by Kaleb Schad
But what were they doing here? What was happening?
Daveon chewed at his cheek as he crossed the Stop’s courtyard.
When he saw the baron crossing the bridge from the keep into town, Daveon knew someone would die tonight.
43
“Fear, faithlessness, cowardice, these are the things we fight against first,” Baron Blackhand called out to the crowd.
From his cell, Anaz could see everything, the baron on the gallows, the man, his wife and their son, kneeling in a line, their hands tied behind them.
No. Not just a man, his wife and his son. Edgar and his family. I put them here.
A black chasm ached inside his heart watching them. It was his fault. He’d told them to run and they’d listened and now they were going to be hung.
It’s my fault.
He tried to draw in the hsing-li. He couldn’t let this happen. He had to find a way out. The hsing-li came, but slowly and Anaz felt as if he were pulling it into him through thick scrub brush, thorns snagging at him and it, making it incredibly difficult. What was this disease in him making everything so difficult? Where had it come from?
The knight, Sir Nattic, and two of his soldiers strung ropes through hooks in the trestle above them. On the ground, beneath the gallows, stood a crowd of several dozen. Anaz could see Daveon Therentell and the innkeeper and the half-orc and Sunell and other faces he recognized, but whose names he’d never learned. The half-orc was grinning and leaning against a young maple tree.
“In war,” the baron shouted, “you are only as strong as the man next to you. In war, we needs must know that nobody, nobody, will abandon you for their own hides.”
Nattic jerked Edgar to his feet and the woman wailed. The boy shook with terror. Nattic forced the man to stand on a tall wooden block. Anaz now saw two others like it under the ropes.
It was a hot night and the dampness from the day had only seemed to swell, making the walls of the cell slick and muddy. Still he climbed it, grasped the bars of the cage top. Anaz’s stained and wore out tunic stuck to his shoulders from the humidity and his fevered sweat.
Someone in the crowd was crying.
“I do not blame these faithless shits for running,” the baron said. “Facing the Wretched is a tall task.”
Now it was the woman’s turn. Her dress clung to her legs and Anaz could see she had loss control of her bladder. “Please, Sir Nattic,” she said. “Please, my Lord Baron. Please.”
“It is a sour thing, to punish the weak like this.” The baron was looking at her, staring straight into her eyes as he spoke.
Anaz tested the grate. It gave when he shoved on it. If he used the hsing-li to build out a platform under his feet here, he could lift the grate and be out. But then what? How could he free them while still honoring his oath?
What choice did he have? He’d put them there.
“I do this,” the baron said, turning back to the people, “not because they disobeyed my command, though that is cause enough.”
They slipped the noose around the woman’s neck and snugged it tight. Even from here, Anaz could see the pinch of the rope in her soft flesh.
She wailed horrid lowing sounds as her son was lifted onto the wooden block. A child. Truly. Blond hair cut straight across his forehead, a spray of freckles across his cheeks and nose. Eyes showing white all around, his mouth mumbling.
“I do this for you, my children.”
Anaz’s arms were beginning to throb, though nothing compared to the savaging his head was taking. He coughed and let loose with a hand to wipe at his mouth and the back of his hand came away black. He had to decide and soon. But the oath…
“Because,” the baron boomed, his voice full and furious, “when you are only as strong as the man next to you, we cannot abide weakness. We survive together. Or we die as individuals.”
The baron moved behind the man’s block and Anaz knew now was the time. He reached into the prison cell’s earthen wall with the hsing-li and nudged it into a small platform under his feet. Grey gauze wrapped around his vision. He started to cough. He shoved at the grate and it lifted, then crashed back into place.
The baron kicked the man’s block out from under him and he fell and the rope snapped tight. The man thrashed. A woman in the crowd screamed.
Anaz tried again, bunching his legs tight, sucking the hsing-li into every fiber of his muscles, and lunged. Too much. Too much hsing-li and the heat and the dampness and the fever. The grate lifted again, less even than the first time, then fell back into place with a brittle clattering sound. Anaz pitched forward off of his crafted ledge.
The baron kicked out the woman’s block, then the boy’s. Sobbing in the crowd now.
Anaz landed in the muck and felt a branch or a bone or maybe his soul stab into his side.
He rolled onto his back and lay there gasping. He could still see them. Not all of them. The boy. His face shifted deep shades of purple in the darkness. His mouth opened and closed, like the Yellow Tip fish Anaz pulled from the stream behind his house and the boy’s eyes bulged and lolled and he didn’t cry, he didn’t shout or beg, hadn’t begged the whole time and Anaz found his lips moving with the boy’s, begging for him. Please. Please.
When the child stopped, when the boy’s eyes stopped seeing and he only drifted as a memory of a person dangling from the end of the rope, Anaz knew. Somewhere, somehow, he had not understood something and it had led to this. But this he understood. He understood this gutted feeling, laying in the muck wishing he were swinging dead instead of this family whose only crime had been love for each other.
And listening to him.
He’d tried to get involved. He’d tried to help. But the greatest sin against the hsing-li and his oath was simply that he’d tried. Effort. Attachment. Getting involved could only ever lead to misery and death. Not just his, but others’. How could he have forgotten that? This was what happened every time he forgot that.
He lay there and wept and tried to convince himself that not doing a thing wasn’t worse than doing a thing.
Daveon stood over his sleeping children, listening to their soft whispering breath. Roasted onion lingered on the air from supper and a grey moonlight hazed into the room.
They had given Miria her own mattress—a little too old to be sleeping with boys—but she had crawled into their bed anyway and the three of them, Miria, Nikolai and Elnis were squeezed against each other despite the heat.
On the other side of the curtain slept his wife. Standing there, he remembered that it wasn’t true she hadn’t spoken to him all day. She had said one thing, about the time while he was gone. “Nikolai has stopped reciting his bedtime prayer,” she’d said. That first night after Daveon had left, she’d asked him if he wanted to say it and he’d shaken his head no and rolled onto his side. That was it.
Even in the dark, Daveon could see Nikolai’s freckled cheeks. Freckled. Like William Fentin’s.
Daveon closed his eyes, but it didn’t matter. William’s hanging body was still there.
He felt like everything was closing in around them. The bone wall days away. The baron executing people for fleeing. Evan Malic wielding his debt like a bludgeon. His family frightened from being abandoned by him…his eight summer old son trying to fill his father’s void. Daveon felt like he was failing at every task Airim had ever given him. No more. He would never let his family be put at risk the way the Fentins had.
Please, Airim, let the stable master come tomorrow.
He opened his eyes and that’s when he noticed Nikolai’s hand dangling off of the mattress. He had something tucked under it. He stepped quietly around the side and when he saw what it was he made an ugly choking sound as he tried to keep from sobbing.
Nikolai’s hand rested on the handle of a knife.
Isabell wouldn’t weep. She had watched the entire trial and execution—no, murder—from her bedroom in the keep’s tower and she hadn’t wept. Tears and prayers, these were not things for saving l
ives.
“I’m scared,” Lelana said. Her handmaiden had come in some time ago and stood behind her and looked at the three dangling bodies with her and they hadn’t said anything until now.
“We all are,” Isabell said, though right now, fear was a distant second to rage. She hadn’t unclenched her fists for over half a sand’s cycle and she cheered on the burn in her forearms. Her wounds from fighting the Wretched had finally begun healing with the physik Essen’s help, but right now, she used the physical pain to bury her emotions.
Her father had to be stopped.
He had only come to her once since she’d returned. He’d said, “When you’re ready to swear yourself to this family and Humay’s future, come to me. Until then, you stay here.” Since then the guards stationed at her door had only allowed Lelana and Essen to see her.
“I mean,” Lelana said. Isabell could hear the tears in her voice. “I’m scared there’s going to be others. In the kitchens tonight. At least three said they were going to try and map the guards’ paths to know when it might be safe to try.”
Isabell nodded. There would be others. Unless someone did something. Unless I do something.
She could hear the crickets in the brush beneath the tower and something jumped in the river. It was a hot night. It wasn’t hot enough.
Lelana started crying, a whispered moan and sniffing as she tried to control it. Isabell turned to her.
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
“You knew them?”
Lelana shook her head. “My family, my lady. Oh, great Airim. They’re going to leave Fisher Pass tomorrow night. They asked me to help, to tell them when and where your lord father’s men will be, but…”
Isabell knew the courage it took for Lelana to even whisper this to her. Simply saying the words would be enough for her parents to be hung.
She wouldn’t be able to find the Airim’s Lances anymore. She was starting to accept that. But it didn’t mean she couldn’t still do something. Lelana was right. People would try to leave. Even after tonight. The fear of the Wretched was greater than the fear of her father. And rightly so. So the question wasn’t how to keep them from leaving, it was how to help them leave without getting caught. She could think of only one way. She’d need help…his help. And that would require both of them getting out of their cages and free to move again.
She had to go to her father. She had to beg for Anaz’s freedom.
Isabell took Lelana’s hand and waited until the woman looked at her.
“Tomorrow night, they fly like an owl,” Isabell said. “My father will never again hang a deserter. I swear it.”
44
Isabell rapped on the door to her father’s study. The two soldiers who’d been guarding her chambers stood behind her. She’d heard about the young soldier her father had killed when she’d left, the one who’d been guarding her door that night. These two hadn’t allowed more than a step’s distance between them and her the entire climb here.
“Come,” her father’s voice growled.
She studied her father as she crossed the room. His long mustache drove down the sides of his mouth, his square jowls jutting sideways and she thought that maybe she had never actually seen him, that she could not imagine having ever climbed on his lap and kissed those cheeks as a girl. There was a violence in this man she’d never known before. Had her mother ever seen it? Had she ignored it?
“Isabell?” His voice held an edge of hope.
“From my room, I can see new walls going up,” she said. She hadn’t been able to decide how to start. Too blunt and he’d parry and shut down. Too coy and he’d get angry. Maybe show interest in his preparations and he’d soften? “New militia being sworn in?”
“You said it yourself. The Wretched are coming.”
“And you ask these farmers to fight the undead?”
“We’re Blackhands, Isabell. We don’t ask.”
“What happens when the Airim’s Lances come to collect that rancher’s horses? They’ll know the king ordered the village evacuated. They’ll tell everyone you disobeyed him.”
“The king ordered what?”
“The village evacuated.”
“Huh.” Her father pushed back his chair and folded his hands behind his head. Stared levelly at her.
He glanced at the two guards behind her and nodded towards the door. They took the hint and let themselves out, closing the door behind them.
“That’s not what the king’s messenger said to me. What he told me was to secure the village. To hold out as long as we can.”
“The messenger will call your lie. And he’ll have Airim on his side.”
Her father smirked. “He’ll need Airim on his side if he’s to testify from beyond the grave.”
“You…” Isabell couldn’t bring herself to say the words. Her father truly was a murderer.
“Besides,” he said, “by then it will look as if the king is lying to save himself. It will be too late.”
“This is madness,” Isabell whispered.
“Am I mad? Yes. I’m furious. I’m furious that the same king’s family who stole our land from your grandfather is now going to steal the rest and give it to the Wretched. I’m furious that his utter incompetence will give all of Humay to the Wretched in the end. I’m mad that we have battled these creatures for generations and nobody has risen to lead Humay from this darkness. And I’m mad that when our country finally has a chance at being saved, at getting new leadership who can light this darkness, my own daughter works against it.”
“How does letting Fisher Pass fall to the Wretched change any of that?” She was trying to keep from screaming. Honest, she was.
“Have you learned nothing at court? This king holds onto power by a fingernail. His father was unliked, but he’d at least protected the right families and they protected him. Not this kid. Nobody likes him. Nobody trusts him. He came to power too soon, should have prayed a little harder for the Rot not to take his pa. Once Fisher Pass falls, once this king loses yet another village to the wall, the rest of the nobles won’t have any choice. All those innocent lives given to the Wretched. Their own people will begin to riot. The nobles’ll have to act and depose him. Olisal has assured me all the pieces are in place…except mine.”
The look he gave Isabell told her exactly which piece he meant.
“You’re asking hundreds of families to die.”
“I’m demanding they lay down their lives so that tens of thousands of families can live.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I don’t have a choice, Isabell. Humay doesn’t have a choice.”
“Choice? And what choice do the people of Fisher Pass have?”
“How they meet Airim. With dignity and courage. Or with cowardice.”
“I can’t…” She felt sick to her stomach.
Her father clenched his jaw and she could see him forcing himself to calm, slowing his breathing. He stretched his hands out over his desk and looked at his papers, then back at her. “Why are you here, Isabell?”
She took a deep breath and tried to swallow. Don’t throw up. Stay calm.
“I want you to free Anaz.”
Her father shook his head and leaned back over his desk, clearly disappointed.
“He’s innocent,” she said. She had to press through. “You know this. All he did—the only thing he did—was to save my life. Father, you should have seen him. He was nearly unstoppable against those creatures.”
“Seems to have been stopped pretty surely.”
“One man against six, seven, Wretched? How many have you faced?” Shit! She really wished at that moment that words had physical form and she could have killed those last ones before they reached her father.
Somehow his eyes became even colder than before. “He’s fine where he is.”
She crossed behind his desk and knelt and took his hands in hers. “Please. I’m begging for his life, Father. I’ll do anything.”
“Anything?
”
Isabell swallowed again. Nodded.
“Swear to me you’ll marry Olisal. Help me keep the people of Fisher Pass in place long enough for the wall to reach them. Then, when the time is right help me overthrow the king.”
She’d known that would be the bargain, had spent the night weighing it. What was one life worth over the lives of this village? If she had to give herself to the Earl and in exchange could free Anaz and thus free the people of Fisher Pass, wasn’t that worth it?
“Anaz goes free and so do I.”
“Not going to happen.”
“People are going to keep running. They’re too afraid of the Wretched. You’ll spend every day hanging deserters and still they’ll try.”
“I’ve tripled the size of the militia. Soon there’ll be more guards than there are free folk.”
“And what happens if someone does get out? Tells what’s going on? Someone might show up—someone with more authority than you—and oversee the evacuation of the village themselves. You know what would happen then. Humay’s laws are clear. You and me and everyone in our household would be exiled at best, executed for treason most likely.”
“That’s why we can’t let that happen.”
“I can’t be penned in my room if you want me to help keep the people of Fisher Pass in place. They need to see me. I need to be able to talk to the influencers, that innkeeper and the butcher, Henley, and maybe the horse breeders, the Therentells. If they’re convinced to stay, others will too.”
Her father stared at her. She didn’t let go of his hands, held herself steady.
“Olisal won’t take used goods, Isabell.”
“I won’t…gods, Father. What do you think I am? Running around rolling in the straw with anyone who’ll have me?”