AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Liath and Sharp Edge moved away.
“He’ll make no trouble,” said Sharp Edge in a low voice. “I am free to do what I wish. I want to stay with you.”
“Then I am pleased to have you. You are the third.”
“The third of what?”
“The third of my nest of phoenix. That is what I will call you, no matter what others say.”
“Who are first and second?” Sharp Edge asked with a petulant grimace. “I like to be first!”
“So you do. In this case, you are the first among your people, if we do not count Secha.”
“I will not count her!” said Sharp Edge with a laugh. “What others claim a place in front of me?”
“A Kerayit weather witch and her slave, who is a cleric—a holy man—of my own people. Look here.” She stared at the crown, counting its stones and studying the burial mounds that rose as hillocks at the edge of the firelight. “I feel I should know this place, yet I do not remember ever being here before. Look how straight and true all the stones stand!”
In their haste to follow Hugh, they had marched without sufficient traveling gear. Even Zuangua’s warriors complained at length, but jokingly, about the cold. It was a form of companionship. Everyone complained except Anna, who took her share of the night’s waybread and ate alone away from the rest. The mask warriors shared out the watch according to Zuangua’s command, but in the end Liath sat all night staring at the blind sky, unable to sleep because when she closed her eyes she remembered the vision she had suffered, the vision of Blessing in the custody of Hugh. Blessing, wed to Hugh. She retched, but her heaving brought up nothing. It was only nerves.
“Bright One, are you sick?” Sharp Edge squatted beside her.
“Sick at heart,” she murmured.
Zuangua slept, or pretended to. The others huddled together for warmth. A night breeze moaned among the stones. In its voice she heard the groans of the forgotten dead long buried under earth. They were surrounded by the dead, those buried here in ancient graves and those in the world beyond thrown into new graves, the countless legions who had died in the aftermath of the cataclysm and the armies of the suffering who would die in the months to come.
“How did he call lightning like that? How did he call the storm?” whispered Sharp Edge. “Can you work such sorcery?”
Her jaw was tight, and her voice bitter. “I do not know how.”
2
DEATH has a smell and a taste, and it can be heard as a whisper and felt as a touch on the lips when that last breath sighs free of the abandoned flesh. What a man might see, walking through the dusk as it swallows the field of battle, is only a shadow of the full understanding of death. With his hounds, he may kneel beside first one man and then another, and he may wish he had the means to heal them all, but another figure rides beside him and among some of these wounded she has already severed the thread that binds the soul to the body. They are already dead, although those around them do not yet know. Although they themselves may still stare at the sky and at their companions, waiting for aid or water or a comforting word.
In this matter, on this day, the Lady of Battles will defeat him. Her hand has swept the battlefield before he reached it. He can only do so much in the aftermath. This evening as he leaves the council of nobles and walks out of Kassel into the surrounding fields, he knows who will live and who will die. Here is a young Wendishman with the merest scratch on his leg and a faint and confused smile on his pleasant face, but he has been trampled and badly broken inside. Here is a Varren youth crying, with his shoulder torn open and flesh glistening as a battlefield chirurgeon plies a needle and thread to close it up and her assistant holds a salve of woundwort ready to bind into the injury, and already the lad’s humors stabilize.
He hopes this terrible burden will lift soon, that he will wake in the morning restored to blindness, but possibly he will always be so cursed. So be it. He accepts the path God has given him to walk.
The hounds tug at his sleeves and lead him past a row of cooling bodies and a contingent of soldiers digging a long grave under the supervision of a weary cleric reciting psalms. There is a tiny chapel built here atop an old foundation; oak saplings push up around it. A few graves are marked with lichen-covered stones, now unreadable, as though this cemetery was used a century ago and then abandoned. Many will populate it tonight.
The hounds pad past tents marking the Varren encampment and into the entangling siege works that protected the southeastern flank of the Varren camp. They sniff up to a half-finished ditch. Water seeps into the dirt. With the shadows drawing long, it is easy to overlook soldiers fallen where pickets have collapsed. In the ditch, a man lies with his legs pinned by a log and his face inches away from being submerged in the rising muddy seepage.
“Here! Here!” Alain shouts, getting the attention of a trio of filthy soldiers wearing the stallion tabards of Way land who happen to be walking past.
They do not know who he is, but they respond as soldiers do. When they see the man caught, they scramble down beside him, and with all four of them slipping and sliding and grunting and cursing and the hounds barking, they get the log lifted and the man—he is husky, no lightweight—dragged out of the ditch.
“Tss!” says one man, with the grizzled look of a veteran. “A Saony bastard, all right.”
So he is, with a crude representation of Saony’s dragon stitched to his dark tabard. When Alain wipes away the mud crusting his face, he is seen to be young, and the Wayland soldiers mumble and mutter and scratch their heads and finally, with a certain practical fatalism, check him for injuries. He’s been cut low, just above the hip, and one foot is broken. The gut injury, especially, is likely to turn black with imbalanced humors, although the youth so far smells no worse than the rest of the dead, dying, and wounded.
He sees her: the Lady of Battles rides across camp, coming into view between a pair of campfires. She is heading in their direction.
“What do we do with him?” asks one of the Wayland soldiers.
The veteran says, “There’s the Wendish camp. They can fetch him when their folk make a sweep this way.”
“Might not find him till morning,” says the youngest of the three. “Because of the dark.”
“Best we take him over there now,” says Alain. “As you’d wish done if it was one of your men found by the Wendish. He needs care right away.”
