Every few yards she stopped to listen. Other men picked over the remnants and tried to make sense of what they found there. Delusion was too easy with the eyes in a place like this. The eyes expected death, and so they simply anticipated it. The eyes might have missed the cellar door beside the remnants of church. Her ears could not mistake a baby’s wail rising from its depths, a cry from earthen womb.
Fitting, she thought. Matairs should never have even entered into her life, had she not saved a babe all those years past. Perhaps they saw something in her that she did not.
Regardless, she hallooed the others down and forced a pair of them to break the cellar’s warped latch. Below, even the cries grew suddenly still—a collective hush, waiting, not daring to hope. She was the first one down the stairs, and though she should have brought a torch, she could not wish that upon any of these just yet.
There she found nine bedraggled souls, most still in their bedclothes. Wide eyes watched her, fear and sleeplessness a red depth in them all.
From a warrior’s perspective, it was not a wise decision. As a guardian of the land, it was the only decision. Though there was not one of them who looked well enough or strong enough to fight, she promised them a road to walk together. She could not have promised them safety; she was not so great a fool as to lie to broken souls.
Ensil and his man Bayer were waiting for her as she emerged from the cellar. “They won’t be keeping up,” Bayer was in the midst of saying.
Motioning toward her to let her know he saw, Ensil placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder and said, “And if we can’t be doing something for them, we should not be going on.”
The one guffawed, sputtered and strode off. He would accept his friend’s decision, even if he didn’t believe in it. “How many come?” Ensil asked when she strode out. She presented them, aging men and women, and children all, their limbs still shaking from their night in hellfire. No value at all, yet the heart of why they fought back at madmen.
“They’re going to get us killed,” one of the others murmured. She didn’t catch which one, or she should have hit him. They were, she thought, doing a fine job of nearly getting killed all on their own.
Ensil, however, went to the villagers and beckoned them out, introducing himself to each in turn. Orders were then barked back, assigning each to another member of the company—eyes for each, hands for each, he said. Then he looked on Roswitte a final time and remarked, “You are in danger of being taken for noble, lady.” This, with a half a smirk.
She might have gagged on that. “Shove your nobility right up that puckered ass.”
There were a lot of people she had greatly desired to say that to for far too long. It felt good to finally get it off her shoulders.
Still, she felt the pull of others’ eyes. Begrudgingly, she turned an apologetic smile to the villagers. It felt forced, however, and awkward, so she let it quickly die.
Ensil, for his part, should have known better than to say anything more. Instead, he said in a low voice, “If we shall be taking them, we cannot continue as we were. Where shall we be going from here?”
She had been pondering that question herself. A verbal prod didn’t help with her indecision. “If we were sensible, we should head south.”
Ensil slapped at a mosquito that sought to worm its way under his collar. “We are soldiers, lady. There is no sense in our marrow. Nor would your duty, I suspect, allow this.”
Damn you and your sense, she wanted to say, for he spoke from experience. Duty had forced her on in the wake of death and bodily destruction. Loyalty had compelled her even when other, more or less equal men, should have tucked tail and run long ago. She liked to tell people it was because she was just too stupid to know otherwise. This one knew the deeper threads of it, and hit out at them.
“And what of yours?” she complained. “Your own men tell you seem to think staying well enough away would be safest, and wisest. Yet they, and you, both listen to my fool’s speech. What do you think is the most dangerous thing?”
Silence fell, save for their breathing and the empty sounds of a dead night. The others had started to guide the people on, shuffling without direction. Before the dust knight could speak, she added, “You are the knight here, ser. You could change the rules.”
For a time, they wavered, each seeming to ponder this. At last, Ensil shook his head and said, “You forget, ‘if I wanted.’ I am not wanting. Rules exist for reasons. You guide us true. Were it otherwise, I should speak—I am no blind set of principles, lady. But you…” For once, he hesitated, seemed to get an itch in the direction of their departing fellows.
“But I what?” she prodded.
The dust knight sighed. “Strong as you are, you turn to others; in this, there is safety. If right, all is well. If wrong, one can always curse them.”
“I know my place!” she barked back. “A sellsword wouldn’t understand that.” And she regretted it even as she said it, though she knew she could never bring herself to apologize for it. It was, after all, how she felt.
He blushed, or winced hot—she wasn’t sure which. Either way, he looked her square in the eyes, his square jaw locked. “You are coming from a place where everything is order, Roswitte. At home, there are parents. There are masters. There are lords. Each says: do this, do that, and if you do not, there is being punishment, there is balance. But this is something else. This is war. Its boundaries…they blur. We…” A language barrier? Indecision? The man closed his eyes, seemed to wrestle with something. “We are making our own paths, yes?”
“Then why,” she said bitterly, “do you keep following me?”
This, to a man she had wrapped in sheets and covered against the flames’ heat.
He blinked, as though startled. “I believe in you.”
There was nothing to say to that. Had it been Fallit, this might have been flirtatious…but she sensed none of that here. She had the uneasy feeling that the dust knight saw things more clearly than she. She shuffled on her feet like a woman half her age, tried and failed to grasp the words to reply. When Ensil spoke of paths and changes, what could she say to something that had been fact her whole life? She struggled against those around her; she struggled toward those above her. Ensil spoke with ease of powerful things.
And her discontent made her think, however fleetingly, of a baker, perpetually pining for things he could not have, without the courage to do anything about it. And it made her think of Rurik, whose pains were his own, and yet kept moving forward, always forward…
Children. By Assal, I am taking lessons from children.
There was nothing conclusive between them after that. After a time, they both simply drifted after the others, gradually overtaking them. Decide, the little voice said within, and so she guided them north and west, to another hold they had seen—another village, this one with a holdfast of stone in its clearings, where some small manner of protection might be found. It seemed as good a place as any to wait for news.
It was a stubby little tower, but the place remained secure. Three stories of grubby stone, but with a single entrance at the second story—accessible by ladder alone—guaranteed that no one undesired should have breached the place shy of siege implements. That said, the town around it had burned, and there remained some wonder as to how any defenders might have made it through without getting smoked out.
This was not a place armed men would have had any impact on. Thus, when Roswitte came, she made Ensil and his heavier armed fellows stay behind, opting instead for the company of the rescued villagers and fellow hunters. The others remained to sift through ruins, watching from the corners of their eyes.
She called up to the tower before she noticed the bones. It cut her voice as a knife across the throat. The ladder to the tower had been pulled up, sure, but she doubted it was against armed men. Blackened bones and scarred flesh marred the base of the tower, a small heap without purpose. No iron blades. No maille. Just flesh and bone, thatched together by the r
emnants of spared cloth. Rocks, too, littered these corpses, and scoff marks on the stone.
People had hammered these walls, and her stomach turned for them.
“Nothing here for you!” a voice called from the window above her head.
She glanced back at her train, but none of the villagers would meet her eyes. Roswitte stepped back, then, tried to give herself a better vantage from which to see whom she addressed. “Just folk here, friend. I ‘spect what happened here’s much the same’s what befell us.”
A moment’s silence. Then the same voice growled, “Cannae be, woman. You’re still breathin’. Our folk: if they ain’t in here, they ain’t breathin’ none.”
Is that what befell those heaped about your feet? If the ladder didn’t drop, they weren’t getting in.
“Oh come on, Kurt. You can see the fire’s done,” another voice demanded.
“And what about the ones what set ‘em, huh?”
Fear had them. Rightly so. There wasn’t much she could do to combat that, though—and she hated trusting to hope.
Then one of her villagers stepped forward—a broad, jowly man who looked as though, in another life, he might have been a wagoner. “Kurt! You corpuscular shit! The Maiden’s Head’s meant for all us folk, not your personal kingdom. You open that door or so help me, I’ll go to my grave with your mother’s curses on my tongue.”
Another silence. “Shit,” came the belated note. It wasn’t long after that the door swung open and their interrogator—Kurt—emerged with a crudely fashioned bow leveled at them. “How in the hell,” he was already in the midst of saying, “did your crabby ass survive all that, Benhoff?”
“Her,” the villager said with a thumb hooked to Roswitte. “And the knowledge that nothing death’d offer’d be half so ugly as your rotten maw.”
Someone else threw the ladder down, and just shy of a half dozen heads came bobbing out, clearly eager to have the light of day again. They landed on the bones and stepped over the bodies, seemed to pay them little heed. Strong men, all of them—hearty souls that should have made for fine soldiers. Roswitte felt the twitch in her fingers, moved them ever so cautiously over the base of her bow.
“What hamlet is this?” one of Ivon’s soldiers called to the wagoner.
The broad fellow inclined his head back to the ruins. “Was Müllers Hohl. Good, honest folk. Cept them.” He turned back to the group before them, his eyes gone suddenly dark. “How is it you lot came to the tower, when none else did?”
If it was meant to put out the ringleader, he was anything but. Sidling forward with his bow on his shoulder, “Kurt” spat in the dirt. “Says the man with just nine kin, eh? You know how it is, Benhoff.”
“No, fellow, why don’t you tell us how it is,” Roswitte snapped.
All her life she had dealt with men like this—men that thought they were bigger than other men, that thought the strongest alone made for the fittest soul. They were usually the ones she had ended up holding by their ankles in the river.
The man regarded her with barely concealed disgust. “The hell you s’posed to be?”
“Easy, Kurt,” one of his fellows called. These others seemed less inclined to inch away from their tower.
Roswitte smiled. “Listen to your friend, Kurt.”
The ringleader did not, however, listen to his friend. “Some folk run faster’n others. Not my fault they didn’t get here in time.”
“In time?” Benhoff squeaked. “Half the town must be at the foot of that tower. Clawing. Banging. Screaming. And you’re telling me you couldn’t throw down the ladder for them?”
Kurt shrugged. “People light fires, I don’t ask questions. I hide till the fire passes.”
“And the rest?”
“Each time we open our eyes, we take our lives into our hands. No one else’s,” Kurt said. “You the Inquisition now, friend? If you’re coming, come on then. Talking’s thirsty work.”
His eyes were still on Benhoff when Roswitte nocked an arrow and took the lowlife through the heart. He rocked backward, eyes bulging to the point she thought they should burst, and in his last seconds of life under the brilliant sun, she made sure he heard her say, “So’s dying, outlaw.”
Some people couldn’t seem to grasp that what mattered was what a person did, not what they said or how they said it. Action and reaction—the world was simpler than some would imagine it.
The man hit the ground as his companions scattered for the ladder. Roswitte’s fellows, startled though they may have been, had bows on them readily enough that escape was a fool’s notion. “Please!” one of them begged, from his knees. “He pulled up the ladder! We begged him, begged him!” Though one had to ask: did they really? And even if they had, to whom was their greater duty: their kin, or themselves?
“We come on behalf of Count Witold, to purge this land of all that ails it,” Roswitte said, banking on the notion that they would more likely know their liege than her own. “And I have executed his justice here. The rest of you had best dig your fellows a bonfire, if you don’t wish to end up in the ground with this one.”
By then, Ensil and his sellswords were returning from the village, a stream of bemused faces watching the living debate over the dead. Roswitte ignored them, turned instead to the village man, Benhoff.
“There any other places folk might have holed up?”
He was stunned, and it took him a moment to shake his head. “Not…not here, no.”
Then she turned back to the murderers, willing her eyes to be coals. “How did you come here before all these others?”
The man on his knees sputtered and shook, pressed himself still deeper into the muck. A finger slowly extended from him, toward a distant morass of more ashes.
“We worked the sawmill, up by and by. We were there when the soldiers came, a whole mess of ‘em, running through the trees.”
“The torchbearers?”
“Nay, nay…those came after. Little lightning bugs, I thought first, then…no. Later. These ones didn’t keep much armor. Some gryphons, though. Sigils. A…ah…an owl, or such.”
Ivon. Where are you going?...and can we catch you?
“North, you say?”
“By and by,” the man squeaked. And then he simply ceased to exist in her world.
As Ensil approached, she flagged him down. “I’m going to leave a man here, with the villagers. Make sure these folk keep safe. I think I know where Ivon’s headed.”
The dust knight looked puzzled, but whether by the dead man, or her sudden epiphany, it could not be said. Matter-of-factly, he said, “Your duty, as I recall it, was waiting for him.”
That was quite enough lectures for one day.
“Duty,” she said, “is up to one’s own interpretation.”
* *
As far as wardens went, the man the rebels called Berric—“the Landless,” as he drummed out of a few less than sober soldiers—was not a bad sort, not even a particularly aggressive sort. At any rate, he was far kinder in his interrogations than Isaak ever should have been in his place. There was a place for words, he had found with time, but the threat of violence always needed to be there—a baseline by which men might weight their indecision.
For all Berric’s hard words and cruder jests, he was a man who knew the courts well enough to feign indifference, but not yet so engrained in its intricacies to truly believe it. He trusted in his assessments of those around him—he was shrewd, Isaak had to give him that—and let gut rule where inquiry might have proved the more cunning test.
Over the years, the thing he had found about people was this: the more one talked, the more they opened themselves up to fumbling lies, but the less one talked the less inclined others were to believe. The trick was to seem as though there was a lot to say, without really saying anything. Weave the lie, stick to that lie, mash it into a thousand different pronunciations of the same lie, and eventually it would become fact. For them. For the liar. And Isaak’s mind, well…it did not for
get. It was a useful thing.
Yet even for him, as for the most intricate of webweavers, there were always moments that could spell the end. Even the most predictable people sometimes fielded a question, made a motion, took some otherwise inconceivable action that no amount of preparation could debunk.
For this midlevel functionary, that moment was a query which broke the line of all the rest. Ivon, Verdan, even Witold and the Gorjes—these things were predictable entities. The rebel mainforcers wanted to know what information they could to better seep into the infected wounds of their foe. The Ulneberg had become a sort of anchor weighting them down, but they could not seem to snap its chain again.
There were a lot of questions about Ivon. His brother’s battlefield cunning, familiarity with the terrain and with the people, and his creative dedication to taunting seemed to be making a fool of the Bastard. In chains, from afar, it had been different—Isaak had seen men killing, others being killed, and the triumphant bandits riding back with whoops and cheers and more gear for their own. It had been simple. But nothing was ever simple. Now he saw the faces at the other end of the killing, and came—rather quickly—to understand that Ivon was precisely the reason they had set fire to the woods. They had hoped to draw him out.
Which was precisely the reason Isaak had always had a problem with honorable fools like his elder brother. Honor, however fine in principle, was a virtue only so long as one’s neighbors shared a conscience. More often, it just got people killed. It seemed that all his brother was doing was stirring up the hornets’ nest.
Which led to other questions, but before he could come to answers: “Was Rurik with them?”
How or why that was relevant was a source of immediate distress. His thoughts ran ahead of him, threatened to run away. By then Berric had taken a seat across from him, hands folded in his lap but eyes, very astutely, on his person. A moment’s hesitation—he turned it more to thought than indecision. Forced himself not to flinch.
Why the world seemed determined to bring him back to his own fateful decision, he chalked up simply to luck of the poorest order. He breathed. A few seconds passed. The tent they were in, he reckoned, was no more than 15 feet. If need be, he might have crossed the small space between them before the man could draw his blade—if Berric didn’t suspect him.
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