Only the Valiant. Морган Райс

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СКАЧАТЬ to do seemed to be to stay still; to not even breathe.

      Even so, the man on the track stopped, cocking 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 bloody 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 СКАЧАТЬ