Clay blinked, having lost himself in his own head. He did that sometimes, and could have wished he was better at putting his thoughts into words. He’d sound a right clever bastard then, wouldn’t he?
Instead, he’d stood there dumbly as the silence between Ginny and Gabriel lengthened uncomfortably.
“You look hungry,” she said finally.
Gabriel nodded, his hands fidgeting nervously.
Ginny sighed, and then his wife—his kind, lovely, magnificent wife—forced a tight grin and reclaimed her spoon from the pot she’d been tending earlier. “Sit down then,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll feed you. I made Clay’s favourite: rabbit stew with mushrooms.”
Gabriel blinked. “Clay hates mushrooms.”
Seeing Ginny’s back stiffen, Clay spoke up. “Used to,” he said brightly, before his wife—his quick-tempered, sharp-tongued, utterly terrifying wife—could turn around and crack his skull with that wooden spoon. “Ginny does something to them, though. Makes them taste”—Not so fucking awful, was what first jumped to mind—“really pretty good,” he finished lamely. “What is it you do to ’em, hun?”
“I stew them,” she said in the most menacing way a woman could string those three words together.
Something very much like a smile tugged at the corner of Gabe’s mouth.
He always did love to watch me squirm, Clay remembered. He took a chair and Gabriel followed suit. Griff trundled over to his mat and gave his balls a few good licks before promptly falling asleep. Clay fought down a surge of envy, seeing that. “Tally home?” he asked.
“Out,” said Ginny. “Somewhere.”
Somewhere close, he hoped. There were coyotes in the woods nearby. Wolves in the hills. Hell, Ryk Yarsson had seen a centaur out by Tassel’s farm. Or a moose. Either of which might kill a young girl if caught by surprise. “She should’ve been home before dark,” he said.
His wife scoffed at that. “So should you have, Clay Cooper. You putting in extra hours on the wall, or is that the King’s Piss I smell on ya?” King’s Piss was her name for the beer they served at the pub. It was a fair assessment, and Clay had laughed the first time she’d said it. Didn’t seem as funny at the moment, however.
Not to Clay, anyway, though Gabriel’s mood seemed to be lightening a bit. His old friend was smirking like a boy watching his brother take heat for a crime he didn’t commit.
“She’s just down in the marsh,” Ginny said, fishing two ceramic bowls from the cupboard. “Be glad it’s only frogs she’ll bring home with her. It’ll be boys soon enough, and you’ll have plenty cause to worry then.”
“Won’t be me needs to worry,” Clay mumbled.
Ginny scoffed at that, too, and he might have asked why had she not set a steaming bowl of stew in front of him. The wafting scent drew a ravenous growl from his stomach, even if there were mushrooms in it.
His wife took her cloak off the peg by the door. “I’ll go and be sure Tally’s all right,” she said. “Might be she needs help carrying those frogs.” She came over and kissed Clay on the top of his head, smoothing his hair down afterward. “You boys have fun catching up.”
She got as far as opening the door before hesitating, looking back. First at Gabriel, already scooping at his bowl as if it were the first meal he’d had in a long while, and then at Clay, and it wasn’t until a few days after (a hard choice and too many miles away already) that he understood what he’d seen in her eyes just then. A kind of sorrow, thoughtful and resigned, as though she already knew—his loving, beautiful, remarkably astute wife—what was coming, inevitable as winter, or a river’s winding course to the sea.
A chill wind blew in from outside. Ginny shivered despite her cloak, then she left.
“It’s Rose.”
They had finished eating, set their bowls aside. He should have put them in the basin, Clay knew, got them soaking so they wouldn’t be such a chore to clean later, but it suddenly seemed like he couldn’t leave the table just now. Gabriel had come in the night, from a long way off, to say something. Best to let him say it and be done.
“Your daughter?” Clay prompted.
Gabe nodded slowly. His hands were both flat on the table. His eyes were fixed, unfocused, somewhere between them. “She is …willful,” he said finally. “Impetuous. I wish I could say she gets it from her mother, but …” That smile again, just barely. “You remember I was teaching her to use a sword?”
“I remember telling you that was a bad idea,” said Clay.
A shrug from Gabriel. “I just wanted her to be able to protect herself. You know, stick ’em with the pointy end and all that. But she wanted more. She wanted to be …” he paused, searching for the word, “ … great.”
“Like her father?”
Gabriel’s expression turned sour. “Just so. She heard too many stories, I think. Got her head filled with all this nonsense about being a hero, fighting in a band.”
And from whom could she have heard all that? Clay wondered.
“I know,” said Gabriel, perceiving his thoughts. “Partly my fault, I won’t deny it. But it wasn’t just me. Kids these days … they’re obsessed with these mercenaries, Clay. They worship them. It’s unhealthy. And most of these mercs aren’t even in real bands! They just hire a bunch of nameless goons to do their fighting while they paint their faces and parade around with shiny swords and fancy armour. There’s even one guy—I shit you not—who rides a manticore into battle!”
“A manticore?” asked Clay, incredulous.
Gabe laughed bitterly. “I know, right? Who the fuck rides a manticore? Those things are dangerous! Well, I don’t need to tell you.”
He didn’t, of course. Clay had a nasty-looking puncture scar on his right thigh, testament to the hazards of tangling with such monsters. A manticore was nobody’s pet, and it certainly wasn’t fit to ride. As if slapping wings and a poison-barbed tail on a lion made it somehow a fine idea to climb on its back!
“They worshipped us, too,” Clay pointed out. “Well you, anyway. And Ganelon. They tell the stories, even still. They sing the songs.”
The stories were exaggerated, naturally. The songs, for the most part, were wildly inaccurate. But they persisted. Had lasted long after the men themselves had outlived who (or what) they’d been.
We were giants once.
“It’s not the same,” Gabriel persisted. “You should see the crowds gather when these bands come to town, Clay. People screaming, women crying in the streets.”
“That sounds horrible,” said Clay, meaning it.
Gabriel ignored him, pressing on. “Anyhow, Rose wanted to learn the sword, so I indulged her. I figured she’d get bored of it sooner or later, and that if she was going to learn, it might as well be from me. And also it made her mother mad as hell.”
It would have, Clay knew. Her mother, Valery, despised violence and weapons of any kind, along with those who used either toward any end whatsoever. It was partly because of Valery that Saga had dissolved all those years ago.
“Problem was,” said Gabriel, “she was good. Really good, and that’s not just a father’s boasts. She started out sparring against kids her age, but when they gave up getting their asses whooped she went out looking for street fights, or wormed her way into sponsored matches.”
“The daughter of Golden Gabe himself,” Clay mused. “Must’ve been quite the draw.”
“I guess so,” his friend agreed. “But then one day Val saw the bruises. Lost her mind. Blamed me, of course, for everything. She put her foot down—you know how she gets—and for a while Rose stopped fighting, but …” He trailed off, and Clay saw his jaw clamp down on something bitter. “After her mother left, Rosie and I … didn’t get along so well, either. She started going out again. Sometimes she wouldn’t come home for days. There were more bruises, and a few nastier scrapes besides. She chopped her hair off—thank the Holy Tetrea her mother was gone by then, or mine would’ve been next. And then came the cyclops.”
&n
bsp; “Cyclops?”
Gabriel looked at him askance. “Big bastards, one huge eye right here on their head?”
Clay leveled a glare of his own. “I know what a cyclops is, asshole.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“I didn’t …” Clay faltered. “Never mind. What about the cyclops?”
Gabriel sighed. “Well, one settled down in that old fort north of Ottersbrook. Stole some cattle, some goats, a dog, and then killed the folks that went looking for ’em. The courtsmen had their hands full, so they were looking for someone to clear the beast out for them. Only there weren’t any mercs around at the time—or none with the chops to take on a cyclops, anyway. Somehow my name got tossed into the pot. They even sent someone round to ask if I would, but I told them no. Hell, I don’t even own a sword anymore!”
Clay cut in again, aghast. “What? What about Vellichor?”
Gabriel’s eyes were downcast. “I … uh … sold it.”
“I’m sorry?” Clay asked, but before his friend could repeat himself he put his own hands flat on the table, for fear they would ball into fists, or snatch one of the bowls nearby and smash it over Gabriel’s head. He said, as calmly as he could manage, “For a second there I thought you said that you sold Vellichor. As in the sword entrusted to you by the Archon himself as he lay dying? The sword he used to carve a fucking doorway from his world to ours. That sword? You sold that sword?”
Gabriel, who had slumped deeper into his chair with every word, nodded. “I had debts to pay, and Valery wanted it out of the house after she found out I taught Rose to fight,” he said meekly. “She said it was dangerous.”
“She—” Clay stopped himself. He leaned back in his chair, kneading his eyes with the palms of his hands. He groaned, and Griff, sensing his frustration, groaned himself from his mat in the corner. “Finish your story,” he said at last.
Gabriel continued. “Well, needless to say, I refused to go after the cyclops, and for the next few weeks it caused a fair bit of havoc. And then suddenly word got around that someone had gone out and killed it.” He smiled, wistful and sad. “All by herself.”
“Rose,” Clay said. Didn’t make it a question. Didn’t need to.
Gabriel’s nod confirmed it. “She was a celebrity overnight. Bloody Rose, they called her. A pretty good name, actually.”
It is, Clay agreed, but didn’t bother saying so. He was still fuming about the sword. The sooner Gabe said whatever it was he’d come here to say, the sooner Clay could tell his oldest, dearest friend to get the hell out of his house and never come back.
“She even got her own band going,” Gabe went on. “They managed to clear out a few nests around town: giant spiders, some old carrion wyrm down in the sewer that everyone forgot was still alive. But I hoped—” he bit his lip “—I still hoped, even then, that she might choose another path. A better path. Instead of following mine.” He looked up. “Until the summons came from the Republic of Castia, asking every able sword to march against the Heartwyld Horde.”
For a heartbeat Clay wondered at the significance of that. Until he remembered the news he’d heard earlier that evening. An army of twenty thousand, routed by a vastly more numerous host; the survivors surrounded in Castia, doubtless wishing they had died on the battlefield rather than endure the atrocities of a city under siege.
Which meant that Gabriel’s daughter was dead. Or she would be, when the city fell.
Clay opened his mouth to speak, to try to keep the heartbreak from his voice as he did so. “Gabe, I—”
“I’m going after her, Clay. And I need you with me.” Gabriel leaned forward in his chair, the flame of a father’s fear and anger alight in his eyes. “It’s time to get the band back together.”
Chapter Three
A Good Man
“Absolutely not.”
It was not, apparently, the answer his friend was expecting. Or at least not as emphatically as Clay put it. Gabriel blinked, the fire inside him snuffed out as quickly as it appeared. He looked confused more than anything. Disbelieving. “But Clay—”
“I said no. I’m not leaving town to go running off west with you. I’m not leaving Ginny behind, or Tally. I’m not going to track down Moog or Matrick or Ganelon—who very probably still hates us all, by the way—and go traipsing across the Heartwyld! Tits of Glif, Gabe, there’s more than a thousand miles between here and Castia, and it ain’t paved with stone, you know.”
“I know that,” said Gabriel, but Clay spoke over him.
“Do you? Do you, Gabe? Remember the mountains? Remember the giants in those mountains? Remember the birds—the fucking birds, Gabriel—that could snatch those giants up like they were children?”
His friend grimaced at the recollection; the shadow of wings that spanned the sky. “The rocs are all gone,” said Gabriel, without conviction.
“Sure, maybe,” Clay allowed. “But are the rasks gone? The yethiks? The ogre clans? How about the thousand-mile-wide forest? Is that still there? Do you remember the Wyld, Gabe? Trees that can walk, wolves that can talk—and hey, do you know if the centaur tribes are still trapping people and eating them? Because I do, and they are! And that’s not even mentioning the bloody rot! And you’re asking me to go there? To go through it?”
“We did before,” Gabriel reminded him. “They used to call us the Kings of the Wyld, remember?”
“Yeah, they did. When we were twenty years younger. When our backs didn’t ache every morning and we didn’t wake up five times a night to piss. But time did what it does best, didn’t it? It beat us up. It broke us down. We got old, Gabriel. Too old to do the things we used to, no matter how good we were at doin’ ’em. Too old to cross the Wyld, and too old to make any difference at all if we did.”
He left the rest unsaid: That even if they managed to reach Castia, somehow evaded the encircling Horde, and made it into the city itself, there was every chance in the world that Rose was already dead.
Gabriel leaned in. “She’s alive, Clay.” His eyes were steel again, but his assurance was belied by the threat of tears. “I know she is. I taught her to fight, remember? She’s as good as I ever was. Maybe better. She killed a cyclops by herself!” he said, but sounded as though he were trying to convince himself as much as he was Clay. “They say four thousand survived that battle and made it back to Castia. Four thousand! Rosie made it. Of course she made it.”
“Maybe, yeah,” said Clay, mostly because there was nothing else to say.
“I have to go,” Gabriel said. “I have to try and save her, if I can. And I know I’m old. I know I ain’t what I used to be. Not even a shadow,” he admitted sadly. “I guess none of us are. But I am her father—a shitty one, yeah, to have let her go off in the first place, but not so shitty I’ll sit here moaning about my sore back while she’s trapped and probably starving in a city half the world away. But I can’t do it alone.” He laughed sourly. “And even if I could afford to hire mercs, I doubt I could find any willing to go.”
He has that part right, thought Clay.
“You’re my only hope,” Gabriel said. “Without you—without the band—I’m lost. And so is Rose.” There was a silence after he spoke, weighted with expectation. And then he added, quite unfairly, “What if it were Tally?”
Clay said nothing for a long while. He listened to the creaking boards of his house. He stared at the empty bowls, the wooden spoons resting against the rim of each. He gazed at the tabletop. He looked across at Gabriel and Gabriel looked back. He could see the other man’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, his heart hammering as Clay’s own thumped quietly on, and he wondered if so simple an organ (just a fist-sized, blood-slick muscle) might not have some premonition of what the mind, perhaps, did not yet know.
“I’m sorry, Gabe.”
His friend just sat there. Frowning at first, and then smiling that strange, withered smile.
“I am sorry,” Clay said again.
Another while passed, and Gabriel �
� Gabriel just looked at him, tilted his head ever so slightly, and said, after what seemed like forever, “I know you are.”
He stood. The sound of his chair scraping back was as loud as a falcon’s screech after the long silence between them.
“You can stay,” Clay offered, but Gabriel shook his head.
“I’ll go. I left my bag on the step. There’s an inn in town?”
Clay nodded. “Gabriel,” he began, intending to explain … he didn’t know what, exactly. That he was sorry (again). That he couldn’t risk losing Ginny, or leave Tally without a father if he went off west and the worst should happen (and it would happen, he was sure of it). That he was comfortable here in Coverdale. Content, after so many restless years. And that deep down the thought of crossing the Heartwyld, of going anywhere near Castia and the Horde that surrounded it, scared him shitless.
I’m afraid, he wanted to say, but could not.
Gabriel, mercifully, cut him short. “Tell Ginny the stew was delicious,” he said. “And tell your daughter Uncle Gabe says hello. Or good-bye, whichever.”
Offer him boots, some part of Clay’s mind insisted. A cloak, at least. Water, or wine, for the road. He said nothing instead, just sat there as Gabriel opened the door. Cool air. The wind rustling in the trees outside. The chorus of a hundred thousand crickets in the tall grass.
Griff looked up from his mat, saw that Gabe was leaving, and promptly fell back asleep.
Gabriel stalled on the threshold, looking back. Here it comes, thought Clay. The final plea. The scathing remark about how if it were the other way round he would do it for me. Vellichor notwithstanding, words had always been Gabe’s most potent weapon. He’d been their leader, back when. The voice of the band. All he said, though, before walking out and tugging the door closed behind him, was “You’re a good man, Clay Cooper.”
Kings of the Wyld Page 2