The Bloody North (The Fallen Crown) (2 page)

The rain beats down hard outside the tavern and Rowan has never been more glad for the roaring fire Ceeli has going, or the beer she keeps his tankard filled with. Even for the company of Tarl, mouth running away with him, talking about
everything and anything just for the sake of talking. Rowan doesn't mind. He likes it. There were too many years spent in one remote nook of Starkgard or the other, wandering, fighting and all the rest. This is normal. This is good. There'd never been a chance for idle chat.

Having turned his back on
that life, he finds he appreciates the simple stuff. Working the ground with his bare hands, rain or shine, warm or biting cold. The love of a good woman, Sara, and his young children Rilen and Mae. A life of simple requirements and even simpler pleasures.

He lifts the tankard to his lips, takes a long swallow of the frothy brew. It's not the best he's ever taste
d, but Ceeli, the landlady, does a passable job at brewing her own from scratch – so much so, he can't complain.

"Better get back after this," he tells Tarl.

"You can't stay for just one more?"

He shakes his head. "Strict instructions. There's a stew on the make. Dumplings and all," he says, smiling at the thought. Who'd have ever imagined Rowan Black would take such comfort in a woman cooking dinner for him? Of returning to their home, sitting at the table with his family and enjoying a good meal? Certainly not him. Muriel Bonnet would've laughed at such a notion for sure. "More than my life's worth, if I don't get back in time."

"The stew will keep," Tarl says.

"Yeah but not the dumplings. Sara does them big as fists," Rowan tells him. "Trouble is, leave them too long
, they turn to rocks. And it'll be Sara beating me round the fucking head with them."

Tarl snigger
s into his beer.

"You laugh
 . . ." Rowan says.

He
drains his tankard, makes to leave. Tarl catches his arm.

"Come on. Just one."

Rowan weighs it up – in the same way he decided the fate of men's lives in the past. He weighs his options the same as when he'd selected weapons to carry into battle. The same as when he'd stood with Muriel Bonnet at the siege of Cabril, facing certain death, the pair of them wondering whether they should forget their contract and just escape while they could. They hadn't in the end. They'd stayed. They'd fought. That wasn't how they'd conducted business.

The rest
– their legacy – was history.

"Al
l right," he says, sitting back down. He nudges the tankard toward Ceeli and watches as she fills it, the frothy head wobbling as she sets it in front of him. "Just this one."

* * *

He cried out, screamed, knew he was hot –
burning hot
– hotter than the fires of hell. And yet he shivered with the cold. He felt the sweat gushing out of him, hot at first, turning to beads of ice on his skin within seconds.

Rowan's head thumped
to the pounding of an invisible drum. On and on and on. Something cool pressed against his face and for the briefest of moments took everything away.

He sighed
with relief, heard someone say, "Be quiet. Save your strength. You owe it to them. Don't die here. Get through it."

Then
the hot shadows dragged him back . . .

* * *

"The notorious Bonnet and Black," Muriel says, laughing by the fireside, her dark face lit on one side by the dancing flames. "What would people say if they saw us now, eh? Sitting out here on our own, eating the finest chocolates money can buy?"

Rowan shove
s another chunk of dark chocolate into his mouth. "They'd say we're lucky bastards to have it."

"True enough," Muriel admit
s, eating another piece herself. "Gotta say I've never been a sweet kind of person–"

Rowan laughs, loud and sharp. "You're not kidding!"

"I meant in the food sense, fool," Muriel snaps. "But, it was going to go to waste, weren't it? Why bury it with them?"

"Glad we didn't."

Earlier that day they passed a coach turned over in the road, its occupants shot through with arrows. All of the valuables taken. Even the shoes of the dead. But missed by whomever had raided the coach, was a sack of chocolates. Not the everyday kind one could purchase at a reasonable price in any town in Starkgard, but the fancy stuff the nobles paid good money for.

Rowan had liberated the dead of their fine chocolates
, and now the two of them sat around their fire, filling their faces like children.

Rowan look
s at her. With skin dark as hers, she should have been the one called Black. Muriel hailed from the far eastern edge of Starkgard, where it bordered with the Eastern Empire. There, out on the edges of Starkgard, blacks and whites mingle and marry freely – something frowned upon by those closer to central Starkgard, around the capital city of Akercrov. But that was in civilised society.

Out here, in the wilderness, in the unforbidding lands between towns and cities, the colour of a person's skin matters
little. In the Eastern Empire, Bonnet would have been born a slave. It's all relative.

He thinks of her name again. "You know, for a woman called Muriel Bonnet, you're not as soft as you sound."

"What makes you say that? I thought we were talking about how sweet I am . . ."

"You know what I mean," he says.

"I guess."

The fire crackles. He looks at her deep brown eyes, the smile on her lips, her smooth
, black skin. Not for the first time he finds Muriel Bonnet, his partner in crime, in war, in all manner of unholy matter
s
,
incredibly beautiful. "So frustrating . . ." he mutters.

"What is?"

"That you're so pleasing to the eye," he admits. "And you've no taste for men."

She shrugs. "I find you men far too smelly. Too rough."

"I've known women like that, too," he corrects her. "Some with more hair on their chin than a man."

"Fair point," she says. "But there's no getting around the fact a man can only come once. What use is
that to me? You can't . . . what's the fucking word . . ."

He thinks. "Reciprocate?"

Muriel snaps her fingers, a wide grin on her face. "That's it!"

"Reciprocate me arse," Rowan says, shaking his head as she laughs.

* * *

Hands worked all over his body, fingers pressing here and there,
tugging his skin. He was on his front, soft sheets beneath him. His eyes fluttered open; he looked to the side and could discern the fuzzy outline of someone standing by him. "Lay still."

He closed his eyes again, d
id as instructed, and fell back to a confused, jumbled sleep . . .

* * *

Sara looks about at the abandoned farmhouse, the tatty barn, the overgrown weeds and plants everywhere over what had once been farmland.

"What is it?"
She looks at him.

He squeezes her hand in his. "Ours."

"I don't understand."

"I bought it. Today. Got it at a good price, seeing as how run down it is."

She says nothing, just swallows and looks about once more, as if with renewed vision, as if she'd not seen it properly before. "Right."

"You're not happy?" he asks, wondering if he's made a mistake.

He brought a small fortune with him from his years roaming the country, going from one job to the next. Most of it he has hidden, but he kept a little back to buy a place, to tide them over while they made it all work. To get them set.

"If you think we can make a go of it
 . . ." she says doubtfully.

"I know we can," he insists. "We'll do it together."

"Okay," Sara says, turning to look at him, a smile on her thin lips. She plants a tender kiss on his cheek and Rowan closes his eyes, savouring her feather-like touch. "Together."

* * *

Rowan opened his eyes. He was still on his front. The bed creaked like the rigging of a ship as he turned onto his back, wincing from the pain.

Twilight lit the curtains from behind with a blue-grey hue. He struggled breathlessly to sit, gave up
, and flopped back. The muscles alongside his spine were on fire from where Quayle had cut him with the sword.

Rowan looked about at his lodgings.
A dim little place, with a jug and basin on a nightstand, a chest on the floor, what he recognised as his clothes in a pile on the floor, cleaner than when last he'd worn them.

He couldn't shake what had happened.
If only he'd not had that last drink with Tarl. He would have been home when the men arrived. Maybe he could've fought them off. Done something . . . stopped his son and daughter from dying in the fire.

Stop
ped my wife from being raped and murdered.

Rowan bit back the tears, didn't want to give the grief any further purchase
than it already had. Sometimes it could be akin to an unwanted tree, working its roots deep down inside his skull till it got so far he couldn't pull it back out without damaging everything around it. Rowan finally managed a sitting position, his whole back aching.

Where am I
?

The door opened to his right and a portly woman hobbled in. Rosy cheeks from too many glasses of port, red hair going grey. Apron smeared with grease.
Ceeli. Now it made sense. He was in one of the rooms she kept available upstairs at the tavern.

"Ah,
Sleeping Beauty wakes."

Rowan grimaced from the way his back sang out, being in a sitting position after what had happened.
The wound hurt, a line of fire beneath his skin. "How long have I been here?"

"Three days. You caught a fever for a time,
took me all night long but I drove it out," she said grimly. "Stitching on your back's my best work, I can tell ya. What with the poultice I've had on it, you've not done too bad. Stitches are holding up to muster."

"I'm not
counting on it healing up any day soon," Rowan said bitterly. He remembered the cut, the pain across his whole back. Almost as hot as the burning house behind him in which his children perished . . . "Bastard cut me up good."

"Well, I've seen worse," Ceeli said. "You're going to be just fine, in ya body
 . . . but the rest, well, only you can know that."

"I'm grateful for
everything you've done," Rowan assured her. Afraid of sounding insincere. Under her care, he'd survived. "Truly."

Ceeli st
ood with her hands shoved inside her apron. "It's a tragedy what happened out at your place. We're all in shock. I remember helping Sara birth those kiddies," she said, shaking her head, eyes wet. "Can't believe they've been taken like that."

Rowan didn't say anything. He lay back
down on the bed with a groan, the urge to do anything but just stay there diminished.

"Any idea who they were?"
she asked him.

He shook his head. "No.
Just soldiers."

"The men from the village went running to
ward the smoke. Time they got there, well . . . ya know . . ."

Rowan swallowed. "Yeah."

"It was Tarl brought you back here. Lucky I had a room free," Ceeli said.

"Not sure I can pay you for it
right now," Rowan said. "Might have to wait a few days."

She waved him off. "
No. Wish I could've done more."

Rowan looked away, to the
corner of the room. Anything not to have to look her in the eye. "None of it's gonna bring them back."

Ceeli fetched his clothes from the floor
and cleared her throat. "I washed your things for you," she said, setting them on the end of the bed. "Got most of the blood out."

"Thanks."

"Probably best if you get up and about soon as you can. Scar like that, sometimes it can turn into a knot. Cripple ya," she said. "End up with a stick and everything. If you get up and moving, maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be just as it was before."

"Yeah," Rowan said.
He thought:
Nothing will ever be the same again.

Ceeli took her leave and shut the door behind her
. When she was gone, Rowan let the grief out for some air. Let the tears roll free down his cheeks. Let the sobs heave inside his chest like an accordion played fast and loose. Let all the pain, and the hurt, and the misery come bleeding out from the raw, open wound inside of him, next to his heart. He'd never been one for allowing his emotions to run riot, free from restraint. But in that moment, he would not have cared if Ceeli had come walking back in and seen him in such a state.

When the grief subsided
, he fell back to a broken, tortured sleep . . .