The King's Blood (56 page)

"Someone should say something," Aldrin said, looking at Kynton. But the priest was uncertain how one ashed a man who put as much faith in the gods as he did in all his socks coming back from the launder.
 

Bartrone looked around at his fellows, with both Medwin and Kaltar's deaths, they were his charges now. The responsibility hung upon his neck, "We commend to the flames the body of our mentor, Medwin la'Talser. He...he gave to the world more than he ever asked."

The new Chancellor looked around at his fellows, bloody and bruised, but not broken, "And he would not want us to cower under this tragedy, but grow from it. To let it teach the world."

A heckle tried to crawl out of Pajama's throat, "Teach it what? That wood's flammable?" but he shushed it to sleep with a toffee.

Bartrone approached the pyre with his torch, "Goodbye, our fallen star." He placed the flame against the kindling.

"STOP!"

Chance appeared from out of the caravan, a substantial bundle cradled in his arms. He walked heavily, his shoes sinking in the wet snow and mud from the warming morning. "There ain't no reason to waste so much kindling," he said pragmatically, his voice deadened from all emotion.

Batrone rose from his stoop, pulling his torch away from the fire. Chance looked into the man's eyes and nodded. Slowly, he laid out his brother next to Medwin, placing the Chancellor's head upon Chase's arm.
 

Chance leaned down over his brother's corpse, fussing to make certain his hands were covered, he hated cold hands, and softly kissed him on the forehead. "You be good up there, no getting into trouble. Not without me, anyway," he whispered, unable to tear his hand away from the cold cheek.

Bartrone's hand landed upon Chance's shoulder and squeezed it companionably. As the solitary twin turned to look at him, the new Chancellor passed over the torch. For a moment, his eyes were lost in the dance of the flame, contained but ready to unleash damage at a flick of the wrist. Without saying a word, Chance held the fire against the sticks, watching the kindling catch and burst.

He stepped back, the torch still blazing in his hand as its brethren spread across his own. Ciara's spare hand reached out and found Chance's lonely one. Together they watched the rising smoke and ash.

Grumblings started low as the despair gave rise to anger: What started the fires anyway? Was it you, always leaving your socks too close to the brazier? Me! You're the one that never properly closes his lantern. I thought I saw Mitrione skulking about last night with a candle and one of them banned books.

"I was not!" he cried in indignation, facing down a sea of hatred.

"Then why were you outside the caravan when it caught on fire?" Dean pressed on him.

"Stop," Ciara muttered under her breath.

"I was doing very important things!" Mitrione shot back at Dean, no one hearing the girl holding her arms close to her body.
 

"Like setting our homes on fire," Dean continued.

"What about Bartrone?" the man on trial shouted suddenly, trying to shift the blame to anyone he could think of.

The accused turned away from the still burning bodies to glare at the fat fuck, "What of me?"

"Doesn't it seem peculiar that out of all of us it's Medwin and Kaltar who are burned up, leaving you free to take command."

"You..." he stepped into Mitrione's gravimetric pull, a finger waving into the triple chin, "you dare accuse me."

"We all know what you were before," Mitrione didn't back down from the threatening digit, "Thief."

"STOP!" Ciara's voice cracked like thin ice across the bickering masses. "This infighting, this finger pointing, this bitching will get us nowhere. It won't bring anyone back, and it certainly won't answer for this tragedy."

The historians looked to their shoes, cowed by the slip of a girl running on her single nerve. She didn't stare at anyone, her eyes still watching the burning fires.
 

"I believe I can be of some assistance," a honeyed voice quipped from behind her.

Ciara and Aldrin spun about to watch their assassin dragging a man by the scruff of his neck. The man's arms and legs were bound, but he still kicked like a fish out of water.

Taban dumped his cargo beside the still smoking pyre, "This is your murderer." The man's face was painted purple and black with bruises under both his eyes and his chin. A trickle of blood dribbled from his mouth. Aldrin glared at the assassin after taking in the damage, and Taban shrugged, "He did not wish to come quietly."

Ciara looked away from the man clawing at the ground, trying to find some way to rise. Taban put his heavily booted leg on top of the prisoner, trapping him in place. In response, he squealed like a pig in a chute. The other historians were thrown off by this chain of events, treachery always came from within.

The only movement came from Chance as he dumped his torch into the snow and methodically reached down to the prisoner. A might he'd used to carry his only brother to the pyre lifted the gabbing man up until his legs dangled helplessly off the ground. Pure fury glared into the glassy eyes of the insane. "I could snap your neck," Chance whispered to the prisoner, who still rocked back and forth in his chains.

"You..." the man started to say, before the mighty hands of the solitary twin cut off his air supply. Aldrin placed a hand on Chance, and he shifted so the prisoner could cough out his last words, "you can't hurt me."

"Can't I?" Chance asked softly as his thumb hooked inside the man's trachea. The historians turned away as the prisoner gasped for air, not wanting to watch the death of the man who killed their own. Only Taban and Aldrin looked on, one in appreciation for the skill, the other in horror.

"Why?" Ciara's voice was soft but pulled Chance's thumbs away, letting oxygen back in. "Why'd he do it?"

"Who cares why he did it," Mitrione responded, getting a taste for blood, "all that matters is he pays for it."

"Then all this death, all this loss will mean nothing. Less than nothing," she spat back at him, her eyes flaming in the light.

Mitrione mumbled, but slipped back into the flock, wilting under her desert stare. Someone in the back began to nitpick "How can one have less than nothing? By its very definition nothing is the absence of anything," but he was hushed up by the other fellows afraid of the sand worm's wrath.

She broke from the fire and finally looked upon the wild face of the man dangling inches from death. His hair was shaggy, with brush and mud worked throughout it, though that could have been from a night with Taban who watched her with an expectant eye. The clothes gave even less of a hint as to who he was, a nearly carbon copy of the peasant attire of every man they'd saved in Tumbler's End.

The only hint that this was clearly their murderer lay in his eyes, glazed as if he couldn't see in the present. "Why did you do it?" she hissed into his ears.

His head jerked about, as if he couldn't hear her through the voices in his head. Chance raised him higher and shook, "Answer the lady."

Slowly the wild eye rotated onto Ciara as if he saw her for the first time, "Dark night demon, you can't hurt us anymore. We've joined the Winter Lady in her castle of ice."

"What?"

Chance glared into the crazed eye that rolled over towards him and then it tsked, "Walk with the monsters and expect the sword."

The lonely brother opened his hands, letting the prisoner fall to the ground, his legs catching poorly under him. A loud crack resonated around the silent glen, and the man screamed in pain. Kynton dashed forward, already calculating how to set a fracture in his head, but that dark assassin grabbed him by the arm and held him firmly in place.
 

"Not much point in healing the dead, priest," Taban said as Chance leaned into the squealing face.

The prisoner's cries cut off into low moans as Chance said through gritted teeth, "Why?"

Perhaps it was the shock of the pain, or the realization he was moments from death but logic suddenly broke through the almost endless haze on his brain, "They says you were trouble. You swoops down out of the mountains to pick our bones clean. All of 'em about how dangerous the wagons were."

The prisoner fell silent, his mind slipping away, but Chance leaned on his shattered tibia, getting a scream and a stream of consciousness confession, "Scepticar's left us all! There's no way to gain his favor. We're all dead unless...unless them monsters, them demons of his enemies. Yes, slay them, burn them, bring light into the darkness. AH! End it all so that others can live!"

"He's barking mad," Kynton argued, "You can't be seriously considering this."

"From my home, we put down mad dogs," Taban said simply.

"He doesn't even know where he is! Or who he is," Kynton pointed out as the prisoner began to crow like a cockerel into the rising sun.

"And what would you prefer, priest?" Isa's voice was a breath of ice in the fires of rage, "that he be freed to kill again? Madness like that cannot be broken, cannot be burned out, it can only be stopped."

Kynton broke her pale gaze. There'd been a few; wanderers, pilgrims, their minds consumed by fever even as their bodies healed, that were little more than husks. It was put to a committee vote what was to be done, even though the answer was always the same. The priest sagged, "At least let me administer his confession."

"So you can assure his place in the heavenly afterlife?" Isa mocked as the broken creature tried to crawl away.

Aldrin searched his mind, trying to find an answer, "There has to be something, some place, that he can be sent."

"And the softhearted king would let a murderer roam his lands," Isa turned on the boy. "And what will you do when he kills again, perhaps next time it will be a bunch of widows or children. Where do you send him then?"

The witch's poisoned words slipped into the morning air as Chance watched the mad man still trying to scrabble to his feet despite his broken leg. He'd get to his knees before the pain would spasm and he'd drop again, blood already pooling down his pants leg and onto the snow below. Ciara laid a comforting hand on his arm, and Chance turned to look into the same broken eyes reflected from his lost brother. With her head, she gestured to the mad man and nodded slowly. For the first time pity overtook rage and Chance closed his eyes in bitter tears for the man he'd hurt.

"The Solude of the Lost Boys," Chance whispered to himself before shouting out, "Priest, come here!"

The bickering behind him stopped as Isa folded her arms in supposed triumph over the runny king. Taban released his grip on Kynton, who adjusted his robes before shuffling to Chance's side.

"Bandage him up as best you can," he said to the priest, "and check the restraints. We'll need something he can live with for a while."

"I..." Kynton stuttered, watching the man watching the broken soul crawling upon the ground. But he didn't wait for conformation from Chance and palpated the mad man's leg searching for the obvious break.

"We take him to the Solude of the Lost Boys, they take special cases," he said as he rose to face his fellow brothers. It hadn't been an easy life under the ever-watchful eye, but it was better than blood on all their hands.

"You cannot be serious; he killed your brother!" Dean shouted, trying to get some sense though that thick skull of the Bother.

"Yes," Chance nodded slowly, "and he could be someone else's brother. What gives me the right to kill him?"

"Ah..." Dean tried to start, but only found a burning in his throat from the night's fire.

"The Solude is where we should go," Chance continued in the face of no opposition, "Assuming it is approved by the Chancellor."

Bartrone blinked as all eyes turned to him. He'd been as ready as any of them to spill the madman's blood upon the snow, but watching Chance deflate somehow changed everything. "Very well. We must pick through the remains, make proper burials and transfers, and then we head far into the east for the Solude."

The new Chancellor turned to Aldrin, his eyes wiped clean of the hatred that had always burned there for the boy king, "I am afraid that we can no longer accompany you, my King. If we take this...man, we must set out for Solude immediately."
 

Aldrin nodded slowly, "Medwin," his voice caught at that name, "He only agreed to take us this far. I would expect no more." And he put out his hand, which Bartrone took and shook deeply. For the first time the two of them agreed upon something.

Chance watched Kynton trying to subdue the madman kicking wildly at the doctor poking his wounds. "Did I do the right thing?" he asked the wind, wishing it was his brother.

Ciara slipped her hand inside his and said softly, "I don't think any of us can ever know. Best we can do is try."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
he roar of battle erupted from Marciano's throat as his pike stuck into the chest of a man not much into his adult years. He hurled the corpse to the ground, his pike of little use now, and unsheathed his sword. Gaining ground was proving more unstable with each blood-letting minute. The land was flat and unwelcoming to any strategy of ambush, but still the rebels pushed against them. Men, boys, and he suspected even some women, threw their whole lives against the steel of the Empire.