by Rachel Dunne
The Northman loomed over him. Big and blond and braided, like looking into a mirror. Wrapped in brown furs, sword at his hip. His face twisted, in anger and in disgust. “You shame us all,” he spat in the Northern tongue.
“What is this?” Modatho asked in his reedy voice.
“Peace,” Scal said softly to the Northman. He did not recognize the man, did not know what offense he could have given. “I have no quarrel with you.”
“You mix with heathens. You sully your blood.” His glare found its way to Scal’s cheek where his beard was pale and thin around the old cross-scar. His eyes went wide, his teeth baring. “You. You killed Iveran Snowwalker?” His hand went to his hip, fingers to a leather-bound hilt.
“Peace!” Scal said louder, and it felt that it was his thundering heart the Northman wrapped his fingers around.
“No peace for you, kin-killer,” the Northman said. His sword came free, sharp and shining. There was death written in its edges. The arc of it through the air spoke of blood.
Scal stayed on his knees, and though fear flowed cold through him, he looked away from the blade. He had lived and died enough lives that another ending was not a thing to fear. Perhaps this would be the last ending. He had felt joy, here in Berring, and love. They were good things. Things a man could remember, after his last life was gone.
He had spent all this life running from who he had been made. Running from the threat of blood, but it had found him yet. Inevitable. It was a good word. He did not know who had spoken it, a priest with a soft smile or a bear-faced man. It was fitting, still, that his last life should end in blood, and in the song of steel.
The last thing you do, lad, Parro Kerrus had said, will speak for all your life. It was good, that his last act should be prayer. Perhaps it was enough. Scal bowed his head, bared the back of his neck for the falling blade.
He heard the whisper of it falling, sharp enough to slice the air itself. The whisper seemed to carry another familiar voice. The voice of winter, the voice of a snowbear’s grin. That other man, all sharp angles and hard as ice, his last words had been, Must this be how we end? It had been a chance, in its own way, to step from the blood, to step from the bright steel-song. A chance, refused. The falling blade seemed to whisper, too, words spoken before that man had died. Words spoken to a boy, full of anger and sadness, a boy who had no place in the world. While there is breath in you, it whispered, you will not stop fighting.
Scal twisted his body. The sword planted its tip in the hard earth, and Scal rose, mountain-tall, to face the other Northman. Their eyes met. No time for fear, or for surprise. Scal struck with his fist, a careful hit, and holding the weight of years.
The Northman fell heavy as stone. He clutched at his throat briefly, eyes bulging and mouth gaping. After that, he did not move.
Silence filled Berring, a silence deeper for all the song and prayer and joy that had come before. All staring at Scal, and at the other unmoving Northman. Scal let his fingers release from their fist at his side. It did not release the shame that was rising in him. It did not stop the tide of hatred. For himself, for the man who had made him this way, for the claws of the past he could not loose.
“Murderer,” a voice said softly into the silence. There were murmurs of agreement.
A hand reached gently for his arm. Stopped, at the last moment. Modatho would not meet his eyes. “You should leave,” the parro said. Softly, but loud enough that all the others heard. There was a place, in Berring, for a priest.
Scal turned, silent, alone, and walked into the snows once more. Sparse snows, the True North left behind at the other end of Berring. Soft snows, that took nothing and gave nothing in return.
It was a long road from Berring, and lonely. Scal walked it with shoulders hunched, and when he slept, he simply lay down at the side of the road. There was no one to challenge him, and his fear was gone. His past lives had been full of the red-blinding anger that washed his sight like blood. He had thought fear to be the thing to fight the anger—a man who ran was a man who did not fight. A coward did not know anger.
But the fear had been like another man’s cloak. He could wear it, but it did not fit. He left it in Berring, beside the Northman’s body.
The red anger had not risen to replace it. Nothing had. He walked, and he felt nothing, like a limb gone dead to the cold.
He sometimes saw villages on the horizon, the white-dusted road snaking toward their centers. He left the road then. Sank his boots into the deeper snow, drew a wide arc with his footprints. He would find the road again, when the town was at his back.
There was a day when feet joined his own. Four of them, toes splayed wide atop the snow. The dog nosed at Scal’s hip, where he carried the half-charred remains of a rabbit he had trapped. Scal offered the dog a piece of the meat, and she stayed by his side, crunching thin bones between her jaws. Her tail waved the air, tongue hanging from one side of her mouth. Scal had not liked dogs, since a pack of them had once tried to eat him. Still. That had been another life. In this life, perhaps, he could like dogs.
She lay near him at the side of the road when he stopped to sleep, and when he rose with the sun, the dog, too, rose with a mighty stretch and trotted once more at his side. Tulli, he called her; it meant “dog” in the Northern tongue. He had never been good at naming things, but a companion deserved a name. Tulli raced down a hare of her own, and Scal stood patiently by for the dog to finish her meal. Again they slept at the side of the road, but the sun’s next rising showed no sign of Tulli. Scal waited for two hours. The dog did not return. Finally Scal rose, began walking once more down the lonely road. He could not get anyone to stay with him. Not even a dog.
He thought of Vatri, who had found him and followed him, refused to leave even when he had offered her no kindness. She had stayed until he had not minded, until he had grown used to her, until she had understood him better than he had thought someone could, and he her. And she, too, had left him. He had driven her away, but still, she had left.
His hand dug into his near-empty travelsack, fingers roving, brushing. His sight flickered, layered with the vision of another man. Rock and darkness all around, and the steady pull. South. He turned the seekstone in his hands, watched through the witch’s eyes. Watched, and could not help but think of them. The witch, and Rora, and Joros. Vatri. They would have made him someone he was not.
But Scal, in his fifth life, was no one. His hands were not made for shaping, and there was an emptiness inside him.
The road grew wider, and more populous. The villages closer together, and bigger. The cold less, though not by much. Winter still held its hand closed firmly around Fiatera. Scal kept his head down, and skirted wider around the villages, and slept farther from the edge of the road.
He chose a stand of trees as the sun slipped away, pink shadows reaching across the sky and the snowy ground. It would shelter him from wind and sight. The copse was thick, wild for as small as it was, two dozen tangled trees fighting for the same patch of ground. The branches nearly shut out the light of the setting sun, and so he did not see them until he was upon them. It did not help that they wore black robes, dark as night themselves.
“Greetings, brother,” said one of the three, in a low voice that was not welcoming. “I think you’ve found somewhere you don’t want to be.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It felt strange to Joros, to be sitting still and doing nothing besides staring into a fire. He’d had so little time for relaxation since well before he’d left Mount Raturo that trying to relax now felt unnatural. He had the overwhelming sense that there was something he should be doing, something vital, and the fact that he couldn’t do anything made his hands twitch.
Relaxing was far more stressful than it should have been. True, some of it may have been due to a lingering unease caused by building a fire in the shadow of Mount Raturo—not, perhaps, the smartest suggestion to ever pass his lips. He would never admit it, but in his long years within dark
Raturo, he’d forgotten the simple comfort of a light against the pressing darkness. This being the first time in nearly a decade that Anddyr had been out of his reach, that little comfort helped. He’d never admit to that aloud either.
Still, he couldn’t shake the edginess. He couldn’t do anything until Rora returned with his damned mage, and he couldn’t trust that Anddyr would do anything besides cock it all up—there was nothing more Joros could do to help them at this point. They would succeed or die without him doing anything, and that was the proper way to keep one’s hands clean, but it made him feel as useful as pissing on a forest fire. He hadn’t relaxed in years because he hated this kind of stillness—hated it now, especially, because not keeping his mind occupied made him think of red hair and a soft breath in his ear . . . Dangerous thoughts.
He’d tried whittling earlier, borrowing a dagger from one of the fists. That was something one of his brothers—he couldn’t remember which one anymore—had tried to teach him, back before Joros had stopped trying to fit in with his family. He’d turned a stick into a sharper stick, and that had filled all of an hour.
The uselessness was frustrating to an incalculable degree, and the frustration made him want to go do something with his wasted energy—but each time he thought of what else he could be doing, it simply drove home the fact that he couldn’t do anything. The most useful thing he could do was be right here to celebrate the triumph or clean up the failure when Rora and Anddyr returned, and the waiting was what made him feel so damned useless. It was a self-propelling cycle of irritation, and one he couldn’t seem to divert.
One of the fists had pulled out a deck of cards, and they’d sat around playing some sort of bluffing game Joros had never seen before. He’d watched them play and that had actually done wonders for shutting down his mind—it gave him something to focus on, a clear objective. Once he’d learned all their tics, he’d asked to play; it had taken them a few seconds to get over their surprise, but they’d shuffled around to make room for him in the circle. In retrospect, he probably should have lost a few rounds, or at least given them some of their coins back after two of the fists stormed into the trees. But he’d won fair and—well, he’d won, and that was how gambling worked. It wasn’t his fault they were shit liars.
It would be different, so different, if he still had his network of Shadowseekers, but they’d been taken from him, too. All of his tools had been stripped away, leaving him only the maddening mage, the almost-smart twins, and a series of human shields. He could get by fine without any help—he always had—but it certainly limited his options.
What rankled most was that he was so out of options that the crux of this particular plan was Anddyr, of all people. If that wasn’t a sign of how far he’d fallen, then Joros would eat his boots.
Joros wouldn’t lower himself to pacing, and so his only option was to stare sullenly into the fire, which did nothing to improve his mood. Didn’t worsen it either—just a flat level of annoyed anxiety that made him want to scream if it wouldn’t have brought the Fallen crashing down around his ears.
Aro was busy trying to make friends with the fists on guard duty, some of whom sounded like they had been his friends, in whatever checkered past the twins had come from. The fists weren’t having any of it, though. Aro didn’t seem to understand why, but Joros couldn’t blame the fists. It was harder to contemplate killing someone if there was too much of a friendly air.
“All my people’d better come back,” Tare, the ear-cutter, had said to Joros, jabbing a finger into his chest. He’d thought about snapping her finger off for her, but she looked like the kind of woman who would give back twice as much as she was given. She’d made sure Joros was near when she’d said to the leader of the fists: “If every last knife doesn’t come out of that mountain, you kill the boy.”
Joros had neglected to tell Rora that part; she dealt with stress poorly enough as it was. If one of the knives was foolish enough to get himself killed inside Raturo, by the time it became an issue Anddyr would be back with all of his protective spells, rendering the fists and their command a nonissue. Still, it was somewhat pathetic to see Aro so doggedly trying to engage with them.
He offered at every turn to help gather wood, to skin the rabbit whose skull a fist had smashed with an impressively accurate rock-throw, to join the few looking for fresh water, to walk the donkeys so they stayed limber, even to help dig a latrine. Mostly they answered him with silent shakes of the head, which seemed to hurt him more than an outright rebuff would have. Rora had once compared her brother to a kicked dog; Joros couldn’t deny the accuracy of that.
There was nothing Joros could do but wait. It would be easier if he could just accept that. He leaned back, resting on his elbows, staring up as embers crackled among the stars. He forced his jaw to loosen, his fingers to open. For a moment, the embers seemed to dance in familiar shapes against the dark sky, cascading red hair and an eager smile. He’d been avoiding thinking of her so that he could stay focused, stay sharp . . . and here he was with nothing to focus on, nothing he needed to be sharp for.
He watched the embers dance against the stars, twining and twisting into a familiar smile, familiar curves. He didn’t allow too much to come bubbling up—he wasn’t a fool—but he did feel a rumble of sadness, a frisson of remorse. Regret for everything that could have been. Good to know, in a way, that he could feel this without it undoing him; that he could still think of her without dissolving into a puddle of grief or a tower of rage.
It was, surprisingly, a good moment, silent and peaceful and calm, and so of course the merra would ruin it.
“What’s after this?” she asked. Joros looked down and found her horrific face staring at him through the fire—jarring, after the dancing embers. “What happens after you’ve killed all your brothers and sisters?”
He swallowed his regret quick enough. No more time for indulgence—there were other things he could waste his time on, in this endless waiting. “I’ll finally be free of you, for one.”
She didn’t react to that at all—Joros supposed he’d been growing a little lax with his insults. “You’ll just walk away?” she pressed. “Go back to a normal life as, what, some nameless merchant? A farmer?” Her laughter was almost as ugly as her face. “What will you do, once you’ve won?”
“What do you care? Once the Ventallo are dead, there will be no more Fallen to defeat, no more reason for you to follow me.”
“Once the Ventallo are dead, there will be hundreds of people suddenly with no leaders. It would be the perfect time for an opportunistic man, conveniently positioned, to step in.”
Joros was very careful not to show any reaction to that beyond a single raised eyebrow, though internally he was calling her every kind of foul name he could think of. “You think I want to lead the people I’ve turned my back on? The ones I’ve betrayed?” There was an art to making the truth sound an utterly ridiculous thing—it was in the tone, in a carefully raised eyebrow. “Why in all the hells would I be working so hard to destroy them if I wanted to lead them?”
“You’re not destroying them,” she said, undeterred. “You’re just removing the ones who stand in your way.”
“You’re a fool. You do remember we burned Fratarro’s hand together? That it was me who found it, me who wanted to burn it?”
“Oh, I believe you want to see the Twins kept bound. I do believe that. Who would you lead if they were freed?” She made a broad motion, taking in herself and glum Aro and the fists with their silent disinterest. “Us?” That laugh again, setting Joros’s teeth to grinding. “No. If the Twins stay bound, the Fallen will still need leaders. If you kill everyone who stands in your way, everyone who knows better, why wouldn’t they let you lead them? And you’re smart enough to get others to do all the work for you, to keep your hands clean.”
“You’ve an impressive imagination, I’ll give you that. It’s a dangerous combination with a mistrustful personality. No wonder the Northman was so protect
ive of you. You’re like a child bashing its head against everything to test what’s the hardest.”
That silenced her for a while; it seemed she didn’t like being reminded of the traitorous Northman. He’d have to remember to mention Scal more often.
“You didn’t see what happened in the North,” she said softly. Joros almost didn’t bother straining to hear her low voice, but, truthfully, he was bored. More, she was the sort of person who would consider an argument won if she got no response. “You didn’t see what I did. Boy.” Joros heard the scuffle as Aro startled nearby, clearly not prepared for the merra’s attention. “You saw what happened to the Northmen.”
“I was too far away to see anything,” Aro muttered.
“You saw me call out, and you saw how the Parents answered my call. Every last one of the Northmen fell beneath the Parents’ fire.”
“Fell asleep,” Aro said. “You said you made ’em all sleep.”
“I lied.”
Aro turned a little paler, the firelight making his face pink, and he wouldn’t meet the merra’s gaze.
“Do you have a point?” Joros asked, voice radiating boredom.
“You see the scars on my face and think me cursed, but you have it wrong. I’ve been blessed by the Parents, and when I call on them, they answer.”
“I’m sure they do,” Joros drawled, and one of the fists snorted in laughter.
Her eyes narrowed at him, the scarred ridges twisting down. Her lips moved, though if she said anything aloud, Joros didn’t hear it. The sudden flare of the fire drowned out any other comment he might have made. The flames flared with an audible roar, as though some invisible giant had leaned down to blow a gust of breath at the fire, rising three times their previous height, tongues leaping out to flick at Joros and the fists. There were plenty of curses in the face of the sudden heat, and a few shouts, and every one of them scrambled back from the fire—save the merra, who stayed where she sat, smirking.