Only the Valiant

Finally, they reached the summit of the hill and Raymond saw everything that awaited them there. It was enough to make him slump back in the cart, unable to bring himself to move.

There were gibbets set around the hilltop, creaking in the wind as they dangled from chains in the shadow of the fallen tower. There were bodies in them, some picked clean by scavengers, others intact enough that Raymond could see the horrific wounds and bite marks that covered them, the burns and the places where the skin had been cut away by what looked like long knives. Symbols were cut into some of the flesh, and Raymond found himself recognizing a woman who had been dragged from their cell before, swirls and runes carved into her.

“Picti,” Lofen whispered in obvious horror, but Raymond could see that even that wasn’t the worst of it. The people in the gibbets had wounds that suggested they had been tortured and killed, exposed to the fury of whatever wild folk came by, but what lay on the stone at the center of the hilltop was worse, far worse.

The stone itself was a slab that had been carved both with the symbols of the wild folk, and with signs that might have been magic if such things had been common in these days. The remains of a man lay chained on it, and the worst part, the worst part, was that he moaned with agonized life even though he had no right to. His body was laced with cuts and burns, bite marks and the tearing marks of claws, yet still, impossibly, he lived.

“They call it a life stone,” the driver said with a smirk that said he knew exactly how much horror Raymond was feeling right then. “They say that in the old days, healers would use them to hold men to life while they stitched and worked. We found a better use for this one.”

“Better?” Raymond said. “This is…” He didn’t even have the words for what it was. Evil wasn’t enough. This wasn’t some crime against the laws of men, but something that stood against everything that had ever been there in nature. It was wrong in a way that seemed to count against everything that was life, and sane, and ordered.

“This is what traitors get, unless they’re lucky enough to die first,” the driver said. He nodded to the two who had ridden with the cart. “Clear that off. Whatever he did, it’s not his turn anymore. Clear the cages so that it draws the animals.”

Grumbling, the two guards set about their work, and Raymond would have run then if he had been able to, but the truth was that his chains held him far too tightly. He couldn’t even raise himself over the lip of the cart, let alone lift himself beyond it. The guards seemed to know that, moving casually from gibbet to gibbet, pulling the corpses of men and women from them and flinging them to the ground. Some came apart as they dropped, body parts scattering across the hillside for whatever came to devour them.

The woman who had been in the cells with them brushed against the stone at the hillside’s heart as they threw her body aside, and her eyes opened wide. She let out a scream then that Raymond was sure would haunt him until the moment he died, so raw and full of pain that he couldn’t begin to guess at the agonies she had endured there.

“Must have still been alive,” the one with the crossbow said, as the others dragged her clear of the stone. She fell silent again as soon as she stopped touching it, and, just for good measure, the crossbowman put a bolt through her chest before they flung her aside.

They dragged the man on the stone clear next, and to Raymond, the worst part of it was that he thanked them when they did it. He thanked them for dragging him away to die. The moment he left the stone, Raymond saw him go from a struggling, screaming man to a lifeless lump of meat, so much so that it seemed redundant when one of the guards cut his throat, just to be sure.

Now, the hillside was silent, except for the calls of the carrion birds, and rustling that promised bigger predators further off. Maybe there were even human predators watching them there, because Raymond had heard that civilized men didn’t see the Picti out in their wild homes when they didn’t want to be seen. Just the not knowing made it worse.

“The duke says that you’re to die,” the driver said, “but he didn’t say how, so we’re going to play the game that traitors get to play. You’ll go in the gibbets, and maybe you’ll live, maybe you’ll die. Then, in a day or two, if I remember, we’ll be back, and we’ll pick one of you for the stone.”

He looked straight at Raymond. “Maybe it will be you. Maybe you can watch while your brothers die, and while the animals come to gnaw on you, and the Picti come to cut you. They hate the folk of the kingdom. They can’t attack the town, but you… you’d be fair game.”

He laughed at that, and the guards lifted Raymond down, disconnecting his chains from a bracket in the cart and hauling him from it bodily. For a moment, they headed toward the stone, and Raymond almost begged them not to put him on it, thinking that maybe they’d changed their minds and decided to put him there straight away. Instead, they took him to one of the dangling cages and shoved him inside, closing the door behind him and locking it in place with a lock that it would take a hammer and chisel to cut through.

It was a tight fit in the cage, so that Raymond couldn’t sit comfortably, couldn’t even begin to think about lying down. The cage creaked and shifted with every movement of the wind, loud enough that it seemed like a torture in itself. All Raymond could do was sit there while the men dragged his brothers to other cages, unable to even begin to help.

Garet fought, because Garet always fought. It just earned him a blow to the guts before they lifted him and stuffed him into another of the gibbets, the way a farmer might have shoved an uncooperative sheep into a pen. They lifted Lofen just as easily, throwing him into another of the gibbets, so that they hung there with the stench of death all around them from the bodies abandoned on the hillside.

“How did you three ever think that you could fight against the duke?” the driver demanded. “Duke Altfor has said that you’ll pay for what your brother did, and you will. Wait, and contemplate that, and suffer. We’ll be back.”

Without another word, he turned the cart and started to drive away, leaving Raymond and his brothers dangling there.

“If I can just…” Garet said, obviously trying to reach the lock on his gibbet.

“You don’t know how to open a lock,” Lofen said.

“I can try, can’t I?” Garet shot back. “We have to try something. We have to—”

“There’s nothing to try,” Lofen said. “Maybe we can kill the guards when they come back, but we can’t get through those locks.”

Raymond shook his head. “Enough,” he said. “This isn’t the time for us to argue. There’s nowhere for us to go, and nothing for us to do, so the least we can do is not fight with each other.”

He knew what a place like this meant, and that there were no real chances of escape.

“Soon,” he said, “there will be animals coming, or worse. Maybe I won’t be able to talk after. Maybe I’ll… maybe we’ll all be dead.”

“No,” Garet said, shaking his head. “No, no, no.”

“Yes,” Raymond said. “We can’t control that, but we can face our deaths bravely. We can show them how well honest people die. We can refuse to give them the fear they want.”

He saw Garet pale, and then nod.

“Okay,” his brother said. “Okay, I can do that.”

“I know you can,” Raymond said. “You can do anything, both of you. I want to say…” How could he say all of it? “I love you both, and I’m so grateful that I got to be your brother. If I have to die, I’m glad that I at least get to do it with the best people I know in the world.”

“If,” Lofen said. “It’s not done yet.”

“If,” Raymond agreed, “but in case it happens, I wanted you to know.”

“Yes,” Lofen said. “I feel the same.”

“Me too,” Garet said.

Raymond sat there in his cage, trying to look brave for his brothers, and for anyone watching, because he was sure that there must be something or someone watching from the ruins of the tower. All the time, he tried to not to think of the truth:

There was no “if” to this. Already, Raymond could see the first flickers of carrion birds gathering in the trees. They were going to die. It was just a question of how quickly, and how horribly.

CHAPTER FIVE

Royce knelt among the ashes of his parents’ house, charred fragments of wood falling from the frame in a way that matched the tears scouring their way down his cheeks. They scythed tracks through the soot and dirt that now covered his face, leaving him streaked and strange looking, but Royce didn’t care.

All that mattered right then was that his parents were dead.

Grief filled Royce as he looked down on his parents’ bodies, set out on the floor in surprisingly quiet repose, in spite of the effects of the flames. He felt as though he wanted to tear at the world the way his fingers sought out the increasingly ashen tangles of his hair. He wanted to find a way to make this right, but there was no way to make this right, and so Royce screamed out his anger and his grief to the heavens.

He’d seen the man who had done this to them. Royce had seen him out on the road, returning from this as calmly as if nothing had happened. The man had even warned him, unknowing, about the soldiers about to come down on the village. What kind of murderer did that? What kind of murderer killed and then set out his victims as if they were getting them ready for an honored grave?

This wasn’t a grave though, so Royce went around to the back of the farm, finding an adze and a shovel, working at the dirt there, not wanting to leave his parents’ flesh for the first scavengers that came by. Some of the ground was hard packed and charred, so that his muscles ached with the work, but right then, Royce felt as though he deserved that ache, and that pain. Old Lori had been right… all of this was because of him.

He dug the grave as deep as he could and then lifted his parents’ charred bodies into it. He stood on the edge, trying to think of words to say, but he couldn’t think of anything that made sense to send them up to the heavens with. He wasn’t a priest to know the ways of the gods. He wasn’t some traveling tale spinner, with all the right words for everything from a wild feast to a death.

“I love you both so much,” he said instead. “I… I wish I could say more, but anything I could say would come down to that.”

He buried them as carefully as he could, each shovelful of dirt feeling like a hammer blow when it landed. Above him, Royce could hear the shriek of a hawk, and he shooed it away, not caring if there were crows and jackdaws spread across the rest of the village. These were his parents.

Even as he thought it, Royce knew that it wasn’t enough to bury just them. The duke’s men had been there because of him; he couldn’t just leave everyone they had killed for scavengers. He also knew that there was no chance of him digging a pit deep enough for all of the bodies alone.

The best he could hope to do was to build a pyre to finish what the burning buildings had started, so Royce began to work his way through the village, collecting wood, pulling it from winter stores, dragging it from the remains of buildings. The beams were the heaviest parts, but his strength was enough to drag them at least, letting him build them into great cross members for the pyre he was building.

By the time Royce was done, it was fully dark, but there was no way he wanted to sleep in a village of the dead like this. Instead, he searched until he found a lantern outside one of the buildings, only a little twisted by the heat of the fire that had wracked it. He lit it and, by that lantern light, he started to gather up the dead.

He collected them all, even though it broke his heart to do it. Young and old, man and woman, he collected them. He dragged the heaviest and carried the lightest, setting them in their places among the pyre and hoping that somehow it would mean they would get to be together in whatever came after this world.