As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “I confess I wondered if you were in a clever vein tonight, Charlotte,” her father beckoned with aristocratic precision. “It is good that I did not give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  From the walls: “Fürlangen burns! There is a fire in the city!”

  It was a suitable distraction. Charlotte whistled as her father’s annoyed disposition rounded on the claim. Her father was, after all, not the only one with arms to his name. Maynard was gone; she could not hide behind her uncle’s whims. Yet in the turning of bodies at a corner of the yard, she knew she had her own faithful guard. Unfortunately, her noise likewise did not escape her father’s notice.

  “Do you expect to simply ride into the night? Your place is here, Charlotte.”

  She shook her head. “The city burns, father. Would you surrender it to these cowards, even as you cower behind our walls?”

  “And what difference, pray tell, do you suppose either of us should make where strength of arm should fail? This is not politick, nor a matter for reason. This is blood, to be answered with blood. Let it go and—Hackett,” he said, turning to one of his shieldmen, “have those gates closed, damnation. Until we have a better notion of what is happening I will not leave us wide to the whims of the world.”

  So Charlotte started to walk away.

  Whether previously arranged or at a gesture from her father, Ustrit—the shaggier of his henchmen—approached with a torch in one hand and none of the grace that marked his betters.

  Only then did she hesitate. A lesser woman should have cast about for support, but she knew what she would find. What anyone woman—or son, for that matter—should find in such a moment. Her father called her out before all these men only for the purposes of asserting his authority publicly. To aid her now would not be to aid a daughter of the House Cullick—it would mean defiance of its patriarch. From the legion that was her family’s soldiers and men-at-arms, she could expect no aid. Not in this quarter. And her father could be pushed only so far.

  Defiance had sunk even to her posture, she realized. Gradually, she unclenched her hands and rolled back her shoulders, smiling the docile smile that was to be perfection in the courts of men.

  “Father,” she said, quieter now, “in such times, people need a figure to turn to. Images—all of our images—are strong, but a figure is stronger than all the words—”

  “Our soldiers are our symbol. The strength of our arm. You need not risk yourself. The men that can do something about it ride gladly to it, and the people will know this. The rest is nothing but arrogance talking. Think it through. In your room. Come away now from this yard. I have had enough of this folly.”

  Ustrit stepped forward with a deferential nod, the command in his eyes, rather than a gesture. It would not be within him to take her by the arm. It would, however, to give that impression. Charlotte spread her hands, but made no motion to accept her father’s impulse.

  “And what of the witch? What of the men that lie dead in your very fields?”

  At this, her father scoffed, hackles rising. She had pushed him too far. “Martyrs are martyrs,” he snapped, and the tone was all Ustrit needed to take the final steps.

  He would have taken her, too, if another man had not stepped up behind her like a shadow grown in candlelight. The foreboding girth of that shade turned her with as much bemusement as it halted Ustrit. Half of this man’s face twitched with the tense role of nerves too close to surface—fresh skin, blotchy and as though stained pink. It was a hairless face, a hard face, with features that nevertheless marked him unmistakably for a northerner.

  For all this, he remained Dartrek, her own shieldman, and though the witch’s flames had done him ill, they did not keep him from those steps forward and the easy detachment with which he shifted his sword to his off-hand.

  To draw a sword in a noble’s presence, unbidden, was as good as a death sentence. Yet in this he walked a fine line—it was clear he had drawn his blade before the approach, and for a night such as this, there was good reason. That he shifted it to his off-hand meant he gave no offense—but that he left it out, a sign that he could more than amply give it. Ustrit locked eyes with him and the men stared one another down.

  On the steps of the keep, however, with more than one pair of eyes locked on him, Charlotte’s father had gone a particular shade of crimson. Disobedience. It was, for him, akin to being a traitor.

  “Lady,” Dartrek uttered out the still working side of his face. “We are ready…to ride.” His words were halting, uncertain, still being felt out, but their meaning suffered nothing for it.

  Charlotte hesitated. Her guardian, only lately risen, would be butchered in a fight—a fight Ustrit seemed all too ready to give. She wanted to tell Dartrek to back down, but even as her lips parted, she heard the sound, sweet as rain on a dusty field in summer. There was a collective growl of a sort drawn from the ranks of some few men behind them. The stableboy stood beside that crowd with the reins of her gryphon in his hand, and an appropriate look of terror plastered to his face.

  You show what one and all steadfastly feel, sweetling, she thought, doing her best not to turn her thoughts to little Gerold all the while.

  There were soldiers and there were soldiers. Somewhere in the night a line had drawn, and there was sense and logic to one side, and there was emotion and reaction to the other. She had never, admittedly, thought that she should take the latter’s camp—the path that deviated from patience.

  Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she could still feel the tingle of the wind on her hair that day in the fields of Lucretsia. Yet more to the surface, the vision of a woman bound in chains, to a rock and to a family and to a destiny, which bled more than any other soul should have had to bleed. That, more than anything else, hardened her heart against what she had to do.

  “Father,” Charlotte said with a genuinely respectful bow, “you may shut the gates behind me, but I will not have it said the lion lurks within its den when something prowls its jungle.”

  The man who had hugged her but a week before glared down at her with stiff pride. His hands did not tense. His lip did not quiver. Even the flush of immediacy had left him, and the dead expression that succeeded it chilled Charlotte to her core. But she held firm. As a lioness. As he, the lion.

  “Go, then, with my blessing,” he said, though his face said something else entirely. There will be consequences, that mask read, and she did not doubt its capability.

  In the moment, she simply could not care. Ustrit stood down and she twisted on her heel, though she deliberately slowed her pace to grant Dartrek his dignity. He hobbled at her back, one boot dragging a little behind the other.

  “You did not have to do that,” she said.

  Yet his eyes were fixed somewhere ahead of them, and he did not slow. “No,” he answered, and nothing more.

  Others waited for them. While much of the crowd had dissolved, no less than a baker’s dozen were mounted and ready to ride. With a boost from the stableboy, Charlotte hastily joined them, and together, they rode into the ashes of the night. Even as they rode across the fields, however, there was some small satisfaction in the fact that the gate never closed behind them.

  As they fanned into the trees that dotted the hills about Fürlangen, another man came riding to meet them from the opposite direction. He was garbed in the colors of her house, dark hair wild with the distress of the night’s dark deeds, but he was not so far removed from sense as to forget the proprieties of station. Yet when he was done with his proper addresses, his tone grew altogether grave.

  “They’ve gone into the city, milady.”

  “How many? Who?” she asked prudently.

  “We know not. By their prints…they came afoot though.”

  “And the city?”

  “It burns. More than that I know not.”

  “What of the prisoner? Has she been found?”

  The man turned, gesturing back to the burning city. “In there, milady. Somewhere in there. Sh
e loosed her bonds ahead of these cretins, but the dead…we’ve many dead. They struck quick, with the shadows their cloak.”

  With the shadows their cloak. For some reason that phrase, beyond all others, struck her to her core. It knotted itself there with a sailor’s heavy hands, and she had heard enough. It was not in her to let her city burn, nor any more of her people with it.

  “You men,” she snapped back at her train, “we are into the city. Soldier,” she quipped at the messenger, “get your fellows together and into the streets. You will need buckets.”

  The man rode off ahead of them, not even the thought of objection hanging on his tongue. For Charlotte and the rest, it was a swift trail, past the mushroom grove where Usuri had, until recently, remained bound—as much for her own sense of mind as anything. It did not put her to any greater ease.

  Death had claimed that field. It had snapped the tenuous bonds that tethered men—strong, hardy men at the peak of their days—and driven them into the exile of its embrace. It all but froze her. She had known these men. Day after day, she had watched them in the yard and smiled as she flaunted the failings of their bonds. Usuri had laughed with her. Now there was no laughter. No knowing. They were gone in the flutter of a pin, and laid their inadequacies bare.

  It was the nature of their doom that struck her most of all. She beckoned Dartrek as she wandered amongst the dead. “What do you make of them?” she asked, needing his eyes.

  What she took under scrutiny, he took in at a glance. “Butchered,” he grunted.

  “By?”

  “Sword.” Dartrek squinted. “Same sword. All.”

  One sword. One man. She did not much care for that omen. But in a world where a woman like Usuri drew breath, she was forced to reevaluate her estimation of possibility.

  “Meaning?”

  Dartrek looked at her with a huntsman’s care, but said nothing. He was not a creature that liked to speculate. An infuriating quality, at times.

  They rode on, passing beneath the easternmost of the city’s gates through a jostling crowd of fury and fear. Fire stirred terror in men at the best of times. To wake to it in the dead of night, amidst the ringing tunes of invasion and murder, were the sparks of riot and madness. Citizens, whatever they were in the humbling light of day, pressed against her, against the thin line of guards, against the walls and their neighbors and anything else they could get their hands on, all in a vain effort not to help, but to flee—to flee to the specter of safety.

  People, she sometimes feared, were not naturally logical. Certainly, no logical man would rush headlong into the dark unknown and call it sanctuary. Fight or flight. The animal quandary.

  They pushed their way through, moving as one to keep any overly ambitious souls from dragging them from their mounts. One of the men barked an order and Charlotte found herself especially clustered. Shielded. It gave more the impression of a conquering king than it did a citizen riding to market. She did not find it entirely displeasing, either.

  As soon as they pressed past the gates, however, they found themselves with more room to work. Fürlangen was a place of broad, brick streets, rendered in the sweeping, concentric style of a city that, with time, had ringed itself out, and out, and gobbled up the plains surrounding. Though the streets were crowded with panic and opportunity, it was large enough that the danger of stampede was not so great—on the main streets, anyway.

  While citizens had the run of the streets, neither the constabulary nor the town guard lingered in any sort of meaningful fashion. Bucket brigades could be seen hastening back and forth through the madness, but the enforcers were scattered, either defending the gates or tempting fate driving back the mobs of confused peasants from the heart of the danger. Moths, after all, sometimes rushed to the heat of the flames, rather than away.

  What men they could interrogate, however, guided them west, through the gaping circuit of the farmers’ market and the cramped, suffocating drudgery of the Reisendeburg—that westernmost stretch of immigrants and warehouses. It was not pretty in the light. Even less so in the grunge of smoke and ash. Wailing rose from this place, and the mobs coalesced, and even the armored girth of Charlotte’s compatriots found little leeway in their mass.

  “Dry wood,” Dartrek noted at one point.

  “The whole district might go up,” another man chimed.

  Charlotte gritted her teeth, knowing some of these men very likely had their own families still living in this city, would fear—and reasonably so—for the safety of them. And not just for the flames, either. There were men that took advantage of such situations, much as an invading army: for rape and for plunder. Yet she could afford no distractions. Not now.

  “Any man that would leave, leave now. I’ll not hold it against you,” she called from the saddle. “To the rest: eyes and ears to task. Or so help me, we ride for naught.”

  None abandoned her. Though she felt the heat in the looks they turned on one another, there was not one that turned those looks aside, or pulled apart. Small favors do exist, she ought to have murmured, but instead she drove them forward, to the weeping and the howling.

  “Milady! Milady!”

  The voice was nigh a whisper in the tumult, but they heard it all the same. Charlotte sought it out, and bobbing through the crowd that engulfed them near to the heat of the flames—which had consumed a block by then—an armored man pushed forward, trying to reach her. It was obvious, from the tomato shade that had claimed his face, he had been yelling for some time.

  A pull of the reins spread her gryphon’s wings. It buffeted Charlotte enough that it gave her room to breathe, and drove the crowd back. Between that and the plain iron resting in her compatriots’ hands, most began to give them room.

  “What news?” she called to the winded man.

  He gripped at the reins of her gryphon, not bothering with the formality his kind had engrained in them. “It’s—it’s spreading, lady. But the people speak nonsense. There’s no army here. No fighting in the streets. I—is his lordship coming? Or Ser Maynard? We need…”

  A shout drew him off. Someone had rushed the line of guardsmen, leading to him being tackled and wrestled down. People were shouting, surging, trying to reach the burning homes.

  “Who then? What caused all this? We have dead men, messar.”

  “And more before the night be—” The man’s tone was bitter, at first, but seemingly catching himself, he wilted. Before he could apologize, however, Charlotte held up a hand, anticipating him, and bid him onward. “There was a woman, they says. Terrible woman. Says she started the fire. But—”

  “Which way?”

  “The warehouses…” he stammered, and that was the last she needed of him.

  It was not, however, the most helpful of notions. For, while it pointed them in the right direction, those prophetic words were nothing short of another needle, another haystack. While better kept than the housing that surrounded them—and, by and large, walled in by the wealthier hands that owed them—the warehouses formed a sort of district within a district, a cobwebbing of wood and stone that formed the so-called war chest of the city. They looked alike. They were difficult to break into.

  And all of those things might have played a greater significance, had not the earth rumbled and the stone foundations of one such warehouse cracked, heaved, and separated before her very eyes. It was the most direct show of magic she had yet seen. It did not make it any less stupefying.

  “What in the Maker’s name?” someone cried behind her.

  There was a chance, however slim, that someone in there might still be alive. She said, “I am going in there, and so help me, if they take my head from my shoulders, there is no one on the face of this earth that will keep me from haunting you. All of you.”

  Idle threats, she had long been taught, only diminished one in the eyes of those they threatened. Fortunate for her, then, that she took not one single word of that idly.

  Of their paltry party, she could count on one
hand the number that cordoned off the street and swept the perimeter, while the others rammed down the small gate and fanned out ahead of her. Another man held back with their steeds, while the rest—Charlotte and Dartrek excluded—moved on the massive, sagging double doors that formed an entrance. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Dartrek, following the observation of one young soldier, slipped around the side and claimed the ramp that was the building’s side entrance.

  Yet at the last moment, Dartrek grew bold in a manner to which Charlotte was unaccustomed. She, pressing ahead, suddenly jerked with the iron grip that clasped her forearm. It was a grip matched by the intensity in her ailing shieldman’s narrow gaze.

  “Not for you. You…stay.”

  Ignoring the sheer audacity of the demand, she reached a hand up to his and gripped it. Then she met his stare with the determination of her own.

  “There is a ward in there under my family’s charge. There is a man, or men, in there, which have not only killed my family’s men, but set fire—”

  He snorted, knowing as she did, no doubt, the falsity of pinning that particular woe on anyone other than their witch.

  “—to our city. It is only right that one of us should oversee their fate. And you—you will remove your hand from me. I will not be denied.”

  “Not wise,” Dartrek said, staunch as a ramrod.

  Elsewhere, the air rumbled with the clamor of strong men battering down teetering doors.

  “Until they are done, few of the great moments ever seem to be.”

  His hand slipped away and he let her go. Yet she, in turn, let him at least have the dignity of his station—to be the first through the door, for shields, however staunch and strong, were not powerful for thought, but for action. Dartrek heaved open the door—it was unlocked—and spilled starlight into the unstable remnants of what at least appeared to have been a menagerie of textiles and the raw materials that formed their base.