At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  “But it is not done. That is the point.”

  “That’s not how they see it. Your father—”

  “Is all the more reason to march. What would the world think of a people that refused to avenge their master? Especially one such as him. We owe him and Idasia this war, and I’ll not have anyone second guess it.”

  “And if they resist?”

  Tessel’s gaze grew grim. “Disloyalty is death. You know this.”

  He lowered his head. Death was the burden. For so many things—or it was supposed to be. A night far and away danced to mind, with a woman and a cell and a man calling for blood. It was disloyalty then, too. Only fate had been merciful.

  No, not fate, he thought as quickly, and with it, found the strength to look up again. Father.

  “This questioning, Rurik—what guides it truly? Would you leave with them—these men that care so little for you?”

  “No,” he nearly shouted. “No. What they do matters little to me. It is concern, Kyler. Your father promised me freedom long ago but…it is done. I am where I belong.”

  Freedom seemed naught but a ripple of a notion. It disrupted the reflections of the world, only to break upon the distant shore, unchanged. It was enough for some men to chase after. Rurik tried to tell himself he was no longer one of those men.

  Truth be told, Rurik would not have known what to do with such bounty if he had it. Essa couldn’t stand to look at him. His brother barely tolerated him. The people of Verdan knew him only as a rapist and an exile.

  But most important was the taint. Blood would have stained such a gift, for it was the blood of pity that earned it. Matair would have been a name rooted in the corpse of a dead man, for even emperors could not raise fathers from the grave.

  Such thoughts settled like weights in his gut—parts mixed with sorrow, and with anger. Duty was best. Freedom would not have been right, and hope was too far gone to care.

  Still, something in the way Tessel took the news unsettled Rurik further. Dark eyes seemed to sink into themselves, searching inward. The long face slackened, shifted.

  When Tessel’s voice came again, it was barely above a whisper. “He said this?”

  “Assal be my witness. But death changes all.”

  Tessel always looked a man in the eyes when he spoke to them. Yet this time, he turned away all the same. “Why are you here, Rurik? For glory? Or phantoms?” When Rurik did not answer, Tessel looked pointedly to his knee. “I do not mean it harshly, my friend.”

  It was a question he had long asked himself, in the darkest hours of the night. All the way to Verdan, it had stalked the purpose of his blade. When war found him, he found himself no better prepared to answer it. The truth was, as often as he looked inside himself for answers, his own hands never guided the truth. Life was something others always decided for him.

  “It wasn’t my choice.”

  “Choice?” A sharp, bitter laugh cracked the general’s demeanor. “Who spoke anything of choice? Few ever have that. But all men have thought, my friend, and it is yours I seek, to reach my point. Why do you think you are here?

  “To hide,” Rurik answered belatedly.

  “I see. Cheer, then—I do not begrudge you it. You would not be the first. But my father, well…he came for the opposite.”

  Rurik could not keep the confusion from his face.

  “I tell you, my father came here to die, Rurik.”

  Death, the priests said, was the final path. Ademius had seen it long ago, and worked its trails to the fruit at their core. Death was the path to new beginnings. The path to Assal. The path to freedom. It was why, they said, all men moved inevitably toward death. Not only was it predetermined, but each was predisposed.

  Life moved in circles. Such was the path. What came would come again, breath to breath, until each riddled out the truth within. War was a path to the next, as sure as any, but lies gained nothing. Rurik twisted the concept around, unable to find words.

  The Emperor had smiled as they spoke. He was not a man toward death. He promised life, and Rurik had to believe. Anything else just didn’t make sense.

  Tessel’s gaze returned to him, murky but observant. “People ask why I did not stop him. Why I let him ride that vainglorious charge. Well, that is the truth of it. Our good marshall may be incompetent but, sooner or later, his sieges would have worked. His march would have gone on. Months. Years down the line. But my father would not have lived to see it, and one of those hounds at the capital would have taken all the glory.

  “I know not the truth of things between you, but I know thus: my father was a great man whittled by time. The world is too sick to notice, but he rode here to die as a man should. With the wind beneath his knees and a sword in his hand.”

  All at once, Rurik beheld a boy limping across a field. A horse whirled, spears and long guns baiting it round and round about. An emperor reared. His sword flashed. And he died in the dust, with vultures pecking at his flesh.

  Glory? It echoed hollow. A hollowness that struck and spread within, and left him cold.

  “He was already dead. For all that he had tried, the world burned around him. For seventy years he had built it up, but he would need another seventy to keep it. And his body ate at him in ways time seemed incapable. At a time, he could barely breathe.

  “Tell me Rurik, do you understand what I am saying? A man has a right to die a man, and yet, it’s a secret thing.” Tessel’s eyes fell to his hands. “Secret that this dread nonsense burned through his lungs and through his gut; secret that he rode to meet death on his own terms. No man…no man should suffer.” His hands curled, and he looked to meet Rurik again, defeat and pride mingling in the shadows.

  It was a long moment before Rurik could find the words to speak.

  “You tell me, you say, so many dead, so many lives…this march—it was all for one man?”

  “Aren’t they all? One man. One nation. One faith.” Tessel added the last with a sarcastic roll of the eyes. “That is the nature of the world.”

  We shall see these evil things undone, the man had said.

  Lies, all of it. Sickness burbled in Rurik’s gut, deeper and more profoundly than any flu. Why should it hurt? He had said it himself—it no longer mattered. Dead was dead. It’s just another lie. But it wasn’t just another lie. It was the greatest of deceptions—a play upon a child’s hopes, and fears, to make an oath upon a dead man while pissing on his grave.

  It was one thing to lose hope. It was quite another to learn it was nothing more than a fever dream.

  Even emperors were men. Men lied. Men died. Words moved between them, but these were naught but air. What meaning did they really have? Matair—it was only a name. It could be invoked, and discarded, and the world would go on, unmoved.

  Always, he would remain Rurik, but Matthias, he would go to eternity as the bold, and the brave. No one told stories of the dark things brave men did to stir others to that same goodly death. A family may have waited on the sons’ return, but they were to be sacrifices before the martyr’s name.

  Air, blood, and dust. That was all he ever had.

  Rurik was very glad he was already sitting down.

  “If they knew, his enemies would call it cowardice…”

  In the confines of his heart, Rurik took up the cry as well. Coward! Coward! Coward! Like a rooster’s cries. He struggled to smooth his hands against his legs—to give nothing.

  Just like the dead man.

  “All men have flaws,” Tessel repeated, more quietly this time. “But do you know what he told me before we broke camp that day?” He let it hang, as if he himself could scarcely believe it. “Son, he says, I do not care if anyone else could hear it, save you, but you are mine, and a fine one at that. The greatest wrong I ever did you was to whelp you on a baseborn woman. Were it all different—and this is the thing—I should have set the crown to you myself.

  “And yet…and yet I am expected to take heed of a man that has never laid eyes on him? O
n greedy uncles? That is true injustice.”

  Rurik was too numb to feel anything more than the barest edges of the general’s passion.

  Still, he answered: “And what would you do of it?”

  At this, a solemn smile made a foreshadow of Tessel. “As I said: I know not the truth of things between you. Truly, I know only the shape of my own heart, and it would tell you this: stay with me, Rurik. Stay with me and you shall have the blood you seek.”

  * *

  Motion defined the night. Subtle motion. Most would not distinguish it. A few men moved horses into the center of the camp, one or two at a time, while others hoisted saddlebags and arms. Others drifted along the perimeter edges, pikes or swords tensed for blows, wandering heavily but purposefully and turning away all that did not belong.

  For a young hunter, the obvious thought surrendered the horsemen to a raid and the blades to a camp laid nervous by the turning of the day’s events.

  Yet there was more to it. If the raiders were knights, as the bearing and—in many cases—the faces gave these to be, they left their preparations to their pages and their squires alone. These men shared the burden with them, though all took great care to wear footmen’s garb. This was not to say, however, that they were bad at it. Most would not have second-guessed the effort, but Roswitte had seen many of these men before, and their boys too. Their faces didn’t fool her.

  Raiders kept their horses to the stables until the last, for it allowed a quicker departure with fresher, rested steeds. This was an act of silence, or treachery, or both. Something not meant for unknown eyes.

  Raiders also traveled light. The weapons and armor were common fair for this, but these men loaded sheets, coin, clothes, and food—an act more suited to refugees than to warriors.

  As they meandered toward their lord’s tent, Roswitte could not help but wonder if this was why she had been summoned. To fight or to flee.

  Brickheart’s presence among the packers leaned her toward fight. When Othmann had been taken, Brickheart had slipped away like a mouse in the night, to rally Witold’s banners into a marshaled ring of steel. None had relented and none had been permitted entrance—Roswitte included—until Ivon had returned and ordered the camp at ease.

  Now, the grizzled master-at-arms of Verdan stood with Jörg—Ivon’s shieldman—hands at their sides and voices low. Both nodded to her, quieting briefly as she passed.

  So it was that the utter lack in Ivon’s tent surprised her little. Everything had been stripped, packed, and taken. Only Ivon remained attired, his squire fussing at the buckles of his armor as he himself worked to tie his dark hair back into a tail. If he started at her entrance, he let nothing slip. He dismissed her accompanying guards, but left the squire to his affairs.

  After a moment of awkward silence, he glanced over his shoulder again, regarding her. “Do words fail you, warden?”

  She shrugged. “Not my place to speak first.”

  There was a sigh in the way he sagged and shrugged off, but it found no sound. He stepped away from his squire, hefting a piece of glass to admire the boy’s work. The child trembled when a hand reached for him. It clapped him on the shoulder.

  Like father and son, she mused. It was always the quiet moments like this, away from men and steel, that one could see the mother in him. Even then, few did. Precious few words could adequately capture this scion of the Matairs. Careless was not among them.

  “Just as well. For Ros, I need you to listen to me now.”

  Roswitte snapped back to attention and drew upright, tensing at the familiar stress in her master’s tone. The last time such a tune had played, Fallit’s life had been the call of the curtain. Yet the servant in her bid her only say: “Your burdens are my own, lord. Speak, and bid them gone.”

  Ivon started to speak, frowned, and turned away, tapping his fingers up the plates of his armor. Indecision was unbecoming on the man, she decided then. Nor could he mask it, as his father had, unaccustomed to it as he was.

  But there was always something to break a man. One merely had to find it.

  “What if I were to tell you something terrible will soon sweep this camp?”

  She felt her throat tighten. Danger, a little voice cried. “Are you in danger?” she asked, just a little too quickly. Ivon quirked an eyebrow at her familiar tone, but she remained as she was.

  Ivon’s frown deepened into a sigh. His head gave a shake. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just…” His knuckles rapped against the metal. “This isn’t the place for me anymore, Ros. Not the war. No one’s talking. No one’s moving. Yet my home—it calls. Calls me back from the silence. And—I fear if I do not go tonight, I may never live to see it.”

  “And what of your brother?”

  “Rurik?” With a nod, she cast him back to a rueful sort of silence. His stance stiffened, and Ivon slowly shook the thought out. “That one is at home here. Let him be. We were never meant for the same roof anyhow.” His knuckles rapped a final note, and the lord gave his head another shake. She knew the tune, and it did not settle her. Nerves held that chord, and Ivon Matair was not one for anxiety. “All the same, the ears I trust to this are few. You were a confidante of my father. I trust in that. As such, I asked you here tonight to offer: will you come with us?”

  Her own eagerness surprised her. “Yes,” she answered immediately. “Gladly.”

  Fallit’s hand fell heavy on her shoulder. Visions of trees and deer and a little cabin in the woods mingled with the words and tainted the taste of them. All the while she wondered what she really wanted—but then again, some things were never meant to be known, and never would.

  Oaths were but words men hid behind at the end of the day. They passed as easy from one to another. Let them call her a bear all they wished. Now, she wished to hide in her words. There were no other dens left to her.

  Chapter 7

  On the same morning the last dredges of slush finally dissolved into mud, a rider bearing royal colors called on Vissering Castle with a message for Walthere and the Empress both. The man came without escort, a fact Charlotte took as somewhat ludicrous in the present political air, but her father adhered well enough to the old codes of how to treat an envoy, even if that messenger did not make the process easy.

  He was a young man, the salty pepperings of a beard attesting to how recently manhood had graced him. An unlikely figure for the task, Charlotte supposed. But than, so many of their fighting men had gone east with the old emperor, and it was better the young than the infirm.

  When ushered into the castle’s solar, he waved both food and drink, and refused the offering of a seat. He was of a single mind, and to his credit, he read his message faithfully: a demand for the presence of Charlotte’s father and the Empress both at the coronation of Prelate Leopold, to become Emperor Leopold II. Bare octaves had passed since Walthere had lent his voice to the other electors of the Altengard and given the man his approval.

  A flicker of amusement crossed the count’s eyes just long enough for Charlotte’s watchful gaze to catch, but his poise remained otherwise intact, and their guest did not seem to notice. The dear empress was not likewise composed, but fortunately she deferred to Walthere, who respectfully declined, claiming both his wife and Princess Sara as too ill to travel. At this, the messenger scoffed, claiming it was not a request, but a duty.

  “The Lady Mother and the princess have tarried here too long, at any rate,” the messenger babbled to deaf ears. “His Majesty asks that she return in all haste. She will be well cared for, I am to assure you.”

  But the Empress would have none of it. “As I am here,” she countered. “And I would not leave my coz’s side at so dark an hour.”

  For most, that answer, delivered with Imperial weight, should have been enough. Yet at this, the messenger dared cross another step between himself and the high lords, eyes blazing with arrogant defiance. “And by Assal, my lady, His Highness says such tarrying ushers your empire into a far darker hour at that.
If you do not come, he has said he will be forced to remove you at a later date. So too the princess, and your son as well.”

  It was nothing short of a miracle that spared the man the sword of any one of the men-at-arms huddled with them in the room. As it was, it did not spare him the spearing gaze of her uncle, nor the harsh rebuke of her father.

  “You would threaten an empress?” Walthere calmly balked. “Tell me, in Anscharde, do they still teach boys to use their heads, or merely to wag their tongues?”

  The man left shortly thereafter, red-faced. Charlotte watched him through a window as he put his spurs to his horse and kicked it through the gates in a scantly-suppressed fury. If their new emperor were half so bold as he, she had little doubt they would soon regret that child’s wounded pride.

  Supposing, of course, his daggers were swifter than their own.

  “Was that—was that good?” The Empress’s hands remained folded about each other in her lap. They were hands that wanted to tremble. Her gaze did not rise from them, even to address the count. “He will be back, I think.”

  Charlotte glanced to her father, a perfect portrait of resolute distance—a perfect portrait of jurti’s disassociation with reality—but when it became apparent he had nothing to say, she crossed the room to take the damaged woman’s hands in hers.

  “You did well, majesty. Considering how fast that one ran from here, I dare say pride will not let him back again.”

  This was no longer a woman playing games. Surelia was a woman that did not know how to play the game in the first place. For all her splendor, she was a simple mind—all she had ever wanted was for people to love her and her family, and now the honesty that many didn’t, that many would even dare to disrespect her openly, laid open a wound Charlotte suspected had long festered within her. There was a certain way to deal with such a creature, and Walthere’s hard manners were not it.

  A shocked sort of innocence flared in Surelia’s eyes at Charlotte’s placating words, and a grateful smile passed between them.