Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

  They avoided towns, in part because Rose feared the mercs they’d tousled with back in Highpool might come seeking retribution, but mostly because she was sick and tired of explaining to every person who asked that no, they weren’t heading west, and yes, she was well aware there was a Horde invading Grandual.

  Instead, as the sun set and violet clouds piled over the star-spangled wash of deepening blue, they found a remote steading and paid the farmer handsomely for use of his barn.

  Tam was leading one of the ponies into a stall when Freecloud took the reins from her hand. “I’ll finish this,” he told her. “Rose needs you outside.”

  “For what?”

  The druin’s ears bobbed in imitation of waggling eyebrows. “Go see.”

  Rose was waiting in the yard with her swords drawn. She passed Thistle, which was the smaller of the two, to Tam and then backed off a step. “Hit me,” she said.

  But Tam was too busy marvelling at the weapon in her hand. I’m holding Bloody Rose’s sword, the girl in her fairly shrieked. It felt lighter than it should have, and up close she could see the flowing druic script etched along the blade’s cutting edge. The scimitar’s hilt was slightly curved as well, bound in black leather worn raw by Rose’s grip.

  “Where did you find these?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Conthas. I stole them from my stepfather on my way to Castia.”

  Tam blinked. “You have a stepfather?”

  “Had. He fell out of a skyship.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry …”

  Rose’s armour clanked when she shrugged. “He was an asshole,” she said. “Now, hit me.”

  Tam raised her sword. “Hit you where?”

  A low chuckle. “Wherever you can.”

  “What if I hurt you?” Tam asked, genuinely concerned.

  “You won’t.”

  “I might get lucky.”

  “You won’t,” Rose repeated.

  Tam lunged, angling a backhanded chop at Rose’s left arm, and found her hand suddenly empty. Thistle arced through the sky and landed in the snow several yards away.

  “What was your first mistake?” Rose demanded to know.

  “I, uh, dropped my sword?”

  “That was your last mistake. Your first was telling me where you would strike.”

  Tam shook her hand, trying to rid the tingling numbness from her fingers. “But I—”

  “You did,” Rose said. “With your eyes. With your body. Hell, you may as well have sent me a letter. Dear Rose, I’ll be attacking from the left shortly. Please knock the sword out my stupid hand. Yours truly, Tam.”

  Tam might have laughed were she not so thoroughly embarrassed. “All right, so I’m terrible at fighting,” she muttered. “I bet you’re terrible at playing the lute.”

  The gauntlet on Rose’s left hand flared green. Thistle flew into her hand and she returned it to Tam with a grin. “Try again.”

  And so Tam tried again. And again. And again. After each failed attack (one of which left the bard sprawled on the ground with a mouthful of snow), Rose helpfully pointed out where she’d gone wrong.

  Whack. “You’re too slow.”

  Thump. “You’re off balance.”

  Crack. “You’re holding that sword backward.”

  Freecloud and Cura emerged from the barn and shared a wineskin between them while Tam’s humilation continued. To make matters worse, the farmer’s daughter trotted across the yard and stood watching as well. The girl, who looked to be about Tam’s age, was dragging a huge iron broadsword sheathed in rust. After a dozen more disastrous defeats, Rose declared the training session at an end.

  “You did well,” she said. “Better than I expected.”

  She must not have expected much, Tam grumbled to herself. She scanned the slush at her feet for any trace of her dignity, but it was nowhere in sight.

  “Bloody Rose!” called the farmer’s daughter. She had the lilting accent of folk from Bellows, east beyond the Silverwood. “Will you spar with me some? Just until dark?”

  To Tam’s surprise, Rose obliged. “Pay close attention,” she told the bard. “This girl might teach you a thing or two.”

  The farmer’s daughter was good. Or at least she looked good to Tam. She was certainly fast, and obviously strong, considering the size of that bastard sword she was using. After going several rounds with Rose, the muscles in her arms stood out like stone carvings on a temple wall. She was graceful, too. Rose even went so far as to praise her footwork, despite pointing out that she angled her left foot before every thrust.

  When the girl paused to catch her breath and twist her long hair into a knot, Tam found herself studying her sleek neck and smallish ears, the tips of which had gone red for the chill in the air.

  The girl caught Tam staring. “I like your hair,” she said.

  Tam offered a tight smile in reply, since her voice was off gallivanting with her dignity and nowhere to be found.

  When night fell in earnest, the girl—sweat-slicked, her breath gusting in rapid bursts—shook hands with Rose, shot Tam a grin, and jogged off home.

  “Use dirt,” said Rose, as she and Tam headed toward the barn.

  “Sorry?”

  “Tonight, at her window. A stone might break the glass—or, worse, wake up Dad. If there’s no glass, make sure she knows you’re there before climbing in, or she might take your head off with that pig-sticker of hers.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tam asked, feeling heat flood her cheeks. “Why would I throw dirt at her window?”

  “Because,” Rose said, wearing a smile Tam couldn’t quite interpret, “that girl might teach you a thing or two.”

  Tam went for a walk after dark. She headed toward the treeline first, despite Rose pointing out that the farmhouse was in the opposite direction. Cura offered her a curious, two-finger salute as she left the barn, which the bard realized afterward had been either a lewd gesture or a helpul pointer.

  She wandered in the forest for a bit, and nearly screamed in fright when a dark shape settled on a bough overhead. It’s only an owl, she realized. The bird’s round face swivelled to watch her, its eyes glinting green in the shadows.

  Tam stumbled upon a trapper’s lean-to shelter, barely discernible for the tangled thatch disguising it. Fearing it might be home to some wild animal, she hurried back toward the barren field. Her route, fortuitously, took her near to the farmhouse, where she couldn’t help but notice a lantern glowing on the sill of an open window.

  She almost yelped when someone took hold of her arm.

  “Sorry,” the girl whispered, sliding her hand into Tam’s own. Her grip was strong, and her skin was ice cold, as though she’d been waiting outside for a while. “It’s dark,” she whispered, pulling Tam toward the treeline. “Wouldn’t want you to trip and break your neck.”

  The moon had disappeared behind a cloud, so Tam could see nothing at all once they entered the forest. Her guide, at least, knew where she was going, and before long they came to the trapper’s shelter Tam had fled from earlier. The girl knelt by the entrance, unfastening the toggles before slipping inside.

  Tam stood for a moment outside the mound, listening to the crack and crackle of the winter forest and waiting for her nerves to settle. She hadn’t been intimate with many people—mostly because trying to pursue romance under her father’s regime was like trying to throw a party in prison. There’d been Saryn—her first—and then Roxa, who Tam suspected had been more interested in boys than girls, but had made an exception because Tam’s father was a famous mercenary. Occasionally she’d fooled around with the daughter of a cook in the Cornerstone kitchens, but she could never for the life of her remember the girl’s name.

  Something her uncle once told her sprang to mind. Boys are like raccoons, he’d said. They’re pesky, and not to be trusted around food. Also, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.

  When Tam had told him she fancied girls, Bran had offered a revised theory almost
immediately. Girls are like coyotes. They run in packs, they make noise when you’re trying to sleep, and if one comes near you it’s best to scare them off with fire.

  “What are you waiting for?” The girl’s voice was muffled by the skins stretched over the hut’s wooden frame.

  Tam banished Bran and his rubbish advice from her mind, then ducked through the flap. It was dark inside and smelled like pine needles. Something grazed her cheek, and then there were fingers in her hair, a mouth on her lips, wet and warm. The girl’s tongue slipped through her teeth, probing, and Tam felt a tingling in her belly as it grazed her own. A callused hand slipped between her legs and her thoughts blew away in an instant.

  Tam returned the favour, was rewarded with a throaty gasp, and soon after that the girl’s body spasmed as if a lightning bolt had struck her bathwater. Panting, the girl pulled her tunic off, and Tam, perhaps a touch overeager, writhed from her coat like a snake desperate to molt a season early. She finally got it off, along with her tunic. She’d expected to freeze, but she burned instead.

  They spent something like an hour within the humid confines of the shelter. By the time they emerged and walked hand in hand to the edge of the wood, Tam had, in fact, learned a thing or two.

  The girl kissed her once more before sprinting toward the house. Tam took her time rejoining the others, in part because her legs were quivering so badly she could barely walk, but also because it gave her time to turn the last hour over in her mind, as though examining a bauble from some foreign land, or a pure white shell plucked from the grey-stone strand of her days.

  She was almost to the barn when Brune awoke, screaming like a man gone mad.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Bringol’s Bridge

  The farmer arrived just after dawn with a basket of eggs, a wheel of soft cheese, and a ration of fragrant, freshly ground coffee beans. “All the way from Bastien,” he announced proudly. “I brought the harvest in a week early thanks to this stuff.”

  Freecloud thanked the man and set about making breakfast, while Rose smoked a pipe and watched the water boil. Cura teased Tam about her encounter with the farmer’s daughter (“Did you hold hands?” “Are you two getting married now?”), while Brune sulked alone in one of the empty stalls. The shaman’s hair obscured his face, but his bowed neck and slumped shoulders made his shame evident. He sniffed now and again, wiping his nose with the back of one huge hand.

  When breakfast was ready, Rose brought him a bowl of scrambled eggs and a tumbler of strong black coffee. Tam had expected Fable’s frontwoman to berate him for what had happened back in Highpool, but instead she laid a hand on the shaman’s ruddy cheek and used her thumb to swipe a falling tear. They spoke at length; Brune’s voice an anxious grumble, Rose’s the soft murmur of a groom trying to soothe a skittish horse.

  “What?” the shaman blurted suddenly. “Are you serious? What about the contract?”

  “The contract can wait,” Rose assured him. “But if the Widow is telling the truth, and we’re to stand any chance of surviving what’s to come, we need you to figure this out.”

  Brune’s heavy brow knitted. He fixed Rose with as serious a look as Tam had ever seen him wear. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Of course.” Rose put the steaming mug in his hand. “Now go thank Tam for saving your life. I was this close”—she held two fingers an inch apart—“to killing you the other night.”

  Around noon that day they spotted a hamlet nestled between two hills. Rose called a halt and sent Brune into town on an errand. Shortly after he left, one of Rose’s saddlebags began yelling at her.

  She rushed to her mare’s side, rummaged through her satchel, and withdrew the small glass orb Tam had seen her holding back in Woodford.

  It had been dark and dormant before, but now it contained the face of a man whose lean, angular features were framed by a tumble of blond hair gone grey at the temples. He was wearing an impish smile, and although she’d never met him before, Tam knew Golden Gabe the moment she saw him.

  “Rosie! Hi! It’s me, Dad.”

  Rose held the orb at arm’s length, as if expecting it to crack open and hatch a hell-spawned demon. “Dad, you know I can see you, right? You don’t need to tell me it’s you. And you don’t need to shout, either. I can hear you just fine.”

  “Where are you?” Gabe shouted. “Are you safe? Did you hear about the Horde?”

  “We’ve been through this, Dad. I’m not going to fight the Horde. I promise.”

  Her father looked relieved. “Good,” he said. “But …”

  “But …?” urged Freecloud, his ears stiffening.

  “It broke through Coldfire Pass. I don’t know how,” he said, before either Rose or Freecloud could ask. “It’s possible not enough mercs made it in time. The winter’s been especially harsh, and roads through the mountains … Well, the snow slows our people down, but not the Horde, apparently. Not with a giant to clear a path.”

  Tam briefly imagined Brontide kicking through mountainous drifts like a toddler after the season’s first snowfall.

  “So what now?” Rose asked. “Which way are they headed?”

  Gabe was shaking his head. “No one knows. They might—”

  “Mommy?”

  Rose flinched. She glanced at Freecloud, who came to stand next to her. Where before she had held the orb at arm’s length, Rose now cradled it like a bird she’d found fallen from a nest.

  “Mommy, are you there?”

  Another face loomed in the glass, too close. Tam saw a green eye blinking, then a mouthful of teeth, then nothing as a palm smothered the image within.

  “Here,” came Gabriel’s voice, muffled. “Hold it like this.”

  The scene in the orb jostled a while longer, but then a little girl’s face looked out. She was fine-featured, with her father’s narrow nose and sun-struck emerald eyes. Her hair was long and fine, a colour between silver and green. The sylf’s smile, however, was all Rose. “Hi, Mommy! Where are you?”

  “Hi, Wren. Daddy and I are way up north, in Kaskar. Where are you?”

  “I’m right here!” the girl squealed, once again pressing her face to the glass. “Can’t you see me?”

  “We can see you,” said Freecloud, leaning in beside Rose. “You look beautiful, honey.”

  An impish giggle. “Grandpa says I’m the prettiest girl inside of the Harpwild.”

  “Prettiest girl this side of the Heartwyld, love,” Gabe corrected. “And what did we say about calling me Grandpa?”

  “You said not to because it makes you seem, um, old.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you are old!”

  They heard Gabriel scoff. “Go talk to your mother!”

  “We’re visiting Aunt Ginny and Uncle Clay,” Wren announced. “They have all the horses here! Your horse, and Daddy’s horse, and Grandpa’s horse. And Tally took me for a ride, um, yesterday.” The sylf held up three fingers. “She’s fourteen already!”

  “I see Grandpa’s been teaching you to count.” Freecloud laughed.

  “I could teach her swordplay instead,” Gabe mused from beyond the sphere’s vision. “Though she’s not quite strong enough to lift Vellichor yet.”

  Vellichor! Tam got chills just hearing that name. The Archon’s fabled weapon! The sword he’d used to cut through—

  Cura nudged her in the ribs. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. “Give these two some privacy, huh?”

  Despite wanting to stay and sate her curiosity about Rose and Freecloud’s relationship with their daughter, Tam grudgingly followed.

  Up ahead was a shallow stream spanned by an ancient stone bridge. Instead of crossing it, Cura picked her way down the steep bank. Tam followed, slipped, and went tumbling through snowy brush toward a hard landing on the ice below. The summoner skidded down to her, laughing, and nearly slipped herself when her boots hit the glazed surface of the stream. Tam caught her before she fell, and the two of them stood clasping one another until they
were sure of their balance.

  In the shadows beneath the stone arch they found the frozen corpse of a bringol, which Cura explained was a kind of troll. He was enormous—or would’ve been, were he not hunched against the stonework with his legs splayed and his chin on his chest. His copper-brown scales were sheathed in ice. Rime sprouted from the deep shelf of his brow, and an icicle as long as Freecloud’s sword clung to the tip of his nose.

  There were a few skeletons trapped in the ice around him: a pair of cows, dozens of birds, and an assortment of small animals. In the bringol’s lap was a calcified copper bell cut with crescent-moon-shaped holes.

  “See this?” Cura picked it up, being careful to keep it very still as she did so. “When a bringol rings its bell, whatever hears it is dazed by the sound and drawn to its source. We’re lucky this one’s dead.” She reached inside and wrenched the clapper loose, then tossed both it and the now-harmless bell to the ground.

  They poked around for a bit. Cura found some chests buried in the snow, while Tam studied a series of crude drawings the monster had scratched on the underside of the bridge, many of which depicted the bringol mating with what she assumed were cows.

  “Who exactly is the Widow of Ruangoth?” Tam asked eventually. She’d heard the name from Linden Gale back in Highpool, then again in the barn this morning. “I mean, besides being the one holding our contract up north.”

  Cura closed the lid on a trunk of mouldy clothes. “I don’t know much about her either. She was married to the Marchlord—his second wife, apparently—and when he died she got it all: his castle, his money, his land. Lucky girl, if you ask me.”

  The bard managed a weak smile. “I guess.”

  “You guess? She got a castle, Tam. A castle. I’d say that’s worth losing a husband, wouldn’t you?”

  Tam was gazing sightlessly at the broken bell. The deep-buried memory of her father’s racking sobs echoed in her mind. “No,” she said.

  For a few seconds Cura’s voice was nothing but a droning hum, like the sound of someone speaking through a closed door.