A Warrior's Burden: Book One of Saga of the Known Lands

by Jacob Peppers

  “I’m sorry, lad,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean…”

  “No,” Matt said, “no, I’m sorry. I didn’t know…about your husband and your daughter…I didn’t—”

  Maeve waved a hand. “Leave it, lad. I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered, believe me I am. I only…you see, Matt, I have lived a long time—longer than I ever expected to, in truth. And I have seen people’s grief turn them into monsters. I would not see that happen to you, not if I could help it. But I understand, I do, understand the desire to defend yourself. So if you really want him to teach you…”

  “I asked him before,” Matt said softly, his shoulders slumping. “He said no.”

  She nodded. “Well. Just think on it, okay, lad? Sleep on it. And if, when you wake in the morning, you still want to learn…I’ll talk to him. Okay?”

  “Really?” he asked, turning to her, and there was no denying—no matter how much she might have wanted to—the hope in his eyes, in his voice. “You would do that?”

  Maeve sighed. “Yes. I would, if you really want me to, I will. But I can’t promise you it’ll do any good. Cutter makes his own decisions—he always has.”

  He nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t…” But they were words spoken for her, she saw that from his face, saw that they were just his attempt to soothe things over, words meant as an apology. “But, Maeve…can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “If Cutter really is a prince…then why…why does he care about me? Why did he take me away from the village? Why was he even in the village in the first place?”

  She winced. “I don’t want to keep you in the dark, Matt, I know how that feels. But if you want Cutter’s reasons, you’d best ask him yourself.”

  Matt sighed. “He won’t tell me. He doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Maeve watched the boy, feeling sorry for him. A boy with a history he knew nothing about, a bloody, tragic legacy from which he had come. A legacy which would follow him, one way or the other, for the rest of his life. There were those—many—who would see him killed for that legacy, would execute him for crimes he had not committed and for reasons he did not understand. “I’ll talk to him,” she said finally. Then she rose.

  “You’re leaving?” he said, looking up at her. Fifteen or sixteen years old. Not a child, not anymore, but neither was he a man, and like a child, he was watching her, frightened at the thought of being alone, and that she understood. After all, children were scared of monsters in their closets, under their beds, but she knew enough of the world, had lived and struggled and suffered within it long enough to understand, as all adults came to, sooner or later, that the monsters they had imagined in their youths were actually very real. Only, the real monsters did not hide underneath beds or in wardrobes. Instead, they walked among men, hidden in plain sight, often behind smiles and soft words, but monsters just the same. Sometimes, those monsters were people you knew. Sometimes, they were your friends, your family. Sometimes, they were your prince.

  “Yes,” she said, moving toward the door. “You need your sleep—we all do. If I know Cutter, he’ll want an early start in the morning, so you’d best rest while you can.”

  “Okay,” he said in a soft voice. “Sleep well, Maeve.”

  “And you,” she said, giving him a wink before turning and stepping out of the room, closing the door behind her. Sleep well. Maeve appreciated the sentiment, truly she did, but she doubted that she would sleep well. Doubted, in fact, that she would sleep at all. More likely, she would spend hours tossing and turning, thinking and worrying, and regretting, that most of all. But even that lay somewhere beyond her, minutes or hours, there was no way to know for sure.

  No, she would not shuffle to her room to lay and nestle curled up against her regrets and her fears. At least, not yet.

  There was something she had to do first.

  ***

  It did not take her long to find him. There were others standing surrounding the great blaze, villagers mourning their dead, sending prayers up into the air to accompany the great pillar of dark smoke drifting into the sky. There were other forms, many, men and women who could have been anyone, their forms vague and indistinct in the darkness, yet it was not difficult to pick him out.

  For one, there was the fact that he was far taller and wider at the shoulders than any of those others gathered around the fire, but mostly it was because while those others huddled in groups, those who had lost the most sobbing and wailing while those with them did their best to offer what little comfort they could, he stood alone. A lone figure receiving no comfort and giving none, a figure who stood so still that he might have been a statue placed to appear as if it regarded the flames.

  She had known she would find him here, had been able to trace her way to him as easily as if she’d had a map. He doubted that, if he were asked, he could have explained what had brought him here to this great blaze within which the corpses of those villagers who had died burned, but she knew well enough. He had come because he must come, the same way that a moth must brave the flames of a torch, attracted to it by some imperative which it could not deny. Only fire waited for the moth in its coming, only the possibility of drifting too close and being burned and it was much the same with him, for there was nothing here, nothing but grief and pain.

  But it was not grief, not pain that drew him. Neither was it, like the moth, the flame and the heat it provided. No, he was drawn, now, like always, to this place not from the fire or the grief and certainly not the comfort. He had been drawn to it because it was a place of death and now, as in all times since she had known him, her prince was drawn to death, seemed to gather it about himself like a cloak, like some dreaded creature of the night which survived only by the death of others. In the end, it changed nothing that the creature regretted its existence, its need to make use of such macabre fuel to sustain itself, for the creature, like the moth, could do nothing else.

  She wondered as she approached what thoughts ran through his mind as he stood staring at the blaze. Did any? Or did he only stand there, absorbing the death, the grief, the way those others around him absorbed the heat of the great pillar of flame?

  His back was to her, and he did not turn at her approach. The sound of her footsteps was covered by the cries of the bereaved and the sparking cinders of the dead as the fire crackled and popped, yet he grunted in recognition. “Maeve.”

  “Prince.”

  He did turn then, regarding her with a blank expression. “I’ve asked you not to call me that—I am a prince no longer.”

  “‘Course not,” she said, “and I’m not an old woman whose looks, such as they were, have been replaced with too many aches and pains to name. We are what we are, Prince, and we cannot change it just by the saying so. Priest was right about that much. I’m a woman who was once a celebrated beauty and who now is only old and tired and you…” She trailed off then, suddenly unable to finish.

  “And me,” he said, as if he knew well enough the words she’d left unspoken. “But some things do change, Maeve. Caterpillars turn into butterflies.”

  “We are not caterpillars, Prince,” she said softly, realizing how his words echoed her own thoughts from days before. “We are people and we do not change so easily as that.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said. It was not easy to tell—it never was as far as the prince was concerned—but she thought she detected the slightest bit of regret in his voice. She understood that regret, had seen it, heard it, in him before, and now, like then, she had no comfort to offer, so she only stood silently, turning to gaze at the fire.

  “But you are not right in all of it,” he said finally.

  She turned to glance at him, raising an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  He gave her a small smile, one that obviously cost him. “You are still beautiful, Maeve. Now as ever.”

  Despite everything, she felt her face flush with pleasure at his words. Ridiculous, of course, to feel
pleasure in the midst of so much death, so much pain, but then she told herself that it was only the way of the world. Tragedies happened, death happened. People lost those they loved—she herself had lost many—and they moved on. After all, what else could they do? But even that was not the most ridiculous part of it, for she knew that she was not for him. She had wanted him, once, she like every other woman in the kingdom, for while Cutter might be a killer, might be terrifying, there was often beauty, attraction in terror. It was why people feared the night—rightly so from what she had seen—yet still spent so many hours gazing into it, why so many bards and artists chose it as the subject of their works. Scary, yes. Unsettling. But beautiful.

  Cutter had been much the same fifteen years ago, and even now time had done nothing to detract from his allure. A big man, strong and powerful, and what lines time and pain had left on his once youthful, handsome features had not stolen their beauty but served, instead, to accentuate them. Yes, there had been a time when she had wanted him, and if she were being completely truthful with herself, part of her wanted him still. Wanted him in the same way that a woman might, upon seeing a terrible storm heading in her direction, neglect taking shelter, unable to pull her eyes away from the majesty, the horror of it. Yet as beautiful as she had once been, as famous as that beauty had once been, he had never been hers to have, not then and certainly not now.

  After all, a woman might appreciate that storm, a moth might seek the flame, but they could not cuddle up against it, and it would not keep them warm when the world grew cold. No, Cutter was not a man for love, or if he was, it was not for her. There had been one woman, once, one who Maeve believed the big man had loved dearly, at least as much as a man like him was capable of loving anything, but that had been a long time ago and it was that love which had led, in the end, to so much tragedy, to so much death.

  She knew that he could not love her, not like that, yet she found herself wanting to say something, wanting finally to divulge those feelings which she had held so close for so long, the feelings which she had never dared to share for fear of what he might say, what he might do. The words were on the tip of her tongue, threatening to spill out of her in a terrifying, damning, relieving flood—then a scream rose in the darkness, one not borne of fear or pain but of terrible grief, and she swallowed, choking the words back.

  Now, standing among such grief, with the ashes of Ferrimore’s dead rising in the air, was not the time. Perhaps there never would be one, and perhaps that was even for the best. After all, what good would it do? No good for her, certainly, and no good for him. More than that, it would not be fair, not for either of them, so now, like fifteen years ago, she chose to keep that love close, and lest the urge come upon her again, she decided to change the subject.

  “He loves you, you know.”

  “Who?”

  Matt. He loves you.”

  Cutter turned away from her, clearly uncomfortable, choosing the flame, choosing the dead, over the thought that the boy might love him. Others might have found it funny that a man who was at home on a battlefield with enemies seeking his death and a great axe in his hands and blood—his own and that of his enemies—staining him might be so discomfited by talk of love, but Maeve did not find it funny. Mostly, she found it sad.

  When it was clear that Cutter would say nothing, she sighed. “He wants you to train him.”

  He grunted. “I know.”

  “And yet…?”

  He turned back to her then, and though his face remained expressionless, she could see a storm of emotion in his gaze. “No. I…no.”

  She grunted. “You’re probably right. Being who he is, there’ll be no shortage of men and women wanting to see him dead, your brother chief among them. Better if he can do nothing to defend himself, if he’s only left at the mercy of men who have none.”

  He frowned. “I would have thought you’d be glad.”

  “In a perfect world, perhaps. In a world where villages were not massacred just to make a point to one man, in a world where men and women were not forced to feed the bodies of their loved ones to the fire and watch their ashes drift on the wind. But we do not live in a perfect world, Prince, and it is not a kindness to send the boy out into it without the means to defend himself.”

  He turned away and several seconds passed, so that she began to think he would not answer. But then, he did. “I wanted to protect him, Maeve. I would not send him out into the world, if I could help it. It is why I took him to Brighton in the first place.”

  “And yet, the world found him,” she said. “Your brother found him.”

  “I tried, Maeve,” he said, turning to her. “I wanted…I wanted to keep him safe.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “But no one is safe in this world, Prince, him least of all.”

  He met her eyes then, and his features twitched, as if the mask he always wore was threatening to come off. “What do I do, Maeve?”

  She grunted, startled by the question. She had known her prince for a long time and had lost count of the scraps they’d been in, had lost track of the number of times they had faced seemingly impossible odds and yet had managed to come out the other side. And in all those years, in all those bloody battles, she had never known him to be uncertain. Even when their situation had seemed dire, their deaths imminent—perhaps, even, especially then—he had always seemed to know what to do, had been a creature of certainty, of will, and it had been that will which had carried them through so much when others would have, when others had fallen. He had braved assassins, armies of the Fey, creatures out of nightmare, had beaten some of the world’s best warriors in single combat, and none of that had ever made so much as a crack in his seemingly insurmountable will. But where the world’s greatest warriors and most dire threats had not marred that certainty, a young boy had.

  A storm of emotions raged in Maeve then as she stared at his face, the mask of certainty gone for the first time she had ever seen, and chief among those was fear. Fear for what it might mean that the mask was finally slipping, for whatever else the man had been, brutal, often cruel, he had always been certain, and it had been that certainty, more than anything, which seemed to make him more than a man, which made him, instead, a force of nature. One that could never be defeated, could never be killed, one that a person could only hope to avoid or, if avoiding was impossible, hunker down beneath the force of it the way a family might hunker down at the approach of an impending storm.

  It rocked her, seeing that mask slip, seeing that beneath it all, beneath the thousands of stories told about him, her prince was just a man after all. Suddenly she felt short of breath. She had not realized until that moment just how much she had come to rely on the man’s strength, on his certainty even while she’d thought him less than human because of it. And he was less than human, that much she still believed, but he was more too. “You talk to him, Prince,” she finally said.

  He frowned. “Talk to him? What good will that do?”

  “More than you know,” she said honestly. “You have kept him alive thus far, a task most would have thought impossible, particularly since your brother has been hunting him since he was born. But it isn’t enough only to live, Prince. We know that better than anyone…don’t we?”

  “What will I say?”

  Asking her as if she somehow knew, he, the world’s most feared man, staring at her with fear in his own eyes, waiting for her answer. And here, at least, she would not disappoint him. “The truth, Prince. He has not had an easy life so far, and I doubt it will get an easier. Tell him the truth.”

  “You mean…about his past? About…his mother?”

  “Yes,” she said, “for he deserves to know. But more than that, tell him how you feel.” She leaned close. “Tell him about his father.”

  He recoiled at that as if she’d slapped him, his eyes widening with surprise. “The truth,” he said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  He considered that, seemed on the verge of agreei
ng, perhaps even on the verge of tears, a sight she would have never thought to see, but then his features shifted, and the fear and uncertainty left his face, and he was the man, the force, she had known once more. He regarded her with hard, blue, somehow cold eyes. “I will train the boy,” he said finally, his voice dry and without any hint of emotion.

  She stared at him for several seconds, trying to decide what she was feeling to see the mask in place once more. Was it regret? Relief? Perhaps it was a mixture of both. She sighed. “I think that will be good.”

  “But even so, that will not guarantee that he will be safe.”

  “No,” she said. “This world, Prince, is full of much—pain and grief and fear. But guarantees, I’m afraid, are in short supply. As long as he is alive, the boy will have those who seek his death. As long as he is alive, Feledias will not stop until he sees him dead.”

  “You’re saying that I cannot keep him safe.”

  “I’m saying that no one’s safe, Cutter. Still, as for the boy’s safety…I’ve got some ideas about that.”

  “What are they?”

  She winced. “You’re not going to like them.”

  He sighed. “No, no I don’t expect I will.”

  “As long as the boy acts like a fugitive—as long as you act like he is—then he’ll be treated like one. Feledias and his ilk will never stop hunting him, and the price on his head will only continue to increase.”

  “So what, then?”

  She turned to him, meeting his eyes. “A fugitive can be hunted down, can be accosted everywhere he goes. But a prince—”

  “No.”

  The word was a dry growl. The mask slipping again, but this time giving way not before sadness or fear but anger—and that, at least, was familiar. Maeve knew, logically, that the man would not kill her, that she was his friend or at least as close to one as a person like him was capable of having. The problem, though, was that knowing a thing logically and knowing it emotionally were very different. She believed she was the man’s friend, but then she had thought of him, so recently, as a force of a nature, like a thunderstorm or a tornado. And only a fool tried to befriend either. Her mouth felt impossibly dry, and she cleared her throat. “What I mean—”