Blood Song

The same open smile, the same ache in his chest. Send her away, his inner voice commanded. Only pain can result if you keep her here.

“Lord Vaelin!” Fief Lord Mustor’s cry dragged his attention back to the courtyard. “Where are you? Shtop these men!”

“I have much to share also,” he said before turning away.

At first Fief Lord Mustor raged at Vaelin’s refusal to stop the burial of the bodies, loudly restating his ownership of the keep and the primacy of his authority in his own lands. When Vaelin replied simply that he was a servant of the Faith and therefore not bound the word of a Fief Lord, Mustor’s mood degenerated into a baleful sulk. After his appeals to Prince Malcius earned only a stern look of disapproval he took himself off to his dead brother’s quarters where he had amassed a large proportion of the keep’s wine cellar.

They remained at the High Keep for another eight days, anxiously awaiting word of the war’s end. Vaelin occupied the men with constant training and patrols into the mountains. There was little grumbling, morale was high, boosted by triumph and the shared spoils of the keep and the dead which, though meagre, fulfilled a basic soldierly desire for loot. “Give ‘em victory, gold in their pockets and a woman every now and again,” Sergeant Krelnik told Vaelin one evening, “and they’ll follow you forever.”

As Sister Sherin had promised Alucius Al Hestian recovered quickly, waking on the third day and passing the basic tests that showed his brain was not permanently damaged, although he could remember nothing of the battle or how he came by his wound.

“So he’s dead?” he asked Vaelin. They were in the courtyard, watching the men at evening drill. “The Usurper.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he gave Black Arrow the letters of free passage?”

“I can’t see how else they could have fallen into his hands. It seems the old Fief Lord went to great lengths to protect his son.”

Alucius wrapped his cloak tightly around his shoulders, his hollowed eyes making him seem an old man peering out from behind a young man’s face. “All of this blood spilt over a couple of letters.” He shook his head. “Linden would have wept to see it.” He reached inside his cloak and unhitched Vaelin’s short sword from his belt. “Here,” he said, offering the hilt. “I won’t need this anymore.”

“Keep it. A gift from me. You should have a souvenir of your time as a soldier.”

“I can’t. The King gave you this…”

“And now I’m giving it to you”

“I don’t… It shouldn’t be given to one such as I.”

Seeing the way the boy gripped the sword-hilt, the tremble of his fingers, Vaelin recalled the red slick that covered the blade when he had been pulled from beneath the pile of corpses near the gate. The face of battle is always most ugly when seen for the first time. “Who better to give it to?” he said, putting his hand over the hilt, gently pushing it away. “Put it on your wall when you get home. Leave it there. I will not take it back.”

The boy seemed about to say more but restrained himself, returning the sword to his belt. “As you wish, my lord.”

“Will you write about this? Is it worth a poem, do you think?”

“It’s worth a hundred, I’m sure, but I doubt I’ll write any of them. Since my awakening, words don’t seem to come to me as they once did. I’ve tried, I sit with pen and parchment but nothing comes.”

“It takes a while for a man to return to himself after a wound. Rest and eat well. I’m sure your talent will return.”

“I hope so.” The boy gave a faint smile. “Perhaps I’ll write to Lyrna. I’m sure I can find some words for her.”

Vaelin, who had plenty of words of his own for the princess, nodded and turned back to the drill, venting his sudden anger at a man who held his pole-axe too high in the defensive formation. “Lower it, lackwit! How are you supposed to gut a horse with your weapon stuck up in the air? Sergeant, an extra hour’s drill for this man.”

Each evening was spent in Sherin’s company. They would sit in the lord’s chamber exchanging stories about their experiences over the last few years. He discovered she had travelled far more widely than he, visiting Fifth Order missions in all four fiefs of the Realm, even taking a ship to the enclave in the Northern Reaches where Tower Lord Vanos Al Myrna ruled in the King’s name.

“A lively place, despite the cold,” she told him. “And home to so many different people. Most of the farming folk are in fact exiles from the southern Alpiran Empire. Tall, handsome people with black skin. Apparently they angered the emperor and had to take ship or face extermination, fetching up in the Northern Reaches more than fifty years hence. Most of the Tower Lord’s Guard is made up of exiles, they have a fearsome reputation.”

“I met the Tower Lord once, and his daughter. I don’t think she liked me much.”