Sullen did not, at least, appear to have brought many Clevers with him. There were two or three unmartial-looking figures down there, setting a camp slightly separate from the rest. Small, and hunched and cloaked. Other than that, it was swords and bows and spears and axes, all around and everywhere.
Yulan lifted his eye to the vertiginous towers that stood in mute observance of the scene. High up and far away, but still dominant. Still speaking of greater works than the rude and low struggle to be played out beneath them. Carrion birds were spilling down from the tops of those towers. Gliding on wide wings down and down, along the face of the escarpment, and settling in the fields around Towers’ Shadow. Come at last to feast on yesterday’s work, while those in and around the Kingshouse prepared another banquet for the morrow.
He had thought he would feel despair, standing here and looking out upon the ruin of all his hopes. Yet he did not. Towers’ Shadow stood, and would stay standing, for Sullen cared not one whit for that place or its people. The host arrayed before the walls overmatched the Free, but still they had the Clamour, and Akrana. There was hope still to be found, if the search was diligent enough.
Drann came along the wooden walkway and joined him. Together, they looked out upon the gathering of the Clade.
“You have to send them away,” Drann said at length, and then added when Yulan looked questioningly at him: “The villagers. You’ve ten men in here with no cause to die for. They don’t belong.”
“I see,” Yulan said.
Drann faced him with stern certainty. No trace of doubt, or admiration, or awe. Not a flicker of yearning to belong in those eyes, Yulan thought. Good.
“It’s not their fight,” Drann insisted. “It’s not about saving their village any more, not about saving everyone from the Orphans. That’s done. This is the Free and the School.”
“That it is,” Yulan agreed. “You think I should parley, then.”
“I do.”
“I had Hamdan send a message arrow out a few minutes ago,” Yulan smiled. “The Free don’t need others to die for us. We do that for ourselves, when it’s needed.”
Yulan came out from the gate of the Kingshouse on to the bare hillside. Perhaps the rashest act of his entire life, as both Hamdan and Akrana had explained to him at great and angry length. He did not disagree, but nor did it concern him. He felt liberated from thoughts of consequence, and what he might gain from this risk felt more than sufficient justification for it. Lives were precious, after all. They were worth fighting for, and sometimes perhaps you could fight for them by talking.
And there was, too, the conviction within him that Sullen would not try to kill him now. Not when so many others he no doubt wanted dead remained behind the walls of the Kingshouse, and when Sullen had an army to do the killing of them for him. He watched the man, the traitor, striding up the slope towards him. Coming to parley, as Yulan had suspected he would if given the chance. Out of arrogance, self-importance, curiosity. In search of the pleasure he would derive from baiting a cornered quarry.
“Close enough,” Yulan said, when Sullen was twenty or so paces below him.
Sullen came to a halt and spread his empty hands.
“Here I am, Captain,” he said. “Is someone going to put an arrow in me now?”
“No one’s going to try to kill you,” Yulan said.
He could have closed the gap in little more time than it took to think it. There his foresight failed him, for he could not see clearly what would happen. He knew Sullen could match him, perhaps better him, once blades were drawn.
And if he attempted it, even if he succeeded in it, Yulan would know that he had not truly tried to avert what would come after. Every death – the Free, the villagers – would be one more regret for him to remember and carry through what remained of his life, however brief that might be. He had enough of those already. For the same reason, he had refused Hamdan’s pleas to be allowed to skewer Sullen’s throat with an arrow from the wall. So he would attempt something still more difficult than killing Sullen. Bargaining with him.
“I saw a flock of birds unlike any I’ve seen before as we rode up here,” said Sullen calmly. “A long way off, but I saw it pass through the roof of a forest. I heard trees falling, I think. Would that be Wren’s doing, perhaps? Her legacy to the world?”
Yulan said nothing to that. Sullen was undeterred.
“Her gone. Kerig a ruin, I imagine. You’ve spent your Clevers freely this time, Yulan. Only got that white-haired witch I bled back at White Steading still to call on. Is that right?”
“The Clamour, if you leave me without choice.”
“Yes, of course.”
Not a flicker of concern at the invocation of that terrible Permanence, Yulan noted. No chinks in Sullen’s dour armour.
“I will yield the Bereaved to you, to the School, if you stand aside,” Yulan said.
“Certainly. Bring it out and you can be on your way. That is all the Mistress of the School seeks. The Bereaved.”
Yulan stared at him. Sullen did not look away. The intensity of Yulan’s gaze could find no purchase on those dead eyes. It spilled from their impermeable sheen.
“Usually I know when a man is lying to me,” Yulan sighed. “Not you. I never could tell with certainty, no matter how I suspected it. I think it’s because there’s no part of you, not the faintest memory, that knows or cares what honesty is. Nothing to stir when you lie, and betray you.”
“You might be right.”
“I know you’re lying this time, though. Whatever that poor fool of a Mistress imagines, your desires have never really trodden the same path as the School’s. It would break your dead heart to see us walk away from this, wouldn’t it? And in any case, whatever Wren did to bring Kerig out from your grasp, I don’t suppose the School is likely to forgive or forget that, are they?”
“Think what you will,” Sullen said with indifference.
“I’ve eleven men of the village in there. I want to send them away. They’re of no interest to you.”
Sullen’s eyes narrowed just a touch. The workings of that reptile mind.
“I don’t find anyone interesting, Yulan. Not even you. But yes, you can march your levies out if it pleases some notion of mercy you hold dear. It’ll speed along the end to all this, so I could hardly object.”
“Why do you need that ending so badly? What is it that’s eating you inside out, that won’t let you turn aside?”
“I don’t need anything. I want it. You, the Free, are the one and only time I’ve failed in an undertaking. You’re the only ones to have slipped through my fingers. I’ve greatly enjoyed my service in the Clade. The School, after all, gives me licence to indulge my pleasures.”
“And makes you feel important, no doubt,” Yulan grunted.
“But they shrink from the final step against you. Even after I killed Merkent, they couldn’t see that it no longer mattered what Crex thought, what the law dictated. They or you must pass from the world. I waited a long time for the circumstances to arise that might bring about what was necessary. I do understand these things, you see. Kill or be killed. I understand that.
“I’ve understood it since that day at White Steading. Since I put a blade in Merkent’s belly. Because I know you, Yulan, and I know your lackeys. I understood that some day, somehow, you would come for me. You, or Akrana, or that little archer friend of yours; one of you would find me and kill me. Whatever it meant for the Free, however much wrath it brought down on you, you would eventually find a way. That’s what you like to tell yourselves, isn’t it? The Free will find a way.”
“True,” Yulan acknowledged.
“Now you see’ – Sullen gestured behind him without looking round – “I have brought all these fine men to kill you first, because I have no wish to die. Not yet. I’m not finished with the world.”
“You’ve no ambition but to spread hurt and havoc and harm. You can mime reason and life, but they’re not in you. The world has no u
se for a blight such as you, Sullen.”
“No? We’ll see, won’t we? We’ll see whose nature is the stronger.”
“I would have bested you then, on that bridge, if you hadn’t thrown yourself into the river. I had already bested you. I’ll do it again.”
Yulan did not imagine that goading this soulless shell before him would serve any great purpose. Nor did it seem likely to do any harm.
“Recollections can differ. I’m still here, after all, and Merkent’s still dead. I feel unbested. Certainly today, because the truth is a simple one here, isn’t it? You waited too long, Yulan. If you had come for me first, then perhaps you might have had the better of it. But you didn’t. I’m the first to make the lunge, and so here we are, with most of the Free scattered and hiding, the last of it penned up in this absurd little turret of a castle, waiting to die.
“And I’ve had a great deal of time to prepare for this day. For the Free. I have given it much thought. Do you know what I concluded?”
Yulan shook his head. He had what he wanted, if the villagers could come out of this alive. Further sparring would win him no more ground.
“I think I can beat you,” Sullen said. “I can’t be sure, of course. We know, men like you and me, that in such a game there cannot be certainty. But I think I can. I think I know how.”
And that did set loose a flutter of doubt in Yulan’s breast. It felt incautious, ill judged. Neither of which were traits he would hang upon Sullen’s shoulders. It might be a lie, of course. But there was something about it that had a more subtle, more grey scent. And one fragment of truth it most certainly contained: Sullen would have been anticipating this day, preparing himself for it, for years.
If he could not instil doubt, but only acquire it himself, Yulan knew there was no purpose in further delay.
“I’ll send the villagers out,” he said, and turned on his heel. He walked up towards the gate. His back tense and exposed. Readying itself for injury. Sullen had only words to fling, though.
“Do it quickly, would you? Don’t play me for a fool, or I might take against you.”
Yulan sought Drann out as the villagers gathered beside the postern gate at the rear of the Kingshouse.
“I told Sullen there were eleven villagers,” he said. “This isn’t your fight, any more than it’s theirs. The only ones out there who might recognise you are Sullen himself and the men with him when Kerig was taken. Sullen’s on the other side of our little hill, and he’ll have his trusted men at his side. So it’s past time for you to take your leave of the Free.”
The young man did not look offended, as Yulan had feared he might, so much as puzzled.
“If I’d stopped Sullen when he came for Kerig, if I’d brought Wren back from the drowning pool, maybe none of this’d be happening. Maybe it is my fight.”
“Two answers to that,” Yulan said, shaking his head. “First, ifs are —”
“Hares. I know.”
Yulan frowned. “Hares?”
“Ifs are hares, Akrana told me once.”
That did sound very much like the sort of thing Akrana would say, Yulan acknowledged. She had turned the horrifying wound of her lost childhood into a scar, ever present but not crippling, by ruthlessly narrowing her vision. No looking back, or ahead. Watching only her own feet on the path. No wondering what might have been, or what might yet be, because she could not bear to trust either of those things.
“I was going to say they’re chains. There’s more than enough other folk willing to set chains upon you, one way or another. No need to add to them with ones you forge yourself out of things that didn’t happen. Right or wrong, done is done. Sometimes you can try to mend it, and you can certainly regret it, but you can never undo it, so don’t waste time imagining it undone.
“Second, you know as well as I do, there’s not a thing you could have done to stop all this. These people – Sullen, Kerig, Wren – they’re not so easily turned from their chosen paths. Not by the likes of you. Not even the likes of me.”
“Even so,” Drann stubbornly persisted. “You saved my life yesterday. It might be you saved everybody’s life, from here to Armadell, when you took the Bereaved away from Callotec. And they’re going to kill you anyway, aren’t they? Sullen and the rest. Even if you gave them the Bereaved, they would kill you.”
“They would try,” Yulan nodded.
“I’ll stay. I can make it my fight. I can choose that, can’t I?”
“All are allowed to choose to be fools,” Yulan smiled. “I think we spend half of our lives that way, don’t you? I’ve a better idea, though. You can do me one last service, one that matters.”
Drann raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“Walk out of that gate, with the villagers. Keep your face down if you can, but if anyone asks, you’re an exile from the north who’s made a home here. Get one or two of the others to agree your tale, and it will be fine. And once you’re out there, find some safe place not too far away and wait to see what happens. Watch the last day of the Free, because one way or the other, that’s what it will be. The end of us, by our choice or by Sullen’s.
“And when it’s all done, go to Creel of Mondoon and tell him everything that’s happened, from the day we rode out of his camp. He’s the only one of the Council worth anything. And he’ll pay you well for the story, if I know him at all. After that, go back to your home, and as you go, you can tell anyone and everyone the tale of the last day of the Free, because it’ll be a tale worth the telling and we’ll want it told. Whatever happens, we’ll want it told.”
Yulan had thought that Sullen would come as soon as the villagers were away. He did not. His ranks did not move from their posts at the foot of the hill. That was puzzling. But then Sullen was not entirely like other men. There was nothing to do but wait. Yulan did it atop the keep, sitting with his back to the uppermost battlements. He could hear, rising up from below, the faint and indistinct sound of Callotec snarling abuse at Akrana, through the dirty cloth that gagged him. That made Yulan bitter, and prey to bleak thoughts, so he shut it out.
He had found a stick inside and, for no reason he could precisely explain, taken to cutting away at it with his knife. Trying to whittle it into some more pleasing or purposeful shape. It was a thing he had often done, and done well, when he was a child.
Hamdan was sitting beside him, watching his clumsy efforts to recover that childhood talent.
“Do we die today, you think?” the archer asked.
Yulan considered for a moment, turned the thin piece of wood in his hand. His working of it really was rough, compared to what he had been able to do when he was young. It was a pity, to have lost the knack of that.
“Maybe,” he said eventually. “Sullen certainly thinks it likely.”
Hamdan nodded. Scratched at his beard.
“Where will you go, after this is all done? When the Free’s done with?”
“You know the answer to that,” Yulan said.
“Hestin? The Clamour?”
Yulan nodded.
“You think that’s what she’d want?” asked Hamdan.
Yulan let the wood fall. He returned his knife to its sheath along his calf. He was not going to be relearning the craft today, so it could wait for another time. Another place.
“Don’t know. It’s what I’ll do, though, for as long as it needs doing. It was me who kept her alive and let her try to tame it. Me who persuaded Merkent that the Free could accommodate it, and her. Use them.”
“Huh,” Hamdan grunted. “That was a miserable bloody hunt, wasn’t it? Going to be the Free’s greatest failing, if Hestin hadn’t shown up. Done our work for us.”
“A good many of us would have died,” agreed Yulan. “More than already had done. It took… what? Six of us? And we could never have stopped it. Not without her. We owe her a debt for that. I owe her a debt. Seems only right it should be me who walks alongside her to the end.”
“That’s a road you can’t know wher
e it’s going.”
“But it’ll come to an end sometime, somewhere. I always had a notion that when she was failing, when it was slipping out from under her bonds, I’d buy a ship and strand it on an island far out to sea. Silly idea. As if that would do any good.”
“And then? After your voyaging was done?”
Yulan could not help but smile sadly at that. The unthinking humour of life and the world had earned that much from him, after all.
“Then, if I still lived, I was going to find a way to kill Callotec and Sullen. Since they and I find ourselves gathered upon this little hill far from anywhere, I can’t help but feel the world, or life, is trying to convey some message to me.”
“One less thing to worry about,” Hamdan said. “That’s the message. Anyway, I’ll go with you. With Hestin and the Clamour. Two’s better than one, trying to keep her, and the world, safe.”
“I know. I always knew that, Hamdan.”
Yulan heard feet pounding on the stairs inside the keep. He guessed their meaning and lifted himself up, twisting to peer over the top of the battlements. The Clade were advancing. He hurried to the top of the stairwell and clambered down, shouting. He went down through the Kingshouse, floor by floor, and out into the yard. Shouting all the way.
“One last day to be the Free. Every one of you think on that, because there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to be but here, on these walls, at this gate. You’re to be the last of the Free and it’s for you to choose what they say of us in days to come! How we lived or died, how we fought in the last hour of the last of the companies!”
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The Kingshouse
The Free Page 33