There was no reason for them to be there. Unless Curnden Craw had done what he said he would, and told Black Dow the truth. And Curnden Craw was a man famous for always doing what he said he would. Calder licked his lips. Seemed a bit of a foolish decision now, to have gambled against the inevitable. Seemed he was such a good liar he’d managed to trick himself on his chances.

‘Prince Calder,’ whispered Shivers, taking a step forward.

Way too late to run. He’d only be running at the Union anyway. A mad hope tickled the back of his mind that his father’s closest might leap to his defence. But they hadn’t lasted as long as they had by pissing into the wind. He glanced at Pale-as-Snow and the old warrior offered him the tiniest shrug. Calder had given them a day to be proud of, but he’d get no suicidal gestures of loyalty and he deserved none. They weren’t going to set themselves on fire for his benefit any more than Caul Reachey was. You have to be realistic, as the Bloody-Nine had been so bloody fond of saying.

So Calder could only give a hopeless smile, and stand there trying to get his breath as Shivers took another step towards him, then another. That terrible scar loomed close. Close enough almost to kiss. Close enough so all Calder could see was his own distorted, unconvincing grin reflected in that dead metal ball of an eye.

‘Dow wants you.’

Luck. Some men have it. Some don’t.

Spoils

The smell, first. Of a kitchen mishap, perhaps. Then of a bonfire.

Then more. An acrid note that niggled at the back of Gorst’s throat.

The smell of buildings aflame. Adua had smelled that way, during the siege. So had Cardotti’s House of Leisure, as he reeled through the smoke-filled corridors.

Finree rode like a madwoman and, dizzy and aching as he was, she pulled away from him, sending men hopping from the road. Ash started to flutter down as they passed the inn, black snow falling. Rubbish was dotted about as the fence of Osrung loomed from the smoky murk. Scorched wood, broken slates, scraps of cloth raining from the sky.

More wounded here, dotted haphazardly about the town’s south gate, burned as well as hacked, stained with soot as well as blood, but the sounds were the same as they had been on the Heroes. As they always were. Gorst gritted his teeth against it. Help them or kill them, but someone please put an end to their damned bleating.

Finree was already down from her horse and making for the town. He scrambled after, head pounding, face burning, and caught up with her just inside the gate. He thought the sun might be dropping in the sky, but it hardly mattered. In Osrung it was choking twilight. Fires burned among the wooden buildings. Flames rearing up, the heat of them drying the spit in Gorst’s mouth, sucking the sweat out of his face, making the air shimmer. A house hung open like a man gutted, missing one of its walls, floorboards jutting into air, windows from nowhere to nowhere.

Here is war. Here it is, shorn of its fancy trappings. None of the polished buttons, the jaunty bands, the stiff salutes. None of the clenched jaws and clenched buttocks. None of the speeches, the bugles, the lofty ideals. Here it is, stripped bare.

Just ahead someone bent over a man, helping him. He glanced up, sooty-faced. Not helping. He had been trying to get his boots off. As Gorst came close he startled and dashed away into the strange dusk. Gorst looked down at the soldier he left behind, one bare foot pale against the mud. Oh, flower of our manhood! Oh, the brave boys! Oh, send them to war no more until next time we need a fucking distraction.

Where should we look?’ he croaked.

Finree stared at him for a moment, hair tangled across her face, soot stuck under her nose, eyes wild. But still as beautiful as ever. More. More. ‘Over there! Near the bridge. He’d have been at the front.’ Such nobility! Such heroism! Lead on, my love, to the bridge!

They went beneath a row of trees on fire, burning leaves fluttering down around them like confetti. Sing! All sing for the happy couple! People called out, voices muffled in the gloom. People looking for help, or looking for men to help, or men to rob. Figures shambled past, leaning on one another, carrying stretchers between them, casting about as though for something they had mislaid, digging at the wreckage with their hands. How could you find one man in this? Where would you find one man? A whole one, anyway.

There were bodies all about. There were parts of bodies. Strangely robbed of meaning. Bits of meat. Someone scrape them up and pack them in gilt coffins back to Adua so the king can stand to attention as they pass and the queen can leave glistening tear-tracks through her powder and the people can tear their hair and ask why, why, while they wonder what to have for dinner or whether they need a new pair of shoes or whatever the fuck.

‘Over here!’ shouted Finree, and he hurried to her, hauled a broken beam aside, two corpses underneath, neither one an officer. She shook her head, biting her lip, put one hand on his shoulder. He had to stop himself smiling. Could she know the thrill that touch sent through him? He was wanted. Needed. And by her.

Finree picked her way from one ruined shell to another, coughing, eyes watering, tearing at rubbish with her fingernails, turning over bodies, and he followed. Searching every bit as feverishly as she did. More, even. But for different reasons. I will drag aside some fallen trash and there will be his ruined, gaping corpse, not half so fucking handsome now, and she will see it. Oh no! Oh yes. Cruel, vicious, lovely fate. And she will turn to me in her misery, and weep upon my uniform and perhaps thump my chest lightly with her fist, and I will hold her, and whisper insipid consolations, and be the rock for her to founder upon, and we will be together, as we should have been, and would have been had I had the courage to ask her.

Gorst grinned to himself, teeth bared as he rolled over another body. Another dead officer, arm so broken it was wrapped right around his back. Taken too soon with all his young life ahead of him and blah, blah, blah. Where is Brock? Show me Brock.

A few splinters of stone and a great crater, flooded by churning river water, were all that remained to show where Osrung’s bridge once stood. Most of the buildings around it were little more than heaps of rubbish, but one stone-built was largely intact, its roof stripped off and some of the bare rafters aflame. Gorst struggled towards it while Finree picked at some bodies, one arm over her face. A doorway with a heavy lintel, and in the doorway a thick door twisted from its hinges, and just showing beneath the door, a boot. Gorst reached down and heaved the door up like the lid of a coffin.

And there was Brock. He did not seem badly injured at a first glance. His face was streaked with blood, but not smashed to pulp as Gorst might have hoped. One leg was folded underneath him at an unnatural angle, but his limbs were all attached.

Gorst bent over him, placed a hand over his mouth. Breath. Still alive. He felt a surge of disappointment so strong that his knees nearly buckled, closely followed by a sobering rage. Cheated. Gorst, the king’s squeaking clown, why should he have what he wants? What he needs? What he deserves? Dangle it in his fat face and laugh! Cheated. Just as I was in Sipani. Just as I was at the Heroes. Just as I always am.

Gorst raised one brow, and he blew out a long, soft breath, and he shifted his hand down, down to Brock’s neck. He slid his thumb and his middle finger around it, feeling out the narrowest point, then gently, firmly squeezed.

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?

He squeezed a little harder, impatient to be done. Brock did not complain. Did not so much as twitch. He was so nearly dead anyway. Nothing more than nudging fate in the right direction.

So much easier than all the others. No steel and screams and mess, just a little pressure and a little time. So much more point than all the others. They had nothing I needed, they simply faced the other way. I should be ashamed of their deaths. But this? This is justice. This is righteous. This is—

‘Have you found anything?’

Gorst’s hand sprang open and he shifted it slightly so two fingers were pressed up under Brock’s jaw, as if feeling for a pulse. ‘He’s alive,’ he croaked.

Finree leaned down beside him, touched Brock’s face with a trembling hand, the other pressed to her mouth, gave a gasp of relief that might as well have been a dagger in Gorst’s face. He slid one arm under Brock’s knees, the other under his back, and scooped him up. I have failed even at killing a man. It seems my only choice is to save him.

A surgeon’s tent stood near the south gate, canvas turned muddy grey by the falling ash. Wounded waited outside for attention, clutching at assorted injuries, moaning, or whimpering, or silent, eyes empty. Gorst stomped through them and up to the tent. We can jump the queue, because I am the king’s observer, and she is the marshal’s daughter, and the wounded man is a colonel of the most noble blood, and so it is only fitting that any number of the rank and file can die before bastards like us are inconvenienced.

Gorst pushed through the flap and set Brock down ever so gently on a stained table, and a tight-faced surgeon listened at his chest and proclaimed him alive. And all my silly, pretty little hopes strangled. Again. Gorst stepped back as the assistants crowded in, Finree bending over her husband, holding his sooty hand, looking eagerly down into his face, her eyes shining with hope, and fear, and love.

Gorst watched. If it was me dying on that table, would anyone care? They would shrug and tip me out with the slops. And why shouldn’t they? It would be better than I deserve. He left them to it, trudged outside and stood there, frowning at the wounded, he did not know how long for.

‘They say he is not too badly hurt.’

He turned to look at her. Forcing the smile onto his face was harder work than climbing the Heroes had been. ‘I am … so glad.’

‘They say it is amazing luck.’

‘Too true.’

They stood there in silence a moment longer. ‘I don’t know how I can ever repay you …’

Easy. Abandon that pretty fool and be mine. That’s all I want. That one little thing. Just kiss me, and hold me, and give yourself to me, utterly and completely. That’s all. ‘It’s nothing,’ he whispered.

But she had already turned and hurried into the tent, leaving him alone. He stood for a moment as the ash gently fluttered down, settled across the ground, settled across his shoulders. Beside him a boy lay on a stretcher. On the way to the tent, or while waiting for the surgeon, he had died.

Gorst frowned down at the body. He is dead and I, self-serving coward that I am, still live. He sucked in air through his sore nose, blew it out through his sore mouth. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Obvious, perhaps. Something that everyone knows. Something that everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor. He poked at the boy’s corpse with a toe, rolled it onto its side, then let it flop back. Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.

He stepped over the corpse and walked back towards Osrung, past the shambling grey ghosts that clogged the road. He was no more than a dozen steps inside the gate when he heard a voice calling to him.

‘Over here! Help!’ Gorst saw an arm sticking from a heap of charred rubbish. Saw a desperate, ash-smeared face. He clambered carefully up, undid the buckle under the man’s chin, removed his helmet and tossed it away. The lower half of his body was trapped under a splintered beam. Gorst took one end, heaved it up and swung it away, lifted the soldier as gently as a father might a sleeping child and carried him back towards the gate.

‘Thank you,’ he croaked, one hand pawing at Gorst’s soot-stained jacket. ‘You’re a hero.’

Gorst said nothing. But if only you knew, my friend. If only you knew.

Desperate Measures

Time to celebrate.

No doubt the Union would have their own way of looking at it, but Black Dow was calling this a victory and his Carls were minded to agree. So they’d dug new fire-pits, and cracked the kegs, and poured the beer, and every man was looking forward to a double gild, and most of ’em to heading home to plough their fields, or their wives, or both.

They chanted, laughed, staggered about in the gathering darkness, tripping through fires and sending sparks showering, drunker’n shit. All feeling twice as alive for facing death and coming through. They sang old songs, and made up new ones with the names of today’s heroes where yesterday’s used to be. Black Dow, and Caul Reachey, and Ironhead and Tenways and Golden raised up on high while the Bloody-Nine, and Bethod, and Threetrees and Littlebone and even Skarling Hoodless sank into the past like the sun sinking in the west, the midday glory of their deeds dimming just to washed-out memories, a last flare among the stringy clouds before night swallowed ’em. You didn’t hear much about Whirrun of Bligh even. About Shama Heartless, not a peep. Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

‘Beck.’ Craw lowered himself stiffly down beside the fire, a wooden ale cup in one hand, and gave Beck’s knee an encouraging pat.

‘Chief. How’s your head?’

The old warrior touched a finger to the fresh stitches above his ear. ‘Sore. But I’ve had worse. Very nearly had a lot worse today, in fact, as you might’ve noticed. Scorry told me you saved my life. Most folk wouldn’t place a high value on that particular article but I must admit I’m quite attached to it. So. Thanks, I guess. A lot of thanks.’

‘Just trying to do the right thing. Like you said.’

‘By the dead. Someone was listening. Drink?’ And Craw offered out his wooden mug.

‘Aye.’ Beck took it and a good swallow too. Taste of beer, sour on his tongue.

‘You did good today. Bloody good, far as I’m concerned. Scorry told me it was you put that big bastard down. The one who killed Drofd.’

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