Chapter 53

Chapter 53: Chapter 53

The black walls of Shepfold sank behind the rolling golden hills of the Imperial heartland, and the morning mist swallowed what was left of them.

For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I was on my own. No cohort tramping in step around me, no cramped dark of a tomb under the swamp, only iron-shod hooves ringing on the old paving stones of the King’s Highway and a whole sky overhead.

I rode Ironfoot, a big Imperial destrier bred in the northern pastures for the Vanguard’s heavy cavalry: thick muscle, a dark, sour cleverness, built to carry an armored knight through a shield wall. Even he felt the load. He gave a soft huff with every mile, his broad back working under me and the runed bastard sword slung across my shoulders.

I wore the Legion’s formal traveling uniform, a crimson cloak lined at the shoulders with grey wolf fur against the autumn chill, over a dark leather tunic. The silver insignia of a Lieutenant, two crossed swords over a shield, was pinned to my chest.

Astra wasn’t on my shoulder. He was a speck in the blue far above, riding the warm air rising off the hills. The rune under his wing pulsed faintly at the back of my mind, a steady thread of warmth that kept the open road from feeling quite so empty.

After the marshes, the heartland felt like another country; I welcomed the change in scenery. The King’s Highway was all trade and quiet: merchant caravans hauling timber and salt behind slow teams of oxen, farmers driving carts heaped with harvested wheat.

Every one of them did the same thing when they saw the crimson cloak and the black leather of the 7th. They pulled their carts to the edge of the road and lowered their heads. Mothers drew their children behind their skirts. The mercenaries the merchants had hired, hard men every one, found their own boots suddenly fascinating.

They were afraid of me.

They couldn’t have known about the rune under my sleeve, or what a Swelled Bud was. They only saw the cloak, and the cloak meant the 7th Legion: the Emperor’s bloody knife, the monsters sent into the mud so the heartland could sleep in clean beds.

I rode past in silence, back straight, my glowing right eye hidden deep in the shadow of my hood. I didn’t want to frighten anyone. I only wanted to reach the capital.

By the third evening the farmland had given way to the dense pine forests of Oakhaven province. The highway’s paving was cracked and uneven there, furred over with green moss.

I steered Ironfoot off the road into a small sheltered clearing under the spread branches of an enormous, ancient oak. The air turned sharply cold as the sun went down, and the stars came out thick and bright.

I unsaddled Ironfoot, rubbed down his dark coat, and left him to graze on the forest grass. I gathered dry deadwood and built a small fire, and the flames threw orange shadows up the surrounding trunks.

I sat on a mossy log, unbuckled the gauntlet from my right hand, and rolled up my sleeve. The Rune of Antiquity woke the moment it felt the night sky. The pale, silvery scars along my arm began to throb with a soft white light: sharp, angular lines, like a constellation that had fallen out of the heavens and burned itself into my flesh.

I looked up through the branches at the stars and tried to remember Elara’s face.

I put everything I had into it.

I shut my eyes and reached for the barracks in Shepfold, the warmth of it. The smell of that awful barley porridge we’d all complained about. Her voice whispering in the dark when we were too scared to sleep, before our first deployment.

Her face still wouldn’t come. Every time I reached for it, it slipped through my hands like water. The Bud had reshaped my mind, and her face hadn’t made it through.

But the feeling stayed. The ache, the warmth I’d had for her, the knot of grief in my throat. All of it was still there.

The Bud hadn’t burned my soul out of me. It had only rebuilt the house it lived in.

Astra fluttered down from the branches and landed on my knee. He tilted his head, black eyes on the tears gathering on my lashes, and gave a soft trill. Then he nudged his beak against my glowing arm.

"I’m still here," I whispered, stroking the grey feathers along his neck. "I can’t see her face. But I haven’t forgotten how to miss her. I won’t let the mud take that from me."

I spent the next hour cleaning and oiling my weapons by the firelight. The work was plain, and I knew it by heart, and it settled me. Then I wrapped myself in the crimson cloak and slept, deep and easy.

The quiet held until the afternoon of the fifth day.

Rain had been falling since just after dawn, a heavy grey rain that turned the dirt shoulders of the King’s Highway to slick mud. The pines crowded in close on both sides, and the road ran between them like a corridor.

The rune flared before I saw anything. It went cold and sharp under my sleeve, and a pale, ghostly picture bled through the rain: an iron-bound oak log dropping out of the treeline to block the road, and the glint of rusted crossbow bolts in the foliage.

I eased back on the reins and stopped Ironfoot forty yards short of a narrow bend.

"Come out," I called. My voice was low and calm, and it carried through the rain without effort. "I know you’re there."

For a long moment there was nothing but rain on pine needles. Then a low, coarse laugh drifted out of the trees.

The oak log came down across the road anyway, right where the rune had shown me. Had I kept my pace, Ironfoot would have broken his legs on it.

Fourteen men came out of the underbrush and spread across the highway. Not soldiers. They wore a mishmash of stolen chainmail, boiled leather and ragged wool cloaks, and carried rusted broadswords, hunting spears and iron maces. Three hung back with hunting crossbows leveled at my chest.

Highwaymen. Deserters and cutthroats who lived off the merchant caravans crossing the province.

Their leader came up the road, a huge, scarred man with a patch over his left eye and a two-handed battleaxe. He took in my lone horse, the young face in the shadow of my wet hood, the crimson cloak of the Legion.

"Well, well." He rested the axe on his shoulder. "A stray pup from the Emperor’s kennel. The 7th usually runs in packs. What’s a lone Lieutenant doing this far from the mud? Deserter? Or just stupid?"

I looked them over, all fourteen, and the rune laid it out for me without being asked. I could draw the sword, let the static run, and take the leader’s head before his axe moved. His falling body would make a shield against the bolts. Then I’d close the gap and butcher the other thirteen in under twenty seconds. A clean, one-sided slaughter. Everything the Bud had put in me wanted it. It wanted the Ember unchained and fourteen bodies in the road.

My hand stayed off the hilt.

I looked at their dirty, desperate faces. Murderers, yes, but just men, ordinary ones, with no idea what they’d stopped on this road. They thought they’d caught a lonely cavalry officer.

I took a slow breath and pushed the heat in my chest back down. I didn’t want to be a monster today.

"Turn around," I said. I sounded steady, and tired all the way through. "Walk back into the forest. Drop the crossbows and I’ll ride past, and every one of you will see the sunset. Don’t make me draw my steel."

For half a second they just stared. Then the whole lot of them burst out laughing.

"The girl’s got jokes!" the leader barked, his one eye gleaming. "Take the horse. Take the armor. If she fights, put a bolt in her leg!"

He charged, axe raised. The three crossbowmen fired.

The world slowed to a crawl. Starlight washed across my vision, cold and silver, and I watched the three bolts cut through the raindrops, each one trailing a thin glowing line.

I leaned hard left in the saddle. The first two bolts hissed past my right shoulder, a finger’s width clear. The third I plucked out of the air with my gauntleted hand. It bruised my palm through the leather, and the iron shaft snapped in my grip.

Before the axe could come down I was out of the saddle and on my feet on the wet paving stones.

He swung the axe around flat, a sweep meant to cut me in two. I stepped inside it, quicker than he could follow, and ducked under the iron. I wasn’t trying to kill him. I drove the heel of my left hand up under his chin.

The blow landed with a sound like a melon dropped on stone, and his jaw came out of its socket with a crack. The force of it lifted all two hundred pounds of him off the ground and threw him backward through the rain into the mud, out cold before he landed.

The other ten froze, the laughter dead in their throats. They looked at their leader twitching in the mud, then at the lone girl standing empty-handed in the rain.

"I warned you," I said quietly.

Two of them came at me with hunting spears, going for my ribs. I slid aside from the first, took hold of the shaft and snapped it like a twig. The broken half knocked the second thrust wide, and I stepped in and drove the blunt end into the pit of that man’s stomach. He folded, wheezing. I spun, swept my boot into the backs of the first man’s knees, and he went down face-first on the stones.

It stopped being a fight after that. I just took them apart.

I moved through the rain without hurry. No static, no sword, only my own strength, and it was enough to break their weapons and take the legs out from under them. One man swung a mace, and I caught his wrist and twisted until the bone popped and the mace dropped. Another tried to tackle me. I took him by the leather harness and threw him ten feet into the trunk of a pine.

Arms broke, ribs bruised, men dropped unconscious. Every blow stopped short of a kill, and I meant it to.

Then one of the men I’d put in the mud lost his nerve.

He scrambled backward, eyes wide, and pulled a small glass vial of glowing green liquid from inside his cloak. Alchemical fire, the kind that eats through Imperial plate. It would burn Ironfoot alive.

He yanked the cork out with his teeth and drew back his arm to throw it at my horse.

The choice wasn’t mine anymore.

My right hand went over my shoulder, and the runed sword hissed out of its scabbard. I fed a sliver of the Ember’s heat into the Mystic Runes of the Sky. Swinging was too slow. I threw it like a javelin.

The dark steel crossed the gap in a streak of blue static and went clean through the highwayman’s chest, pinning him to the oak log across the road. The vial slipped from his dying fingers and smashed harmlessly in the mud a few feet away.

The runes let go, and blue lightning crackled through the wet wood of the log. That was too much for the last six. Lightning, and a man nailed to a log like it was nothing. They broke.

Swords hit the mud. Crossbows hit the mud. They ran for the pines, slipping, falling, screaming.

I didn’t chase them.

I stood in the freezing rain and watched the trees swallow them, my chest rising and falling slow. Around me, seven men lay groaning, clutching broken arms and dislocated jaws. One was dead, pinned to the barricade.

I walked over through the puddles, took the hilt in both hands and dragged the sword out of the dead man’s chest with a wet crunch. I wiped the blade on his cloak and slid it back into its scabbard.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking a little, the way hands do when a fight drains out of them. Not fear.

I hadn’t lost control. The Bud had wanted a massacre, and the rest of me had said no. I’d held to mercy until the only way to protect Ironfoot was to kill. I was not a monster.

I whistled. Astra dropped out of the grey sky and landed on my shoulder, out of the rain, and Ironfoot came trotting up, picking his way carefully around the groaning men.

I climbed back into the saddle, pulled the crimson cloak tight against the cold, and rode on past the barricade.

Better than three weeks of road still lay between me and the capital.