning came word that rations would be cut again. It did not go over well in camp. Men fell to bickering long before the supplymen ever reached them all. Voices shouted over the din of the camp such that the air sweltered. Rain drizzled on the tensions and the canvas, and made mockery of their paths. Essa breathed it in and tried to let it wash her away.

  “It’s a mite pissy out there,” Roswitte eloquently noted as she stepped into their camp late that morning. She shook out the hood of her cloak and stood slogged and sodden before them. Like a drowned rat, in her way.

  The rest of the the Company were splayed around what might have been, in gentler times, the foundations of a campfire. Some nights, Rowan stared so hard into those unused lines, Essa suspected he wished to test the capacity for mental kindling. Suffice to say, while some—as she—were content for a morning without labors, others all but leapt for the break in the monotony that the forester’s visits brought, as infrequent as they were.

  Rowan strangled a dry laugh. “As though it were good before. Starvation has that effect.”

  “More’n that,” the forester said, largely ignoring him. “Lot of folk scurrying for Tessel’s door. There’s something else, something—”

  “Effise?” Alviss asked. He paused from whetting the head of his bardiche.

  “Battel?” their dark-skinned compatriot asked from beside him.

  For Chigenda, the word almost seemed to come with a sort of divisive pleasure. He, more than anyone else, had chafed from idleness. But it wasn’t the food, or disease, or any of the countless things that plagued the other soldiers. For Chigenda, Essa sometimes thought, it was earnest disappointment in the prevailing of logic in their war.

  “No. Mayhaps. They said there was a messenger—” Roswitte turned, twisting her gaze on Essa mid-sentence. “And how’re you this morning, child? Speaking?”

  Essa never knew quite how to reply to the woman’s jibes. So instead, she stared. The forester’s sharp smile faltered after a moment. “Well,” she said, “comes and goes, I suppose.”

  “Like a little somethin’ else I know,” Marvelle’s high voice called. Essa turned to find the squat man loping into camp alongside his long-faced associate. They didn’t sleep in the Company’s camp, but they were never far. Not while the Gorjes’ camp encircled their own. Grins in place, the pair moved toward them with all the grace and poise of Kalavri jackals. “How’s the errant knight-lord, eh? Pull youself from his coattails for little ol’ us?”

  “Fine,” Roswitte said tightly. She flicked her gaze to Alviss, seemed to share some dark thought, and twisted back on Essa again. The woman caught her by the wrist, nearly yanking Essa off her feet in her haste to go. “But I’m taking this one for a touch.”

  “If you—”

  “Alone,” Roswitte snapped through Rowan’s interruption. Its vehemence was enough to stay him. “We won’t be long.”

  Roswitte wasted no time in camp and Essa couldn’t rightly blame the woman. Behind them, she could hear the Gorjes moving in, and Gunther’s distinctly throaty tones as he inquired after what he dubbed “the peaches.” The grind of Alviss’s axe began anew.

  But if the air was tense in camp, it was little better between the pair of them. Essa found her times with Roswitte to be awkward. Silence pervaded the space between them, despite the forester’s occasional efforts, and Essa was often left with the distinct feeling that the woman was forcing it. She sensed Alviss’s hand in it, but she would never say as much.

  Officially, Roswitte was sworn to Ivon Matair, ostensibly the lord of Verdan since his father’s execution. She slept in his household’s tents and could often be seen going about his work. Many of the men snickered about it—some of those from Verdan liked to call her Matair’s bear—but no one doubted her dedication. Nor did they trade their barbs with her directly. Still, between her duties, she could occasionally be found at their own camp. What drew her there time and again since Rurik had left was beyond Essa.

  Grudgingly, however, she had to admit the extra feminine presence was appreciated, at times. Though calling Roswitte a woman was a…stretch.

  For her part, Essa never knew quite how
to address the woman. She guessed Roswitte was at least twice her age, if not older—she certainly looked older. Time had little to do with it, however. The way she moved. The way she acted. There was a perpetual tension to her that often left her seeming wearied and worn. She never spoke of it, though. A testament to her strength, perhaps. Or something of a shield. For all that the woman was, she never spoke of herself.

  She could also pull a longbow back to full draw. A feat, to say the least. And Essa had already seen her skill with a knife.

  Sometimes, she seemed to look at Essa as though she were very far away, or as though she saw someone else in her eyes. It was unsettling.

  “So,” the forester ventured as they breached the ring of Gorjes tents, “how are we feeling today?”

  The question they always asked. Essa shrugged her shoulders and focused on a man playing fetch with one of the camp hounds. It seemed absurd, watching a grown man in rings running laps with a bloodhound. Best take care of it, she thought regardless. If there was one thing to be said for the starvation it was this: it had certainly cut down on the number of wild dogs.

  They went on. A man emptied his waste bucket at their feet. Near the gates of Pasłówska, another man fell to bickering with his brother over a tack of tasteless ikir.

  “Should we stop them?” Essa asked quietly. All around them, their brothers-at-arms either watched with a grim sort of bloodthirstiness or turned away in disgust.

  Roswitte cocked her head at the men, then rolled her eyes past Essa. “No.” She stepped around them and continued on into the row of tents. Essa lingered a moment, hesitant, then trotted after her. When she caught her, the forester only shook her head. “Soldiers will be, child.”

  There was something in the way she said it. A snap of rebuke. Essa bit her tongue against a venomous retort and narrowed her eyes to the trail.

  “Where are we going?”

  It was Roswitte’s turn to shrug. “Where ears find no purchase.”