Only the Valiant (The Way of Steel—Book 2)

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Royce ran through the forest, feeling the crunch of branches underfoot, clutching his sheathed sword to his side so it wouldn’t catch against any of the trees. Without the horse he’d stolen, he wasn’t moving fast enough. He needed to go faster.

He ran faster, spurred on by the thought of getting back to the people he cared about. The Red Isle had taught him to keep running, regardless of the way his heart hammered in his chest, or his legs ached. He’d survived the trap-filled run across the island, so forcing himself to run further and faster through a forest was nothing.

The speed and strength that he possessed helped. Trees flashed by on either side, branches scraping at him and Royce ignoring them. He could hear woodland creatures scurrying to get clear of this thing running through their territory, and he knew that he had to find a better way to make progress than this. If he kept making this much noise, he would attract every soldier in the dukedom.

“Let them come,” Royce whispered to himself. “I’ll kill them all.”

A part of him wanted to do that and more. He’d managed to kill the lord who’d put him and his friends in the fighting pit; he’d managed to kill those guards who had come at him… but he also knew that he couldn’t take on a whole land’s worth of enemies. The strongest, fastest, most dangerous of men couldn’t fight more than a few enemies alone, because there would simply be too many places that a blade could come from unexpectedly.

“I’ll find a way to do something,” Royce said, but he slowed anyway, moving through the forest more carefully, trying not to disturb the peace of the trees around him. He could hear the birds and the creatures there now, the sounds turning what had felt like an empty space into a landscape of sounds that seemed to fill everything.

What could he do? His first instinct when he’d run had been to keep going, out into the wild spaces where men didn’t live, and the Picti held sway. He’d thought about disappearing, simply vanishing, because what was there to hold him there?

Briefly, his mind flashed to an image of Genevieve, staring down from the stands of the fighting pit, apparently uncaring. He pushed that image aside, because he didn’t want to think about Genevieve. It hurt too much to do it, when she’d done that. Why shouldn’t he disappear into the spaces where men didn’t live?

One reason was Mark. His friend had fallen in the pit, but Royce hadn’t seen the moment of his death. A part of him wanted to believe that somehow Mark might have survived it when the games had been disrupted like that. Wouldn’t the nobles want to see another fight from him if they could get it? Wouldn’t they want to get all the entertainment that they could from his friend?

“He has to be alive,” Royce said, “he has to be.”

Even to him, it sounded as though he was trying to convince himself. Royce shook his head and kept going through the forest, trying to orient himself. He felt as though he wouldn’t be able to do anything until he got home. He would get there, and then, once he was safe again, he would be able to make a plan about what to do next. He would be able to decide whether to run, or try to find Mark, or somehow magic up an army with which to take on the duke’s men.

“And maybe I’ll pull it out of thin air,” Royce said, and kept moving. He moved with the speed of a hunted animal now, keeping low, ducking under foliage and picking his way over the leaf litter without slowing down.

He knew the forest. He knew the routes through it as well as anyone, because he’d spent more than enough time here with his brothers. They’d chased one another through it, and hunted small creatures. Now he was the one being chased, and hunted, and trying to find a way clear of it all. He was fairly sure that there was a hunting track not far from where he stood, that would lead down to a small brook, past a charcoal burner’s hut, and then down toward the village.

Royce headed for it, picking his way through the forest, and was dragged from his thoughts by a sound in the distance. It was soft, but it was there: the sound of feet moving lightly over broken ground. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t spent so much time with his brothers in these forests, or if he hadn’t learned on the Red Isle that there could be threats anywhere.

“Do I wait, or do I hide?” he asked himself. It would be easy to step out onto the track, because he could only hear a single person coming, and they didn’t even sound like a soldier. Soldiers’ steps had the crisp click of boots, the jangle of armor, and the scrape of spear hafts against the ground. These steps were different. Probably, it was just a crofter or a woodsman.

Even so, Royce hung back, crouching in the shadow of a tree, in a spot where its roots arched up to form a kind of natural enclosure that probably played host to animals when the light faded. Some of the branches nearby were low enough that Royce could pull them down in front of him to block sight there, but still be able to look out over the path. He crouched in place, staying still, his hand never straying far from his sword.

When Royce saw the single figure approaching along the track, he almost stepped out. The man there appeared to be unarmed and unarmored, wearing only loose-fitting gray silk clothing that seemed dark and shapeless. His feet were encased in slippers of equally gray hide, with wraps reaching up over his ankles. Something stopped him though, and as the man got closer, Royce could see that his skin was just as gray, marked by tattoos in purple and red that formed swirls and symbols, as though someone had used him as the only available surface to write some mad text on.

Royce wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but there was something about this man that felt dangerous in a way he couldn’t place. Suddenly he was grateful that he’d stayed where he was. He had the feeling that if he were standing on the track right then, conflict wouldn’t be far behind.

He felt his hand tighten on his sword hilt, the urge to leap out there unbidden in his mind. Royce forced his hand to relax, remembering the field of deadfalls and tripwires on the Red Isle. The boys who had rushed in without thinking there had died before Royce could even begin to lead them across safely. This had the same feel. He wasn’t afraid, exactly, but at the same time he could feel that this man was anything other than harmless.

For now, the sensible thing to do seemed to be to stay still; to not even breathe.

Even so, the man on the track stopped, c*****g his head to one side as if listening to something. Royce saw the stranger crouch, frowning as he took a selection of objects from a pocket and cast them on the ground.

“You are fortunate,” the stranger said, without looking up. “I only kill those the fates send me to kill, and the runes say that we are not to fight yet, stranger.”

Royce didn’t answer as one by one, the stranger picked up his stones.

“There is a boy who needs to die because the fates decree it,” the man said. “But you should still know my name and know that eventually, fate comes for us all. I am Dust, an angarthim of the dead places. You should leave. The runes say that much death will follow in your wake. Oh, and do not head in the direction of the village that way,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “A large body of soldiers was heading for it when I left.”

He stood and padded off, leaving Royce crouched there, breathing harder than he would have thought, given that all he had done was hide. There was something about that stranger’s presence that had seemed to almost crawl over his skin, something wrong about him in ways that Royce couldn’t begin to articulate.

If there had been more time, Royce might have kept crouching there, suspecting more danger from the man. Instead, the only things that mattered were his words. If soldiers were heading for the village, that could only mean one thing…

He started running again, faster than ever. On the right, he saw a charcoal burner’s hut, smoke behind it suggesting that the owner was at work. A horse that looked as though it was more accustomed to drawing a cart than to being ridden stood in front of it, hitched to a post. The house seemed quiet, and on another day maybe Royce might have wondered about that, or shouted for the owner to try to persuade them to let him borrow the horse.

As it was, he merely cut it free from the hitching post, leaping onto its back and heeling it forward. Almost miraculously, the creature seemed to know what was expected of it, galloping forward while Royce clung to its back, hoping that he would be in time.

***

It was sunset when Royce emerged from the forest, the red of the sky closing in on the world like a b****y hand. For a moment, the glare of the setting sun was enough that Royce couldn’t see past the redness to the ground below, as the whole world appeared to be on fire.

Then he saw, and he realized that the flame red was no trick of the sunset. His village was on fire.

Parts of it burned brightly, thatched roofs turned into bonfires by the flames, so that the whole skyline seemed filled with it. More of it was blackened and smoking, soot-colored timbers standing like the skeletons of the lost buildings. One toppled over even as Royce watched, creaking and then falling, tumbling to the ground with a crash.

“No,” he murmured, dismounting and leading his stolen horse forward. “No, I can’t be too late.”

He was though. The fires that burned were old ones, holding a grip now only on the largest buildings, where there was the most to burn. The rest of his village was a thing of charcoal and acrid smoke, so long from the point where the fire caught that Royce could never have hoped to get there. The man he’d passed on the road had said that soldiers were arriving as he left, but Royce had reckoned without the distance, and the time it would take to cover it.

Finally, he couldn’t avoid it any longer, and looked down to where the bodies lay. There were so many of them: men and women, young and old, all killed indiscriminately, and clearly no mercy shown. Some of the bodies lay among the ruins, as blackened as the wood around them; others lay in the streets, with gaping wounds that told the story of how they had died. Royce saw some cut down from the front where they had tried to fight, some hacked down from behind when they had tried to run. He saw a cluster of the younger women, killed off to one side. Had they thought that this was just another raid for the nobles to take what they wanted from them all, right up to the moment when someone had cut their throats?

Pain flowed through Royce, and anger, and a hundred other things, all balled up into a knot that felt as though it might tear his heart in two. He staggered through the village, looking at death after death, barely able to believe that even the duke’s men would do something like this.

They had, though, and there was no undoing it.

“Mother!” Royce called out. “Father!”

He dared to hope, in spite of the horrors around him. Some of the village’s inhabitants must have made it to safety. Marauding soldiers were sloppy, and people could escape, couldn’t they?

Royce saw another knot of bodies on the ground, and this one looked different, because there were no sword wounds on the bodies. Instead, they looked as though they had simply… died, killed with bare hands, perhaps, but even on the Red Isle, that was reckoned a difficult thing. Royce didn’t care right then, because although these people were ones he knew, they weren’t the ones he was trying to find. They weren’t his parents.

“Mother!” Royce called out. “Father!”

He knew that soldiers might hear him if they were still there, but he didn’t care. A part of Royce even welcomed the prospect of them coming, because it meant a chance to kill them, and make them pay.

“Are you there?” Royce called out, and a figure staggered from one of the buildings, soot-caked and haggard looking. For an instant, Royce’s heart leapt, thinking that maybe his mother had heard him, but then he realized that this wasn’t her. Instead, he recognized the form of Old Lori, who had always terrified the children with her stories, and who sometimes claimed that she had the Sight.

“Your parents are dead, boy,” she said, and in that moment the world seemed to break for Royce. The whole of it froze in place, caught between one heartbeat and the next.

“They can’t be,” Royce said, shaking his head, unwilling to believe it. “They can’t be.”

“They are.” Lori moved to sit against the remains of a low wall. “As dead as I’ll be soon.”

Even as she said it, Royce saw the blood on her rough-spun gown, the hole where a sword had gone in and out.

“Let me help you,” he said, starting toward her, in spite of the fresh surge of pain that had come from what she’d said about his parents. Focusing on her felt like the only way not to feel it in that moment.

“Don’t you touch me!” she said, pointing a finger at him. “You think I don’t see the darkness that follows you like a cloak? You think I don’t see the death and destruction that seeks out everything you touch?”

“But you’re dying,” Royce said, trying to persuade her.

Old Lori shrugged. “Everything dies… well, nearly,” she said. “Even you eventually, although you’ll shake the world before then. How many more will die for your dreams?”

“I don’t want anyone to die,” Royce said.

“They will anyway,” the old woman countered. “Your parents did.”

Fresh anger flashed through Royce. “The soldiers. I’ll—”

“Not the soldiers, not for them. It seems there’s more who see the dangers that follow you, boy. A man came here, and I smelled the death on him so strong I hid. He killed strong men without trying, and when he went to your home…”

Royce could guess the rest. He realized something worse in that moment, the full horror of it striking him.

“I saw him. I saw him on the road,” Royce said. His hand tightened on his sword. “I should have stepped out. I should have killed him there.”

“I saw what he did,” Old Lori said. “He’d have killed you as surely as you killed all of us just by being born. I’ll give you a piece of advice, boy. Run. Run away into the wilds. Let no one see you again. Hide as I once hid, before I was this.”

“After this?” Royce demanded, his anger flaring. He could feel hot tears on his face now, and he couldn’t work out if they were grief, or anger, or something else. “You think I can walk away after all of this?”

The old woman closed her eyes and sighed. “No, no, I don’t. I see… I see this whole land shifting, a king rising, a king falling. I see death, and more death, all because you can’t be anyone but who you are.”

“Let me help you,” Royce said again, reaching out to help plug the wound in Lori’s side. There was a flicker of something that felt like the shock from wool rubbed the wrong way, and Lori gasped.

“What have you done now?” she demanded. “Go, boy. Go! Leave an old woman to her death. I’m too tired for this. There’s plenty more death waiting for you, wherever you try to walk.”

She fell silent, and for a moment, Royce thought she might be resting, but she seemed too still for that. The village around him was still and silent once again. In that silence, Royce stood silently, not knowing what to do next.

Then he did know, and set off for the remains of his parents’ home.