by Anthology
"That if you keep following this track…" The Red King sawed the hare open on the edge of the impaled sword. "Then you shall have to go over the shoulder of Y Brenin before you reach Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth. He would tell you that between us and that mountain, there is a valley at the foot of Caer Pwyll filled with nothing but reeds and marsh that is difficult to cross even on a fine day. For a horse, and two men in armour…"
The Red King held his hand out into the rain pouring off of the caparison and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. The knight wrapped his arms around himself, but wet metal-against-metal brought him little comfort.
"And what would you suggest?"
"Take the east fork in the road, half a day from here."
"Through Bannik and Gerwester?"
The Red King nodded.
"Through two villages sympathetic to you, and a stone's throw away from the North Road?" the knight asked stonily. He shook his head. "We go north."
The Red King sighed and spread his hands in frustration. He studied them for a few moments, smeared with blood and rain, then began to strip the fur away from the dead hare in his lap. "You know," he said, peeling the muscle away from the bone and biting into the slick red meat. "I'm certain that I recognise you."
The knight watched the Red King suck down raw flesh and fought against a knot of nausea. The Red King chewed methodically, staring out into the rain. This close, the knight could see that his strange black eyes weren't pupiless at all, but rather that the pupils were so swollen that the brown of his irises was almost swallowed up…
"Is there something that you want to ask, Ser Mercher?" the Red King said.
The knight hugged himself little tighter and looked away. "Caer Isel," he said under his breath. "You wanted to know where you've seen me before? You appointed me, and five other guardsmen, to keep watch over Edling Gwyn when you consigned him to live and die in that tower."
"You're the traitor." The hard bark of a laugh lodged somewhere in the Red King's throat. He swallowed another sliver of raw meat and shook his head. "The one who helped my brother to escape and take the north from me. And Gwyn knighted you for your trouble, did he? Well then, I suppose that it turned out well enough for you."
Well enough? the knight thought. It has ended in nothing but war and blight and famine. It has broken this land more deeply than you ever managed to alone.
"So, tell me." The Red King wiped some of the bloodied fur off of his hands. "I've heard that you sleep beside Gwyn. On the floor, like a trained dog. And that the two of you have spent the last two summers bathing in the Ysprid together like a pair of newly-weds. So, I'm intrigued. Does my brother fuck you well enough to compensate you for all the trouble you have put yourself through for his sake?"
The knight clamped down on the plume of rage and embarrassment and watched the rivulets of rain catching on blade of his sword. "You don't know a damned thing about me!"
Something quirked at the corner of the Red King's mouth. "I see. He hasn't had you yet, then. Do you think that's because he's ignorant of your feelings, or because he simply doesn't care?"
The knight swept to his feet, tearing the caparison aside and drawing his sword out of the earth. The Red King watched him calmly and did not move to stand. His lips and chin were smeared with hare's blood and water.
A gust of wind surged up the side of the mountain and whistled between the leaning stones, turning the low cloud into unformed shapes that hurried through the cairn. The knight shivered and sheathed his sword at his side.
"Mount up, Goch," he said. "If you freeze to death, I'll leave you for the crows."
***
"This is madness!" the Red King shouted from the saddle as they crested the wide green saddle of Caer Pwyll and descended down into the marsh, raising his hand to block out the light. "We must turn back."
They had abandoned most of their armour not long after the cairn, but the sky was still grey and thunderous, and the knight's feet sank up to the ankle as the track became a stretch of churned-up mud then petered out entirely.
The Red King dug his feet into the stirrups. "Mercher!"
The knight ignored him, leading the courser by the bridle towards the mountain in the east: a low black tangle of granite looming in grey sky. If I can reach that mountain, he thought. Then perhaps the way will be a little easier over its feet.
After an hour, the knight's legs burned. His courser's feet dragged in the stagnant water. And they had come less than half a mile.
The knight stopped to swipe the sweat off of his brow, and his courser's feet bubbled down into the fluid earth.
"You'll have to dismount," the knight said, trying not to draw too hard for breath.
The Red King eased his injured leg over the mare's back and lowered himself out of the saddle. Moss and marsh gave way like flesh under his feet.
"Lovely," he said. "You know that you'll kill us both before we reach the city, don't you?" The Red King checked the empty waterskin on his belt, knelt, and drank from the grey mire with cupped hands.
The knight grabbed the back of the Red King's shirt and hauled him to his feet. "You certainly will be if you insist on eating every raw dead thing and drinking from every stagnant pool between here and Dinas Pair," he said. "What's wrong with you? Keep walking."
The knight took another step towards the mountain, but his courser was sunk almost up to her hindquarters. She whickered with panic when she realised that she couldn't move, and the knight took her bridle in both hands to calm her. As soon as she stopped fighting him, they pulled. Straining against the air together, the mare occasionally freeing a foreleg only to slap it back down into the swamp. Then the strength was out of her and she just stood there, panting hard.
"Gather as many of these reeds as you can," the Red King said. "Give her something to stand on."
The knight muttered a few half-believed words of reassurance to her and did as he was bade. He'd only walked a few heavy, aching steps when he came upon the bodies.
They were three, he thought. Two adults, and a child. But it was difficult to tell. The marsh had turned them grey. Their faces were bloated and fly-blown. Flesh wrinkled like the skin of an elbow, and open eyes turned to the milk-white of cut quartz. By his reckoning, they had been dead about a week.
The knight tried to remember how to breathe. "We are not the first ones to try this way," he said.
The Red King waded through needles of marsh grass to his side. "Southerners," he said. "Farmers, most likely. The blight has driven most of them out of their homes. Since your great and noble master has been turning back any refugees on the North Road, most of them try the old paths through the hills in the hope of better fortune."
"Do you expect to make me pity these people?" the knight demanded. "To turn my back on Gwyn?"
"No." The Red King stood. "I don't."
They worked in silence after that, laying out whatever they could find around the courser. Somewhere far away a peal of thunder trembled in the mountains. When they had done all that they could, the Red King put his palms to the mare's hindquarters and the knight took up her bridle. She was tired now, and without her help they were soon sweating and breathless.
"You never answered my question." The Red King stood back and rubbed his watering eyes.
The knight gave one last pull, raised both hands in defeat, and sank down to his haunches. "What do you want now, Goch?"
"Where are you from?" the Red King asked. "Who were you, before you became a bloody bane in my side and set my brother back upon the north?"
"I was no one," the knight said. "Just another unwanted bastard weaned in an orphanage in the wildwood. A farmer paid them for me when I was ten." The courser slumped down defeated, stretching her neck out until her nostrils were barely above the water.
"Old enough to work," the Red King said.
The knight made a soft sound of agreement. He put his hand under the courser's jaw, lifting her head enough to breathe. "He wasn't a cruel man," he said.
"But he wanted his money's worth from me. Worked me like a draught horse for six years before I managed to slip away and enlist with your guard. Six summers of the sun on my back and the breath of the wind in me. Six winters digging in those blasted, frozen fields."
"Do you miss it?"
The knight looked towards the southern horizon. "Sometimes."
"Let's try again. Come here, maybe you can push better than I can. Use those shoulders of yours, plough boy."
The knight put the flats of his hands to her hindquarters and pushed until his muscles shook. The courser shrieked and thrashed at the pulled grass until she finally found footing. Then she heaved forwards, screaming and kicking out with her powerful back legs. As she came free, one of her shod hooves slammed into the knight's chest like cannonshot.
Concussion rang in his ears, and the marsh reached out to catch him as he fell. He found that he was looking down on his own body—his chest imploded, ribs dashed into the hollow space of his lungs, and the whole marsh shifting and surging underneath him like a wave.
An explosion of coughing pain brought him back into himself. He strained for a breath that wouldn't come, but the front of his shirt was drenched with marshwater instead of blood, and when he put his hand to the ache in his chest his ribs did not feel broken. The Red King offered down his hand, and the knight took it, pulling himself back up.
He followed the grim look on the Red King's face to where his courser stood, three-footed. One of her hind legs was snapped at an impossible angle below the knee, bone puncturing bay fur and blood dripping from her hoof.
A deep calm drove down into the knight's fingertips, and he forced his voice to soften as he took her head up in both his hands. He let the steadiness of his body pass into hers and bowed his head until it touched her muzzle.
"Gwyn gave her to me," he said softly, his voice twisted out of shape. "I had her from a yearling."
"Mercher…"
"Be quiet."
The knight drew his sword slowly so as not to startle her. A murmur of metal against leather, a few more gentle words, and one sharp, deep thrust that drove the blade up to the hilt in her chest. Her howl filled up the whole valley as she wrenched away, overbalanced, and fell hard onto her side. A huge flower of dark blood blossomed out into the grey water. The knight knelt and put his hand on her neck. Her eyes rolled white. She sucked down a lungful of mashwater, spasmed, and fell still.
"I'm sorry," he said, catching his tongue between his teeth. "I'm so sorry."
He grasped the bloody hilt of his sword and worked the blade out of her body.
"Come here," he told the Red King. "I'll need your help to butcher her."
***
Y Brenin rose out of the valley like the arched back of a fish: a high ridge of bare jagged granite sculpted by time and weather into a host of peaks, buttresses, and gulleys. More a wall than a mountain, dividing the southern high places from rich northern lowlands with a serrated ridge of bare granite. They approached it swathed in the fog of a grey morning, rounding a scree slope that sank down into a high valley filled with a crooked finger of black lake. A heron raised its head on the far shore, poised between the worlds of fog and water, looking more a spirit than any living thing.
The knight raised his eyes, tracing line from the quiet of the water to the mountain looming in the cloud. His breath tangled in his throat and a shiver of recognition cut through him as an indistinct figure all but crawled over the ridge behind him. Until he saw the colour of the hair and the blackness of the eyes, the knight was certain that it was not the Red King that walked towards him out of the mist but his lord.
"He looks fierce from down here, doesn't he?" the Red King said, the fog smothering the sound of his voice. "From the north, Y Brenin's as smooth as glazed ceramic and blue-grey as a thundercloud. But the sun never touches the south face, and so it's gouged by ice and wind and water. Nothing more than an accident of circumstance, when you think on it."
"You talk too much, Goch," the knight said, his voice harsh with dehydration and his tongue so swollen that he could barely speak.
He shrugged the Red King's hand away and glissaded through the scree to the waterside, boots sliding in great strides through loose sharp stones.
The water was smooth as jet, and when his fingers broke the surface it was cold enough to hurt. He knelt and drank his fill, until his stomach and his throat burned with cold and his hands were white-numb.
The Red King slid down behind him, favouring his good leg. "We shall have to go over the eastern slope," he said. "There's a shepherd's track that cuts down into the valley on the other side. It's steep, yes, but passable."
The knight splashed the dark water into his face and stood. "Do you not understand what it means to be a man's prisoner, Goch?"
"Someone may have tried to explain it to me once," the Red King said. "But I'm not sure I listened. I tend to forget these things rather quickly when my captor seems determined to lead us both into a certain, painful death. Or would you rather ignore me and die the same way as your horse?"
The knight turned around too quickly and grabbed the Red King's shoulder. "I've had my fill of you," he growled, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from shivering.
"Why?" the Red King asked. "Because I am right and you cannot bear to admit it? Or because I sound too much like my brother, and you are afraid that you might fall pathetically in love with me?"
The knight's grip tightened until his arm shook.
"Tell me," the Red King said. "When all of this is over and I am returned to my throne, do you think that Gwyn will give up his lands and his riches to live out his days with some ignorant little plough boy? Until he is old and bitter and you must nurse him to his death? Or do you think that he will continue ordering you around like a kicked dog? Sending you off into every pointless battle that he wages against me in the hopes that one day you just don't come back?"
"You think that I care?" the knight spat. "So long as I get to stand at his side on the morning that they hang you?"
The Red King shrugged. "If you wanted me dead, then you should have killed me on the battlefield and had your fill of it. My brother might even have been grateful enough to let you up into his lap for the night." He frowned for a moment and made a small, amused sound. "Only you don't really care if I hang, do you, Mercher? It isn't me that you are in a rage with, it's yourself. My brother might forgive you if you beg and grovel at his feet for long enough, but it will all taste like ashes in your mouth. You know that you've failed him by refusing to carry out his order on that battlefield, and you shall always know it. It will haunt you in the dark quiet of the night between now and the day that you die."
The knight seized the Red King's shirt and found his lord looking back at him accusingly.
His curled fist slammed into the Red King's jaw. It would have thrown the Red King from his feet if the knight hadn't gripped him by the hair and kissed him hard and full on the mouth.
The Red King tensed in response. His body curling like a windless flag, and his fingers running over the clinging thinness of the knight's shirt to the hilt of the knight's sword. Metal rasped on leather, and he broke away to draw the blade into his hand. His laughter sang off of the south face of Y Brenin.
A surge of humiliation snarled through the knight, bleeding into the love and hate, loyalty, and the fury at his own stupidity.
Then the edge of his own sword was coming for him.
Instinct pulled his body out of the way of the blow. His feet touched the lake, and a deep quiet smoothed all his thoughts down into nothing. He reached for the shield slung across his back and trusted his feet to keep him out of the way for long enough to fasten the enarmes.
When another strike came, the knight was prepared. He brought his shield out to block, and the sound of metal-against-metal burst in his ears. The next swing was swift and terrible, and the knight had no choice but to turn away to catch it. He twisted fully, kicking up stones and water and drove the poin
t of his shield hard into the Red King's belly.
The Red King laughed and heaved for breath, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and leaving a long black streak up the length of his arm. "Do you expect to beat me?" he said, stepping out and forcing the water to the knight's back.
"You're half-crippled with that wound, half-crazed with the infection, and I've already beaten you once," the knight retorted, crouching down to scoop up a handful of small wet stones. "So yes, I rather rate my chances."
The Red King feinted left then swung around hard right. The knight brought his shield out to cover his flank, too late. He barely noticed the notched sword tear through his hip but felt the sudden weakness in his leg.
Quick blood ran down his body into the water, and the Red King touched the black wound on his own thigh. "Evened things out a little, wouldn't you say?"
The knight gritted his teeth and rolled his shoulders into a shrug. "Only seemed fair, the way you're flailing that sword around," he said. "It was either let you land a blow, or give up my shield and see if you could fare any better against an unarmed man."
The Red King laughed, and when the knight thrust forwards he stepped carelessly aside. "You have a quick tongue on you, boy," he said.
"And you have the eyes of a cave-dwelling rat. Shall we see how well a rat fights blind?"
The knight moved to make another blow, but when the Red King brought up his sword, he threw the handful of scree and dirt into his face, then struck him with the shield's edge. The Red King crumpled down into the lake. His red hair drifted into black water, and when he made to regain his feet the knight straddled him and pressed the top edge of his shield against the Red King's throat. In response, the tip of the sword pressed into the soft flesh under the knight's jaw.
In the sudden quiet, their breath echoed off Y Brenin and came back to them out of the fog.
"I could lay your throat open," the Red King said, spitting water. "Leave you here to bleed to death."
"The edge on that is as blunt as a tourney sword," the knight said calmly. "Do you think that I would die before I broke your neck?"