Fall of Light (14 page)

Her tears made him feel bad, and he vowed to fix everything when he returned home. The soldiers were finally gone from Abara Delack. They had marched east, into the forest that had been burned down first, to make the going easier. But people were hungry in the town. They were leaving because there was not enough food there. When they left, pulling carts, they took with them whatever the soldiers hadn’t stolen from them. Wreneck had seen them on the road, all going somewhere else, but it seemed no one could decide where that was, as the families went off in different directions from each other. And every now and then one of them came back, only to leave again a few days later, heading out another way.

So the town Wreneck walked into was almost empty of people, and those who remained were mostly staying in their houses. The livery had burned down, he saw. So had the land office. A few men and women stood outside the tavern, not doing much or saying anything, and they watched Wreneck walk past.

Pausing, he looked into the narrow alley beside the tavern, thinking to see the one-armed man who had been Orfantal’s mother’s secret friend, since the alley was where the man lived. But he wasn’t at his usual place on the steps to the cellar. Then he caught a faint motion deeper in the alley’s shadows, something small and huddled, trying to keep warm beneath a thin blanket.

Wreneck headed over, stepping quietly, as if sneaking up on a nesting bird. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, so he said nothing.

When the figure started and looked up, Wreneck halted. He saw, shining out from a grimy face, eyes that he knew well.

‘Jinia?’

At the name the girl shrank back, pushing up against the stone wall and turning her face away. Her bare feet pushed out from under the thin blanket, and their soles were black and cracked.

‘But why didn’t you go to your family? Ma said you did. She said you went off in the night, when I was asleep. When I was still getting better.’

She said nothing.

‘Jinia?’ Wreneck edged closer. ‘You need to come back home with me.’

Finally, she spoke, her voice thin and sounding tired. ‘She didn’t want me.’

‘Who?’

Still she kept herself turned away, her face hidden. ‘Your mother, Wreneck. Listen. You’re a fool. Go away. Leave me alone.’

‘Why didn’t she want you? I saved you!’

‘Oh, Wreneck, you don’t know anything.’

Confused, he looked around, but no one was in sight. The people in front of the tavern had not come to help, or even look. He didn’t understand grown-ups at all.

‘I’m broken inside,’ she said, in a dull voice. ‘I won’t have babies. Everything down there will hurt, always. This is my last winter, Wreneck, and it’s how I want it. There’s no point. No point to any of this.’

‘But,’ said Wreneck, ‘I’m broken inside, too.’

She was so quiet he thought she hadn’t heard him, and then she sobbed.

He went to her. Knelt at her side and put a hand on her shoulder. She smelled bad. She smelled like what the old men had begun distilling in their sheds, and only now did Wreneck see the rotting heap of potato skins nearby, that she had been eating. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to die. If you did you wouldn’t be eating that. And you wouldn’t be trying to stay warm. I love you, Jinia. And that brokenness. That hurt. It’s just what lives inside. That’s all it is. On the outside, you’re always the same. That’s what we’ll give each other – everything that’s on the outside, do you see?’

She wiped at her face and then looked up at him, the eye that wasn’t wandering meeting his gaze. ‘That’s not how it is, Wreneck. That’s not love at all. You’re too young. You don’t understand.’

‘That’s not true. I’m eleven now. I’ve made a spear, and I’m going to hunt them down and I’m going to kill them. Telra and Farab and Pryll. I’m going to stick my spear in them until they’re dead. And you’re going to watch me do it.’

‘Wreneck—’

‘Come with me. Let’s go explore the monastery.’

‘I’m too drunk to walk.’

‘It’s just what you’ve been eating.’

‘It kills the pain.’

‘So you can walk and it won’t hurt.’ He reached down and helped her stand. ‘I’m going to take care of you,’ he said. ‘From now on.’

‘Your mother—’

‘And after the monastery, we’re going away. I told you. We’re going hunting, for the people who did that to you.’

‘You’ll never find them.’

‘I will.’

‘They’ll kill you.’

‘They tried that already. It didn’t work.’

She let him take her weight and when he felt it there was a stab of dull pain from the sword-scar. They tottered for a moment, and then hobbled out of the alley.

As they turned to make their way up the street, one of the men in front of the tavern called out, ‘You’re wasting your time, son. All you’ll get is a lot of blood.’

The others laughed.

Wreneck swung round. ‘You grown-ups make me ashamed!’

They were silent then, as he and Jinia slowly walked up the main street. She leaned hard against him, but he was still big, still strong, and where the soldier had stabbed him it only hurt a little bit now, not like the first time, when he thought that maybe something had ripped.

Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal. That took all the work and that’s what living was – work. He had years of practice.

‘You’re sweating,’ Jinia said when at last they reached the outskirts of town and looked up to the hill and its summit where huddled the scorched ruins of the monastery, showing them a gap-toothed wall and a gateway with no gate.

‘It’s hot.’

‘No, it’s cold, Wreneck.’

‘I’m just working hard, Jinia. I’m used to that, and it’s good and you know why?’

‘Why?’

He thought about how he would say what he felt, and then nodded. ‘It reminds me that I’m alive.’

‘I’m sorry, Wreneck,’ she said. ‘For your burns, from when you carried me through the burning rooms. I should have said that before. But I was mad at you.’

‘Mad at me? But I saved your life!’

‘That’s why, Wreneck.’

‘They weren’t much,’ he said after a moment. ‘Those rooms, I mean. There was hardly anything in them. So the places where rich people live, why, they’re still just rooms.’

They had begun the ascent, much slower now. At his words, Jinia snorted. ‘They would tell you otherwise.’

‘I saw them. Those rooms. They can try telling me anything they like. I saw them.’

‘You were friends with Orfantal.’

Wreneck shook his head. ‘I was a bad friend. He hates me now. Anyway, I won’t be that again. The nobleborn grown-ups don’t scare me any more. Orfantal wasn’t like them, but I’m sorry that he hates me.’

‘Nobleborn,’ she mused, and he smelled her sweet breath. ‘It seems I’ve found one of my own.’

He didn’t understand what she meant. She was still a little drunk.

Then they ran out of breath with which to talk, as the hill was steep and the track slippery under its thin coat of snow. The monks were all dead for sure, since they would have swept this clear. There was nothing living in sight. Even the crows had long gone.

At last, they reached the summit, and Jinia stepped away from him, to stand on her own, but she reached across and took his hand.

Suddenly cowed by her gesture, and the feel of her thin fingers and her pinched palm, so easily swallowed up by his too-big hand, Wreneck said nothing. But he felt very grown up.

‘I’m not so cold any more,’ she said. ‘Not so drunk, either. But the pain’s back.’

He nodded. Yes, it was back, and not just where the soldier had stabbed him. It was back in other places, too, all through his insides. Aches. Deep, deep aches. When he could stand them no longer and he had to move, he stepped forward, and she fell in at his side, and they walked towards the shell of the tumbled wall’s gate.

‘They used to bring food into town and give it away to the poor,’ Jinia said. ‘But only once or twice a year. The years they didn’t, everyone hated them. But it was just bad harvests. When they only had enough to feed themselves. Still, everyone hated them.’

They passed beneath the arch and strode into the littered compound, and were halted by the sight of all the snow-covered corpses.

Jinia pulled sideways at his hand, stretching out his arm.

But all the pain he’d been fighting against inside was suddenly too much, and blood had leaked out from his sword-wound, and once it leaked out, the battle was over. Darkness took him, and he sank into it, although in the instant before he knew nothing, he heard Jinia cry out as his hand tugged loose from her grasp.

When he next opened his eyes, the ground under his back was wet where the snow had melted. Jinia was kneeling beside him, and she had taken off her blanket and draped it over him, and he saw tears on her cheeks. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

‘You fainted. There was blood. I thought – I thought you died!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t. It was just that the wound remembered the sword.’

‘You should never have helped me.’

‘I can’t help helping you,’ he said, pushing the brokenness back inside and sitting up.

She wiped at her cheeks. ‘I thought I was alone. All over again. Wreneck, I can’t do this with you. I lost everything and I have nothing and it has to stay that way.’

He watched her stand, watched her brush the crusted snow from her bared, bony knees, revealing cracked red skin and scabs. ‘You can’t make me hope,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘You’re leaving me?’

‘I told you! I can’t stay with you!’

‘Don’t die in that alley, Jinia.’

‘Stop crying. I won’t. I’ll survive. I’m like you. They can’t kill us. I get food left for me. Not every grown-up is bad, Wreneck. Don’t think that, or you will be a very lonely man.’ She looked around. ‘There’re cloaks I can find here, maybe even real blankets – horse-blankets, maybe. There’re some sheds that didn’t burn. I’ll search in those and find something. I won’t freeze to death.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise, Wreneck. Now, when you go back home, go round the town. Don’t go down the main street. Some people there are mad at you, for what you said. It’s a longer walk, but go across the fields. Say you’ll do that. Say it.’

He wiped at his eyes and nose. ‘I’ll cross the fields.’

‘And don’t tell your mother about any of this.’

‘I won’t. But I won’t be there long anyway.’

‘Stay with her, Wreneck. If you leave, you’ll break her heart.’

‘I’ll make it better.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ She nodded towards the gateway. ‘Go on, then.’

The sadness in him was a worse pain than any other he’d ever felt, but he stood up. The cold bit at his wet shirt against his back. ‘Goodbye, Jinia.’

‘Goodbye, Wreneck.’

Then, remembering his regrets after he saw Orfantal off, he lunged to her and hugged her tight, and all the pain he felt when he did that, from the sword-wound, from everything else, seemed right.

She seemed to shrink in his arms, and then she was pushing him away, taking hold of his shoulders to turn him round and then giving him a little push.

He walked through the gateway.

Wreneck would cross the fields, as he had promised. But he wasn’t going home. He was going off to make things right, because even in this world some things just had to be made right. His ma would still be there when he finally went home, after he’d done everything he needed to do. He could fix things with her then.

But now, he would wait for dusk, hidden from sight, and then go and collect the spear he had buried under the snow near the old stone trough.

He was eleven, and it felt as if the year before it had been the longest one in his life. As if he’d been ten for ever. But that was the thing about growing older. He’d never be ten again.

The soldiers went east, into the burned forest.

He would find them there. And do what was right.

  *   *   *

‘What are you doing?’ Glyph quietly asked.

Startled, the dishevelled man looked up. He was crouched beside a heap of stones that had been pulled from the frozen ground along the edge of the marsh. His hands were filthy and spotted with blood from scrapes and broken fingernails. He was wearing a scorched wolf hide, but it didn’t belong to him. Nearby, left on the snow-smeared ground, was a Legion sword and scabbard and belt.

The stranger said nothing, eyes on the bow in Glyph’s hand, the arrow notched in the string, and the tension of the grip.

‘You are in my family’s camp,’ Glyph said. ‘You have buried them under stones.’

‘Yes,’ the man whispered. ‘I found them here. The bodies. I – I could not bear to see them. I am sorry if I have done wrong.’ He slowly straightened. ‘You can kill me if you like. I won’t regret leaving this world. I won’t.’

‘It is not our way,’ Glyph said, nodding down at the stones.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘When the soul leaves, the flesh is nothing. We carry our dead kin into the marsh. Or the forest where it is deep and thick and unlit.’ He waved slightly with the bow. ‘But here, there was no point. You take the bodies away to keep your home clean, but no one lives here any more.’

‘It seems,’ said the man, ‘that you do.’

‘They had rotted down by the time I returned. No more than bones. They were,’ Glyph added, ‘easy to live with.’

‘I would not have had the courage for that,’ the stranger said.

‘Are you a Legion soldier?’

The man glanced across at his sword. ‘I killed one. I cut him down. He was in Scara Bandaris’s troop – the ones who deserted and rode away with the captain. I went with them for a time. But then I killed a man, and for the murder I committed Scara Bandaris banished me from his company.’

‘Why did he not take your life?’

‘When he discovered the truth of me,’ the man said, ‘he deemed life the greater punishment. He was right.’

‘The man you killed – what did he do to you? Your face is twisted. Scarred and bent. He did that?’

‘No. This face you see has been mine now for some time. Well, it’s always been mine. No.’ He hesitated, and then shrugged. ‘He spoke cruel words. He cut me with them, again and again. Even the others took pity on me. Anyway, he was not well liked, and none regretted his death. None but me, that is. Those words, while cruel, were all true.’