Turning, she set her teeth and listened and when she thought no one was there she threw it lightly. The stone spinning in the air and everything so quiet and then clattering off into the dark. Into the deep shadows behind the bones.
She looked up, then, at the others she must remove. She had counted their number once and now did not for counting them was too much and made the task seem larger than her and she contented herself to look only at the next stone. This one rounded on the bottom and flat on the top. High enough that she'd have to reach over her head with the chains swinging from her wrists to work on it.
Another step, another notch.
The queen took up the spoon again and thought of that woman on the horse with the flowers in her hair and the blood in her veins and how she had been married when she was fifteen to the steward of this city so that he would become a king and an alliance would be built. Two city states upon the corpse of the dead empire, trying to forge out something more. A peace built by their fathers' fathers after the Second War of the Splintering. Perhaps riding into the town that day with eyes wide and palms covered in sweat she had last felt like that girl she had never truly been.
But now, in the dark and the bones, she worked back toward that lie again. The girl she'd been now dead twenty years and replaced by a woman who knew far more of the world and who had truly found just what her blood would buy her.
She stepped up to the wall and worked the spoon into the crack and brought it toward her along the wall and felt the mortar drift down as dust in her hair, in her eyes.
Chapter Five
Outside the men standing in the dark and swirling snow and more of them now under the cracking sky than there had been all night and some with torches and all talking to each other and moving in a fashion both aimless and menacing. Brack watched them and drank the dark tea Tarek had brewed and felt it move through him and watched them still. These who would not come closer but would wait until he stepped out.
Not to fall upon him in anger, but to plead. For their very lives, they felt. He knew it as he had seen it before and would again and the way men looked when they felt only another man could keep them from death and whatever hell waited was something he could not shake.
“What do they think I am?” he asked. Raising the tea and drinking again and still unable to determine the type but knowing full well what it did to the blood in his veins.
“Exactly what you are,” the old man said.
“They think I'm more than I am.”
“I don't see it that way.”
Brack turned slowly and looked at him and did not blink. “You know what happened last time? You know how many men died? Screaming and clawing at the air and some burned the way a pig looks on a spit with their flesh blackened and eyes gone and still running. Not dying. For how long? Seconds, minutes, it's all the same.” He pointed back toward the window. “All of them looked like those men before it. Only a handful looked like it after, and even they weren't the same. One of them doesn't speak anymore and another, when he does, nothing he says makes any damn sense.”
The old man crossed to the window and stood with him. The other sitting on the far side of the room with his eyes closed and smoking his pipe in this early morning.
“And what happened in the end?” Tarek said.
“You know what happened.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Brack was silent for a moment. Chewing it and turning as they both thought of it and what he would say. Then he said: “I killed it.”
“You killed it.”
“But they think I can save them. I damn well can't do that. I never have.”
Tarek took out his own pipe and lit it with slow and careful hands and raised it lightly smoking to his lips. The scent of that within rich and yet fresh at once. Filling the room and adding to the scent of the tea in a way that intertwined the two and made one scent new and all its own. Brack waited in silence while he did it and the sun rose.
“They think they'll die without you.”
“They'll die with me.”
“Then what difference does it make?” He smoked. “Are you here to kill it?”
“Don't question me.”
“That's not an answer.”
“You know I'm here to kill it.”
“That's what they know, as well. The spearman told everyone who you are and they know why you came from the keep. You can't be what you are and also expect no one to think it means something.”
He drank his tea and the mug was cooling in his hands and he went over to the fire and filled it from the kettle and came back. Wiping his hand on his pants where he had spilled the tea and not feeling it but knowing it was at least hotter than it had been. The fire burning down now toward the core of the logs and no one adding more to those flames. Perhaps for the reality of true fire lurking out in that hinterland.
“If they know I was at the keep, then they should look at the keep,” Brack said. “All there burned and dead. A handful fled for the gap. Will they join them?”
“Still, they know. You came to kill it and now they want you to kill it.”
Brack stood silent for a moment and then he closed his eyes and opened them again. “That's not what they want.”
“Then what do they want?”
“They want to live. All men just want to live.”
“Is that why you're here?”
“No. I'm here to kill it.”
“There's no way that can be the same?”
“It never is.”
Juoth stood and came over at last. His pipe left on the arm of his chair but the smell of it still in his breath, hair, clothes. He too looked out at the roving crowd and slowly licked his lips and did not look at Brack or the old man as he spoke. “Let's go out to them.”
“And tell them what?”
“Tell them to go home.”
Brack laughed, the sound harsh and clipped. Took another drink of the new tea already cooling. “Go tell them.”
“You have to.”
“And they'll go.”
“They won't. But when they die, you'll have told them to go.” The man shrugged and his face did not change. “These men will die. All men die, but these ones. These ones die today. Tomorrow. Next week. It doesn't matter. If it comes here, they die here. Might as well have it on their own heads.”
At long last Brack smiled and shook his head, then tipped it back and looked at the ceiling. There the wooden beams hewn from trees in these very mountains and the roof pitched hard against the piling snow and the chimney rising in stone and shadow, the firelight flickering at its edges, to go through mortar and wood to that open air. Somewhere above the howling of the wind over the opening of that chimney.
“So I shouldn't care?”
“Men do what they do. They die how they die. You can't save them all and you know it and they're fools if they don't know it. So go tell them they're fools and let them be fools. You're not going to kill it if you're thinking about anything else. Wash your hands of them.”
“I could send them to the gap.”
The islander snorted. “You can't send everyone running for the gap.”
“I can't?”