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‘Did that stay your hand, even once?’
‘Why would it, milord?’
‘Indeed, why would it?’ He then turned back to the clearing and its corpses. ‘Why would it, when justice serves the savage? Why would it, when the cause justifies the crime? Justifies? Absolves, more like. I wonder if the rise of priests among us was for the sole purpose of blessing the killing we would do. Priests, kings, warlords, highborn. And, of course, officers and the iron-clad fist that backs them.’ He swung round. ‘So bless this field. In the absence of priests, we can leave the gods out of it. Bless it for what it is, Ivis, in a world where killing is no crime.’
Shaken, Ivis backed up a step. ‘Milord, you give cause for despair.’
‘I give it? Abyss below, Ivis. I’ve but carved words to name what we’d rather not name. If the messenger delivers despairing news, is he the cause of it?’
He moved past Ivis then, on his way back to their camp upon the road. Ivis waved his squad to follow, watched them file silently past, and finally, with a lingering glance back at the glade and its hooded sentinels murmuring among the trees, he took up the rear.
We are past distinctions. He said as much. The field behind me announces the same. And if, in these shattered woods, a goddess slowly sinks down upon a bed of spikes, to that crime even history is blind.
* * *
It was a delusion to imagine that a wild forest was filled with such bounty as to keep the belly full. Even in the absence of wolves and hunting cats to keep their numbers down, deer and elk could starve in the winter. Sharenas Ankhadu understood, now, the purpose behind the seasonal hunts of the Deniers. Victuals needed collecting, pits needed digging, meats smoked or salted to be buried in caches. In such a realm, bound to the seasons, a single family struggled, and what congress existed between each one was both fraught and tense.
The moans and pangs of an empty stomach found no relief in the sentiments of nobility and dignity. Nothing proud was conferred by the laying bare of raw need. And yet, she now recalled bitterly, she had, in shared company with her kin, often spoken with a kind of voyeuristic nostalgia, longing for simpler days, when purity meant fingers pressed deep into the earth, or the brutal pursuit of some scampering prey, as if her own blood held a memory of past lives, each one a paragon of virtue.
But time played its tricks with such things. The noble face with its mouth stained red, the battered hands with dirt beneath cracked and chipped nails, the worn furs and threadbare tunics, and the blank, solemn gaze so often mistaken for dignity, did not belong to her past, but existed in step with her – among these forest dwellers, and the castouts in their caves in the hills.
Delivering slaughter upon them had been a crime almost beyond measure.
Beloved Kagamandra, I now comprehend the meaning of unconscionable. No bleaching of the skin can cleanse what we have done here.
And now, see what we have made them,
our suffering kindred of the forest. If nobility hid in their mourning shrouds, the time for grief has passed.
She moved among corpses. She saw faces she recognized, although death stole away most of what she remembered of them. Most of the arrows had been cut out from the wounds they had made, although here and there a shattered shaft had been left behind, tossed aside once the arrowhead had been retrieved. Beyond the rough, jumbled line of fallen soldiers, there were others who had been caught in flight. Their frantic paths of retreat were plain enough to see.
Hallyd Bahann’s company, drawn here by Sharenas herself.
Here is a lesson, my love, but one I’ll not venture to broach. In any case, best look away now, as I become another raven amidst this feast. A flicker of this iron beak, some flesh to dull the pangs. While on the branches, jaded black eyes ponder their new rival.
Hearing a noise she turned.
Their approach had been quiet, and now they stood less than twenty paces away. Sharenas adjusted the knife in her hand, eyeing the strangers. Then her eyes narrowed.
Bah, he is anything but a stranger. ‘Gripp Galas,’ she said, her voice cracking with disuse. ‘Marriage palled, did it? The woman beside you is comely enough, but her instead of Hish Tulla? Age has taken your sight along with your wits.’
‘Sharenas Ankhadu?’
‘Why doubt who stands before you? Did I not visit your winter nest? Did I not huddle shivering beneath furs in that unheated cell you call a guest room?’
The woman suddenly scowled. ‘Once the fire was lit, it warmed up quickly enough.’
Sharenas squinted at her. ‘Ah, yes. You, then.’ She waved with her knife to the bodies surrounding them. ‘Seeking old friends, perhaps?’
‘If so,’ Gripp Galas said, ‘then for a different purpose than you, it would seem.’
‘The forest is unfriendly.’
‘And, I believe, has been so for some time, Sharenas Ankhadu.’
‘I am a deserter. A murderer of fellow officers and more than a few of these soldiers and scouts. They were hunting me.’
‘This was a battle, not an ambush,’ said the woman.
