Only the Valiant

He was almost ready to set his lantern to it when he remembered Old Lori; he hadn’t collected her yet in his grim harvest, even though he’d been past the wall she had been leaning against a dozen times or more. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite dead when he’d left her after all. Perhaps she had crawled further back to die on her own terms, or perhaps Royce had just missed her. It seemed wrong to leave her apart from the others, so Royce went in search of her fallen form, returning to the spot where she had lain and searching the ground around by lamplight.

“Are you looking for someone?” a voice asked, and Royce spun, his hand going to his sword in the second before he recognized that voice.

It was Lori’s, and not. There was something less cracked and papery about this voice, less ancient and wearied by time. When she stepped into the circle of his lamplight, Royce saw that was true of the rest of her too. Before, there had been an ancient, timeworn old woman. Now, the woman in front of him seemed almost young again, her hair lustrous, her eyes piercing, and her skin smooth.

“What are you?” Royce asked, his hand straying to his sword again.

“I am what I always was,” Lori said. “Someone who watches, and someone who learns.” Royce saw her look down at herself. “I told you not to touch me, boy, to just leave me be to die in peace. Couldn’t you just listen? Why do all the men of your line never listen?”

“You think I did this?” Royce asked. Did this woman—he still had trouble thinking of her as Lori—think that he was some kind of sorcerer?

“No, stupid boy,” Lori said. “I did this, with a body that won’t let me die. Your touch, one of the Blood, was just enough to catalyze it. I should have known that something like this would happen from the moment you washed up close to the village as a baby. I should have walked away then, instead of staying to watch.”

“You saw me arrive at the village?” Royce said. “Do you know who my father is?”

He thought back to the white-armored figure he had seen in dreams, and to the time the master of the Red Isle had said that the unknown man who had sired him had saved his life. Royce knew nothing about him, save that the symbol burned into his palm was supposedly his.

“I know enough,” Lori said. “Your father was a great man, in the way that men call themselves great. He fought a lot, he won a lot. I suppose he was great in some of the other ways too: he tried to help people where he could, and he made sure those under his protection were safe. This pyre of yours… it’s the kind of thing he would have done, brave and righteous and so utterly foolish.”

“It’s not foolish to want to keep our friends from the crows,” Royce insisted, giving Lori a hard look.

“Friends?” She thought for a moment or two. “I suppose, after enough years, a few of them might have been. It’s hard for me to truly be friends with anyone though, knowing how easily death comes to most. It will come to you too, if you insist on lighting a beacon so that everyone from here to the coast can see that the duke’s men haven’t finished their job.”

Royce hadn’t thought of that, only of what needed to be done for the people of his village, and what he owed them, after bringing this down on their heads.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Let them come.”

“Yes, definitely your father’s son,” Lori said.

“You know who my father was?” Royce said. “Tell me. Please, tell me.”

Lori shook her head. “You think I’ll willingly hasten everything that’s to come? From what I’ve seen, there will be death enough without that. I will tell you this: look to the symbol you bear. Now, will you give an old woman a head start before you do anything stupid like lighting that fire?”

Anger flickered in Royce, roiling up from within his grief. “Don’t you care about any of the people here? You’re just going to walk away before this is done?”

“It is done,” Lori countered. “Dead is done. And don’t you dare accuse me of not caring. I have seen things that… arrgh, what’s the point!”

She flung a hand toward the pyre Royce had built, muttering words in a tongue that hurt his ears just to hear. Smoke started to billow up from it, and then the first small flickers of flame.

“There, does that make you feel better?” she demanded. “I managed to keep myself from resorting to that while a man stabbed me, I was going to let myself die, not that I had the power to do much else, being so old. Now you have me doing it in five minutes, damn you!”

Royce had to admit that her anger was quite impressive. There was something almost elemental about it. Even so, there was something he had to ask.

“Did you… did you have the power to save people here, Lori?”

“You’re going to try to make this my fault?” she demanded. She nodded over to the spot where the fire was just starting to catch. “Magic isn’t just wishing for sheets of fire or calling lightning from the sky, Royce. With a ritual long enough, maybe I can do some things that might impress you, but a spark like that is about the limit of what I can do as I am. Now, I’m going, and don’t you try to stop me, boy. You’re going to cause enough trouble for me as it is.”

She turned, and for a moment, Royce thought about catching hold of her arm, but something made him hold back, simply staring out as the fire grew in the dark instead. There ahead of him he could see the flickers and sparks of the conflagration as it grew, building up into something that looked as though it was consuming the entire sky with its heat.

Royce stood as still as he could, thinking of all the people committed to that fire, wanting to honor them by watching the last moments that their bodies had there. The blaze burned and burned, rising and falling with the wind and with the fuel beneath it, so that it seemed to Royce almost like a kind of symphony born out of the fire.

Something else came through the fire, dark against the flames, flitting through them as easily as if it didn’t feel them. Royce made out the shape of a great fishing hawk, of the kind that plunged into the lakes nearby, but this was no normal bird. Its feathers seemed tinged by the red of the fire where they weren’t a deep, sooty black, and there was something far too intelligent about the look it gave Royce as it circled him, glowing with embers in the dark.

On instinct, Royce held out an arm the way he’d seen falconers do, and the bird settled heavily on his forearm, working its way up to his shoulder and preening itself. It spoke, and Lori’s voice came out.

“This bird is a gift, although the gods alone know why I’m doing it. I will see what she sees, and tell you what I can. May she be your eyes, and stop some of what’s to come from being worse.”

“What?” Royce said. “What do you mean?”

There was no answer, beyond the shrill shriek of the hawk’s call as she took to the air. For a moment, Royce had an image of the fire below him, the circle of flames it formed seeming puny from so high above…

He came back to himself with a start and held out his arm for the bird. She landed as casually as if nothing had happened, but he found himself staring at her. There was a flicker of flame in her eye that made it clear that this was anything but a normal hawk.

“Ember,” Royce said. “I shall call you Ember.”

***

Royce stood with Ember through the night, ignoring the way his legs ached, and his body fought with him in the desire to move. They stood vigil over the fire while it burned, with the hawk flitting from time to time above the flames, soaring in the thermals they created.

He didn’t move; he felt as though he owed the dead that.

Eventually, the sun came over the horizon, and as it did, Royce saw the men and women on the edges of the trees near the village. He turned toward them, and he felt himself stumble, his legs unwilling to obey after so long standing in one place. If these were the duke’s people, then he was as dead as Lori had predicted he would be.

Strong hands caught him up as they came forward, and now, Royce recognized some of them. There were friends from the village, and others from villages further off, deeper in the dukedom. They were all about his age, some dressed as foresters, others just dressed in whatever they had on hand. All of them carried weapons.

Royce recognized one of the boys who held him up, a large young man called… it was Hendrik, wasn’t it?

“What are you doing here?” Royce asked them. He looked at some of the ones who had come from his village. “I thought…”

“Some of them got away,” Hendrik said. He was taller than Royce by a head, and there were those who joked that he must have the blood of some troll kin out of stories to be so large. “We heard what happened here, and when we saw the fire burning, we came.”

“What you did, building the fire, standing there,” a girl with short red hair said; Royce thought her name was Matilde. “It was right somehow, you know?”

Royce nodded, because he understood. He managed to stand now without help, looking round at all of the others.

“But what are you all doing here?” he asked.

“We’re here to help you,” Hendrik said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Help me?” Royce said. “Help me with what?”

“Help you overthrow the duke,” Matilde said. “We heard what you did back in the pit, and there’s a whole rebellion in the dukedom. We want to be part of it. We want to help.”

Royce started to shake his head, wanting to tell them that he didn’t intend to start a rebellion, wasn’t planning to kill whoever the new duke was. Then he thought about all the people who had died in his village, and who must have sent the men to kill them, and he knew that wasn’t true. He wanted the new duke dead, just as he wanted to kill the man who had slain his parents and then passed him by like it was nothing.

“It will be dangerous,” Royce said. “Most of you… you aren’t fighters.”

“More dangerous than sitting at home waiting for some nobleman to decide he has taken a fancy to me?” Matilde demanded.