The Things We Bury

by Kaleb Schad

  “Move, Therentell,” Two Fingers said.

  What if Malic is right? Daveon looked around the room and could see the doubt painted on faces.

  “Maybe he will order the evacuation. Maybe, first, he’s sending scouts out to the wall himself,” Daveon said. “Think of that?”

  Lady Isabell and Anaz looked at each other.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Malic said. “I got a nose for horse shit and this all stinks worse’n you do coming from your ranch. Seems to me people might be looking for an excuse to run from some responsibilities.” He wagged a finger at Daveon. “Seems to me some folks showing their true colors once the pressure sets. Starting to see whose legends maybe tower their truth. Who’s thinking of running.”

  “Move your ass, Therentell,” Two Fingers said.

  Daveon looked at the people sitting at the trestle tables. People he’d grown up with. Victor Nillimon who, as a boy, had punched him once for kissing a girl he liked. Connor and his wife Zella. Lost all four of their children to the Rot and still found a way to not just help with their own furlongs, but Old Man Pillin’s as well. Could even smile doing it. Good people. People who would die if Malic was wrong and the wall was coming. People who were watching him, watching to see what a Therentell will do.

  “My family was here when the mill went up on the Blood Song River. We don’t leave it lightly,” Daveon said.

  “You don’t leave it at all,” Malic said. “Not if you don’t want to be named a coward and a thief.”

  “Coward and a thief,” rumbled Two Fingers.

  Daveon could feel his face flare.

  “After all, who would protect that pretty wife of yours?” Malic said.

  That was twice. In one day. Evan Malic would never again speak his wife’s name or Daveon swore he’d make his crippled hand feel like a hangnail. Alysha had had the courage to stand up to Malic at Market. Was Daveon, now, really going to bite his tongue and let the snake speak to him like that in front of everyone? No more. Malic was wrong. He was done running. From everyone.

  “Last chance, Therentell. Move or I move you,” Two Fingers said.

  Daveon locked eyes with the half-orc and stepped forward. Towards him.

  Two Fingers rolled his shoulders. “‘Bout time. Always did want to test those fucking war stories of yours. See if you’re as good as you say you are.”

  Daveon felt like his legs had turned to worms. He knew exactly what his war stories were worth. Stack them in front of this half-orc who’d supposedly cut off his own fingers and Daveon knew they wouldn’t reach the bastard’s toenails. Could he back down now? Could he let everyone he’d ever known watch as he revealed just what he truly was? Would his father have backed down?

  Would Rayen have?

  No. Then again, they probably wouldn’t be pissing themselves either.

  “This is going to be a one-sided pounding and I’m swinging the hammer!” Two Fingers screamed.

  The shove wasn’t fast. Daveon saw it coming, but couldn’t stop it. He came off the floor, smashed into Edgar Fentin. Spun sideways. The edge of the table reached through his stomach to kiss his spine. Someone screamed. A woman’s hair in his face, then the woman’s bowl.

  He’d landed in Mary Fentin’s stew. He gasped, but took in a mouthful of lamb and soggy potatoes. Coughed a sickly slop out across the table. Shouting as dishes crashed to the floor, ale splashing across neighbors.

  He lifted his head and tried finding his breath. He could feel grease smeared across his entire face, sliced carrots sticking to his cheek, a chunk of lamb in his hair. Laughter and blood roared in his ears. Connor cupped a hand, catching ale snorting out through his nose from laughing so hard. Mary Fentin gave him a look of pure horror and disgust while patting at her chest with a napkin.

  When he managed to find his feet again and faced Two Fingers, his guts hollowed out at the half-orc’s eager grin. There were no shortage of things Daveon had heard compared to a fickle mistress—power, love—but at that moment his courage was as faithful as an unpaid whore.

  The Lady Isabell covered her mouth.

  Anaz stepped towards him. Daveon glanced at him, at his body of scars, that testimony of war, of fights fought and won. He bet Anaz had never been thrown into someone’s dinner. He bet Anaz had never been humiliated like this.

  He stumbled to the door, the laughter following him into the night. He had to get away. It was that or puke in front of everyone.

  Out into the street, through the market square. The humiliation blinded him, everyone’s faces swirling, laughing, and dancing. In fact, so blinded was he, that he walked right past the Baron Blackhand and six of his soldiers who, at that very moment, were on their way to the Sunflower Stop.

  15

  Anaz stared at the table, at the wasted food and dripping drink, and all he could see was his new friend—his only friend—spread across it. A friend who’d tried to protect him. It had never happened before. Not like that. Reyn had protected him, but that was more from himself than anything. This was the first time someone had ever put themselves in harm’s way for him. And the best Anaz could do was let him be humiliated like that. He could have done something. Stopped this whole thing. But he hadn’t. He’d done nothing.

  Wasn’t that right? Wasn’t that what the hsing-li had shown him was right? Let things unfold as they may?

  The half-orc hadn’t stopped laughing. He dragged his sleeve across his nose and said, “I don’t know what flew better, Malic, those ducks you were serving tonight or Therentell.” This raised a couple chuckles from people, but there were more who just looked beaten. Exhausted from fear and tension.

  Isabell was right. He needed to get out of this village. Her senits were worth the risk of being alone with her for a couple of days. After all, he wasn’t some teenage boy anymore. He was a grown man. He could control his urges. But what about your heart?

  “My lady, after second thought—” Anaz started to say when the door banged open.

  Two men in chainmail with gold and scarlet tunics emblazoned with great-horned deer across their chests charged into the Inn. One carried a meaty battle axe and smashed the pommel against the floor several times for silence even though nobody was talking.

  “Shit,” Malic hissed.

  Isabell shot a look at Anaz, at his shirtless body. She smashed her wig on top of her head and yanked her hood up. She took a half step behind the innkeeper.

  “The lord Baron Blackhand summons ye to the square,” the soldier with the battleaxe shouted, scanning the room. “Make haste, he—”

  His eyes landed on Isabell.

  “My lady?” he said. “What…” His eyes ever so gently swung over to Anaz. He looked him up and down, the naked body, the scars, the half-orc behind him.

  Without saying a word, the other soldier rushed forward to seize him.

  “Anaz,” Isabell shouted, “Run!”

  Anaz only made it a step before the half-orc’s arm’s clamped around him like chains. He started to struggle, then stopped. He couldn’t do it. Not without hurting them.

  And that was something he’d sworn he’d never do again.

  “Truly, Airim has favored us!” The baron stood on a pavilion that a family of jugglers had erected for Market Days. Under him were what Anaz assumed was half the village, most holding lanterns or torches, spattering hot light across everything. Despite the hour, many wore traveling clothes, had the sheen of sweat from packing and readying to flee yet this evening.

  The guards, one to each arm, towed him through the crowd, cussing at people to move aside. Behind him, Isabell followed, along with the half-orc and innkeeper, though the innkeeper kept slipping further and further away, staying near the edge of the crowd, picking the same lanes Anaz would have picked for a fast escape, noting where the guards were softest. It was clear to Anaz the innkeeper hadn’t always been an innkeeper.

  “Tonight a second messenger arrived,” the baron continued. His smile couldn’t have stretched fur
ther without dislodging his jaw. “The wall has shifted. It no longer threatens Fisher Pass!”

  Not since the Pit had Anaz heard cheers like this. Cloth hats flew into the evening sky. A woman dropped to her knees praying. All around Anaz, men clapped each other on the back and laughed.

  The innkeeper stopped his worming towards the edge, looked to Two Fingers with a crooked grin.

  From under her hood, Isabell locked eyes with Anaz. She wasn’t smiling.

  “There was no chance we’d ever let those pissy little Wretched push us from our homes,” the baron was calling over the laughter, “but I’ll be glad to not have to cross blades with them all the same,” Baron Blackhand said. “Is the innkeeper out here yet?”

  The baron searched the crowd, shielding his eyes against the torch light. “Innkeeper! Tonight everyone drinks for—”

  He stopped. The guards and Anaz broke through the front row, stood at his feet. Isabell behind them. Anaz couldn’t help but notice how her pants leggings fluttered from her trembling.

  “Lord!” shouted the guard. “Your daughter—”

  “Isa?” The baron cut off the guard. A strand of brown hair had broken loose and hung out from under the hastily donned wig, her hood no use with the lanterns next to her face.

  She pushed back the hood and took off the wig.

  The baron looked at Anaz, then back to his daughter and his face turned solid, his eyes unblinking, cold. “I thought you were in your chambers.”

  “I needed some air,” Isabell said.

  “Your chamber has a window.”

  “And walls and a door that locks. I’d looked to be a bit freer. It came down to throwing myself out the window or coming here.”

  “Free.” The baron’s eyes scraped across Anaz’s naked torso. “You seem to have been free with more than the air.”

  The woman who’d dropped to her knees watched everything, eyes rolling wildly between Anaz, the baron and his daughter.

  “They were in the Stop,” the guard said. “The innkeeper and his man were near them.”

  “My lord, please,” Malic said closing in on them from the edge of the crowd. “I had no idea. The wig, my lord, you must believe me. If I had known I would have sent for you—”

  “What have you been doing?” the baron interrupted the innkeeper.

  Isabell wouldn’t answer. She looked at Anaz, that rattling dread moving to her eyes, pleading for him to protect her. And do what? Confront her father on the lie he’d just told? To fight her father’s soldiers and steal her away like some child’s story? What did she hope he could possibly do for her?

  “This man here was talking to her,” Malic said. “All night. He kept talking and trying to buy her drinks and, mind you, I had no idea who the beautiful young lady was, but it didn’t seem proper, did it, Two Fingers? It didn’t seem proper, no. And I asked the man to leave, but he wouldn’t. And so I asked my guard here, Two Fingers, to help him leave. And that’s just what he was doing. He was just so doing it, my lord, when your soldiers came in.”

  Anaz wasn’t really listening to the innkeeper except enough to know the man was lying. Instead, he was thinking about the lady Isabell, out on those roads in the mountains. Alone. The screams of the elven couple as they were attacked. He was thinking about Daveon the horse breeder and his wife and his two sons. About Sunell, the first friendly face he’d seen in town. About the blacksmith with the limp. He wouldn’t be able to run. Wouldn’t survive without someone’s help. All of them would die.

  No, he couldn’t try to save them.

  But he could at least kick the hornet’s nest. See what came out. See if anyone else picked up the fight from there.

  “Is it common here,” Anaz said, his voice soft, almost a whisper, “to lie so much in this village? Already in five minutes I have heard two.”

  The torches’ bubonic light sawed across the guards’ metal armor, glinting from sword pommels, barbed gauntlets. A third and fourth soldier stepped closer to Anaz, the crowd so silent that Anaz could hear the creak of their leather gloves as they stretched their fingers.

  The baron walked to the edge of the pavilion. He descended the stairs, one slow step at a time, never looking away from Anaz.

  “Please, Father,” Isabell whimpered. “We were only speaking. I swear!”

  Villagers poured away from the baron as he walked towards Anaz, as if splitting a field of wheat. He stopped in front of Anaz. This close, Anaz realized how big the man was. Not Hakkana large. Not fat. He was broad, easily able to carry Anaz on either shoulder.

  “You say this innkeeper lies?” the baron asked.

  “His was the second,” Anaz said. He opened himself to the hsing-li, it’s calming presence pouring into him like water. Pray douse these flames, he thought. What was he doing?

  “And the first?” The baron glanced past Anaz to Isabell.

  He didn’t allow his eyes to drift for even a moment from the baron’s. The guards holding him were already tiring, their grips loosening that little bit, enough that Anaz would be able to slip the man to his left, then strike the man to his right. He could ask the hsing-li to suck the fire out of the torches and lanterns, spread it like a wall between him and the baron and disappear before the smoke cleared. But it would burn them. Anaz’s stomach clenched at the thought. No harm to mortals. Never again. He’d sworn.

  “The first lie, son,” the baron whispered. His breath bitter and dense.

  “The second messenger,” Anaz said. “He came tonight?”

  “Did I not say so?”

  “By horse?”

  “Never seen a courier keep his job by foot.”

  “Odd that none of us who have been in and out of the inn or through town saw him or heard anything. That seems like something we would notice. A traveler like that. With that kind of a message, I mean.”

  “When did you arrive here, son?” His tone and his smile said peace, but Anaz had seen Suckle Claws in the desert look less threatening.

  “Last night.”

  “You saw the young fellow stretching at the gallows?”

  “I saw.”

  “I ask because I want you to be certain of your next answer before you give it. I hold to the old laws. A man convicted of lying may find himself without a tongue.”

  His eyes never blinked, the pupils inflamed black orbs in their sockets.

  “Are you accusing me of lying?” the baron asked.

  “Father! He didn’t say anything!”

  The baron snapped his fingers at a guard, then pointed at Isabell. The guard shoved his way to her and gripped her arms. Even from here, Anaz could feel the terror wash off of her. She didn’t have the strength, he realized. She couldn’t stand up to her father, couldn’t accuse him in front of all of these people.

  And if she can’t do it, how can she expect me to?

  Anaz looked at the ground and muttered, “I say only that I didn’t see a horse.”

  The baron patted Anaz’s cheek. “Probably too busy trying to worm your way between my daughter’s legs, eh?” His smile was wide enough for Anaz to see the sharp canines. “My hands are a bit sore. I had to correct a servant the other night after he harmed my daughter, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t correct you myself.”

  “Please, Father. Please,” Isabell sobbed.

  He closed his eyes and wrapped the hsing-li around himself. Anaz knew what was coming. He’d have to let it happen. What choice did he have without hurting them by fighting back? But afterwards, he was getting out of this town. He’d had enough of Fisher Pass for a lifetime. Not that that lifetime would be very long without some coins to get through winter.

  Maybe he could help her and himself at the same time, he decided. After all, that wasn’t exactly getting involved, right? And one thing was certain. If he could put even a small stone into the baron’s boot, he’d be happy.

  He looked at Isabell. “My lady,” he said, “whatever happens here, if the offer’s still on the table, you have a deal.” />
  “Then we have a deal,” she said and nodded to him.

  They didn’t waste any time. The first blow set his left ear ringing. White behind his eyelids.

  “Ask anyone here and they’ll tell you I am a strict, but fair man,” the baron shouted.

  Another punch, this one to his front teeth. Salt on his tongue. Spit. Bloody drool dribbling down his chin.

  “Do I have high standards for my people? How could I not? We are Blackhands.”

  The punch to his stomach forced his breath from him in a spray of spit and blood.

  “But let no man say that I shirk my own responsibility to them, that I hold them to a standard I cannot meet myself.”

  Someone kicked out Anaz’s knees. He fell into the baron who shoved him backwards. He landed on the ground with someone’s foot crushing his face into a stone.

  “We are of a body! If I could, I would have every man, woman and child take the mark of the stag as reminder that what happens to one happens to all. That when one of us cries for help, we all come running.”

  In some ways, Anaz was grateful when they switched to kicking his body. Give the incomprehensible agony ripping apart his face a second to calm. Even through the hsing-li the pain seared.

  “A stranger like you, I expect your fear to put cowardly accusations in your mouth. But, how could I lie to my people? It would be like lying to myself. And that is something I never do.”

  A new kick to his face set the world cartwheeling.

  “Now, to show my generosity, I want you to know that this will be the extent of your punishment. We must correct, but then forgive and forget. Is that not what we are taught by Airim’s mectors?”

  The baron knelt and lifted Anaz’s face by the chin. “You know what? On second thought, maybe I do have one in me after all.”