The Crimson Shield (25 page)

‘What does he want, our great prince?’ The words dripped out of him. Twelvefingers had been so like the young Corvin that Yurlak had sent away. But the fates were fickle and Medrin
had almost died in his first battle at Corvin’s side, and the wound had taken years to truly heal, and by the time he was strong again, the war was all but done. Now look at him.

‘That’s for him to say, General.’

It hardly mattered. Tomorrow he’d either smash the Vathen or the Vathen would break him at last, and it would be what it would be. He followed the young soldier who’d been sent for
him, a man too young to even have a full beard yet. Medrin’s men they called themselves, the young ones who’d grown up seeing their fathers and their uncles sailing across the sea to
fight. Who were used to tales of war and battles, used to hearing of nothing but victory, even if maybe their fathers and half their uncles never came back again. They were hungry for it, feeling
they’d missed something, yet they had no idea of what war truly was. Tomorrow they’d know better.

Medrin had taken his tent. The Screambreaker supposed he was entitled. Yurlak’s son, after all, but didn’t he have his own?

‘Screambreaker.’ Medrin sat on a stool. He had a thin knife in his hand and he was using it to pick at the dirt under his fingernails.

‘Medrin.’ Corvin didn’t bow. Medrin might expect it but that was a Marroc thing. Lhosir faced one another as equals. Always.

‘You left Andhun to the Marroc.’

‘Yes.’

‘When I returned they tried to take the shield from me.’

‘Did they succeed?’

Medrin stopped his picking and looked up. ‘Clearly not, Screambreaker, otherwise I would not be here. Would you like to see it?’

‘I’ve seen it before.’ He nodded. ‘It’s a good thing. People will sing your saga for this. Your men will fight harder when they face the Vathen.’

‘Why did you leave Andhun, Screambreaker?’

‘To face the Vathen in the field.’

‘But Andhun has walls.’

‘It does. And a Lhosir doesn’t hide behind walls.’

‘And what’s a row of shields then, if not a wall, Screambreaker? Indeed, do we not call it a wall? A wall of shields?’

‘A wall held by men.’ Corvin closed his eyes for a moment. A headache. Yes, he had a headache coming. Now
there
was a thing that never used to trouble him on the night
before a battle. Slept like a newborn, he used to. ‘Do you mean to order us back through the gates, Medrin?’

‘I strongly doubt the Marroc will open them for you. If the reception they gave their prince is anything to go by, I imagine they’d welcome us with arrows and javelins and anything
else they can lift and throw.’

‘They gave their word they wouldn’t close their gates until the Vathen were in sight of the walls.’

‘Have you looked, Screambreaker? Don’t bother, because
I
have and they’re firmly shut. I had to beach my ship a mile down the coast to get here at all.’
Twelvefingers got up and walked to the back of the tent. He picked something out of the shadows, something dark and round. The shield. In the gloom it had lost its colour. ‘Are we going to
win, Screambreaker? Are
you
going to win?’

‘Yes.’ Strange to have no doubts about such a thing.

‘They are ten times our number.’

‘More like five.’

‘They beat you outside Fedderhun.’

‘Fedderhun was lost before the first blow.’

‘Yet you fought it anyway?’

‘Yes.’ Hoping some good might come of it. Or that he might finally die.

‘Me, I would have stayed behind the walls – as I was told by my prince until my prince came back and said otherwise.’ He lifted the shield. ‘You’ll face the Vathen
in the vanguard?’

‘A man who claims leadership can do no less.’

Medrin put a hand over his heart, over the wound he’d taken half a lifetime ago when he’d first crossed the sea. ‘Harder for some than others.’

‘Yes. But still true.’

‘Should I give you this shield then, since you say you lead my army?’

‘I lead those who will follow, no more. You took the shield. It’s yours by right.’

Twelvefingers smiled for a moment. ‘
You
took it first.’

‘And I lost it, and now you have it. It’s a shield and I already have one.’

‘I might give it to you as a gift.’

‘And I will accept any gift given with a good heart, Twelvefingers. But there’s no need.’

‘I’m displeased with you about Andhun, so you’ll get no gifts from me today. Win this battle and the shield is yours, Screambreaker. Now tell me how you’ll do
it.’

So Corvin told him. It wasn’t any work of genius. Only the plan of a man who’d seen more of war than any other.

G
allow watched Jyrdas burn through the night. As the flames died, he went back to the beached ship and slept. In the morning Valaric was waiting
for him. ‘Give me your axe. No Lhosir carries arms in the streets of Andhun now.’

‘My axe went to Jyrdas. If you want it, pick over his ashes.’

They walked side by side in silence up the beach, along the bank of the Isset and up the hill, past the castle towards the Castle Gate. The gibbets were all gone. Valaric followed his eyes.
‘What, did you think we’d leave them?’ Marroc soldiers fell in behind them. They jeered and threw insults, and if Valaric hadn’t been there, Gallow knew they would have set
upon him. They knew who he was.
What
he was.

The gates opened to let him through. Valaric turned his back.

‘I fought among you against the Vathen,’ Gallow said. ‘I don’t regret that. As for the rest, all I wanted was my family and my forge, making a life for us all. Watching
my sons grow up happy and strong.’

Valaric turned his head and spat. ‘Isn’t that what we all wanted? A lot more of us would have had it if you forkbeards had stayed across the sea where you belong.’ He walked
away. The gates closed and Gallow was alone. The stumps of the gibbets remained beside the road where they’d been cut down. He stopped beside them and took the locket out from under his
shirt, closing his fist around it. The Vathen had come. How could he not fight them?
Our land, yours and mine. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask to find the Screambreaker half dead
after we fled, but how could I leave him when he’d stood and fought as I had, with no reason save the doing of what was right? I didn’t ask you to bring the Vathen to our home, and when
you did, how could I send him away alone, barely alive? O Arda, why did you have to do that?
His grip on the locket was so tight it hurt. His vision was swimming, tears on his cheeks. He still
had the money Tolvis had given him for the horses. A little to get him home and plenty left to put a smile on Arda’s face. If that was what he wanted.

Fate. He walked past the ruins of homes that had once crowded in the shadows of Andhun’s walls. Was he sorry for what he was? No. But no one had made him sail with Medrin, chasing after
the Crimson Shield. No one had made him offer Tolvis Loudmouth his axe instead of leaving him in the road and heading for Varyxhun with a string of Vathan horses. He could have been beside a warm
fire, listening to Arda shout and rave at him for what had happened to their home, knowing all the while that she loved him despite herself. He could have been holding his children in his arms,
watching them sleep. All he had to do was forgive her for the one terrible thing she’d done. Say it was a mistake, a moment of madness, though they both knew it had been neither of those
things.

The gibbets, the blood ravens, Medrin’s murderous hunger, Jyrdas’s pyre: none of that would have been any different, but he wouldn’t have seen it. Yet now he had. And Arda
would be a lie too, however easy it might feel, and when the Maker-Devourer whispered in his head at the end of his days,
Have you led a good life?
what could he say? Not
Yes, yes, I
have
, not any more.

He could feel Jyrdas’s ghost laughing at him.
You’ve turned into one of them. A sheep.
And perhaps it was true and perhaps he was, and perhaps that wasn’t so bad after
all. He looked at the locket one last time and then squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he put it back inside his shirt.

The road towards the mountains was the one that he and the Screambreaker had travelled after the hills around the Crackmarsh. If he followed it far enough, it would take him to Tarkhun, squeezed
between the Isset and the Shadowwood and the Ironwood. A boat across the water and he’d be on the Aulian Way, past the Crackmarsh and then winding up the mountains to the Aulian Bridge and
the old fortress of Witches’ Reach guarding the entrance to the valley. And, past that, Varyxhun. He wasn’t sure how long it would take. Ten days? Twelve? Something like that. Plenty of
time to think about what to say when he got there.

Away from the city gates the gibbets were still up. The bodies were little more than skeletons now, pecked clean by the birds. Further still and he passed small knots of men on the road. Lhosir.
They looked him over.

‘Another Marroc who wants to fight,’ said one. ‘Good for you. That way.’ They pointed across the fields to where a haze of smoke hung over a low rise.

‘What’s that way?’ he asked.

‘The Vathen!’ They laughed. ‘Any more of you in there?’

Gallow shrugged. ‘I’d keep out of the city for a bit if I were you, after the battle’s done. Be safer out here.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. Best if
you
keep away, more likely.’ They laughed again and rode on towards the gates.

‘And what does that mean?’ he called after them. They didn’t answer but they didn’t need to. If Medrin won, his anger with the Marroc for what Valaric had done on the
beach would be unquenchable. Andhun would burn.

He walked on, talking to himself, muttering under his breath. Varyxhun, that was where he should be going. To Arda. To his family. To what
mattered.
And if Medrin happened to beat the
Vathen and turned on Andhun and then burned it to the ground and slaughtered and raped every man and woman within its walls, was that his business? Arda would tell him no, it wasn’t. And she
was right, wasn’t she?

Was that how to say he’d led a good life? Just let that be?

He didn’t even notice that his feet had left the road until he reached the rise and saw the Lhosir army spread out on the other side of it. They’d taken him that way instead of
towards his home, quietly and without a fuss, as though they knew perfectly well where he needed to go.
A fat lot of good that pledge was then.
Arda was laughing at him, mocking and
scornful.
Lasted what? A few minutes?

He pushed his hand to his chest. ‘Sorry.’

Was that how to say he’d led a good life? No, it wasn’t.

Can’t eat sorry.
But she’d betrayed him. She’d betrayed all of them. And she had no answer to that.

Smoke from the campfires – he could smell it, could see its dirty stain in the air. It was hardly suffocating, but for some reason it was making his eyes water again. He saw Arda behind
him, clear as the sun, waving him away as he’d gone to fight the Vathen at Lostring Hill, shaking her head.
Stupid men. Always think they have to fight. Can’t you just stay here and
look after the people who matter? What about us, Gallow? What do we do when you get yourself stuck on the end of a spear?
She too had had tears in her eyes.
Going to have to find myself a
Vathan now, am I?
The more she shouted and raved at him not to go, the more she gave herself away.

‘I will come back,’ he’d murmured, ‘I swear it.’

That’s what Merethin said.
She turned her back on him and disappeared.

No one challenged him as he walked through the Lhosir army. He found the Screambreaker at his breakfast at the far edge of the camp, looking out towards where the Vathen would
come.

‘Truesword.’ He didn’t look up. ‘When Medrin came back with the shield, I wondered what happened to you. And to Loudmouth and to Jyrdas.’

Gallow looked around him. The soldiers nearby were old ones. The Screambreaker’s men, the ones who’d fought the Marroc years ago. Men he trusted. ‘Jyrdas? A Marroc put an arrow
in him. Jyrdas killed a couple of them anyway, just to make a point. Then he called Medrin
nioingr
until Medrin stuck a knife through his good eye to shut him up.’

‘Sounds like Jyrdas.’

‘The Marroc let me built him a pyre and speak him out and then they let me go.’

‘Good of them.’ The Screambreaker was still staring out across the fields as though none of what Gallow was telling him particularly mattered. He pointed. ‘The Vathen will come
from there. They won’t want to fight today, so we’ll take it to them.’ He beckoned an old Lhosir closer and whispered in his ear. The soldier nodded and trotted away.

‘I feel the Maker-Devourer more closely these days,’ said Gallow. ‘You and I have a grudge between us. I would have it ended before I meet him. You spoke words not fitting for
a guest in my house. Or were you too gone with fever to remember?’

‘I’ve not forgotten, Gallow. We’ll settle it after the Vathen are defeated.’

‘And if I want to settle it now?’

‘I’ll say no and remind you that you’re a Marroc and have no voice here. If I call you
nioingr
, so what?’ He turned sharply, before Gallow could reach for a
blade. ‘Hold your hand, Truesword. Fight the Vathen. Fight beside me as I know you can and I’ll concede that the words I spoke were wrong.’

‘Concede it now!’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

The Screambreaker stood up and faced Gallow squarely. ‘I remember you from the old days, Truesword. You were fierce and terrible, without mercy or remorse, and I was proud to have you
fight among my men. I saw you fight the Vathen on the way to Andhun and I saw the man I remembered. But you’ve changed. Your beard is gone. You’re either more or less than the man I
once knew and I don’t know which it is. Do you, Gallow?’