Chapter 307 - 298 — The Man Who Endured II

Chapter 307: Chapter 298 — The Man Who Endured II

"I am going to offer you something," said the stranger. "Listen to all of it before you decide you understand it."

"I’ve nothing to trade."

"I have not asked for anything."

He stepped closer and Sevrin let him.

"When they cut you, you bleed and you slow down and eventually you stop. When they kill four hundred of yours, you have four hundred fewer. Everything they do to you makes you smaller. That is the arrangement, and it is the only arrangement you have ever fought under, and it is why you are losing." He let that sit. "I am offering you a different arrangement. What is done to you and yours becomes something you can hand back. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. That is all it is."

"And what does it cost."

"Nothing you have."

"Everything costs something."

"Then let me be precise," the stranger said, "since you value it. It will not make you a better man. It will not bring back the four hundred. It will not stop the next attack from coming. It will only mean that when it comes, you are not smaller afterwards." He shrugged. "You will still have to decide what to do with it. I will not decide that for you. I have no interest in deciding it for you."

Sevrin stood there with the fires burning in the valley below him.

They were coming up the road. Everyone in the stronghold knew it, and he had eleven thousand people behind him and four thousand who could hold a spear, and the arithmetic had stopped working a month ago.

"If I say no?"

"Then I go and watch someone else," said the stranger, "and this place burns in nine days, and I will be a little disappointed. That is all."

Sevrin thought about the western quarter and the frost.

"Do it," he said.

The stranger did not smile. He simply reached out and put two fingers against the centre of Sevrin’s breastplate.

There was no light and no pain and nothing at all.

"You will not notice it," he said, "until they hurt you."

---

They came up the road four days later and Sevrin took a spear through the side on the second hour.

It went in under the arm and out the back of the plate. He knew exactly what that meant — he had watched forty men take that wound in twenty years and none of them had walked off a wall afterward — and he was already going down when the red came.

It came up out of the stone under his knees.

It went round the wound and stayed there and did nothing to it. He could feel the hole. He could feel his own blood going down inside the armour and pooling in the hip.

And his legs took his weight.

He stood up with a spear wound through his middle and his body would not admit that anything was wrong with it, and he killed the man who had put it there, and the next one hit him across the shoulder with an axe and *that* wound stayed open too, and more red came, and gathered, and sat on him waiting.

He did not know what to do with it.

Then a man came over the parapet at Ivet’s signal post, and Sevrin’s arm came up on its own, and he gave it back.

He did not throw a weapon. There was no weapon. What went out of him crossed twenty feet of wall and took the man apart, and the two behind him, and a section of the parapet, and left a mark on the stone that was still there eleven years later.

The wall held.

They pushed the assault back down the valley road by dark and lost eighty-one people doing it, which was the smallest number Sevrin had written down in a year.

And somewhere above the smoke, high up where nobody but him was looking, the stranger sat on the edge of the tower with his wings folded and watched, and did not come down, and did not say a word, and took no credit for any of it.

---

It worked.

That was the part nobody ever understood afterward. It worked, and it kept working, and for a while it was the best thing that had ever happened to those eleven thousand people.

They came again in the winter with three times the numbers and Sevrin let them hit him for two hours before he answered, and the answer broke the assault so completely that they did not come back until spring.

They came in spring with siege engines and burned the eastern gate and killed two hundred and six, and Sevrin took every bit of it, and when he gave it back there was nothing left of the engines or the men who had built them.

The worse they hurt him, the more dangerous he became.

His people worked that out before he did. He would come down off the wall with three wounds open and red running in the seams of his armour and they would cheer him, actually cheer him, because it meant the next thing that came up that road was going to be destroyed.

And Sevrin began to want to be hit.

Not consciously. Not at first. He simply noticed one morning that he had stopped stepping out of the way of things.

---

The justifications came in order, and each one was reasonable when he made it.

They killed ten of his in the orchards, so he killed their soldiers, and that was war, and nobody in any world would have called it anything else.

They came back and killed forty in the western quarter, most of them not soldiers, so he destroyed the camp those men had come from. That was harder to say out loud. It was still, he thought, correct — you do not let that happen twice.

They answered the camp by burning two villages that had never held a spear between them, and Sevrin went and found every settlement that had fed and sheltered and paid for the men who did it, and he was still not wrong, exactly, and the thing he gave back that night was the largest thing he had ever released, and he was carrying eleven days of accumulated wounds when he released it.

They answered that with something worse.

And by then he had a reason ready before they had finished doing it.

The stranger came sometimes. Not often — three times that year, four the next. He never gave an order. He never asked him to do anything at all. He would stand on a wall or a ridge with his wings folded and that pleasant unbothered face and ask a question, always only one, and then leave.

*Was that everyone who was responsible?*

*Would you have done that a year ago?*

*Do you still count them?*

Sevrin had never once been able to answer that last one.