Chapter 306 - 297 — The Man Who Endured I

Chapter 306: Chapter 297 — The Man Who Endured I

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They lost the lower valley on a wet morning and it cost them four hundred and eleven people.

Sevrin got the count at noon and read it twice, because the first time he had read it as a hundred and eleven, and a hundred and eleven would have been a bad week.

He was standing on the outer wall with the paper in his fist and the smoke still going up off the terraces below when Ivet came along the parapet at a run to tell him the eastern signal post had gone dark.

She was nineteen and she had ink on her hands and she stopped four feet away because she had learned to stop four feet away.

"There’s no answer off the east post since dawn."

"Then they’re dead."

"Or the lamp’s—"

"Ivet." Sevrin folded the paper. "They’re dead. Take the post down. You’re not going out there to check a lamp."

"Somebody has to—"

"Nobody has to." He did not raise his voice. He had learned, twenty years ago, that raising his voice cost him more than it bought. "Off the wall. You’re standing in the open where anything with a bow can see you."

She went, and she took two steps and turned round.

"They’re going to come up the valley next."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

"We hold the ground we can hold," Sevrin said, "and we don’t spend anybody buying back ground we can’t."

---

His captains wanted to answer.

He listened to all of it in the hall that afternoon with his hands flat on the table. Take four hundred down the valley road tonight, burn what they left behind, make them pay for the lower terraces. There were men in that room who had lost family in the last nine days and he did not once tell them they were wrong to want it.

He told them it would not work.

"They want us out of the walls. That’s the entire shape of it — they’ve been giving us reasons to come out for a month. The day we come out, they come up behind us and there are eleven thousand people in here with the gate open."

"So we do nothing."

"We do the things that keep those eleven thousand alive."

"And what do I tell my brother’s wife?"

Sevrin looked at the man for a long moment.

"Tell her the truth," he said. "Tell her I could have burned a camp for him and chose not to, and that she can hate me for it, and that she’ll still be here in the spring."

He was furious the entire time. He had been furious for a year. He simply did not let it choose anything.

---

He went up to the northern parapet after dark, because that was where he went when he could not sleep, and stood looking down at the valley he had lost that morning.

There were fires down there that were not his.

"You are not what I expected."

Sevrin had his sword half out before he had finished turning.

The man was standing on the parapet ten feet away, on the outer edge of it, where there was six inches of wet stone and a hundred-foot drop, and he was standing on it the way a person stands on a floor.

He was extremely beautiful.

That was the first thing, and it was so out of place on a wall above a burning valley that for a moment Sevrin could not get past it. Tall. Broad through the shoulders without any of the thickness that came from carrying armour for a living. A face with hard clean lines to it and dark hair falling loose past the jaw, and an expression of mild, friendly interest, as though he had come out to look at the weather.

He was not wearing anything a soldier would wear.

And behind him were wings.

They were enormous. They came off his back and went out over the drop and kept going, and the feathers were black — but not evenly black. Deep in among them, down at the shafts, there was a crimson light moving, the way there is colour deep inside a bar of iron that has been in a forge and taken out and left to look cold.

Above and behind his head hung a ring.

It was the shape of a halo. It was exactly the shape of a halo, unbroken and perfectly round and floating without anything holding it — and the light burning around its circumference was red-gold, and it did not feel like any holy thing Sevrin had ever been taught about.

"Put the sword away," the man said pleasantly. "If I wanted this place I would already have it."

Sevrin did not put the sword away.

"You’re not with them."

"I am not with anyone. I have been watching you for eleven days."

---

"Why."

"Because you are angrier than any man in this valley," said the stranger, "and you have not done one single stupid thing about it."

He came down off the parapet edge and stood on the walkway, and did not close the distance further, which Sevrin noticed.

"Four hundred and eleven this morning. Sixty in the orchards last week. Your master of horse — that was a personal thing, wasn’t it? Thirty years." He tilted his head. "And this afternoon you sat in a room with men begging you to burn a camp, and you told them no, and you were not calm. I watched your hands. You wanted it more than any of them."

"What do you want."

"To ask you something." The stranger’s tone did not change at all. "When you imagine the men who took the lower valley — what is it you want to happen to them? Precisely. Take your time."

"I want them off my ground."

"That is not what I asked."

"It’s the answer you’re getting."

"No." The stranger smiled slightly. "Try again. Do you want them *judged*? Do you want them beaten and sent home? Or do you want to stand in a field and watch them understand, at the end, exactly what they did?" He spread one hand. "There is no wrong answer. I am only curious."

Sevrin looked at him for a while.

"There are two thousand people in the western quarter who won’t have grain past the first frost," he said. "That’s what I’m thinking about. That’s what I was thinking about when you started talking and it’s what I’ll be thinking about when you’re finished."

Something moved behind the stranger’s eyes.

He was, Sevrin realised, actually pleased.

"There it is," he said. "That is what I came for."